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Thinking of building a NAS just like this

H

HardTech

Golden Member
http://prolig.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/freenas-zfs/

Things I'd do the same:
- Power Supply (I already have it)
- motherboard
- CPU
- case

Things I'd do differently
- SSD (I already have an Intel X-25M G2 80GB)
- USB thumb drive for FreeNAS (https://www.2leef.com/store/product/surge_usb_drive/)
- hard drives (5x WD Red 4TB)
- RAM (or I'd buy the same, I don't really care as long as it's cheap, ECC unbuffered, and is from a reputable company [Kingston, Crucial])

Thoughts? This would net be about 15TB of usable storage if I do a RAID5 setup, and 16GB of RAM. Right now I'm using about 2TB of storage, so this will provide me with a TON of upgrade room.

My goals are:
- File storage
- iTunes server
- Fast enough to saturate my home network (1Gbps)

Is there anything inherently wrong with this setup?
 
I could, but that seems kind of excessive. Plus, the article mentioned using an SSD for the logs and cache, and it sped up performance quite a bit over the 5400 drives.
 
HardTech said:
I could, but that seems kind of excessive. Plus, the article mentioned using an SSD for the logs and cache, and it sped up performance quite a bit over the 5400 drives.
Click to expand...
If you had ever had a disk error cause a failed rebuild on a single-redundant array, you wouldn't think it was excessive. ()🙂

Using an SSD for log/cache doesn't have anything to do with that.
 
dave_the_nerd said:
If you had ever had a disk error cause a failed rebuild on a single-redundant array, you wouldn't think it was excessive. ()🙂

Using an SSD for log/cache doesn't have anything to do with that.
Click to expand...

I've had disk failures affect a NAS before, but 1-disk redundancy is fine with me in a 5-disk array. Obviously I'd scale up if there were more disks, I'd go with 2-disk redundancy for 6 disks or above.
 
I mentioned the SSD as it will take up a SATA port, and there are only 5 ports on the motherboard. So 1 SSD and 5 hard disks, 1 of which will be used for redundancy
 
Well, as long as you know what the risks are, it's your tradeoff to make. My NAS is only single-drive redundant, but it's also all backed up to Crashplan. 🙂

Have at it!
 
dave_the_nerd said:
Well, as long as you know what the risks are, it's your tradeoff to make. My NAS is only single-drive redundant, but it's also all backed up to Crashplan. 🙂

Have at it!
Click to expand...

I don't have a good story on backing up my backups. I guess not everything has to be backed up again, only the things that are special to me, like pictures.

Anyway, thanks for your input! How big is your NAS? And how many disks does it have?
 
HardTech said:
I don't have a good story on backing up my backups. I guess not everything has to be backed up again, only the things that are special to me, like pictures.

Anyway, thanks for your input! How big is your NAS? And how many disks does it have?
Click to expand...

I have a 3-disk RAIDZ (3x2TB) that's about 1/3 full and uploaded to Crashplan, and a 2-disk RAIDZ (2x2TB) that's about half full of system backups for the other computers in the house.

It's wasteful and I'd like to do it differently. Unfortunately, ZFS doesn't let you stripe in additional disk after a zpool is created. Some day when I'm bored I guess I'll migrate it off to something else, destroy the pools, create a single 5-disk zpool, and do it "right."

But not today.
 
I got away with having two four disk RAIDZ pools for a while without ECC memory, but that was really risky. Now I have four RAIDZ2 vdevs in one pool with ECC memory and feel much safer. ECC memory is definitely a must with ZFS if you care about data integrity over time.
 
dave_the_nerd said:
I have a 3-disk RAIDZ (3x2TB) that's about 1/3 full and uploaded to Crashplan, and a 2-disk RAIDZ (2x2TB) that's about half full of system backups for the other computers in the house.

It's wasteful and I'd like to do it differently. Unfortunately, ZFS doesn't let you stripe in additional disk after a zpool is created. Some day when I'm bored I guess I'll migrate it off to something else, destroy the pools, create a single 5-disk zpool, and do it "right."

But not today.
Click to expand...

I've thought the same about my storage situation as well for a long time. I have a 1TB hard drive on my iMac that I use for random stuff and to house downloads before moving off to my NAS, and I have a NAS that is 2.5TB or something like that (can't really remember) but only has a few hundred GB left. I also have a 2TB Apple Time Machine for my iMac backups. I've always thought about revamping everything "someday". That day has come.
 
HardTech said:
I've had disk failures affect a NAS before, but 1-disk redundancy is fine with me in a 5-disk array. Obviously I'd scale up if there were more disks, I'd go with 2-disk redundancy for 6 disks or above.
Click to expand...
You haven't any redundancy during a rebuild with 1 disc redundancy.
How long would a rebuild take with 4tb discs?
 
HardTech said:
Hmm, I'd ballpark about half a day?
Click to expand...
Could be longer.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7071/synology-ds1812-8bay-smb-soho-nas-review/7

This is showing a day and a half.

The problem is that heavy activity (like a RAID rebuild) can actually cause disks that were marginal to fail prematurely, so you end up with failure clusters. Also, per-disk read error rate on disks means a VERY high rate of recovery errors with disks over 1TB in size.

The (rather conservative, obviously) rule of thumb for the systems we sell is 1 day per TB of rebuild (it never takes that long), and defaulting to dual redundancy for any array with >750GB disks.
 
How about this motherboard (SUPERMICRO MBD-A1SRi-2758F-O)?

Really my only concern is whether it'd be fast enough to saturate the gigabit network on read/write. I won't be using the server for much else. Maybe an iTunes server, but that's about it.

The IPMI will come in handy as well since I don't have a spare monitor to connect to the NAS when I'm setting it up.

Bleh - it only has 2 SATA 6Gbps slots.
 
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HardTech said:
How about this motherboard (SUPERMICRO MBD-A1SRi-2758F-O)?

Really my only concern is whether it'd be fast enough to saturate the gigabit network on read/write. I won't be using the server for much else. Maybe an iTunes server, but that's about it.

The IPMI will come in handy as well since I don't have a spare monitor to connect to the NAS when I'm setting it up.

Bleh - it only has 2 SATA 6Gbps slots.
Click to expand...
That board would be fine. The CPU should be plenty capable of saturating 1GbE, and there aren't many ways to get ECC RAM on an ITX platform affordably.

A single platter HDD isn't going to saturate a SATA 3.0Gbps connection anyway, so that's alright. You could add a SATA card if you wanted.
 
Just a quick update on some recent decisions:

- Decided to go with the Avaton quad-core board instead of octo-core. Reason: It's cheaper and I don't plan on using it much beyond a NAS with maybe some jails running on it (bittorrent, owncloud, maybe vpn)
- Going with 32 GB of RAM. Reason: why not
- Going with 6 hard drives, 4TB HGST in a RAIDZ2 configuration, so 4 storage + 2 parity. Reason: 6 or 10 drive configurations are the best to use with RAIDZ2. 7 or 8 would be suboptimal.

Still need to do more research on whether I should install the SSD at all.
 
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Double check whether Free NAS supports Avoton NIC's? I interpret your initial post as saying Free NAS will be the OS.
 
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the NIC's are actually powered by an Intel chip. There are lots of reports of people running freenas successfully with the boards (as long as the firmware is all up to date)
 
Just 2TB of data currently? Do you plan on going apeshit and downloading a lot of Blu-ray movies or something?

That just strikes me as a huge investment for not a lot of data. You could get by with a single 4TB drive and an external 4TB backup drive and still have almost double your current storage needs, and have everything backed up.
 
Carson Dyle said:
Just 2TB of data currently? Do you plan on going apeshit and downloading a lot of Blu-ray movies or something?

That just strikes me as a huge investment for not a lot of data. You could get by with a single 4TB drive and an external 4TB backup drive and still have almost double your current storage needs, and have everything backed up.
Click to expand...

I don't want to think about upgrading storage again for a long time. But you're right, I could fill the array with 1TB drives and still have double the space, and can upgrade the size later if I wanted to.

And 1TB drives seem to be about as expensive as 2TB drives now, which run about $70 each. Less than half of a 4TB drive. That would give me 8 TB of space, and I could upgrade later on.

Thanks for the suggestion 🙂
 
And for 8TB of space, you could buy a $100 Atom system with a few 3TB or 4TB drives.

Whatever you do ... with as little data as you have, you seem determined to spend several times what is necessary so that you can do RAID and ZFS, instead of taking the much simpler and cheaper path of JBOD with good backups.
 
What would be the fun in that? I may be spending a little extra, but at least I'd learn something and can reuse the server and increase the volume with minimal work in the future.
 
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