DAT NAS build

shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
in Hardware
Gonna build a nas.

cpu/mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131843&Tpk=itx

case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112339

ram/drives: whatever is on sale on black friday/cyber monday

now, the questions:
1) how much psu do I need for the board + 5-6 mechanical drives (5400 rpm, most likely) + os ssd/hdd
b) psu suggestions - the case needs a psu < 140mm long
6) is the cpu sufficient?
4) os - xubuntu/freenas/other?
q) raid 5/6/zfs?
Cliff_Forster
«1

Comments

  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    1) I wouldn't think you'd NEED more than 400W for those specs.

    6) CPU should be fine. The only thing that it might slow down on is software RAID 5/6. Parity calculations are time consuming... which brings me to

    4) FreeNAS (or just FreeBSD), hands down. If you're only using this box as a NAS there is no reason to use anything else. ZFS is made of awesome for this kind of task. Might as well use the best tools for the job amirite? That said, you'll want to cram all 8G of ram into that board if you want to use some of the cool ZFS features like block level deduplication (which can save some serious storage space on larger volumes).
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    4) Board claims to support only 8GB, but people are putting in 16 just fine. Will probably do that if I go ZFS route.
  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    edited November 2012
    You could also not use deduplication if you're not concerned about storage space. From my understanding, that's the part of ZFS that requires the most RAM.

    EDIT: The FreeNAS docs have some things to say about RAM: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations#RAM

    tl;dr - I was wrong, you want 8GB base and much more if you want to use deduplication. My bad.
  • doabarrellrolldoabarrellroll San Jose, CA Icrontian
    For that cost, +-$300, you could just buy a diskless system off the shelf. I've been looking into these myself. A number of them have a kind of "embedded linux" in them as an OS, however, you can find very good ones that allow you to install XP, OS X Leopard, and/or some flavors of Linux.

    Most of these systems only require about 1-2 GB of RAM, but you may as well max it at around 3 GB.

    Depending on what you're going to use it for, I would say, go for something on a windows platform because then you can integrate all your files on AD.

    I've been using a SmartStor 4300N for a while now, it's not the greatest unit in the world, but, at 4TB on RAID 5 it works well. It uses plugins for iTunes, has it's own torrent server, and is DLNA compatible.
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    The cheapest 5 bay diskless nas on newegg is 700 dollars. This build will give me a 6 bay diskless nas for much cheaper with much more ram (better for zfs). If i really cared i could also throw in an ssd to further improve performance. It will be able to do all of the things you said your box can do. Plus this way I get to build another PC myself.

    There do seem to be performance issues with samba shares but all the machines in my house run 7 pro so I can just use NFS shares.

    Buying a prebuilt diskless nas would be much easier but I'm quite familiar with Linux and will enjoy the project. It will also be fun to play with a new build/platform.
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    the case was $90 last night - I ordered all the parts and picked up 16 gb of ram as well. Total cost < $270
  • RootWyrmRootWyrm Icrontian
    7 Pro NFS is far from flawless. Performance might not suck as hardcore, but there are other problems. It's a partial stack. Only 7 Ultimate got the full 2k3 NFS stack (which is good) - and Windows 8 is right out, as is Server 2k8R2 and later.
  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    Are the Samba performance issues you speak of specific to FreeNAS @shwaip?

    I use Samba for my fileserver at home and (anecdotal evidence huehuehue) I've never seen any major performance issues. It was always good enough to push media around where I needed it and do backups. Are you going to use your NAS for anything more than that?
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    It's specific to the board i want to use. smb is single threaded and the low power cpu can't quite do everything with one core.
  • RootWyrmRootWyrm Icrontian
    edited November 2012
    shwaip said:

    It's specific to the board i want to use. smb is single threaded and the low power cpu can't quite do everything with one core.

    No, that's specific to the implementation of CIFS. Not the hardware. FreeBSD native CIFS (non-Samba) is multi-threaded with good thread safety. I don't know the state of Samba these days, since I pretty much gave up on it a long time ago.

    To be clearer; even if the CPU only has one core, multi-threaded only means that operations do not necessarily block. Single-threaded means that an idling operation can block an active read of a different location. Regardless of how many CPU cores are available, multi-threaded would generally be preferred because clients would not block each other.
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    zzz

    i know the difference.
    TushonJBoogaloo
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    Does anyone have any opinions about WD red drives vs any others?
  • RootWyrmRootWyrm Icrontian
    shwaip said:

    Does anyone have any opinions about WD red drives vs any others?

    Yes. Use these. The only Seagates that won't brick on you for absolute certain are the ACTUAL enterprise drives, which you can't get - they're only for ODMs who do their own firmware maintenance and load. The Barracuda ESes you can buy are NOT the same. And Samsung.. epic sigh. 20K PoH and bricked all three. Toshiba's no better.

  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    shwaip said:

    Does anyone have any opinions about WD red drives vs any others?

    Never used them... but we use Barracuda ES drives at work all the time. No matter what the above says, they're great and extremely reliable. Very rarely have to replace them.
  • MAGICMAGIC Doot Doot Furniture City, Michigan Icrontian
    edited December 2012
    I've always used WD Black drives in all my systems without a problem. I think WD was developing a line of NAS specific drives, it was going to be their Red line drives. Not sure if they are available though.
  • MAGICMAGIC Doot Doot Furniture City, Michigan Icrontian
    They are
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236342&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-_-pla-_-NA-_-NA
  • doabarrellrolldoabarrellroll San Jose, CA Icrontian
    shwaip said:

    The cheapest 5 bay diskless nas on newegg is 700 dollars. This build will give me a 6 bay diskless nas for much cheaper with much more ram (better for zfs). If i really cared i could also throw in an ssd to further improve performance. It will be able to do all of the things you said your box can do. Plus this way I get to build another PC myself.

    There do seem to be performance issues with samba shares but all the machines in my house run 7 pro so I can just use NFS shares.

    Buying a prebuilt diskless nas would be much easier but I'm quite familiar with Linux and will enjoy the project. It will also be fun to play with a new build/platform.

    I know it's rated poorly on Newegg, but, this is one of the best diskless system you can buy out of the box. 5 bays of storage with Windows Storage Server preloaded on it. $350

    At the very least, you could just load a Linux Kernel on it instead.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822154590
  • RootWyrmRootWyrm Icrontian
    MAGIC said:

    I've always used WD Black drives in all my systems without a problem. I think WD was developing a line of NAS specific drives, it was going to be their Red line drives. Not sure if they are available though.

    Red has shipped. Blacks should never be used for always-on or on-sleep-on cycled drives. The motors aren't built for it, so they give out fairly quickly. Any sort of constant load or always on, either use WD Red or HGST Enterprise drives. Specifically the ones with the 5 year warranty that cost 2-4x as much. Otherwise? You will be sorry.

  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    doabarrellroll said:

    shwaip said:

    The cheapest 5 bay diskless nas on newegg is 700 dollars. This build will give me a 6 bay diskless nas for much cheaper with much more ram (better for zfs). If i really cared i could also throw in an ssd to further improve performance. It will be able to do all of the things you said your box can do. Plus this way I get to build another PC myself.

    There do seem to be performance issues with samba shares but all the machines in my house run 7 pro so I can just use NFS shares.

    Buying a prebuilt diskless nas would be much easier but I'm quite familiar with Linux and will enjoy the project. It will also be fun to play with a new build/platform.

    I know it's rated poorly on Newegg, but, this is one of the best diskless system you can buy out of the box. 5 bays of storage with Windows Storage Server preloaded on it. $350

    At the very least, you could just load a Linux Kernel on it instead.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822154590
    Cool. I must have missed that in my search somehow. My build still ends up cheaper...and i'm probably going to go to 6 drives with raidz2.
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    for a bit more about it:

    Went with 6x 3tb wd red drives with raidz2 (ZFS raid-6, roughly).
    Ubuntu server 12.10 installed on an older 50GB SSD

    The most difficult thing, by far, was getting the motherboard tray back into the case after installing the mobo. (Also, fyi: 10" SATA cables aren't long enough).

    The most time consuming thing was running badblocks to test the drives (~3.5 days).

    Transfer speeds (over 1GbE) are about 65 MB/s (according to windows file copy dialog). Goes higher if i'm transferring a large single file, but not by much. Definitely seems like it might be CPU-limited on the NAS side, but I don't imagine I'll ever notice once I get all my files copied over.

    The box is basically silent - I'm interested to know the power draw, but not interested enough to find my clip on ammeter and make a power cord that will let me measure.
  • Cliff_ForsterCliff_Forster Icrontian
    Dat Nas, my inner sophomore giggles.
  • BlueTattooBlueTattoo Boatbuilder Houston, TX Icrontian
    @shwaip, thanks for sharing a really interesting and useful project. Good job.
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    BlueTattoo said:

    @shwaip, thanks for sharing a really interesting and useful project. Good job.

    thanks!

    All of my other builds have been for gaming/workstation type builds. It's a pretty big difference. Hopefully I did a good enough job and my data won't disappear any time soon :)
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    jelly
  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    I really need to get my home Xen box online so I can build my virtual uber-nas...
  • RyderRyder Kalamazoo, Mi Icrontian
    Strange that you are only getting 65MB/s over the Gbe, I assume that may be due to the file system you chose?
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    Ryder said:

    Strange that you are only getting 65MB/s over the Gbe, I assume that may be due to the file system you chose?

    samba is pegging the cpu. i'll see what speeds i can get with a scp or nfs file transfer
  • BlackHawkBlackHawk Bible music connoisseur There's no place like 127.0.0.1 Icrontian
    edited January 2013
    What would you have done differently now in hindsight?
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    I'm really happy with it as a nas. I might do it with a bit more power so i could run ps3 media server or something on it, but for now i don't know if i'd do much differently.

    If i were lian li, i'd make the case about 1" longer and wider, so the sata cables didn't have to bend and then it would also be possible to use a modular PSU.
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