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Building a NAS

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Re: Building a NAS

#31

Post by mjevans »

jonathankoren wrote: post #12
melp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do a lot of high resolution photography and videography work. I've got about ~15 years of raw images and video files that I could probably go through and delete, but I'd rather keep them around so I can pretend that maybe some day, someone will be interested in looking at them. I look at it as a modern version of the boxes full of pictures and slides my parents and grandparents kept in their basement for decades an…

What's your backup strategy? My experience with the FreeNAS people was "build a second nas", but that always struck me as stupid for a home setup.

That is actually the cheapest way over time.

If you're able to tag stuff you know you want to keep and it's a smaller set you could look in to something like Backblaze B2 (previously a featured story on HN); the storage costs are relatively moderate, but restoration from it will cost you.

I haven't yet heard of any solution along the lines of "Rent a (large) NAS for a month" for those times that you're upgrading your array and need to switch filesystem formats. Having that option would make the juggling much easier and safer. Looking at the S3 storage and bandwidth costs I imagine there is actually a market to be served by such a product.

Maybe renting one of those higher end tape drives makes sense... but I can't get over the idea that even renting a stack of hard disks would be cheaper and more effective at this scale.

PS: Make sure you encrypt all of the data going in to the temporary storage; those aren't your disks.

Re: Building a NAS

#32

Post by vbezhenar »

I own HP Microserver Gen8. It allows to use 4 disks, it's a real server (ECC memory, hardware watchdog, KVM over network and much more), it's extremely quiet and it costs $200 with Celeron processor. Also it's quite outdated at this moment and requires using "hardware raid" (implemented in software proprietary driver) for optimal cooling, it's awesome machine and I didn't found anything better yet. I only wish HP would continue this line.

Re: Building a NAS

#33

Post by pfarnsworth »

_JamesA_ wrote: post #11
melp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sits at about 250W, goes up to ~300W when it's running a scrub or something.

To put that in perspective it's roughly $0.60 a day, $18 a month and $219 a year USD assuming a rate of $0.10 per kilowatt hour [1] plus an additional 853 BTU/hr cooling load on the AC system [2]. [1]: http://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/electricity-calcula... [2]: http://rapidtables.com/convert/power/Watt_to_BTU.htm

Rates in California would be double that or more, depending on which tier this put the user. For me, my old 8-cpu Xeon server cost me ~$50/month in electricity so I decommissioned it, however, this would also push me towards wanting to get solar panels for the house.

Re: Building a NAS

#34

Post by linsomniac »

Oddly, I recently went the other direction. In the past I've built some storage servers similar to this, and 6 months ago I took 6x 2TB laptop drives in a 6 drive "mobile rack" that fits in one 5.24 bay in my desktop (IcyDock MB996SP-6SB).

Loving it!

Now, my storage needs are fairly modest in comparison to the author. I'm running with RAID-Z2 and at 44% capacity. I have this unit in my work workstation, at an external office. It is quiet and cool.

I used to have a big house with a room I could put a bunch of computers in. I moved to a smaller house, but more importantly I was just tired of managing a business-class infrastructure at home (VLANs, multiple APs, UPSs, batteries, patch panel, servers, etc).

So I copied a backup of my storage server from an off-site box, to S3 with Glacier, copied the primary to this ZFS array on my workstation, removed junk I was just holding on to, and now my home infrastructure consists of a Cable Modem and Google WiFi mesh. Huge improvement in maintenance!

Here's a blog post I wrote about one of the previous incarnations: https://www.tummy.com/articles/ultimatestorage2008/

Re: Building a NAS

#35

Post by johnthomas00 »

System is probably good for 3 or 4 years, right? If your cost of funds is 6%, that works out to: 3 years: $177/month 4 years: $136/month

Add $20/month for electricity: 3 years: $197/month 4 years: $156/month

Could that rent respectable enough device(s) in the cloud?

Re: Building a NAS

#36

Post by mciancia »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #21
Teknoman117 wrote: post #7

Wow, I actually just got done building a home NAS for myself. As far as storage controllers, I managed to find myself a working SAS 9201-16i for $50 on eBay (16 port SAS card, only supports IT/HBA mode). Also got some cheap used 10 GbE cards off eBay as well for the link between my workstation and the NAS. Got a 4 port card for the NAS to turn it into a cheapo 10 GbE switch (OCe14104-U-TE with four SFP+ fiber optic t…

Wow 50TB for $60 per month... Amazon Drive sounds like an insanely great deal for me if it works the way I think it does, but the reason I haven't tried it yet is I honestly don't see them being able to keep storage space unlimited for very long, if it in fact competes in the same real-time sync'd storage space as the likes of Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc. Every such service that I've ever heard of that offer…

*$60/year :)

Re: Building a NAS

#37

Post by jonathankoren »

mjevans wrote: post #31
jonathankoren wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your backup strategy? My experience with the FreeNAS people was "build a second nas", but that always struck me as stupid for a home setup.

That is actually the cheapest way over time. If you're able to tag stuff you know you want to keep and it's a smaller set you could look in to something like Backblaze B2 (previously a featured story on HN); the storage costs are relatively moderate, but restoration from it will cost you. I haven't yet heard of any solution along the lines of "Rent a (large) NAS for a month" for those times that you're upgrading your…

You still have to put the second NAS somewhere, preferably offsite to avoid the house-burns-down fail case. Personally, I don't even know where I put this second NAS, since it would need power and bandwidth, unless you really wanted to sneakernet a NAS, which would work, but seems really weird.

My home nas is small enough where I can reliably backup to some USB external drives and store in a drawer offsite. According to FreeNAS, that's a horrible solution because USB is too error prone and moving disks shortens their life, and blah blah blah, and so USB backup is explicitly a WILLNOTFIX, and a sign that the requestor is stupid, as opposed to knowing full well what the risks are, and is satisfied with them. The horrible FreeNAS community, and the lack of this feature was why I adopted OpenMediaVault. (I highly recommend OMV.)

I guess I could always upload TARs to Glacier. That might be a legitimate solution.

Re: Building a NAS

#38

Post by [deleted] »

johnthomas00 wrote: post #35

System is probably good for 3 or 4 years, right? If your cost of funds is 6%, that works out to: 3 years: $177/month 4 years: $136/month Add $20/month for electricity: 3 years: $197/month 4 years: $156/month Could that rent respectable enough device(s) in the cloud?

[deleted]

Re: Building a NAS

#39

Post by aidenn0 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #18
no_protocol wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you consider a low power NAS approach? Spending somewhere around $20 per month on electricity for a home server seems like a lot to me. Maybe if it was hosting a handful of VMs for various purposes, but I suppose you don't want to run a NAS as a VM?

From what I've seen the nas is used for video editing, so you'll need fast access that only expensive internet connections can provide. as a comparison, s3 for 60tb is $1600 a month.

well there are tradeoffs. If you want low power and high performance, you come down to choosing between either SSDs (very expensive) or a lot of laptop drives (cheap, but higher latency; throughput for something like video is fine though as you can fit a lot of them in a chassis; switching from 8drive Z2 groups to mirrors gets you a 4x improvement in throughput, which completely negates the throughput disadvantage of 5400 vs 7200).

Re: Building a NAS

#40

Post by AtticusTheGreat »

johnthomas00 wrote: post #35

System is probably good for 3 or 4 years, right? If your cost of funds is 6%, that works out to: 3 years: $177/month 4 years: $136/month Add $20/month for electricity: 3 years: $197/month 4 years: $156/month Could that rent respectable enough device(s) in the cloud?

Getting 60TB of usable space in the cloud is pretty expensive. Honestly I have no idea why he needs so much space, but if he does need it all, he probably didn't make out too badly. One of the main benefits of the cloud, though, is that you only pay for what you use, and he has to over-provision from the beginning, so let's consider that.

So he's currently using about 10TB of 60TB of usable space. If he uses Amazon S3's standard storage, he would be paying about $230/mo. If he uses infrequent storage that is $125/mo. That goes up as his usage goes, so when he's using 30TB that will be $690/mo and $375/mo respectively. He also has the benefit of high speed ethernet with the home NAS, unless he has fiber 1Gig internet, in which case speed is probably a wash. I'm not sure if there are other significantly cheaper cloud storage solutions at that scale.

So I'd say he hasn't done too badly for himself, though he probably could have saved some on the hardware by getting cheaper parts.

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