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Building a NAS

jro.io

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Re: Building a NAS

#81

Post by rb2k_ »

seltzered_ wrote: post #42
ValentineC wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) Thanks, I didn't realise these exist. I've been wanting to create a DIY version of Synology's "slim" model line [1] for a while, but haven't been able to find an off-the-shelf enclosure that would fit my needs. Putting six drives in a 5.25" bay is a fantastic idea. [1] https://www.synology.com/en-glo…

Not quite as slim, but I recently put a super micro d-1520 motherboard in an old intel ss4200 case that's relatively compact (could theoretically put it in a 30l backpack) and it holds 4 desktop hard drives: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/another-x10sdv-...

I recently built a NAS with 4x 4TB 2.5 inch drives

Re: Building a NAS

#82

Post by cm2187 »

The problem with these NAS is noise. I see on the pictures that the NAS is just next to his desk. Even if you get a quiet chassis (rack servers tend to be noisy as hell, but synology chassis are pretty quiet), having 12+ disks running next to you is very noisy too. I am looking forward the time SSD will be cheap enough to be used for mass storage.

Re: Building a NAS

#83

Post by cm2187 »

melp wrote: post #9
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…

I might get that new consumer-grade switch with 10GbE copper, but that's down the road a bit.

I wonder when we will see 10GbE ports on laptops though!

Re: Building a NAS

#84

Post by cm2187 »

melp wrote: post #6
justryry wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your power consumption like on this set up?

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

Why not going for less but larger disks then? It would be more power efficient. You have consumer 8TB disks. Surely you don't need that many disks for performance. Pretty much any Synology NAS will saturate a 1GbE link.

Re: Building a NAS

#85

Post by noja »

cm2187 wrote: post #82

The problem with these NAS is noise. I see on the pictures that the NAS is just next to his desk. Even if you get a quiet chassis (rack servers tend to be noisy as hell, but synology chassis are pretty quiet), having 12+ disks running next to you is very noisy too. I am looking forward the time SSD will be cheap enough to be used for mass storage.

Use Noctua fans.

Re: Building a NAS

#86

Post by barrkel »

StillBored wrote: post #51
barrkel wrote: post #22

I have a 36T NAS (26T usable raidz2), built using the Norco 4224 chassis. The backplane / drive trays that it comes with aren't 100% reliable, so I would recommend trying to get a SuperMicro chassis instead. I keep mine in the attic to keep the noise down. Mine runs fine on an old Q6600 with 4G of RAM. I'm not trying to do anything silly, like enabling dedupe, so it's not a problem. I'm running ZFS on Linux, again, n…

Are you backing up all 36T to crashplan? I've been using crashplan on my NAS for a few years now, but I feel bad and only really backup critical stuff. (aka its just a few TB) rather than the full 50T+ on the NAS.

No. I don't back up backups, VM zvols, or media that's easily re-aquired or doesn't have very high value (eg commutes). And of course the NAS isn't full.

Re: Building a NAS

#87

Post by barrkel »

pmiller2 wrote: post #71
barrkel wrote: post #22

I have a 36T NAS (26T usable raidz2), built using the Norco 4224 chassis. The backplane / drive trays that it comes with aren't 100% reliable, so I would recommend trying to get a SuperMicro chassis instead. I keep mine in the attic to keep the noise down. Mine runs fine on an old Q6600 with 4G of RAM. I'm not trying to do anything silly, like enabling dedupe, so it's not a problem. I'm running ZFS on Linux, again, n…

How much does it cost to build and run a system like that? What does "my pool wanders between 40 and 70% utilization" mean? I'm assuming you're not talking about free space, because you say you don't delete things.

I don't delete things for a year or more at a time. I am talking about free space.

Cost is in low thousands, I haven't tabulated it recently.

Re: Building a NAS

#88

Post by ThatPlayer »

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…

If you like Google Drive, their Google Apps plan will give you unlimited storage for a slightly more expensive plan.

One limitation I've met with Amazon Cloud Drive is a 50GB file size limit. Both of these support rclone which is what I use for backups anyways.

Re: Building a NAS

#89

Post by roel_v »

I used to build my own NAS systems; and it's fine if it's a hobby; but it's a lot less trouble and a lot less stressful (when you actually have data to care about) to use something ready made like a QNAP. I switched to a QNAP TS-863U a few months ago, and boy is it great to have a UI that will let you do RAID upgrades/resizing without having to lay awake at night wondering if you chose the right incantation of mdadm out of the 3 or 4 you came up with that could work.

Re: Building a NAS

#90

Post by mkup »

fnj wrote: post #77

People always make such a big deal out of getting ashift "right". In actual fact, there is NEVER any valid excuse to make ashift any smaller than 12. It should default to 12. It is a scandal that it still defaults to 9. You aren't going to find a single hard drive in the world that you would ever use in ZFS, which does not have 4k sectors, papered over as fake 512 byte sectors in the interface.

In FreeBSD, there's a sysctl for setting minimal ashift to 12 and ignoring 9 reported by disk. I always have this one in my /etc/sysctl.conf:

vfs.zfs.min_auto_ashift=12

(This must be done before creating ZFS pool.)

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