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Building a NAS

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Re: Building a NAS

#91

Post by boredprogrammer »

ValentineC wrote: post #41
linsomniac wrote: post #34

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 externa…

> 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…

I came across this product recently: https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1 which is seeking crowd funding at the moment. Personally I think they've made a mistake by going for 2.5" storage first with 3.5" coming later. Anyway, it sounds like it might be of interest to you?

Re: Building a NAS

#92

Post by varky »

tracker1 wrote: post #54
myrandomcomment wrote: post #29

Eh. Cool. To much work. I just bought a FreeNAS Mini because I am lazy. But this very cool.

been thinking of DIYing a freenas mini xl.. can save about $500 by building with the same MB, but don't like the case options.. not sure what case iXSystems uses, or where they get it (probably custom)... but with the same MB and an 8-drive itx case, came out around $900, but concerned about the clock/brick issue with that CPU.

The 8-drive version is built around an Ablecom CS-T80 case.

The 4-drive version is a SuperMicro 721TQ-250B system.

Re: Building a NAS

#93

Post by dromenkoning »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #78

Wow, this is an amazingly detailed blog post. I only skimmed it, but since I'm in the process of setting up my own NAS I'll definitely have to revisit it and read slowly. Is anyone here using FreeNAS Corral? I've been toying around with it for a few days, and its been a frustrating experience. My first sign that I should've avoided it was that trying to install 10.0.3 with UEFI just fails. With 9.10 they have a nice…

After a lot of consideration, I went with Corral over NAS4Free because the former offered the (FreeBSD native) Bhyve hypervisor for VM's whereas NAS4Free has an integrated Virtualbox instance.

After yet another issue with basic functionality in the Corral release - and reading about even worse experiences on the forums, I decided I couldn't trust this product with the most crucial role in my environment and installed NAS4Free instead.

Re: Building a NAS

#94

Post by milcron »

boredprogrammer wrote: post #91
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…

I came across this product recently: https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1 which is seeking crowd funding at the moment. Personally I think they've made a mistake by going for 2.5" storage first with 3.5" coming later. Anyway, it sounds like it might be of interest to you?

I agree. A 3.5" version of that is exactly what I need.

Re: Building a NAS

#95

Post by zurn »

roel_v wrote: post #89

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…

Commercial consumer NAS boxes are notoriously bad wrt security though, even firewalled. Apple Airport Extreme is probably the only one with a decent track record (and I say this as someone who doesn't use Apple products).

Eg QNAP requires you to install security patches manually, and as a result had a ShellShock worm exploiting QNAP boxes: https://threatpost.com/shellshock-worm-exploiting-unpatched-...

Re: Building a NAS

#96

Post by dom0 »

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…

The main issue with used server hardware that is a couple generations old is that they use a lot of power. E.g. it's no problem to buy dual or quad port Intel server adapters for like 20 Euros, but these draw 6 / 10 W, while newer ones (e.g. those based on the i210-series) draw much less than 1 W/port.

Similarly older storage controllers require more power even when idle, older CPUs and mainboards draw more power when idle. Fan control in server boards has improved somewhat, and these can draw a lot of power (....just ask any Sun Fire server....) as well.

Re: Building a NAS

#97

Post by dom0 »

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…

I use quite a bit of Supermicro hardware and have to conclude that it's just good stuff (tm). Recently had to work with an Intel server board, ick... no comparison at all.

Re: Building a NAS

#98

Post by dom0 »

melp wrote: post #67
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…

36T to CrashPlan sits on 36GB of RAM at all times... screw that. rclone never uses more than ~2GB to manage my whole 50TB dataset. edit: Also, I'm using a SuperMicro chassis, not a Norco. I've got a section where I go into why I went with SuperMicro.

Uhm, what exactly is crashplan doing with all that memory?

Re: Building a NAS

#99

Post by squarefoot »

I rebuilt my home NAS a few months ago. Former one was a huge Debian tower box with one system+temp storage disk plus 3 soft RAID1 pairs. It worked well for about 6 years, save for a partial failure due to bad disk connectors (SATA connectors are among the worst junk ever designed by a human). CPU was a low power Celeron more than enough for the task. When building the new one I wanted to reduce to the minimum both power consumption and hardware maintenance hassles so I got on Ebay a used server 2U rack box including a good quality PSU, then a Mini ITX industrial Atom main board with 4 SATA ports. Not being that familiar with BSD and derivatives, initially I wanted to stay with Linux, but this time I didn't want to fiddle with mdadm and other stuff so I gave Openmediavault a try; I probably did something wrong, but the experience was frustrating, from menus taking forever to appear to errors that shouldn't be there in a self contained system, so in the end I turned my attention to NAS4Free and never looked back. The only problem being the much greater RAM requirements of ZFS, which makes the maximum RAM on that board (4GB) barely enough, but in the end it works flawlessly as I keep running services to the minimum (NFS, SMB, Transmission). Total expense was very low as everything was purchased used, save of course the 4x3GB WD RED disks. The system boots off a USB key which is plugged directly on an internal USB port, so there are no dongles attached to the case.

Re: Building a NAS

#100

Post by Jaruzel »

People are going to hate me for this, as it's not a Linux solution... but after trying various *nix NAS distros and being disappointed, I settled on letting Windows do it for me:

- Get a generic small tower box with 3-4 year old hardware in it via eBay (or a business IT clearance site)

- If it's not got Windows on it, find a dirt cheap copy of Windows Server 2008 (again eBay etc).

- If there's no SATA RAID on the motherboard (unlikely), get a 4 to 8 port PCIe RAID card.

- Thrown in a bunch of identical disks of your preferred size

- For Raid 1: In Windows mount them all, and create Mirrored sets in software (via Diskmgmt)

- For Raid 5: Either do it via the BIOS (if supported) or via Diskmgmt (however RAID 5 in software is quite slow).

- Create file shares (SMB/CIFS/FTP etc).

- Job done.

I have this as my main File Server, and unless I'm hammering the box from multiple clients simultaneously I get max Gigabit throughput on all file transfers.

Also, and this is the big bonus for me, Software RAID 1 in Windows doesn't create funny disk volumes, so you can break the mirror and still access all your data from the remaining drive(s) - I've seen horror stories of bespoke partitioning in commercial NASs, and people losing data when the motherboards die - I don't want that ever happening to me.

Finally - Windows Server also supports iSCSI, so you can just keep adding new boxes with disks in, all presented via the same File Server.

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