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Building a NAS

jro.io

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Re: Building a NAS

#21

Post by lewisl9029 »

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 offered unlimited storage at one point have had to backtrack on their unlimited storage claims after enough users really took them up on their offer. Note I'm talking about services like Bitcasa and OneDrive, that offer real-time sync/access, not backup & archival services like BackBlaze and Crashplan that don't have the same egress bandwidth requirements.

For those who use Amazon Drive and understand it better, does it do real-time sync like Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox? Or is it just another unidirectional backup service?

Re: Building a NAS

#22

Post by barrkel »

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, not a problem with that amount of RAM despite ZoL having a less than ideal caching situation in the kernel.

I do my backups with Crashplan. Not only do I back up the NAS with Crashplan, but I back up my various PCs and laptops to my NAS, for faster restores should I need it. Crashplan supports peer backup, which works well.

I tuned my recordsize by copying a representative sample of files to different ZFS filesystems with different settings, and comparing du output. The empirical calculation seemed easier.

I've used my NAS for a various things; video / photo archive, VM backing store (serving up zvols as iSCSI endpoints), working space for a variety of side-projects. More than anything else, it gets rid of the idea that storage space is in any way scarce, and removes the requirement to delete things (very often, anyway; I built up several years worth of motorcycle commute headcam videos at one point). My pool wanders between 40 and 70% utilization.

Re: Building a NAS

#23

Post by abusque »

opk wrote: post #17

I like the creative use of what appears to be an Ikea table for a rack.

That's actually a fairly common setup, known as a LackRack [0], although this one seems to be a different size/model, but maybe that's my eyes playing tricks on me.

Edit: actually now that I look back at it I'm almost positive this is the deeper lack "coffee table".

[0] https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack

Re: Building a NAS

#26

Post by Bedon292 »

melp wrote: post #2

I originally posted this on reddit, but I'm happy to see it reposted elsewhere. Let me know if anyone has any questions.

I already have a FreeNAS system, but I have been thinking about upgrading a few parts, like the chassis. Right now it sits in a cheap Tower, and doesn't have enough drive slots for my liking. So this is a really interesting guide.

Re: Building a NAS

#28

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

vmarsy wrote: post #13
melp wrote: post #2

I originally posted this on reddit, but I'm happy to see it reposted elsewhere. Let me know if anyone has any questions.

That's a huge setup :) One questions I have regarding NAS is backups of the NAS itself. If I have a very simple NAS with 2 drives in Raid 1 (let's call it Drive A and B), and I want to make a physical backup of my NAS in a different location. How easy is it ? What is the best practice. Ideally you could just have a big rsync method that takes care of it, or rclone as described in the article, but what if you want to…

If your NAS is small enough, you could get a couple of external drives and rotate them.

I've got a QNAP 4-drive NAS and the stuff I want to keep backed up fits in under 2TB. Based on that, I've got a 2TB external drive and have set up a backup job to sync the stuff I want to keep to that drive every morning.

There's no reason you can't get two drives and swap them every week. Just set your backup job to run weekly and unmount/eject the target drive when complete. Every Monday you just grab your drive and take it to work, and every Friday you bring the old drive home and plug it in.

Of course, any backup that requires manual work is likely to get neglected eventually. "Oh, I haven't done much work in the last week, I don't need to take the drive to work today" is something I've told myself all too often when it comes to my Mac backups.

Automated is better. If you have a second NAS at a remote site, you should be able to use ZFS send/receive to update a remote NAS over the internet.

Re: Building a NAS

#30

Post by mrbill »

I did a smaller, simpler build with 8 x hotswap-bay SATA drives running off two 4-port PCIe SATA controllers. Not counting drives, it came to about $550.

http://www.mrbill.net/nasbuild/

I originally started building it around a Dell YK838 SAS 6i PCIe controller card, but got tired of fiddling with using other systems to reflash the firmware and then having to mask off pins on the PCIe connector to get the system to even POST.

I replaced all the "factory" fans, as well as the two on the back of the hotswap drive modules, with Noctua equivalents.

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