NAS Build: Advice Needed

GaryC

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This NAS will be for content backup and media storage. This is what I've planned so far:

Case: Coolermaster RC344
CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 245
Mobo: Asus M5A78L-M LX
RAM: Patriot-S 8Gb 1333Mhz (4x2)
HDD: 3x Seagate NAS ???Tb
OS: FreeNAS

I might swap out the PSU that comes with the case if it turns out to be too crappy, but everything is selected to be cheap, since it's just a NAS build.

The only item I'm concerned about is the HDD. I'll put them in RAIDZ1 (equivalent to RAID5), but I'm not sure in what sizes. I currently have 2x 2Tb drives in my desktop in RAID0, and it's only just above half full. I could go for 3x 2Tb drives to get 4Tb of useful storage equal to what I have now, or 3x 3Tb drives to get 6Tb of useful storage, with an extra 2Tb. I've done some calculations, they're both around the $60/Tb price and the final build will only differ by $50's difference, so it's not much between them. The case and mobo can take up to 6 HDDs, so I'm not too concerned about lack of space.

Is there any advice you guys can shed?
 
FreeNAS blows amazing amount of balls, I would go with a vanilla BSD build just take all the crap you don't need out. IIRC RAIDZ doesn't allow adding of drives, you'd basically have to make another array if you ever want to add storage. Never had experience with Seagate drives, tend to stick with WD and from I hear their Red line (NAS specific drives) is quite good. Otherwise the more storage the better, once you have the storage to "waste" you start finding ways to fill it up.
 
Regarding expanding the capacity, I'll either just add another 3 drives to make 2 RAIDZ1 arrays, or completely swap drives out. I'm planning to have a similar setup in my parent's house for to have both NAS setups cover each other's asses. So I can just get the data from my parent's house, and vice versa.

Regarding the WD Red or Seagate NAS, both seem pretty even to me, I'd just going for the cheaper brand.
 
Another thought, if you don't want to deal with creating a vanilla BSD install you could also look at Eon, it's OpenSolaris based and also geared for ZFS.
 
NAS Build: Advice Needed

FreeNAS blows amazing amount of balls, I would go with a vanilla BSD build just take all the crap you don't need out. IIRC RAIDZ doesn't allow adding of drives, you'd basically have to make another array if you ever want to add storage. Never had experience with Seagate drives, tend to stick with WD and from I hear their Red line (NAS specific drives) is quite good. Otherwise the more storage the better, once you have the storage to "waste" you start finding ways to fill it up.

I agree with all of this. I have two 3TB WD Reds and they seem great. I recently added two 3TB DeskStars and put them in RAIDZ2 (6TB usable) and I quickly abandoned FreeNAS when I tried it a while back. I decided to go with ZFSOnLinux and Ubuntu this time around rather than FreeBSD because I wanted to use the machine as my XBMC media center too and XBMCBuntu was less effort than trying to figure out XBMC+FreeBSD (I got tired of maintaining a NAS and an HTPC when one machine was plenty powerful for both duties).

RAIDZ cannot have disks added to it (although my understanding is that there isn't a technical reason why it couldn't be done given the interest of a talented FS developer). You can add a second RAIDZ vzdev (zvdev? I can't remember the right terminology) to your pool for more space, but remember that if two disks die in either set die, all your data goes.

Since you're going to set up a second one (good job, RAID is not a backup strategy) RAIDZ is probably enough, bit understands that if a disk fails a single read failure during the resliver (which is actually pretty likely when reading 4-6TB of data) will mean some data loss. I personally never do less than RAIDZ2/RAID6 anymore, because restoring from offsite backups is a huge PITA that I'd rather not deal with (not to mention the associated downtime).

I recommend getting the 3TB drives. They aren't much more and will future-proof your investment.
 
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Have they addressed the performance issues? I remember there was some sort of a translation layer required because of the incompatibility between GPL and w/e license ZFS is under.

ZFSOnLinux is the native kernel module version, and I would say it is "fast enough". They specifically say that they haven't optimized for speed yet, and some benchmarks show that it is slower than ext4 (duh) or even BTRFS, but I haven't yet noticed any slow disk access. I'm only using it for NAS activities and playing videos locally, and it can handle all of that plenty quick. It is definitely 4-5x faster than my DM-RAID1+LVM+EXT4 setup when listing my large movie and music directories, which were the only noticeably slow actions before I switched to ZFS.
 
When I built mine, I was mulling over OS choices for a while until I eventually settled with ubuntu server but I'm sure any flavor of 'nix would be just as good. Also, I would recommend getting an SSD or a reliable usb thumb drive to run your OS from.

I loosely followed this guide: http://www.havetheknowhow.com/
 
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I ended up with Ubuntu server myself, but I also don't run any kind of safe redundancy on the NAS. Mainly because I just use it for shows/movies/anime I am not too worried about it. My actual important data is backed up to a stand alone drive and REALLY important data is on Google drive (seeing as how they are likely pretty good at keeping back ups :p)

I am actually using a flash an SD card and a USB stick for my OS partition (LVM is a beautiful thing), it works quite well for just running the OS as it doesn't need a whole lot of space. When the rebuild comes I'm planning on using a small SSD for the OS drive.
 
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