DIY NAS Service Life (Hardware)

[nobbnobb1]

So I'm probably a decade behind on this, but my current NAS is a low power machine I built in 2009. It was originally running Windows Home Server, then eventually I migrated to Windows 10 using Storage Spaces for my drive expandability and redundancy. Despite being slow for W10, I love the familiarity and functionality so I never bothered getting into NAS specific OS.

Hardware wise, it's got 4x drives but the hardware is all super low draw, so the Antec EarthWatts EA380D power supply is barely above ambient. This PSU is apparently known for capacitor issues but when I went in to inspect, everything looked perfect and even that nasty yellow glue never changed colors at all. The drives have between 20-80k hours and have never skipped a beat. On the motherboard, I did notice one bulging capacity last year which I changed out. The only thing that gets me nervous is now Im worried the other capacitors of this brand may go.

So I'm wondering, with this sort of hardware what's a reasonable time before I decommission it? My next build will probably be OpenMediaVault but admittedly there would be a learning curve figuring all that out. Anyone else running decade old NAS hardware? Is this a disaster waiting to happen?

[eccerr0r]

Re: DIY NAS Service Life (Hardware)

I've replaced most of the parts in my DIY NAS already. It's not just NAS, it's a home server/VM host and the server/shell/compute box aspect is of more use than the NAS. Hard drives failed/obsoleted (thank goodness for RAID5), motherboard failed, memory replaced/upgraded... I think just the CPU, PSU, and OS did not change. Installed Gentoo Linux back then and still the same now... and didn't even reinstall yet it's still latest - rolling release at its best.

4x500GB -> 3x2TB RAID5 (with multiple disk swaps as they failed/got upgraded. My SATA hotswap bay was helpful)
4GB -> 6GB RAM -> 8GB RAM
Gigabyte motherboard (unknown failure mode/not capacitors AFAIK) -> Intel motherboard

I may end up switching the board to my spare low power Supermicro board (fanless CPU) with 16GB RAM in the future, mainly because it gives so much more leeway for the virtual machines. 8GB is marginal and getting more DDR2 is $ARM$LEG. The Supermicro board would give me ECC RAM along with the additional 8GB so that would be a plus... The machine would unfortunately be quite a bit slower than the current machine but probably acceptable since it should never swap except if there is a memory leak...or I run too many VMs.

... and no OS reinstalls needed!

[dmill89]

Re: DIY NAS Service Life (Hardware)

That's definitely pushing it age wise. I've found most "desktop grade" hardware handles around 5 years of 24/7 use fairly well, beyond that reliability tends to suffer, "server grade" hardware can often go 10+ years but once you get beyond that power-efficiency and performance tend to become issues. I've gone through a few NASs/servers (some did more than just NAS use at some point, but all did at least that)over the years.

My first unit was built with (mostly) new desktop grade hardware (AMD Athlon 64 socket 754) around 2005 and was used until around 2011 before it was retired (aside from a few fan replacements it still worked, was just getting outdated), this was then replaced with a used Dell PowerEdge 830 Server which ran until 2019 (again still ran, just outdated and very power inefficient at this point), both of these ran Windows server. The PowerEdge was then replaced with a used HP ProDesk 600 G3 desktop which was replaced at the beginning of this year (the desktop hardware was still ok, but the 50k+ hr. drives were having issues and I wanted room for more than 2 drives) with a used HP ProLiant ML30 gen 9 server, both of these systems used TrueNAS Core.


Hers's my current NAS/media server:
HP ProLiant ML30 Gen 9
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1260L v5
RAM: 24GB DDR4-2133 ECC
OS Drive: 256GB Intel Pro 5400s SSD
Storage Drives: 4X 8TB HGST HUH728080ALE600 7200rpm HDDs (RAID-Z1 essentially ZFS's version of RAID5)
Other cards: TrendNet TEG-25GECTX 2.5G ethernet card.
OS: TrueNAS Core 13.0-U5-1.

[nobbnobb1]

Re: DIY NAS Service Life (Hardware)

That's definitely pushing it age wise. I've found most "desktop grade" hardware handles around 5 years of 24/7 use fairly well, beyond that reliability tends to suffer, "server grade" hardware can often go 10+ years but once you get beyond that power-efficiency and performance tend to become issues.

I'm curious what kind of problems do you notice beyond that in terms of reliability issues? Hard drive and fan failures are fairly easy to work around. This is the only machine that I've really ever ran for such long periods. Even then, it's not a 24/7 machine. It auto powers down from midnight to 6am everyday.

I would also maybe attribute my reliability to the fact that I built it to be a pretty low power machine. ~50 watts on idle with 1 drive. Was very surprised to see the infamous yellow glue in the power supply to still look like new. If this power supply was run anywhere close to full load, the yellow glue would have turned brown by now and have likely shorted itself out somewhere.

Although that being said, I was surprised that I saw a bulging capacitor on the motherboard...suggesting the others could be degrading too even if they still look normal visually.

[eccerr0r]

Re: DIY NAS Service Life (Hardware)

My machine is up 24/7/365, and I never measured the wattage, though idle power is probably around 90-100W, half due to RAID, half due to CPU (~60W idle with 1 disk, and then another 15W each disk). I just have the main RAID drives in the system - the OS boots off the RAID, so no additional disks to keep track of and could get back to 4 disks to a 6T RAID if I needed more space.

Technically a good brand of capacitor shouldn't bulge when they fail, bulging tends to be the result of the plague with bad electrolyte. Good capacitor electrolyte will eventually just dry out without any visual cues. The original Gigabyte board I was using has solid polymer caps and still looks pristine, yet frequently and randomly fails boot. I have it controlling another set of RAID disks as a backup server that keeps a copy of the main RAID, it can go down without penalty minus no longer being able to backup or restore until it gets fixed.

The equally old intel board does not have solid polymer caps and still working...knock on wood. Then again if it does fail, the supermicro board is waiting in the midst...

[dmill89]

Re: DIY NAS Service Life (Hardware)

I'm curious what kind of problems do you notice beyond that in terms of reliability issues? Hard drive and fan failures are fairly easy to work around.

Aside from the aforementioned HDD and fan issues (while fan issues themselves are "minor" if you don't catch them in time a failed fan can of course potentially lead to major overheating damage, I've seen plenty of "cooked" components from a bad fan), mainly cap failures in PSUs (PSUs with good quality Japanese caps rarely have issues) and motherboards (though this has gotten better as more hardware has gone to all/mostly polymer caps on the motherboard) and the occasional BGA issues (mostly older chipsets with known issues), cooling is definitely key, hot running hardware is definitely more failure prone.

*note: my "sample" mainly consists of decommissioned office PCs from offices that had "keep your PC on after hours to receive updates" policies so they ran 24/7 or nearly so.

[dmill89]

Re: DIY NAS Service Life (Hardware)

My machine is up 24/7/365

Same here, the HP ProLiant ML30 Gen 9 from my post above draws 65-70W at idle with all 4 disks spun up (which they always are), and another 10-15W on top of that when transferring files.

[Topcat]

Re: DIY NAS Service Life (Hardware)

One of these days I need to redo my NAS with something low-power.....but it would be such a headache.....and everything works!! ...but it likes electricity! Not to mention, it'd be quite embarrassing to put ITX boards in the NAS enclosure....

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: DIY NAS Service Life (Hardware)

do it! the planet will luv u for it for not making the planet warmer by burning less fossil fuels. slightly off topic, thats why i decided to get a p3 for a win98 retro gaming pc. i've had two s478 board failures within 6 months several months ago and i'm only left with one last working s478 board.

i think p4 hardware just dont last due to their higher tdp. i bought some china watt meters and found that the p4 computers pull around 150-180w from the wall during stress testing. in contrast, a p3 system with the same video card, psu and hard drive etc. pulls 50-55w from the wall. thats 3x less power! i was shocked at how little power it consumed! as a comparison, my dell latitude e6500 laptop with mobile core 2 duo p9700 2.8 ghz cpu pulls 40-45w from the wall during stress testing. i didnt expect a desktop p3 to pull just slightly more power than a laptop! so i think i'll just store away my p4 computers in the store room for now...

[lti]

Re: DIY NAS Service Life (Hardware)

At least Pentium 4s are everywhere. Unfortunately, the "Windows 98 retro gaming computer" people are learning that, so they aren't worthless anymore. It feels wrong to install Windows 98 on a Pentium 4, but they're the newest thing that has official Windows 98 drivers.

The old P4 Dells never seemed to die (except the GX270 and GX280 - the rest kept running with blown caps like nothing was wrong).

I still don't have a NAS. Maybe I should get one some day, but I feel like I would probably try too hard to make a mini-ITX Core 2 Duo system (based on a random CPU pulled from a bumpgated laptop) work with reasonable performance before buying an embedded Ryzen that will probably have its own problems (as all "cool" hardware does for me).

[eccerr0r]

Re: DIY NAS Service Life (Hardware)

I need to stick more disks into my nas box... Probably want to merge a RAID box that I solely use to backup my PVR into my main NAS^H^H^H^H shell box, then I can delete the OS from that RAID for more space.

Just that it's not very convenient to have 10 hard drives disks in a standard minitower case and I need another SATA host adapter.

[Topcat]

Re: DIY NAS Service Life (Hardware)

do it! the planet will luv u for it for not making the planet warmer by burning less fossil fuels. slightly off topic, thats why i decided to get a p3 for a win98 retro gaming pc. i've had two s478 board failures within 6 months several months ago and i'm only left with one last working s478 board.

i think p4 hardware just dont last due to their higher tdp. i bought some china watt meters and found that the p4 computers pull around 150-180w from the wall during stress testing. in contrast, a p3 system with the same video card, psu and hard drive etc. pulls 50-55w from the wall. thats 3x less power! i was shocked at how little power it consumed! as a comparison, my dell latitude e6500 laptop with mobile core 2 duo p9700 2.8 ghz cpu pulls 40-45w from the wall during stress testing. i didnt expect a desktop p3 to pull just slightly more power than a laptop! so i think i'll just store away my p4 computers in the store room for now...

I was eyeballing a couple of these for it: https://www.supermicro.com/en/produc...board/X11SSV-Q
I need the PCIe slot for a SAS controller...otherwise everything else I need is onboard.

Far more efficient than what's in it and likely faster....but hard to imagine ITX boards in that monster case....