Building a NAS, need opinions

[Maxxarcade]

I am currently using a very old server as my NAS. It has 16 IDE drives and tops out at about 3.6 TB capacity. It also uses about 330 watts at idle. Since I'm out of space and it costs too much to run and maintain anymore, I need to move to something newer.

My needs are something with true hardware RAID 6, hot swap drives, at least 16 TB in RAID 6, and less than 330 watts. So far I've got my eye on a refurb Dell Poweredge 2900 Gen 3 with 10x 2TB drives, PERC 6i, 16GB RAM, Xeon L5420, and remote access card. Total cost is around $1,800, which is far cheaper than anything I was able to do from scratch. The cost of the drives and RAID controller alone are more than that with new hardware. Am I missing any good deals elsewhere?

Even using the crappy WD Red drives, I'd still have about that much into drives alone, and another $400+ in a good RAID card. And most higher end rackmount NAS units seem to be over $2k without drives. Too bad because I love the idea of having a small (Atom/Celeron) CPU for low power draw. But the 50 watt L5420 is still way better than the 2x 89 watt Xeon system I have now.

[mariushm]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

Do you know how old those 2 TB drives are?
Is ECC on motherboard something you really care about?

A good standalone hardware raid card would be something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816151039

Hardware raid, 256 MB ECC onboard, Intel 800 Mhz cpu on board etc, 8 sata/sas drives.
But you have to be careful what drives you pick to use with it.

Atoms and Celerons may be too low performance for the price you pay. You also have to go quite high up the desktop/workstation chipsets on Intel platform to get ECC support.
Atoms and Celerons probably don't have ECC support and they're also somewhat performance limited by being single channel, 1333 Mhz etc.

It may be a good idea to go with an AM3 board, something based on 970 or 990FX chipsets6. Some boards support ECC memory unofficially and some boards from Asus for example even support ECC memory officially.
Intel CPUs are probably less power hungry considering the server will stay most of the time close to idle, I don't think the power consumption of the cpu will matter a lot. The hard drives would use more power than the CPU.

A Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 like the one I have would probably work just fine: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128514 (the UD5 supports ECC unofficially, this one I'm not sure, I didn't test)
An FX-4300 would be more than enough as well: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819113287

With 16 GB of memory, even if ecc unbuffered, should still be under 7-800$.

Hard drives will cost you a lot ... you could go with 8 x 3 TB drives and they'd cost probably about 150$ each so you're looking at about 1000-1200$ in hard drives.
But overall you can get the whole thing for under 2000$ and at least you'd have new hard drives, with warranty, and you could scale up with the hard drives (don't buy 8 at the start, though it would be a pain to extend the array afterwards)


btw... subscriber of your channel, good stuff there, especially the amplifier repairs and repair videos in general.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

Do you know how old those 2 TB drives are?
Is ECC on motherboard something you really care about?

A good standalone hardware raid card would be something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816151039

Hardware raid, 256 MB ECC onboard, Intel 800 Mhz cpu on board etc, 8 sata/sas drives.
But you have to be careful what drives you pick to use with it.

Atoms and Celerons may be too low performance for the price you pay. You also have to go quite high up the desktop/workstation chipsets on Intel platform to get ECC support.
Atoms and Celerons probably don't have ECC support and they're also somewhat performance limited by being single channel, 1333 Mhz etc.

It may be a good idea to go with an AM3 board, something based on 970 or 990FX chipsets6. Some boards support ECC memory unofficially and some boards from Asus for example even support ECC memory officially.
Intel CPUs are probably less power hungry considering the server will stay most of the time close to idle, I don't think the power consumption of the cpu will matter a lot. The hard drives would use more power than the CPU.

A Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 like the one I have would probably work just fine: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128514 (the UD5 supports ECC unofficially, this one I'm not sure, I didn't test)
An FX-4300 would be more than enough as well: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819113287

With 16 GB of memory, even if ecc unbuffered, should still be under 7-800$.

Hard drives will cost you a lot ... you could go with 8 x 3 TB drives and they'd cost probably about 150$ each so you're looking at about 1000-1200$ in hard drives.
But overall you can get the whole thing for under 2000$ and at least you'd have new hard drives, with warranty, and you could scale up with the hard drives (don't buy 8 at the start, though it would be a pain to extend the array afterwards)


btw... subscriber of your channel, good stuff there, especially the amplifier repairs and repair videos in general.

Thanks, I'll look into that a bit. The 990FXa-UD3 is what I have in my daily use PC too.

I forgot to mention though, another reason I like the Dell is for the redundant power supplies. I was planning one plugging each one into a separate UPS, so that the system can stay running even if I have one UPS fail. My existing NAS has a 2+1 redundant PSU with hot swap, which is handy. But it's very old and tired now, and only about 64% efficient.

I think I'd still go over budget with DIY build, since a good case with hot swap trays is another cost issue.

Though the drives in the Dell are probably a few years old, they are enterprise grade, and I plan on buying a couple spares as well. I still trust them more than cheaper consumer drives.

EDIT: ECC would be nice, since my current system has it. Server memory is really cheap on Ebay too :-)

[Maxxarcade]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

Another thing I'm considering is something like the Qnap TS-869-PRO-US. Someone on Ebay is selling 2TB Dell Enterprise drives for $100 each that would probably work in it, so that would set me back about the same amount as the Poweredge 2900 setup. Only drawback is 12tb vs 16tb.

[shovenose]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

Hmm, you know you could buy 3-4TB drives now?
And there are some ATX cases where the whole front is 5.25" inch bays. Each one could hold a SATA Hot Swap adapter...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822236344

[mariushm]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

He wants rack mountable cases.

Those hard drives you link to have lousy history (check reviews) and they often don't work well in hardware raid.

I would consider this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822236537 as it advertises itself as NAS for up to 5 hard drives and with a custom firmware, but only after checking that it has the features needed for a proper hardware raid.

Here's the official page: http://wd.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1060


I don't know, I'm really weary of used hard drives. The 100$ for 2TB sounds very good, for enterprise drives, but still, I personally wouldn't bite.
Even if in a raid, i hate it when a hard drive dies so I'd rather have the 3 year warranty.

Recently, I actually had a drive fail on me 2 months before warranty expired (it was 2 or 3 year warranty), drive was running perfectly for the whole duration with almost 24/7 usage - received a new one still in original packaging... so I'm starting to like the warranties.

[shovenose]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

I'm fairly sure that is the exact same hard drive if you were to open that retail package :P

[Maxxarcade]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

He wants rack mountable cases.

Those hard drives you link to have lousy history (check reviews) and they often don't work well in hardware raid.

I would consider this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822236537 as it advertises itself as NAS for up to 5 hard drives and with a custom firmware, but only after checking that it has the features needed for a proper hardware raid.

Here's the official page: http://wd.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1060


I don't know, I'm really weary of used hard drives. The 100$ for 2TB sounds very good, for enterprise drives, but still, I personally wouldn't bite.
Even if in a raid, i hate it when a hard drive dies so I'd rather have the 3 year warranty.

Recently, I actually had a drive fail on me 2 months before warranty expired (it was 2 or 3 year warranty), drive was running perfectly for the whole duration with almost 24/7 usage - received a new one still in original packaging... so I'm starting to like the warranties.

As much as I love Western Digital, I'm never touching anything other than the Caviar Black or RE type drives. Those cost $200-300 each.

The 2TB drives on Ebay are listed as New.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/301084648601...601%26_rdc%3D1

I'm thinking this QNAP might be a good option if those Dell drives work with it. It's certainly lighter and more efficient than the old PE 2900 would be.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822107081

I tried to go with a 4U rack case with 8 hot swap bays, but those are around $300-400 no matter which configuration I go with. Then I still need to get a good motherboard, RAM, CPU, Raid card etc. It would probably end up over $3k easily.

[Mad_Professor]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811219038
Get one of these motherfuckers. I have one, build quality is good, not great, it uses Six internal SFF-8087 Mini SAS connectors,
but fans are decent and quiet and move a ton of air plenty of room, and allows redundant PSU to be installed.

I coupled this with supermicro x9scm board, xeon E3 1230, 16GB of kingston ram, two LSI HBA and a corsair 650w PSU.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813182254

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816118142

I started off with eight 3TB seagates, although now, I would not advise using seagate, since now all of the 8 drives have died now. I've lost my final one last week. I also had six 1TB Samsung Spinpoint drives, still going strong. Two 1.5TB segate drives which died twice over, and two 500GB RE drives and one 500GB seagate which has bad sectors on it.

New seagate drives are shit.

If I were you, I would go WD Red, Blacks, or Enterprise SE, RE, don't bother with green or blue.

Good place to get cheap hard-drives would be provantage.com

http://www.provantage.com/scripts/se...=31332&V1=3+TB

http://www.provantage.com/scripts/se...=31332&V1=4+TB

As for software, I use CentOS 6 with ZFSonLinux, mythtv backend with lirc, Samba, NFS, and KVM with 5 virtual guest running.

Works great with 4 cores with hyper threading, giving me a nice 8 core server, most of ram is used up by ZFS and the virtual guests, I can max out a gigabit connection with no problem.

Lately though with all the seagate drives dying and running unsupported software and third party repos, the system beginning to experience some stability issues. Most of it seems to be the sas controller attempting to reset the crashed or dead seagate drives, no TLER on desktop drives so I wouldn't be surprised if it's causing the system to kernel panic.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

I've been doing some more digging, and I really like this one too:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822108138

4x LAN trunking looks like a beast, and the software seems powerful as well. Also 4GB RAM capability, which is a bit better than the QNAP.

If it will work with the Hitachi/Dell drives that are on Ebay, I think I'll have a winner. Nowhere near as fun as DIY, but I just can't match the price for what I get from it.

[mariushm]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

You can see/read the Synology 1812 review here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7071/s...oho-nas-review

Not sure what's updated in 1813+ .. i'd guess more built in memory and maybe some newer firmware.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

Right now my biggest issue is picking which hard drives to use. I can get the Hitachi ones from Ebay, or some other (slower/cheaper models) from Newegg for around the same price. But it seems like every drive I look at has a high failure rate. Though maybe it's because people don't bother leaving reviews when they actually work.

My existing NAS uses a bunch of ancient drives with over 50K hours on them, and most are old Seagate Barracude 7200.7. I've had 2 or 3 fail in the last couple years, but they were old when I got them. I probably don't have to worry much about newer drives, though the WD Reds seem to have more issues than normal.

My other concern is being able to have easy access to the NAS when I need it. I have no need for everything to be password guarded all the time, and it would get very cumbersome to put a password in every time I need to access something. Though I would assume that's all adjustable.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

Well, I ended up with the DS1813+ and 9 new HGST 3TB NAS drives. Yay for $2,400 worth of gear that probably won't last as long as my old server

I almost went for the 2TB enterprise drives off Ebay, but I figured these would be good enough for the job, and give me an additional 6TB of capacity. I bought an extra in case one of them is DOA, but it's good to have a spare either way.

At least now I have a good reason to get off my butt and sell a bunch of stuff, which will give me more room to work.

The good points are that I'll be going from 330 Watts and 3.6TB to 75 Watts and 18TB. And 35Lbs vs 135Lbs

[mariushm]

Re: Building a NAS, need opinions

Congratulations on your purchase. Hopefully the drives will last a long time.

Looking forward to seeing a video with retiring that old monster and installing the drives in that DS1813+