Building a mini-ITX home NAS

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Mirado

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I've finally run out of space on my main computer, and instead of just slapping another hard drive in there, I figured I'd venture into the realm of NAS boxes. After doing some research, I came to the conclusion that in order to get the features I really want (10ish TBs of space, as close to saturating a 1gE link as possible, headless box with decent web administration, perhaps some media server duties), I'd be paying far more for a pre-made box from Synology or QNap then if I built it myself.

So, here we are.

I've assembled the part list (with the exception of the drives themselves, which I'll get to), but seeing as this is a build with a lot of firsts for me (first mini-ITX build, first build without Windows/OS X in mind, first multi-HDD RAID/ZFS build, etc), I figure I'd pass it along to the experts in case I've missed something glaring:

OS: FreeNAS
This one is a bit debatable as it doesn't seem to be very popular around here, but the gist is that I'm looking for ZFS support with good web administration and the option for some plugins (media server duty and the like), but I don't need it to be overly configurable (however, I've got no issues with a more robust feature set as long as usability isn't compromised). I'm not adverse to the idea of OpenIndiana + napp-it, but I would love to hear some pros and cons to either choice, or any other suitable OS I may have missed. Really, FreeNAS was my first choice because of sites like Lifehacker detailing a fairly easy setup process, but I'd be happy to work for something that turns out better.

Case: Fractal Design Node 304 - $90
Oh just come out already! Seriously, I've been waiting on this thing for months now, and it finally shows up on Amazon and it's been sitting out-of-stock for a week. NCIX has it, but they won't ship it out sooner then 5-8 days, and I have Prime and....anyway. Perfect case for me. Mini-ITX form factor, six 3.5" drive bays, small (I already have a HAF X sitting next to me so I figured I'd hit the other end of the scale), fan filters, looks nice. Now I just need to get my hands on it!

Mobo: ASUS P8H77-I - $99
Seeing as I'm going ZFS, I figured getting a board with the maximum number of SATA ports was a simpler solution then going for a RAID card to take up the only PCI-E port that mini-ITX boards get. I intend to fill this guy to the brim, so if there's some issue with onboard SATA controllers or an issue splitting between SATA II and III in ZFS, let me know and I'll consider alternate solutions.

CPU: i3-3220 - $130
This is probably overkill for a baby home NAS, but what the hell. The G series Pentiums aren't really that much cheaper, and I'll have the peace of mind knowing that any single core tasks are running over 3 Ghz, whatever good that'll do. Maybe if I go bigger in the future and don't switch over to a Xeon I'll reuse it.

RAM: 16GB Corsair XMS3 - $50 (in hand)
The one point that I keep seeing time and time again is: ZFS loves as much RAM as you can give it. As I'm hoping to use six 2 or 3TB drives, I figure keeping a bit above 1GB per TB is a sound plan. Plus I got it dirt cheap, like $50 or something. I know it isn't ECC RAM but a) I'm pretty sure most mini-ITX boards don't support it and b) if I survive the inevitable hard drive failures only to be done in by RAM corruption, I'm really only going to be losing media. Not all that big of a deal and nothing I'd bother reconfiguring the whole build for.

PSU: 450W Rosewell Capstone - $70 (in hand)
80 PLUS Gold, modular, JohnnyGuru liked it, etc. I figure 450W is going to be more then enough for a no GPU, mostly idle CPU, SFF build. Even with six hard drives. One concern is I may not have exactly measured the dimensions of things all that correctly by a tiny amount (AKA "I forgot to check", first SFF build after all), but that's my fault and not the PSU's. I'll return if I must, but I think the idea is sound.

Total before drives: about $430. That's a much lower price then any six bay NAS that I could find, with a hell of a lot more horsepower and features packed in, with nearly the same form factor.

HDDs: Uhhh....
Ok, so here's my dilemma. Every user review in the world makes it seem like not only does every hard drive fail within a month, but it springs to life and takes a bat to every other data storage device you own. I'm going to chalk that up to a combination of poor shipping and the fact that people only seem to post reviews when something has gone wrong, but it makes for difficult comparison shopping. So, what to do? My first line of thought is to grab six WD Greens (wd10earx), use wdidle3 to crank up the head park time to five minutes, and wait until the whole thing inevitably up and dies, but I'd love to hear other options. I've debated on mixing drives from different companies to reduce the chance that everything came from one bad batch (so two each from WD, Segate and Samsung or whomever), but I'm not sure it's worth the hassle. I could try WD's Red drives, but those are way expensive for SATA drives and seem to just be Green drives with a bit of tweaking and marketing attached, so I'm not sure how much better they really are (and stuff like TLER isn't useful for ZFS).

So, any incite into the HDD question would be appreciated, as that's the big sticking point. Hitachi seems to be favored around here, but the availability of the drives + their price puts them out of my reach. They may be better, but I don't think I can justify the price difference if the WDs will at least last for a while.

I'd like to keep the budget around $1200, so any sub-$175 drive is an option.

The Plan:

Six drives sounds perfect for RAID-Z2, so that'll be my modus operandi going forward. I'm going to hook it up to my router via 1gE, which my main machine is wired to. It's also a wireless router so my laptop will have access, but I know how finicky wireless streaming can be, so that's a very small consideration. If and when this all hooks up correctly, I'll run some tests to see if I'm hitting the interface limit; if so, I might be tempted to try and get some LACP going on, so if anyone has recommendations for NICs and switches that go well with link aggregation, I'm all ears.

Also: UPSs. Worth it? Any issues with Active PFC PSUs? I've heard some issues with cheaper square wave models, so any info is welcome.

Also, if anyone is interested in a bit of a build log, I'd be happy to post pictures and do a write up of the installation+setup, assuming the Node 304 ever gets in! :mad:
 
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Don't buy EARX for freenas ZFS raid. Buy hitachi drives, in my opinion. I did the same thing and ended up replacing my EARX drives with hitachi drives, to the effect of having much better performance.

Ended up using the EARX in a flexraid config on server2008.

I've actually built a machine with the same motherboard, I want to say I had some silly issues with freenas. I could be wrong though. Case and power supply look fine.

UPS is absolutely worth it, in my opinion.
 
I don't even run my DVR without a UPS. And that's just tv shows that aren't very important and half of them I won't even watch. Your nas with I assume valuable data/photos etc, absolutely get a UPS.

apcupsd runs well on most OS and I can monitor it easily through nagios, so I'm partial to the apc variety. NUT also runs on a lot of OS with support for various mfg's, I've never used it though. Make sure you can get something that with gracefully shutdown whatever system you end up going with.
 
Ok, UPS it is. I'll have to do some research before I commit, but that shouldn't be all that difficult.

hotcrandel said:
Don't buy EARX for freenas ZFS raid. Buy hitachi drives, in my opinion. I did the same thing and ended up replacing my EARX drives with hitachi drives, to the effect of having much better performance.

Ended up using the EARX in a flexraid config on server2008.

I've actually built a machine with the same motherboard, I want to say I had some silly issues with freenas. I could be wrong though. Case and power supply look fine.

UPS is absolutely worth it, in my opinion.
Click to expand...

So the EARX drives performed better in a flexraid config? Is it anything specific to FreeNAS that made those disks perform poorly, or is flexraid just a better option for lower performing drives? The Hitachi's are nice but we're hitting near $200 a drive which is pushing me way over my budget; were the performance on the EARXs that much worse? Keep in mind I'm going to be limited to Gigabit Ethernet speeds at maximum.

For that money I could cut down a bit on space and head into SAS territory.

Also, if you recall any specific problems you've had with that mobo, I'd be very grateful. If I can't use it with FreeNAS, I'll either need to swap out OSes or this build is going to need a bit of an overhaul. (Is it possible you are refering to the onboard NIC not playing nice with it? I've already got a few workarounds for that, not to mention there's better support for that specific NIC in one of the later builds.)
 
Danny Bui said:
Wait, $200 per drive? What site are you looking at?

The Hitachi 7100.C 1TB cost $81 shipped now at Newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145304
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Yeah, for the 1TBs. I'm talking about the 3TB models. I want to hit at least 10TB of usable space, and with room for just six drives in my case of choice, that's either 6x3TB (For Raid Z2, giving me 12TBs) or 6x2TBs (For 10TBs at a weirdly numbered Raid Z1)

1TB drives just aren't going to cut it.
 
I built a FreeNAS server based on the hardware bellow for 270$ populated with 3 x 2TB earx wd RAIDZ1. I already owned those drives. I reach 80 - 100 MB/sec with Samba. Not bad. Speeds are slower for small files though.

Case Coolermaster Elite 343 Black
Mobo Intel DH77EB mATX
CPU Intel G630
RAM 2X4GB
PSU Antec Basic 350W

FreeNAS is doing the job for me. I have Apple File Sharing and SMB running just fine. I use SyncBack free in windows to make daily automatic backups. In the jail I run Firefly (itunes server), Transmission and miniDLNA. MiniDLNA streams movies to my 2 WDTVLive and iPad.
 
blurp said:
I built a FreeNAS server based on the hardware bellow for 270$ populated with 3 x 2TB earx wd RAIDZ1. I already owned those drives. I reach 80 - 100 MB/sec with Samba. Not bad. Speeds are slower for small files though.

Case Coolermaster Elite 343 Black
Mobo Intel DH77EB mATX
CPU Intel G630
RAM 2X4GB
PSU Antec Basic 350W

FreeNAS is doing the job for me. I have Apple File Sharing and SMB running just fine. I use SyncBack free in windows to make daily automatic backups. In the jail I run Firefly (itunes server), Transmission and miniDLNA. MiniDLNA streams movies to my 2 WDTVLive and iPad.
Click to expand...

That sounds like an ideal setup for what I want to do. From what I've read, hitting near 100 MB/s using samba is great, and SMB could be even better! (And yeah, I think it's just normal for small files to hit mechanical drives where it hurts.)

Do you have your transmission set to do any automatic downloading? I'd love to pipe it some RSS feeds and have it run along without my interference. Also, how do you keep everything organized? I've seen some people talk about using flexget, any experience with that?

Thanks for the input!
 
This is actually almost identical to what I've been considering lately for a NAS, now that I've given up on the ECC RAM route myself.

The only thing I'd add is that there is a 7-bay case from Lian Li (PC-Q25B) but with the ASUS board being limited to six ports, there's really no need. I think the ASUS board is the only mini-ITX Intel board w/ 6 SATA ports.
 
Mirado said:
That sounds like an ideal setup for what I want to do. From what I've read, hitting near 100 MB/s using samba is great, and SMB could be even better! (And yeah, I think it's just normal for small files to hit mechanical drives where it hurts.)

Do you have your transmission set to do any automatic downloading? I'd love to pipe it some RSS feeds and have it run along without my interference. Also, how do you keep everything organized? I've seen some people talk about using flexget, any experience with that?

Thanks for the input!
Click to expand...

I only used Transmission a couple of times for so far without any form of automation. I picked the Intel DH77EB mATX (not a mini-iTX) because it has an Intel NIC that have a supposedly better performance/compatibility that realtek.
 
Once again, thanks for the input!

jwcalla said:
This is actually almost identical to what I've been considering lately for a NAS, now that I've given up on the ECC RAM route myself.

The only thing I'd add is that there is a 7-bay case from Lian Li (PC-Q25B) but with the ASUS board being limited to six ports, there's really no need. I think the ASUS board is the only mini-ITX Intel board w/ 6 SATA ports.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I looked at the Q25B myself but I decided to go as close to a shoebox style system as possible. Plus, I've always wanted to own a Fractal case; I skipped over them when building my main rig last year, and while I don't regret my decision I've always had an eye for how they put cases together.

I'd be very interested in seeing your parts list if you have anything in mind.

blurp said:
I only used Transmission a couple of times for so far without any form of automation. I picked the Intel DH77EB mATX (not a mini-iTX) because it has an Intel NIC that have a supposedly better performance/compatibility that realtek.
Click to expand...

Oh, ok. As for the NIC, Intel based solutions certainly have the upper hand in terms of support and tested performance, but a few guys over at the FreeNAS forums have compiled drives for this particular Realtek NIC and reported great results, and official support was finally baked in for it as well, so I'm hoping it won't be an issue. If it is, I can sacrifice my PCI-E port for the sake of compatibility, which leads me to ask my next question:

Anyone have any experience teaming up ethernet ports using LACP? I'm not going to count my chickens and say that I'm going to be able to max out 1gE, but if I'm going to go into an Intel NIC anyway, I might want to consider a dual-port one that I could use for something more robust in the future.

I looked into Infiniband and 10gE, bu the former isn't supported all that well and the latter is far too expensive for what I want to do.
 
If he's going mini-ITX like I am, it's probably that. I couldn't find a single mobo that supported it.

As for the integrity issue, it's a much bigger deal in a production environment then a home one. For the home user, it's better to take the money you would have used for overhauling your system with ECC RAM, mobos and server CPUs and putting it towards a UPS, as I've discovered after doing some digging.

RAID is not a backup and you should be off-loading your data regularly, but in a home environment with a low level of data volume, ECC will not make or break you.
 
Mirado said:
If he's going mini-ITX like I am, it's probably that. I couldn't find a single mobo that supported it.

As for the integrity issue, it's a much bigger deal in a production environment then a home one. For the home user, it's better to take the money you would have used for overhauling your system with ECC RAM, mobos and server CPUs and putting it towards a UPS, as I've discovered after doing some digging.

RAID is not a backup and you should be off-loading your data regularly, but in a home environment with a low level of data volume, ECC will not make or break you.
Click to expand...
why do you have to have an ITX form factor?
your space is so cramped you don't have another 3-4 inches for mATX?
or a sleek, stylish ITX case is more important than functionality?

I can understand the additional cost if you are wanting to build a NAS out of existing spare parts, but if not, ECC RAM and supporting motherboard is not much more
and cheap i3 CPUs (unofficially) support ECC

for me, the data integrity features of ZFS are the #1 reason to use it over a traditional file system and by not using ECC memory, you are effectively negating that feature
 
EnderW said:
why do you have to have an ITX form factor?
your space is so cramped you don't have another 3-4 inches for mATX?
or a sleek, stylish ITX case is more important than functionality?

I can understand the additional cost if you are wanting to build a NAS out of existing spare parts, but if not, ECC RAM and supporting motherboard is not much more
and cheap i3 CPUs (unofficially) support ECC

for me, the data integrity features of ZFS are the #1 reason to use it over a traditional file system and by not using ECC memory, you are effectively negating that feature
Click to expand...

I completely agree. A larger, better-cooled, less-cramped case with more motherboard selection (mATX, ATX) is a good idea. Unless you care about looks more than reliability, I'd go with mATX/ATX every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

FreeNAS/NAS4Free installed on a flash drive is fine, but the OS lives in RAM and ZFS is RAM-intensive as well, so you better damned well be sure you get good RAM. If you plan to keep it on all the time, why would you NOT get ECC RAM?
 
blastingcap said:
I completely agree. A larger, better-cooled, less-cramped case with more motherboard selection (mATX, ATX) is a good idea. Unless you care about looks more than reliability, I'd go with mATX/ATX every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

FreeNAS/NAS4Free installed on a flash drive is fine, but the OS lives in RAM and ZFS is RAM-intensive as well, so you better damned well be sure you get good RAM. If you plan to keep it on all the time, why would you NOT get ECC RAM?
Click to expand...

I need the box to be as small as possible because it's going to be moved between two locations, and while I could let it go a bit larger I'd rather trade in a bit of functionality for portability. (This also means it isn't a 24/7 always accessible box, no need for that kind of availability) I don't care about looks, but the case I chose was the smallest I could find that had room for six HDDs, and the reviews have mentioned it does quite well when it comes to both cooling and acoustics.

As for the reliability issue; all of the data is both non-critical and on other media. This is a machine to house a large amount of blu-ray rips, Steam backups and music, so I won't shed any tears if something goes wrong. I chose ZFS because it was an easy way to prevent hard drive failures from tanking the whole thing (I've got about 6TBs worth of data right now so single drives is too much of a hassle) without buying a RAID controller or relying on the crappy mobo-RAID, and also the fact that FreeNAS has it built right in, but if you think there's a better option I'm all ears. The integrity is NOT my main focus; preventing a bad drive from taking the whole system down because of all the moving I'm doing is.
 
Well, the 2100 WAS going for $99 at the time with some rebates, but since that ended I guess I'm going for the 3220 instead! Good catch.
 
Mirado said:
Ok, UPS it is. I'll have to do some research before I commit, but that shouldn't be all that difficult.



So the EARX drives performed better in a flexraid config? Is it anything specific to FreeNAS that made those disks perform poorly, or is flexraid just a better option for lower performing drives? The Hitachi's are nice but we're hitting near $200 a drive which is pushing me way over my budget; were the performance on the EARXs that much worse? Keep in mind I'm going to be limited to Gigabit Ethernet speeds at maximum.

For that money I could cut down a bit on space and head into SAS territory.

Also, if you recall any specific problems you've had with that mobo, I'd be very grateful. If I can't use it with FreeNAS, I'll either need to swap out OSes or this build is going to need a bit of an overhaul. (Is it possible you are refering to the onboard NIC not playing nice with it? I've already got a few workarounds for that, not to mention there's better support for that specific NIC in one of the later builds.)
Click to expand...

The EARX drives I believe the issues I had were with the WD drives reporting 512byte sectors and were actually 4k sectors. I tried some of the tricks aligning them but didn't see any performance increase. The drives themselves formatted in windows work great, pretty fast RW sequential, but again in freenas with ZFS they had a performance hit in comparison.

With the version of freenas I was using I believe the drives weren't being detected because freenas didn't have a driver built in for the chipset, the drives never reported in freenas. I believe this was version 8.0, and there are 2-3 new versions since then so you my have better luck. I worked around this by installing ESX then installing freenas on that.
 
I love my FreeNAS box that I setup and it seems to run great. I know it loves all the ram it can get, but do you really need that much horsepower? I went with one of the AMD APU setups and it is great. The MB and RAM (8Gb) was only $120 after MIR. The MB has 6x Sata6 ports. As for the horsepower my CPU never has an issue. Currently running two ZFS RAID0 arrays so I don't know how much more the ZFS RAID5 overhead may add. I use mine as a SMB server for movies and connect iPads and a WD TV SMP for streaming therefore I don't require the NAS to bit stream anything as the devices handle the buffering. Currently I don't get the highest throughput, but I am quite certain that is an issue with my old old drives (2x 512 and 2x 250) which I'm replacing with 1Tb drives in a few weeks. I have tested the throughput using iperf and got great results so I don't believe the integrated NIC is holding me back.

I didn't feel the ECC issue was a big deal in my situation as the NAS is simply a second copy of my files that is just always on vice my main computer that holds the originals.
 
bbenz33 said:
I love my FreeNAS box that I setup and it seems to run great. I know it loves all the ram it can get, but do you really need that much horsepower? I went with one of the AMD APU setups and it is great. The MB and RAM (8Gb) was only $120 after MIR. The MB has 6x Sata6 ports. As for the horsepower my CPU never has an issue. Currently running two ZFS RAID0 arrays so I don't know how much more the ZFS RAID5 overhead may add. I use mine as a SMB server for movies and connect iPads and a WD TV SMP for streaming therefore I don't require the NAS to bit stream anything as the devices handle the buffering. Currently I don't get the highest throughput, but I am quite certain that is an issue with my old old drives (2x 512 and 2x 250) which I'm replacing with 1Tb drives in a few weeks. I have tested the throughput using iperf and got great results so I don't believe the integrated NIC is holding me back.

I didn't feel the ECC issue was a big deal in my situation as the NAS is simply a second copy of my files that is just always on vice my main computer that holds the originals.
Click to expand...

Do I really need that much horsepower? Right now, absolutely not. However, my line of thinking is that if I desired to move away from Mini-ITX in the future, I'll have a processor which can probably handle triple (or more) of the workload I'd put into it, with the option of going the ECC route if whatever I chose for the new mobo supports it. I don't expect to keep this as a single client box forever, and as I have the cash on hand, might as well push back the potential bottlencks that a slower CPU might cause. For the time being, I agree with your stance on the ECC issue; this box is just making my hard media more accessible, but if I scale to something larger (say, another 6x3TB in RAID-Z2) with multiple people, perhaps the peace of mind will outweigh the cost and retooling.

As for the build itself, I decided to go with 6x Toshiba DT01ACA 3TB drives in addition to the other aforementioned parts. There are murmurings that these are more or less just Hitachi drives, so as long as Toshiba didn't mess up the firmware then I think it was a good call. Certainly better then the WD Green's I was looking at. All told, I should be looking at around 12TB of usable space in RAID-Z2.

Now I all I have left to do is get a UPS, build the system and see how close it comes to saturating a gigabit Ethernet connection and decide if that bit needs an upgrade or not.
 
Mirado said:
As for the build itself, I decided to go with 6x Toshiba DT01ACA 3TB drives in addition to the other aforementioned parts. There are murmurings that these are more or less just Hitachi drives, so as long as Toshiba didn't mess up the firmware then I think it was a good call.
Click to expand...
where did you hear that bit about them being hitachi drives?
 
What is the power usage on those drives. I can't find any reviews comparing these drives to other drives. I am looking at almost the exact same setup as you just different case and PSU and maker of ram. I was thinking of 3TB WD Red's over greens but don't want to pay the price difference. If the power on these toshiba models are not bad however I may grab them instead.
 
Sorrry to bump an old thread but have you gone ahead with this build? Im actually gathering exactly the same parts as in the original thread.
 
Dude hasn't logged in since October of last year. You probably won't get an answer now.
 
I've got the same case (Node 304) and I can only recommend it if space is crucial and you want a small, portable chassis for your NAS. For me the main reason was that I live in relatively old(ish) house that doesn't have power plugs everywhere around the house and the only way I could access the net is in the living room. The apartment is also quite small so I went for the Node 304. Another thing is it has vibration dampening for HDD and it does it well. The big fan at the rear of the case keeps it cool and quiet enough.

I'm using PicoPSU in mine with Intel 2100T processor. The stock cooler that came with the processor is dead silent as is the whole NAS.

At the moment I got 3 3,5" HDDs (3Tb WD Red, 3Tb WD Green and one small Seagate drive) in it plus one OCZ SSD. I've kept mine on 24/7 as transcoder, torrent client, file/media server (got Plex server in it).

Just my 2c
 
If you guys want to talk serious NAS PM and maybe well even get to instant message I'm currently toying with 7 in my shop. All different types of hardware.
 
Danny Bui said:
Dude hasn't logged in since October of last year. You probably won't get an answer now.
Click to expand...

Good point, didnt realize he was new and inactive. Shouldve checked his profile.

...

Also thanks for your personal exp. Varzock
 
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