Which NAS?

V

vengence

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So I'm looking to get a NAS. I want to use it as a network drive across 3 home computers. I'd like to be able to use window's allways avaliable even if offline thingy. It would be nice if I had access from the internet into it, but not required. I'd like it to support 2 drives and Raid 1. I'd also like it to be able to be backed up to "the cloud" by crashplan. It would be nice if it was natively, but if I need to use one of the home computers to do that, so be it. The general workflow is about 100 pictures being exported from lightroom one of the machines to this NAS. (2) 3 gig drives would support all the space I need for a while.

I want something that's going to be easy to use and maintain and not take a million years to build and setup. I've heard good things about the synology brand, but have never used any NAS. I've poked through their models and wow do they have a lot. The 216 play seems appealing, but I doubt I'll ever use the transcoding feature set. Not sure how fast of a CPU I need. I don't want to cheap out 100$ and have something that's slow, laggy, or otherwise annoying.

Suggestions? Other things I'm not considering?
 
* Buy a Dell T20, add 4Gb of ECC memory (comes with 4Gb by default).
* Get decent storage devices (Toshiba is my personal preference but HGST also works I guess, avoid "Green" HDDs)
* Get a real boot drive (not a USB stick), anything above ~4Gb will do
* Load Nas4Free or FreeNAS
* Done

If you want something prebuilt I'd advice you look to at something that at least uses a Celeron CPU (avoid ARM and Atom) from Asustor (preferably) or Synology (usually quite a bit more expensive if you compare those to brands).
 
What advantageous does rolling my own bring? It seems like it's a bunch of extra work, but I don't understand the benefit. Does FreeNAS have better feature set, or is it just better hardware (CPU/Ram) or what?
 
The Synology NAS has a lot of features as it comes, some add on aps that are free, and some you have to pay for. But they are very easy to set up, work fine, and the GUI is pretty slick.

www.smallnetbuilder.com has NAS reviews and rankings. I have an older 2 bay Synology NAS DS-213+ and it works fine for a network drive. I stream movies (that are previously encoded on a powerful PC) to all devices, stream music, even have a 6000 pic slideshow screensaver that I can run using the Synology Media Server add on app (free). If you want plug-n-play, then the price of the Synology will buy you that - but I've never used FreeNAS so it may be just as easy. I use HGST 7K4000 UltraStar 4TB drives, they each have 22K hours on them at present. I can transfer large files like movies to the NAS at ~85-90MB/s with those drives.
 
I'm a fan of QNAP (after having used Synology appliances). They have extra processing power and RAM for auxiliary services. I currently use Freenas, but have been less than impressed with the hardware to performance ratio. The only advantage for me with ZFS has been data integrity.
 
im currently selling my qnap for it could not handle what i was throwing at it. 3 vmware hosts using NFS (also tried iScsi) and the performace was subpar.

just my $.02 worth on the branding.
 
Orddie said:
im currently selling my qnap for it could not handle what i was throwing at it. 3 vmware hosts using NFS (also tried iScsi) and the performace was subpar.

just my $.02 worth on the branding.
Click to expand...

Which chassis and drives were you using with this setup? I currently have numerous appliances in service, and want to avoid any potential issues.
 
@ vengance

It's much cheaper (more than half the price) compared getting a "branded" NAS with the same performance. At least if you're go for the Dell route. Not sure what boss6021 is about, it'll max out gbit just fine and be much faster than your avg QNAP device (unless you go ~600+).
 
boss6021 said:
Which chassis and drives were you using with this setup? I currently have numerous appliances in service, and want to avoid any potential issues.
Click to expand...

it's the ts-451. i started out with 4x 1tb red's which were 5200 RPM and moved to 4x 2tb 7200 spinners from toshiba. i saw spikes passed 600ms with averages in the 100ms.

so im selling it and will go local storage.

Also, the qnap route which was suggested above is something you need to watch. Do not go over 50% of your total storage capacity and ensure you have 1gb or ram per 1tb of storage space your going to use. I tried to two setups with qnap

1) did a raid z2 and saw very good performance reporting from vmware. until i filled the drives up.... lost a disk and the OS.
2) did 3x raid0's and combined them into a single disk per the freenas forums suggestions when it comes to victual storage. I was seeing the same performance as i was with the q-nap.

the servers's specs was a quad-i5 with 32gb of memory. My average pip was 2-3mb of data. CUP was < 5% and memory was fully used (but this is how NFS works - according to the freenas forums).
 
@ boss6021
Exactly what isn't performing as you expect?

@ Orddie
Uhm... no, that's not how NFS works at all. ARC is filling up your memory, and you most likely want to use iSCSI over NFS if possible.
 
I have several brand name NAS's from Synology and QNap, I also have three servers running unRAID which btw is not free whereas Freenas and NAS4FREE are. I used to only recommend brand name NAS's but now I see the flexibility of rolling your own. I personally prefer unRAID, it does every thing I need, offers protection (dual parity in the current beta) and I can add dockers for things like sickbeard, sabNZB, couchpotato etc. They do have a plugin for crashplan so you can use that too. Its not free, but not that expensive either and they offer three versions depending on how many drives you want to use. Have a look, the other options are good too and offer pretty much the same functionality, it just comes down to personal preference.
 
diizzy said:
@ Orddie
Uhm... no, that's not how NFS works at all. ARC is filling up your memory, and you most likely want to use iSCSI over NFS if possible.
Click to expand...

should have said ZFS verse NFS. thanks for the correction.
 
diizzy said:
@ boss6021
Exactly what isn't performing as you expect?
Click to expand...

I am running Freenas on the following:
Intel Xeon E5410
32GB or RAM
4x4TB 7200RPM Toshiba drives in two mirrors
Chelsio N320E 10Gb

This attaches to my host via a Chelsio S320E 10Gb card over iSCSI. I am lucky to see 150MB/s transfer rates.
 
boss6021 said:
I am running Freenas on the following:
Intel Xeon E5410
32GB or RAM
4x4TB 7200RPM Toshiba drives in two mirrors
Chelsio N320E 10Gb

This attaches to my host via a Chelsio S320E 10Gb card over iSCSI. I am lucky to see 150MB/s transfer rates.
Click to expand...


whelp.. good thing i did not invest too much into this... i was going to go the 10gbe route
 
@ boss6021
Sounds pretty reasonable given you'll only get the performance of a single drive in RAID 1.
 
diizzy said:
@ boss6021
Sounds pretty reasonable given you'll only get the performance of a single drive in RAID 1.
Click to expand...

If it were RAID 1 yes, this is the equivalent of RAID 10. Under other storage OS I see much better performance 300-400 MB/s. So, no this isn't reasonable, and I will likely be leaving Freenas for alternatives.
 
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