Low power consumption virtualized NAS/Internet gateway box w/ PCI passthrough

Hey all,

I got caught flat-footed and had a disk die with a massive amount of important data on it. I'm likely going to be footing a clean room bill to fix it. I might be able to have it paid for by an organization - and I might be able to have them pay for a NAS build so that this never happens again.

Right now, though, I have a massive headache looking at something upwards of $1000 to recover data from my drive as a college student who doesn't get to eat breakfast/lunch for quite awhile if he gets hit with a $40 bill.

This first post will be a specifications post. I'll come back with ideas later and post my final build!




I currently run a Pentium G3258 on a very cheap motherboard with 16 gigs of RAM as my Internet gateway and NAS box. I occasionally toss a game server on it. It uses an SSD for the OS drive and has a 3TB storage drive on it.

The mobo does not appear to support PCI passthrough in KVM and I'm out of PCI-E slots anyway. It needs to be replaced.


I'm hoping to drop 4x5TB drives in RAID 10 or 5x4TB drives in RAID-6. I'm looking at the HGST Megascale 4TB drives that Backblaze uses going "hmmm". I'm also looking at the HGST Deskstar NAS drives.

Then I plan on buying a cloud backup plan to keep it all off-site as well.


My needs are:
-Minimal power consumption when idle and routing Internet traffic ( < 30W )
-PCI passthrough for the RAID controller
-80 MiB/s to/from the RAID array.
-Ability to expand to up to 8 disks.
-80W or less power consumption during RAID-based operations with 5 disks.
-65W or less power consumption during CPU-based operations. (TDP is 53W on the Pentium chip)
-100W or less maximum power consumption
-A live pure sine wave UPS to cover this rig

What I'd like is:
-3xPCI-E x16 slots capable of running at x8 (PCI-E x4 network card, RAID controller, 1 for future expansions)
-2xPCI-E x1 slots (1xPCI-E x1 network card, 1 spare)
-Integrated GPU
-Single-threaded Passmark score of around 2000, more than 2 cores if possible

What would make be absurdly happy would be:
-More than sufficient airflow over the hard disks
-Fans that can be set up to turn on upon disk activity and turn off otherwise
-A quiet case that could accommodate up to 9 3.5" disks and 1 SSD



I've never looked at RAID controllers nor have I looked at arrays of this size in a long time. I usually don't build for low power consumption.

I'm not married to the idea of making an all-in-one machine, I do want to minimize power consumption though. So if there's a NAS enclosure that runs a version of Linux or Windows that will let me use one of the cloud backup services on it, I'd be all for it!

Comments/suggestions welcome. I'll be researching this this weekend as I evaluate my other data recovery options.

Well, a few important questions:
1) How much are you willing to spend?
2) What RAID setup are you going for? Hardware? FakeRAID? SoftwareRAID?
3) Are you planning on using ESxi or some other Hypervisor?

1: This thread will be used as justification to have the solution funded externally. "Whatever gets the job completely done with no corners cut and that isn't extravagant."

I likely won't foot the hardware costs, but I will have to pay subscription fees/other recurrent costs for the off-site stuff. Also, the power bill's my responsibility.

2: I've had conflicting opinions on this. I'm unsure. I've been told to use Linux's software RAID in RAID 10 and that my migraine and being in shock was responsible for my consideration of RAID-6. Since this is only accessed over gigabit ethernet (or worst, 15mbps Internet) until 10G becomes available, my answer is "the most stable solution possible" with a secondary concern re: power consumption.

3. I was planning on Ubuntu Server LTS w/ KVM. I wouldn't mind a bare-metal hypervisor in theory. I've never bought the hardware required for them. As a student I have access to Server 2012 R2 and should get free access to Server 2016.

I would just get a prebuilt unit like a Synology, DS1515+ - Products | Synology Inc. load it up with 5 of whatever drives and call it a day. The problem is you still have to remember to copy your data to it, or you can setup an iscsi link to your workstation and even run the os and data drives from there. But when you start doing this stuff, you need so really nice switching equipment.

Unfortunately from all i know the only server that is power efficient enough and has VT-D is XEON 1541/1540 but it's very expensive. So In this case It's just impossible to get such low power usage. Raid controller itself will draw around 10-15W by itself.. Mine server draw aroud 100W from the wall and i have 2SSD,4 -2Tb HDD, 2 NICs and i5 2400.
In that case i'd also go with synology.

I like the Synology Disk Station on paper. It's a perfect fit for the criteria. Looking at it, the DS1515+ supports 5 disks maximum and runs $700 but can do everything I'd need it to including virtualizing my Internet gateway and running any operating system I want it to. Woot! The DS916+ may be problematic due to its lack of Ethernet ports - I would need 3 if I wanted to transfer my Internet gateway over, as the macvtap adapters can't talk with their own physical adapter without a specialized switch.


What's the best cloud backup service for a NAS?

Also, let's look at custom built solutions as well, now and increase the maximum power draw to 80-100W and see if we can drop the price down to <$400 for the system without the disks.

I'm willing to underclock and experiment with undervolting to drop power consumption.

A hardware RAID controller sounds like it might be more than I need for 125 MiB/s maximum theoretical thoroughput.