Barebones but reliable NAS?

[Valnar]

I'm looking for a NAS that is simple, reliable and supports RAID of some variety. I don't need apps or features, although if it does come with them it's not a deal breaker. It will be used purely as a backup device. Probably 4-bay. Speed is not important. Quiet and low-power would be nice too...although I may not even keep it running all the time.

I'm not interested in building my own unless FreeNAS or Unraid happen to be the best (or only) option that fits the criteria. I already own a rackmount server with a bunch o' hard drives. This is to back that up.

Recommendations?

 

[_Gea]

I you need reliability and raid with realtime protection:
use ZFS - nothing else -

For ex a HP G8 microserver with 4 bays and a webmanaged ZFS storage appliance
based on BSD like FreeNAS, Nas4Free or ZFSGuru

or Solaris where ZFS comes from like
Oracle Solaris or a free fork like OmniOS (you can use my napp-it for web-management) or
NexentaStor CE.

 

[Valnar]

I want something small and portable. Easy to carry out in a fire.

It's too bad they don't make pre-built Unraid boxes with an Atom processor and the size of those Synology or ReadyNAS devices. It looks like Synology might be my best bet.

 

[_Gea]

A Microserver is similar in size than a 4bay Synology but much faster (and cheaper) with a CPU like the i3

You can put Xpenology or any solution with snapraid/unraid on it
But do not expect ZFS alike data security with filesystems like ext3/ext4 or ntfs.

 

[Valnar]

Nas4free is looking good. I don't need apps, but I have to be careful about the motherboard. I may go that route.

 

[Valnar]

Wow. Interesting that HP Microserver. Proprietary motherboard but it has 4 hard drive bays. Very nice.

I assume it takes regular SATA drives? Do all the major free NAS products work with it out of the box?

 

[_Gea]

Wow. Interesting that HP Microserver. Proprietary motherboard but it has 4 hard drive bays. Very nice.

I assume it takes regular SATA drives? Do all the major free NAS products work with it out of the box?

Yes,
BSD based (FreeNas etc), Linux based (OMV, Xpenology) and Solaris based ones like OmniOS are ok

 

[Olga-SAN]

i would just basically "clone" your existing rack mount server

you don't need a lot of cpu horsepower and memory slots for backup unit so something like dell r320 with 8 disk cages should work well and not going to cost a fortune

previous generations refurb units are cheap on eBay and @ server money and xbyte if you want warranty

I'm looking for a NAS that is simple, reliable and supports RAID of some variety. I don't need apps or features, although if it does come with them it's not a deal breaker. It will be used purely as a backup device. Probably 4-bay. Speed is not important. Quiet and low-power would be nice too...although I may not even keep it running all the time.

I'm not interested in building my own unless FreeNAS or Unraid happen to be the best (or only) option that fits the criteria. I already own a rackmount server with a bunch o' hard drives. This is to back that up.

Recommendations?

 

[Valnar]

I'm starting to question if I need RAID at all. I run FlexRAID on my server for safety, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt on a backup NAS either. Four drive bays would suffice if I give up RAID, although with 4 4TB drives, I think 12TB would hold me for a while too.

My half rack is full of network gear, two servers, two firewalls, HDhomerun tuners and the like. I'd want my NAS to be non-rackmountable on purpose. Easy to carry out of the house.

My other thought is a mini-itx board and a Lian-Li case.

Darn it. Everytime I try to get away from DIY to save some time, I get sucked back in.

 

[_Gea]

I'm starting to question if I need RAID at all..

I accidentally own a pool from 3 TB Seagates. They are now about 2 years old and it seems impossible to keep a ZFS Raid-Z3 (triple parity raid where three disks can fail prior a dataloss) up and running.

They are supposed to have a 40% chance of a failure per year.
In the end I decided to trash them all.

techreport.com/news/27697/latest-backblaze-reliability-data-shows-carnage-for-3tb-seagate-drives

Good disks have a chance of a few percent per year on new disks that increase over years. Storage without redundancy AND backups is like russion roulette so any sort of redundancy is needed. One of your disks will fail sometime, maybe in 5 minutes maybe in 5 years.

You now have two options:
A backup solution like Unraid/SnapRaid etc that works on demand. They protect the data state of the time you do the backup. They fail if a problem occurs on the initial write or in the time from last backup run. It also does not help to regain a former data state as this needs versioning or snaps.

Mainly this is used for a media server where upgrade options (add any disk at a time) or power saving is the main concern.

If you need realtime protection, you need realtime raid like raid 5/6 or ZFS Raid Z(1-3).
best with a former version or snapshot capability.

Raid 5/6 was the solution in the past. Nowadays you should prefer the similar Raid Z as it adds realtime checksum protection from the initial write to disk paired with snaps and a robust raid without the write hole problems of raid 5/6 (you can reduce this with conventional raid but this remains a problem there even when you add a BBU)