My First NAS; DELL PowerEdge T20. Advice Needed

DiscreteMeat

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 4, 2009
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1.) I'm considering FreeNAS but there's other flavors out there, like NAS4Free and OpenMediaVault just to name a few. I know there's a learning curve but are they mostly similar or does one stand out for some particular reason?

2.) HDDs come in different flavors and NAS specific drives are more costly. But I'm wondering if this is just marketing? Would using a a standard desktop HDD, that doesn't specifically indicate its designed to be used in a NAS system, be unwise?
 
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Lots of views but no replies. Can someone please comment and share their opinion?
 
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It's not much more to get something WD red drives that are a little more designed to run 24/7. Hitachi (now toshiba), seems to be king when it comes to drive reliability.
 
4*3,5" bays only on that Dell, why that choice ?

What do you want to do with the NAS ?

Have you considered napp-it ?
 
4*3,5" bays only on that Dell, why that choice ?

Why that choice? Well, I visit Slickdeals from time to time and my timing was just right to pick up this deal: Dell PowerEdge T20 Server: Xeon E3-1225 v3 Quad, 4GB DDR3, 1TB HDD, DVDRW - $249 AC AR + Free S/H @ Dell
I thought about building my own but this seemed like a great price for a pre-built server that accepts ECC memory. I've since added another 8 gigs of memory to it.

I actually was considering building a video library at one time and thought about building a system with 10+ disks and tons of storage but decided I don''t have the time and probably wouldn't watch most of the movies often enough to warrant the effort, sspecially when streaming from online sources is so inexpensive. Recently while combing through a Slickdeals thread about a deal on HDDs, I came across the following post that solidified my thoughts:

i still cannot figure out why regular household users will need many multi terabytes of storage for home use. just assuming you are storing movies at 20gb each, why would you store 1000+ movies when you probably will play each an average of 1 every 2 years -- life is too short to be spent watching movies. you also have to worry about bit rot and cost of and maintaining back ups. would it be cheaper to rent when you need it? please explain.

What do you want to do with the NAS ?

I'm aware of the drive limitations and was before I made my purchase. But for me, that isn't a problem. I just want to organize my files and keep them in one place so I can access them from any device. I mainly have music, pics and documents spread over desktops, a laptop and phone. I just want to have one central storage location for these files and to keep backups of each device.

Someday I may decide to store video content but maintaining a huge video library no longer appeals to me right now. I'm certainly not knocking it, to each their own. But for my needs a small server with four 4TB disks seems like plenty of space for keeping music, pics documents and backups of OSs.

Have you considered napp-it ?

No, I haven't but I will look into it. I'm no IT expert so what I'm looking for in an OS are three things:

1.) How easy it is to setup and how fast the server is when properly setup.
2.) How reliable I think it is, and how much troubleshooting I think I can do on my own (or with support's help).

And last but not least...
3.) How well I'm able to understand the OS.

I need a very user friendly OS that's fast and easy to maintain and one that won't be so complicated that I need an IT college degree to understand it.
 
It's not much more to get something WD red drives that are a little more designed to run 24/7. Hitachi (now toshiba), seems to be king when it comes to drive reliability.

Good point, I think I'll heed your advice.

One thing I was wondering is since this Dell T20 only holds four 3.5" disks (wich is all I really need) if I wouldn't be better served (no pun intended) to go with something like the QNAP TS-451 4-Bay Personal Cloud NAS for ease of setup and maintenance instead.

Any thoughts on using the QNAP product instead of running something like FreeNAS on my own server?
 
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I personally has a synology 1512+ and that thing was awesome, until I setup a Plex server that needed to transcode movies to devices, which ate the cpu for breakfast. Granted that was a d2500 atom and this is a j1800 in the Qnap but if you decide to go that transcode route you will hit a cpu wall.

How much storage space are you needing? I recently switched to the 8tb smr drives from seagate and they are not too awful as archive drives at about $250 a pop, but I would be careful to read up on smr before you make a commitment with them. I also had about 5x 3tb red drives and they were super solid. Basically what I am trying to get at is if you just need a NAS you can get by with a large singe drive, and something like the qnap, but there are limitations to what those can do versus a actual beast cpu 24/7 type drives.
 
I have a Dell T20 running 3TB WD Red drives in RAID 1. Server 2012 R2. It's a great little system. 20 watts idle and 24 while in use.

Compression, deduplication, runs Blue Iris for my security cameras. The dedupe alone is saving more than 200GB of space on 1.5TB of data. That data is the backups of two computers taken by EaseUs, another 100 GB of Steam game backups, and 80 GB of ISO files.

I still use FreeNAS as a file dump for disposable department data. I've lost all data twice during hardware migration even though I followed instruction to the letter to export ZFS array. It works but I'd never let it manage really important data unless I was a trained BSD and ZFS expert.
 
Server 2012 R2 would be over-kill for my needs and the cost alone steers me away. I'm wondering how well Windows 10 would work as a file-server OS?

I still use FreeNAS as a file dump for disposable department data. I've lost all data twice during hardware migration even though I followed instruction to the letter to export ZFS array. It works but I'd never let it manage really important data unless I was a trained BSD and ZFS expert.

This is exactly the reason I'm thinking FreeNAS may not be for me. It's probably over my head and I'd have to spend weeks trying to get up to speed with it only to make fatal errors with ZFS.

I'm starting to think I should go with a two box solution. Run Windows 7 or 8.1 on the Dell T20 and then install PLEX. Then use a QNAP or Synology 2 or 4 bay NAS for storage wired directly to the T20 and my router. A little more costly using two boxes like that but wouldn't this be fairly easy to setup and maintain?

Remember earlier I stated the following:

I need a very user friendly OS that's fast and easy to maintain and one that won't be so complicated that I need an IT college degree to understand it.
 
Server 2012 R2 would be over-kill for my needs and the cost alone steers me away. I'm wondering how well Windows 10 would work as a file-server OS?



This is exactly the reason I'm thinking FreeNAS may not be for me. It's probably over my head and I'd have to spend weeks trying to get up to speed with it only to make fatal errors with ZFS.

I'm starting to think I should go with a two box solution. Run Windows 7 or 8.1 on the Dell T20 and then install PLEX. Then use a QNAP or Synology 2 or 4 bay NAS for storage wired directly to the T20 and my router. A little more costly using two boxes like that but wouldn't this be fairly easy to setup and maintain?

Remember earlier I stated the following:

FreeNAS isn't difficult to get going. You can follow Youtube videos step by step and have a functioning file store. It's when problems crop up that everything goes to hell when you're not a BSD/ZFS/Solaris expert. You can't browse files from the device. You can't expand a ZFS pool in the way RAID 5 and 6 can. You NEED 8 GB of RAM minimum for ZFS to function correctly. I've never made it work with active directory and NTFS in the way a typical Windows server file share does.

I just want to be clear that FreeNAS isn't bad in my opinion but I think too many Windows users dive into a foreign OS that's easy to use except when it matters most. I've had to resort to the command line or having to attach a monitor and keyboard too many times to my FreeNAS boxes (7 years of experience with it) to recommend it wholesale.
 
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Any thoughts on using the QNAP product instead of running something like FreeNAS on my own server?

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1039188768&postcount=4


I don't own a Synology, but do own a NAS device from a Synology competitor as well
as a "whitebox" FreeNAS system.

Either will work fine.
I only run NFS on both.

Benefits of a dedicated NAS:
- set it up and forget about it
- things go wrong ... you have a support option
- usually quieter, cooler, less power draw (depending on parts used compared to the whitebox build of course)

Benefits of a Whitebox NAS:
- build it with the hardware you want/need
- likely to be cheaper to start off with and upgrade when desired


My "whitebox" NAS is a Dell PowerEdge T110 with
8 x 2.5" drives on a PERC H700 + 4 x 3.5" drives on motherboard SATA.
1 x dual port Intel Gb NIC

Populated with 8 x 2.5" drives, It cost ~$200 more than my 6-bay dedicated NAS device _empty_ !

I can easily increase the number of NICs in it or upgrade to 10Gb NICs
I can add a second controller (which I initally had 2 H700's for 16 drives)
I can increase memory to 16GB for better caching

... just things to think about ... ultimately it will come down to your use plans.
 
Hitachi was bought by WD not Toshiba. WD had to resell some stuff to Toshiba (and Toshiba gave them some stuff in exchange, regarding laptop drives), but if you buy an Hitachi drive, a brand that is still being sold and marketed, you're buying from WD. It's still an Hitachi drive though, my 20 new 4TB NAS drives show up as HGST HDN724040AL.
 
This is exactly the reason I'm thinking FreeNAS may not be for me. It's probably over my head and I'd have to spend weeks trying to get up to speed with it only to make fatal errors with ZFS.
Maybe actually try it first and see for yourself just how complicated it is? As long you're not storing the sole copy of a particular piece of data on that server, it doesn't really hurt to try out FreeNAS for yourself first and see how hard or easy it is for you.
I'm starting to think I should go with a two box solution. Run Windows 7 or 8.1 on the Dell T20 and then install PLEX. Then use a QNAP or Synology 2 or 4 bay NAS for storage wired directly to the T20 and my router. A little more costly using two boxes like that but wouldn't this be fairly easy to setup and maintain?
You can't wire the NASes directly to your Dell. They're NASes so they have to be wired to the router first and then accessed by the Dell over the network. If your network isn't all gigabit already, make sure it is. It might be easy to setup but easy to maintain? Not quite so sure about that.
 
I have a fraction of the experience of other posters in this thread, but I faced a similar question when building my NAS. I compared Nas4Free vs FreeNAS using disk images and thought both performed similarly. The WebGUI was much faster with N4F. The FN forums are much more populated and in general FN seems to be much more popular, maybe because there are so many pre-built / pre-configured plugins. The N4F forums are sparse, but I have always found troubleshooting info for problems, which admittedly were few. I have upgraded N4F a few times since the initial install and moving the configuration over was easy.

The initial setup for both is not that hard, but setting up jails and plugins exceeded my paltry knowledge of BSD. N4F (and probably FN) really encourage you to use the embedded versions on USB, but it's hard to configure jails correctly unless you install to a hard drive.

If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably just use ZoL, which I have more experience with and IMO it is simpler to combine ZoL with other reasonably up-to-date packages like Plex, minidlna, mythTV, etc. From what I read it seemed like ZFS only reached it's full potential on Solaris / BSD, and thus I was discounted ZoL. FWIW
 
You can't wire the NASes directly to your Dell. They're NASes so they have to be wired to the router first and then accessed by the Dell over the network. If your network isn't all gigabit already, make sure it is. It might be easy to setup but easy to maintain? Not quite so sure about that.

I read differently, that you can actually wire a NAS box directly to a media server running PLEX.

If I were to install Windows 7 or 8.1 on my DEll T20 and then install PLEX, from what I read I would do the following: On the server (my Dell T20) I would map the local IP address of the NAS (my QNAP) to a network drive and point PlexMediaServer exclusively to that location. I then connect the QNAP to the rest of my network and the Internet (my router) via the second Ethernet port, so that I can access the NAS directly when adding new content or performing maintenance.

I read about this on a page disusing Installing & Configuring Plex Media Server. Scroll down about 1/3 of the page and under the little video tutorial is a section titled "NAS" and read the 4th paragraph.
 
I read differently, that you can actually wire a NAS box directly to a media server running PLEX.

If I were to install Windows 7 or 8.1 on my DEll T20 and then install PLEX, from what I read I would do the following: On the server (my Dell T20) I would map the local IP address of the NAS (my QNAP) to a network drive and point PlexMediaServer exclusively to that location. I then connect the QNAP to the rest of my network and the Internet (my router) via the second Ethernet port, so that I can access the NAS directly when adding new content or performing maintenance.

I read about this on a page disusing Installing & Configuring Plex Media Server. Scroll down about 1/3 of the page and under the little video tutorial is a section titled "NAS" and read the 4th paragraph.
You definitely misunderstood what I meant by "You can't wire the NASes directly to your Dell." I meant that as in you can't physically connect a NAS to a PC via USB 3.0, USB 2.0, eSATA, infiniband, or any other method since a NAS by definition is meant to be physically connected to a router via LAN or wireless connected to a router. In other words, you can't use a NAS in the exact same way you would with an external hard drive.

What you describe is exactly what I wrote here: "They're NASes so they have to be wired to the router first and then accessed by the Dell over the network." You're still accessing the NAS over the network even when you map the NAS drive to your Plex Server.
 
You definitely misunderstood what I meant by "You can't wire the NASes directly to your Dell."

You're right, I misunderstood. I'm quite new to this server/NAS stuff and I guess I wasn't clear in my post when I said "use a QNAP or Synology 2 or 4 bay NAS for storage wired directly to the T20 and my router". I meant via Ethernet cable.

Thank you for the clarification. The reason I was considering going that route (Run Windows 7 or 8.1 on the Dell T20 and then install PLEX. Then use a QNAP or Synology 2 or 4 bay NAS for storage wired (via Ethernet) directly to the T20 and my router.) is I'm not experienced with other OSs besides Windows. I know it would cost more to do it this way but if it makes it easier for me to keep things running and maintain because I understand it, then I think its worth the extra cost not to have issues I don't know how to resolve. This would also give me more horsepower to transcode video on-the-fly if I ever needed to.
 
Thank you for the clarification. The reason I was considering going that route (Run Windows 7 or 8.1 on the Dell T20 and then install PLEX. Then use a QNAP or Synology 2 or 4 bay NAS for storage wired (via Ethernet) directly to the T20 and my router.) is I'm not experienced with other OSs besides Windows. I know it would cost more to do it this way but if it makes it easier for me to keep things running and maintain because I understand it, then I think its worth the extra cost not to have issues I don't know how to resolve. This would also give me more horsepower to transcode video on-the-fly if I ever needed to.

You're not really getting more horsepower per se since you're merely offloading the storage to a different system rather than offloading the transcoding.

Anyway, like I said earlier, since you already have the server right now, what's the exact harm in trying out FreeNAS and Plex for yourself right now on that server? Yes you do spend time but at least that time is actually spent learning as well confirming with 100% certainty whether or not you're incapable of using FreeNAS as is. It's fine to want to do the route you want to do with the seperate NAS and Plex Server (and substantially higher costs and power usage). But it seems to me that it's a bit of an over-reaction to go that route when you haven't even tried out the other alternative that basically costs you nothing except time.
 
Anyway, like I said earlier, since you already have the server right now, what's the exact harm in trying out FreeNAS and Plex for yourself right now on that server?

You make some very valid points. I haven't tried yet and the only harm would be if I encounter issues with maintenance and need to do repair work. That's when I may be in over my head because I'm not a BSD/ZFS expert. I'll refer back to an earlier post in this thread which has me concerned.


FreeNAS isn't difficult to get going. You can follow Youtube videos step by step and have a functioning file store. It's when problems crop up that everything goes to hell when you're not a BSD/ZFS/Solaris expert. You can't browse files from the device. You can't expand a ZFS pool in the way RAID 5 and 6 can. You NEED 8 GB of RAM minimum for ZFS to function correctly. I've never made it work with active directory and NTFS in the way a typical Windows server file share does.

I just want to be clear that FreeNAS isn't bad in my opinion but I think too many Windows users dive into a foreign OS that's easy to use except when it matters most. I've had to resort to the command line or having to attach a monitor and keyboard too many times to my FreeNAS boxes (7 years of experience with it) to recommend it wholesale.
 
You make some very valid points. I haven't tried yet and the only harm would be if I encounter issues with maintenance and need to do repair work. That's when I may be in over my head because I'm not a BSD/ZFS expert. I'll refer back to an earlier post in this thread which has me concerned.

Well don't put data that you can't replace it. Again this is all for testing purposes, not for real use just yet.

And to counter ochadd's post, unless your google-fu is seriously lacking, most of the common tasks you need to do with FreeNAS is but a google search away. Just because you have to use Google doesn't make using FreeNAS overly technical. Yes you do have to use the command line but like with Linux, the command line is nothing to be afraid of.
 
OK, you've convinced me to give it a shot. And if I come to the conclusion after testing that FreeNAS is too much for me to handle, I can reformat the HDDs and put them in a pre-built NAS box like a Synology or QNAP and add the data back and all is well? i.e, it does no harm to reformat and re-use the HDDs, correct?

By the way, please take a quick look at my other thread in this forum regarding the new HDDs that were just delivered to be installed in my Dell T20. Thanks for all your help.
 
Correct. You can always reuse the drives from the server in a NAS.
 
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