NAS - Where to begin?

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Term-X

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I am looking to getting storage order and I am thinking NAS. I have quite a few hard drives (assorted 1.5TB, 2TB, 3TB) which I have been lazily using via an SATA dock but it's getting tedious and even via USB, the process can be buggy (sometimes drives don't show up on the first power on or until PC is rebooted).


Having looked around at NAS ready-made solutions... they're bloody expensive. Even the 2 drive ones. It almost seems like it would be better building my own PC to house all the drives I want. Though by briefly scanning this forum, there seems to be operating systems dedicated to this kind of storage.

Realistically, what are my options via the custom route? And what are the benefits, if any (aside from "ready to go"), of standalone NAS products like Synology? I would want at least 10 drive capacity, possibly more because I've been skating by the seat of my pants when it comes to HDD and potential failure.


Any advice would be appreciated.
 
If you are looking to reuse the drives you already have, it is a bit more complicated especially if you want one "pool". You are going to need a software raid solution, no hardware raid that I know of supports mixed drives.

Windows Storage Spaces- Allows for mixed drives, but it is not a true nas, requires the host OS, windows 8+ or Windows Server, uses more power.

Unraid - Allows mixed drive, but if you care about write speed then this type of software raid is not for you as you read and write to one drive+ parity drive, so you dont get the benefit of multi drive pool write speed increase. But you can pop the drives in and out and you can add to the pool as you go. Not free

Nas4Free - Has a JBOD and you can use mixed drives but it offers no parity and if you loose one drive you loose the whole pool, basicly like raid 0, I would not recommend this at all.

Thats all I can think of that offer mixed drive support.


Pretty much if you are are wanting something that is plug and play and easy to setup, I would strongly suggest you get a premade "Nas". Your not going to make anything that is that price that uses that little of power that is that easy to setup on your own.

Now if you need something with more power, more features and want to look [H]ard to your friends and family for a more "commercial" solution then you should build your own.

If you do go premade nas I would seriously consider just buying something like a 4 bay and buying 4 big nas drives(6-8tb drives)

Also you need to look at what type of drives that you have now, some types of drives do not do well in RAID arrays ie light use consumer drives(WD Blues, Segate Baracudas)
 
The advantages of a pre-packaged NAS:

The software/hardware are pre-bundled and you don't have to worry about setup or compatibility. Most NAS vendors are good about keeping it updated. Most are pretty power efficient, and the software is typically robust enough to do whatever you need. For the hardware that you get, yes, it's expensive, but I don't think it's all that bad when you look at it as an entire package/ecosystem and want to be able to access data from a lot of various computers on a network. They make excellent "set it and forget it" systems if you aren't looking for something that needs extreme performance or requires a lot of tinkering. If your just looking at one computer though, stick with USB: it's a lot cheaper and will do the same thing.

Going to 10 drives though - that's a lot of bays, and in the NAS world, the bays are where you are going to pay your premium. I wouldn't use JBOD for anything except scratch storage for things you have backed up elsewhere or don't care about.

I agree with Drescherjm - sell your drives now used, consolidate down to a few paired drives and run something with some parity - NAS or otherwise. It's not the same thing as a backup, but it's nice insurance to have. I have good luck with 4-bay NASes for modest storage requirements, it seems to be a nice spot between price and capability.
 
Riouken said:
If you are looking to reuse the drives you already have, it is a bit more complicated especially if you want one "pool". You are going to need a software raid solution, no hardware raid that I know of supports mixed drives.

Windows Storage Spaces- Allows for mixed drives, but it is not a true nas, requires the host OS, windows 8+ or Windows Server, uses more power.

Unraid - Allows mixed drive, but if you care about write speed then this type of software raid is not for you as you read and write to one drive+ parity drive, so you dont get the benefit of multi drive pool write speed increase. But you can pop the drives in and out and you can add to the pool as you go. Not free

Nas4Free - Has a JBOD and you can use mixed drives but it offers no parity and if you loose one drive you loose the whole pool, basicly like raid 0, I would not recommend this at all.

Thats all I can think of that offer mixed drive support.


Pretty much if you are are wanting something that is plug and play and easy to setup, I would strongly suggest you get a premade "Nas". Your not going to make anything that is that price that uses that little of power that is that easy to setup on your own.

Now if you need something with more power, more features and want to look [H]ard to your friends and family for a more "commercial" solution then you should build your own.

If you do go premade nas I would seriously consider just buying something like a 4 bay and buying 4 big nas drives(6-8tb drives)

Also you need to look at what type of drives that you have now, some types of drives do not do well in RAID arrays ie light use consumer drives(WD Blues, Segate Baracudas)
Click to expand...

I see. Maybe the best option then is to eliminate these drives and start fresh with bigger HDDs. I'm not necessarily opposed to that. So I'm guessing by pooling, all drives are logically one drive. And speed increases are an advantage? I guess I'll have to research into the drive pooling because I definitely don't want the failure of one to mean the loss of all data.

drescherjm said:
It may be cheaper to sell all of your drives and just get a pair of 8TB externals when they go on sale for less than $200 each.
Click to expand...

Yea that's my only realistic option is seems. I'm game for it.
 
Term-X said:
I see. Maybe the best option then is to eliminate these drives and start fresh with bigger HDDs. I'm not necessarily opposed to that. So I'm guessing by pooling, all drives are logically one drive. And speed increases are an advantage? I guess I'll have to research into the drive pooling because I definitely don't want the failure of one to mean the loss of all data.
Click to expand...

Yes in a RAID Array either your Hardware raid controller or your software "pools" all of the disks together and then presents this pool to the OS as one big drive. Certain types of RAID have what are called parity drives, ie this is where information is stored that allows if a hd goes out that you can stick a new one in and then use the software or raid controller to rebuild the array from the data from the rest of the drives and the parity drive.

If your funds are limited, what I would do is like drescherjm said, get a USB 3 external drive that has a "NAS" class drive in it(Like a WD RED") you can plug those into a windows pc that you leave on all the time and you can use Windows storage spaces to make a "NAS" drive and you can present that to lots of stuff like a NAS, even a server.

Then when you get the money you can buy your NAS Chassis and then shuck the drives out of the external enclosures and put the in the NAS. When this happens you will loose the data on those discs so you will need a way to back up your data first but, I think this may be your cheapest path to upgrade.

Most nas and storage solutions prefer you to have all of your hardware when you start, ie its hard to add disks later.


 
Right now I am eyeing the Synology DS916+ or the QNAP TS-435A. Both seems to be capable.
 
For what it's worth old Drobo 4 bay units go for around $60-$80. They are flawed systems for sure but they are absolutely better than the cheap 4 bay units and their software raid implementations you'll find on Amazon and Newegg.

Throw in the 4 largest drives you have and see what you get. They have a capacity calculator here http://www.drobo.com/storage-products/capacity-calculator/

Again, I'm not saying this is the best solution but the hardware has dropped in price so much from its original release its worth considering if you want something cheap to play around with.

I'm pretty sure there was a guy selling in the For Sale forum here. Yep, $65 shipped if he still has it... thats a deal even if you don't ever use it long term.
https://hardforum.com/threads/wts-random-stuff-i-need-gone-cheap-laptop-router-drobo.1906401/
 
NexentaStor 5 Community Edition - unix based

I'm running 4.0 version and it's been very stable. Just took an old motherboard/CPU/RAM/Case and turned it into a NAS/Block/File storage repo for VMware.
 
Actually have spent some time doing some research and I am thinking more long term future stuff. I need to build a multi-purpose server anyway (not just for files but also virtualization) and I am thinking of going the custom build route. Right now I am eyeing the Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F-O as the basis of the server. I think it would give me plenty of headway to expand my uses into the future. I understand it would probably cost more but I am fine with that, given it's not just going to serve one purpose now.
 
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