need advice on building a NAS

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iakovl

Weaksauce
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Nov 12, 2008
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right now i have 4*1T hdds in RAID5 in my main pc using a PERC 5/I controller and am thinking about removing the raid from my own pc and building a NAS using 2T hdds

until now i wanted to buil an ITX nas using a 6 sata mobo and FREENAS or UNRAID as OS for it, and selling the PERC to help buy it

but i started to rethink the idea and going with MATX solution, bigger but also cheaper on my end (no need to get parts from other country)

my main and only need is storage capacity with quiet solution...

what do you think is the best thing for me to do in this situation?
 
mATX is, of course a bigger form factor, but if you can afford the space and generally only slightly higher power consumption from mATX boards, then I would save money and go the mATX route. You have more expandability and mATX v. mITX does not have an effect on noise.
 
one of my main issues is what to do with the PERC, great raid card but i don't think i really need the 8 sata while a mobo can have 6 i may need storage but not so much i think

it took me a 1.5 years to fill up my 3T do i think 4*2t in raid 5 (or other form) that is 6T is more then i need to the next year, after that i may think about building another one even

also
i need help on the OS issue, don't know which to choose, from there i can also think about what "RAID" to do, ZFS RAID UNRAID ect...
 
Decide on the OS first and then worry about the hardware, not the other way around. Your choice of OS is gonna dictate what hardware you should be using.

Oh and definitely go mATX.

iakovl said:
i need help on the OS issue, don't know which to choose, from there i can also think about what "RAID" to do, ZFS RAID UNRAID ect...
Click to expand...

You're gonna have to do your own legwork here: the debate between which OS to go with have been discussed quite often in this subforum. There's really no clear cut winner there. It's pretty much down to which OS you're more comfortable with storing your data safely and know how to deal with should problems occur.

Use this as a starting point for your OS search and go from there:
Amahi with Greyhole:
Links:
http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Greyhole
http://code.google.com/p/greyhole/
http://www.amahi.org/

Pros:
+ Lets you use different size drives and combine them into one drive pool ala WHS's Drive Extender feature.
+ Can set the number of copies of a folder/file that you want stored on other drives. So unlike WHS where only a single copy of that data is stored on a different drive, you set it to where that file/folder can be copied across every single hard drive in your PC. So 5 drives means 5 copies of your data
+ Supposedly you're still able to remove a drive from that Greyhole server and still be able to read the files on another PC without greyhole installed.
+ Free and works with Linux, which is also free

Cons:
- Still very new and experimental. So not all of the bugs may have been fixed or discovered yet.
- GUI is still relatively clunky
- Takes extensive amount of time to recover and repool data across a new drive after a drive failure
- Amahi has a tendency to try to become the default DHCP and DNS cache server for the entire network
- Uses the old “landing drive” system of the older iteration of WHS

Notes:
* Should you delete a file while using Greyhole, all the other copies are deleted as well.
* While the above example recommend Amahi Home Server, you can use Greyhole in virtually any Linux based OS

Flexraid Basic:
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexRAID
http://www.openegg.org/

Pros:
+ Uses data based parity in which parity data is only kept of the file actually stored, not like with traditional RAID where parity data is is kept of the entire hard drives, regardless of whether or not you have data on those drives.
+ Allows use of different sized drives as a result of the data based parity setup
+ Free
+ Can be used with either Linux or Windows.

Cons:
- Not realtime parity so if the data needs to be protected at all times, not a good idea to use FlexRAID
- The FlexRAID needs periods of time of no usage at all in order to re-sync the RAID
- If multiple users are editing stored files, flexRAID is not recommended

Notes:
* FlexRAID Live does not have the cons of the FlexRAID Base. However it has not been released yet and even it is, it would still be a bit experimental at that stage.
* A little old but still good reading:
http://www.overclock.net/htpc/694948-has-anyone-tried-flexraid-their-media.html

Unraid:
Links
http://www.lime-technology.com/
http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Wiki[/QUOTE]

Pros:
+ Allows use of different sized drives.
+ Should one or multiple drives die, only the data on those dead drives are lost.
+ If the data on the hard drive isn’t being accessed, the hard drive is spun down until needed.

Cons:
- unRAID Free has a limit of 3 drives (2 data, 1 parity).
- unRAID Plus has a limit of 7 drives (5 data, 1 parity, 1 cache)
- unRAID Pro has a limit of 21 drives (19 data, 1 parity, 1 cache)
- Costs $120 for unRAID Pro (21 drives) and $69 for unRAID Plus (7 drives)
- Relatively low write speeds without that cache drive.

Notes:
* “unRAID™ is similar to RAID-4 in that for every n hard drives, there are n-1 data drives, and a single fixed parity drive” - From unRAID website

ZFS File Server:
Links:
ZFSguru NAS fileserver project
napp-it ZFS server appliance
Building your own ZFS fileserver

Pros:
+ Free
+ Fairly resilient against crashes, corruption, and such due to the copy-on-write feature as well as the snapshots feature.
+ Maintenance free in that the file system will periodically check and fix itself
+ Very flexible in terms of hardware and software changes.
+ Supports encryption of data

Cons:
- May be difficult to learn for a person who've never worked with BSD before
- Requires a large amount of RAM (4GB+ recommended)
- Cannot expand an existing RAID array with additional drives.

Notes:
* ZFS uses a different method of storage expansion:
sub.mesa said:
What you cannot do, is expand an existing RAID-Z (RAID5) or RAID-Z2 (RAID6) array with one or more disks.
But, you can add new disks or RAIDs to an existing pool. So if you have a 4-disk RAID-Z, you can add another 4-disk RAID-Z so you have 8 disks. The second array would share free space with the first; in essence it would be a RAID0 of two RAID5 arrays. ZFS can expand this way.

What you can do, is expanding mirrors and RAID0's. In the example above that's what actually happened: a new array is RAID0-ed with the existing array. New created files will be written to both devices, for additional speed. Setting copies=2 would make files in that directory be stored on both RAID arrays; for extra redundancy.
Click to expand...

* Here’s another thread filled with tips and an excellent hardware list for a large sized ZFS server:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1572188

Once you figure out the OS, THEN you can start talking about the hardware. Otherwise, you'd just be wasting your time, efforts, and cash.
 
ok... thx for the info
Amahi with Greyhole - the experimental part, don't think i want to experiment with my data.
Flexraid - looks good, i can run in on window normally and have my NAS as an extra pc in case something happens to main pc, snap shot RAID looks like a good thing, don't really need live "backup" the nas will be use to store downloaded files.. not files i work on them 24/7
Unraid - also looks good except that i have to pay for the plus version
ZFS - heared a lot about it and i know it can be used under freenas (what about it? as an OS)
will read more about it

so far the flex and unraid looks like the best solutions for me due to the fact that they can spin down not working disks and not having the work 24/7 like my PERC does, also the option to just expand the array without too much pain is a nice option, hdd's in israel aint cheap, 2T costs ~140$ compared to 100$ in USA
 
iakovl said:
ZFS - heared a lot about it and i know it can be used under freenas (what about it? as an OS)
will read more about it
Click to expand...

Yeah the links I provided about ZFS should tell you if FreeNAS is a good option for you.

Really do your research on FlexRAID and unRAID
 
Thanks for the link on the case -- it looks long enough to fit a 5970 (and 6990) if you have one with a waterblock (single slot depth).

When you get it, if you could take some detailed measurements for me, that'd be awesome ;)
 
tell me what you need! i have the case here :) got it few month back for a build i wanted to do... never got to do it till now...
selling my ION ITX and getting a ZOTAC H55 ITX for this build
 
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