What do you think: Budget NAS/Server build

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After my two sons managed to break/lose about 15 DVD's and drop liquids down my $5000 receiver, I decided to move everything to a server where they can't get their mitts on it. Plus this server will serve as backup for photos, movies, and about 300+ DVDs 600+ Audio CDs. (Yes they are all legit-I've been collecting them for over 20 years)

Motherboard
  • $100 Asrock N3700-ITX (Brasswell 2 watts TDP typical) with Four SATA 3 ports + 6 USB3 and 1 Gigabit ethernet.
  • FREE 8 Gigabytes SODIMM DDR3 memory
  • $60 StarTech PX0162 startech2 Port PCI Express 2 eSATA + 2 SATA III - So I can add a DAS later if needed
  • $30SYBA SD-MPE24031 Gigabit Ethernet Card (mini PCI express connection! with FreeBSD support!)
Drives
  • FREE 1x120 GB Mushkin Enhanced SSD (OS & Cache Drive)
  • FREE 2x1TB WD Black (WD1000FAEX...recycled) (ZFS Raid 1)
  • $420.00 3x3TB Deskstar (ZFS Raid 5)
Case:
  • $90 Fractal Node 304 - It will hold 7 drives if 1 is a very small SSD and no long PCIe card.
OS
  • NAS4Free Brigged with Plex Server

Total:~$700
 
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700$ is not budget and a desktop system is not a server.
Use something with a server grade chipset and ECC.

CPU and CPU max power does not matter. On idle even a high power Xeon is very efficient
and over all irrelevant when you look at other components like your disks.
If one needs to save energy in the extreme, I would switch it off.
 
If you're insistent on running ZFS, you really should look at ECC memory.

If you aren't dead set on ZFS, the above can work pretty well with OpenMediaVault. It can run Plex locally.

If possible, please avoid ZFS RAIDz1 or RAID5. With today's hard drives being so large, the odds are high that if a drive crashes, the restore will find additional errors, and you end up being SOL.

RAIDz2 or RAID6 would be much better.

For a multimedia system, you don't need to worry about using an SSD for cache. Your OS would benefit from an SSD, but... no need for ZIL / L2ARC on a system destined to do nothing but serve up Plex / multimedia.

If you do go the ZFS route, please consider more memory. More memory nets a large amount more performance over using an SSD for cache. With memory prices what they are, I'd recommend going with a minimum of 16GB.

If you are content with the OpenMediaVault / Linux software raid, you shouldn't have too much of an issue with 8GB of memory.

What are your Plex CPU requirements? Will this system be transcoding? Or are all of your clients capable of decoding media themselves?
(ie: playback to my laptop is easy on the server, but playback to my Raspberry Pi uses much more server CPU power)
 
_Gea said:
700$ is not budget and a desktop system is not a server.
Use something with a server grade chipset and ECC.
Click to expand...

For 6 TB RAID storage that's about as cheap as it gets. That's the vast bulk of the price. $200 is the foothold for a barebones system with NO drives. ($100 embedded CPU, $25 memory. $25 Power $50 case)

Now what in your opinion makes the difference between a desktop system and a home server? If it's main purpose is to serve up files and take request, then it's a server.

Don't say ECC and server grade chipsets make a server. Technically speaking there is no such thing in a budget NAS/Home server category in a SFF (mini itx) unless you are willing to spend $400 on an ATOM motherboard.

Besides memory parity error is a very rare event. You would have to put it in a torturous environment to really benefit from everything I read.

There might be something better out there. I don't know. Please inform me if there is. That is why I'm asking.

My requirements are file server, backup server, SMB, and DLNA with data redundancy of some type (pref ZFS)
 
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What about backup?

You probably don't _have_ to backup the DVDs and CDs, since you can always spend another couple of weeks ripping and encoding them again. (Not something I ever want to do again. But that might just be me.) And you don't necessarily have to backup any backups you're storing on the server.
 
Your system is fine, its essentially a NAS since you aren't offering any services. If you had any spare hardware I'd use that, you don't need very much of anything to store and serve up files.
 
iamwhoiamtoday said:
If you're insistent on running ZFS, you really should look at ECC memory.

If you aren't dead set on ZFS, the above can work pretty well with OpenMediaVault. It can run Plex locally.

If possible, please avoid ZFS RAIDz1 or RAID5. With today's hard drives being so large, the odds are high that if a drive crashes, the restore will find additional errors, and you end up being SOL.

RAIDz2 or RAID6 would be much better.

For a multimedia system, you don't need to worry about using an SSD for cache. Your OS would benefit from an SSD, but... no need for ZIL / L2ARC on a system destined to do nothing but serve up Plex / multimedia.

If you do go the ZFS route, please consider more memory. More memory nets a large amount more performance over using an SSD for cache. With memory prices what they are, I'd recommend going with a minimum of 16GB.

If you are content with the OpenMediaVault / Linux software raid, you shouldn't have too much of an issue with 8GB of memory.

What are your Plex CPU requirements? Will this system be transcoding? Or are all of your clients capable of decoding media themselves?
(ie: playback to my laptop is easy on the server, but playback to my Raspberry Pi uses much more server CPU power)
Click to expand...

Good info on ZFS and alternative software. I'll check it out. But how does ECC make ZFS more secure?

I'm not worried about Z2 parity. These are backups of family photos/movies/code database. So the client and server storage would both have to crash. (3 drives crashing at the same time in 2 enclosures would be doubtful) Plus I keep an external copy on a 1 TB USB3 drive. I back that up once every 3 months and put it in a fire proof place. If I lose the movies and audio CDs...so be it. I have the DVD's, BluRays, and CDs.

The clients are android, and Roku based. I'm ripping them as high bit rate H.264 .mp4's (Well most of them...some use .MKVs as containers) So they all have native mp4 support. I believe the server is direct playing as a proof of concept of plex server on hardware was running <1% CPU on Roku and Android.
 
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Trimlock said:
Your system is fine, its essentially a NAS since you aren't offering any services. If you had any spare hardware I'd use that, you don't need very much of anything to store and serve up files.
Click to expand...

I have an old Atom 330. But it has 2 gigs memory (4 gigs max). I don't think that really is suitable. I have a power hungry 4.4GHz gaming rig that I use to surf the net that would easily hold 12 drives. But I prefer to keep my net surfing and backup storage separate thanks to things like bitlocker. (Backup storage requires a UNIX user id and password before the drive will mount)
 
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But how does ECC make ZFS more secure?
Click to expand...

Cyberjock is the resident guru over at the FreeNAS forums, and this is his posting regarding ECC on ZFS.

I pretty much use him as the SME for such matters.

As long as you have backups that you don't mind possibly having to restore from, everything is gravy.
Might I recommend taking a gander at ZFSguru if you are set on ZFS? Easy setup and I'm a sucker for a solid GUI.

They are all native MP4 support for the bit rate that you're ripping them to? Awesome. That should make matters easier.

As long as you're aware of the potential issues with ZFS / ECC / 2-parity, I don't see anything wrong with the above system. Performance might be a bit lackluster, but the price is right.

Personally, given that hardware, I'd go with trying to scrounge up a 4th 3TB HD, and running RAID 6 in OpenMediaVault. That way you can expand that array later as your budget / case allow.
ZFS doesn't allow for you to add more hard drives to a VDev once it is created.

Cyberjock's VDev / zpool / ZIL / L2ARC PDF guide:

Edit / Note: The reason that I'd rather just run OpenMediaVault / software-mdadm RAID is because while ZFS scales amazingly on high end hardware.... it doesn't do so hot on low end hardware. Software raid isn't as fancy and lacks a good amount of the improvements of ZFS, but when dealing with this performance envelope.... My backup file server is running a G540 (Passmark 2241) and that is the bottleneck in that computer. An Intel N3700 (Passmark 1923) will likely only compound the issue in ZFS.
 
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iamwhoiamtoday said:
Cyberjock is the resident guru over at the FreeNAS forums, and this is his posting regarding ECC on ZFS.

I pretty much use him as the SME for such matters.

As long as you have backups that you don't mind possibly having to restore from, everything is gravy.
Might I recommend taking a gander at ZFSguru if you are set on ZFS? Easy setup and I'm a sucker for a solid GUI.

They are all native MP4 support for the bit rate that you're ripping them to? Awesome. That should make matters easier.

As long as you're aware of the potential issues with ZFS / ECC / 2-parity, I don't see anything wrong with the above system. Performance might be a bit lackluster, but the price is right.

Personally, given that hardware, I'd go with trying to scrounge up a 4th 3TB HD, and running RAID 6 in OpenMediaVault. That way you can expand that array later as your budget / case allow.
ZFS doesn't allow for you to add more hard drives to a VDev once it is created.

Cyberjock's VDev / zpool / ZIL / L2ARC PDF guide:

Edit / Note: The reason that I'd rather just run OpenMediaVault / software-mdadm RAID is because while ZFS scales amazingly on high end hardware.... it doesn't do so hot on low end hardware. Software raid isn't as fancy and lacks a good amount of the improvements of ZFS, but when dealing with this performance envelope.... My backup file server is running a G540 (Passmark 2241) and that is the bottleneck in that computer. An Intel N3700 (Passmark 1923) will likely only compound the issue in ZFS.
Click to expand...

Interesting article. Thanks for the heads up. A simple fix would be to see if the memory block can be scrubbed before a block RW or to execute a memory test scrub every hour. Overhead would be minimal as read times from drives are considerably slower then memory read writes.
 
ZFS does not rely on ECC. There are many users around using ZFS without and I have not seen any verified report that someone loose his storage due a missing ECC in the past.

But the fact is, without ECC, you are in danger of undetected file or metafile corruptions - with or without ZFS. On ZFS you have a special danger due the autorepair on checksum errors. But you must count that against the more propable danger of silent undetected disk errors otherwise.

At last, you must accept a higher danger of a data or array lost on a server without ECC -
with any filesystem. Maybe a recover with ntfs or ext4 will be cheaper as there are more tools/ service providers that may help you in case of a disaster.

A backup helps to save money and tears in all cases and in case of a real disaster (fire, thief) you need it anyway.
 
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So what's the economical alternative ECC motherboards available?
 
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I suggest you build a NAS and separate server for pled, etc&#8230; I run a old AMD Mobile Turion based HP Micro Server with Freenas. 4GB of ECC ram. As a media box you don't need much. I can peg a 1gigbit connection with this NAS(almost) I run 5 1TBs in raid 1z. Once I upgrade to 4TB drives, I am going to switch to raid2z. My Plex/MCE server runs on a Celeron Haswell based chip 2 core no HT with 8GB ram, and an old 80GB Intel SSD with a 500GB 5400RPM 2.5inch drive for my MCE recordings. All this on an ITX board in an Antec ISK-150
 
ThinkTank was a fairly low cost build, as I had most of the parts already.. I sourced Ebay for the Intel DQ45EK board (new in plastic wrap) and the 3.16 Ghz Core 2 Dou. I run Windows Home Server 2011, though wish it had a Add In to push Media Centre to the Local Network... both Dead MS offerings now.
Upgrade path for ThinkTank is a Asus P8B75-M mATX board and the i5 chip sitting on my shelf. That is far enough down the road. It serves both as a DATA & backup store, as well as a video/ mp3 server. Works for me, mileage may vary...

BlackDragon
 
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