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Question - Thinking about making a NAS (1 Viewer)

aspire2008

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Nov 10, 2012
RedCents
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I bought 2 8TB WD REDS this past weekend cause the deal was to good to pass up.


If I use existing computer parts, i7-860, 8GB ddr2 RAM, Biostar TP55 mb. Is it possible to build a NAS with this kinda hardware and will I get full advantage on bandwidth across the network with this kinda hardware?

Second, I guess the only free software out there is freenas or is there something else I should look at? Disadvatages/Advantages?


Third, raid 10, 5 or 6?


More questions to come...
 
That hardware will be fine with that disk space. You may need more ram if you add more disk space though. My nas is an old dual xeon and it can max out the bandwith no problem, but I do have 32gb of ram in it. I'm using freenas with 2x4tb raid 1, 2x3tb raid 1, and 2x2tb raid 1 as one large logical unit. Avoid raid 5 or 6, raid 1 or 10 are the only real options now. Raid5/6 can fail to rebuild on larger disks due to normal unrecoverable read errors during the raid rebuild. With freenas raid1 gives you more expansion options and still have great performance. I updated my 4tb array group from a 2tb just by replacing one of the 2tb with a 4tb, rebuilding the array, replacing the other 2tb with another 4tb, rebuilding the array, the using freenas to expand the usable space to the full 4tb. Freenas also has some plugins that are useful depending on what you will be using the nas for. Mine is mostly for media so I have a plex server running on it, along with transmission and sickrage for show/movie management. It's a pretty versatile and useful setup. It's not super hard to setup and boots from a flash drive so all of your disk space is only used for the nas.
 
I second Raid 1 or 10 are the only stable options for data safety. With 2 disks you will be doing a simple Mirrored RAID 1. If you had 4 Disks you could do a RAID 10 and pick up parity, striping, and ability to drop 2 drives. This would give you the redundancy of a RAID 1 and the performance of a RAID 0. Which is pretty awesome. That said, I've only done RAID 10 in business environments and RAID 1 using 2 drives is plenty for a home environment. I've done FreeNAS, but not a big fan to be honest, it uses FreeBSD as its OS and I just don't like it. The system admin in me basically makes me do a Linux based solution. FreeNAS would be sufficient for the average user though.

You can safely ignore pretty much all my advice except for build it using RAID 1 and the following:
BUILD THE RAID USING HARDWARE CONTROLLER - NEVER USE SOFTWARE RAID!
 
You can safely ignore pretty much all my advice except for build it using RAID 1 and the following:
BUILD THE RAID USING HARDWARE CONTROLLER - NEVER USE SOFTWARE RAID!

Unless you use freenas. If so let it handle the raid via software otherwise you lose a lot of the benefits of freenas to start with. Otherwise yes, hardware raid is the way to go. :)
 
I have been running both raid 5,1,10 both in business and private situations and i venture to say the choice of raid is very much based on the amount of disk + how it will be used.
There is no such thing as "The winner setup" when it comes to storage solutions.

If you are looking for a stable long term solution the most important thing is monitoring of said space as redundant disks are useless if you dont know their health status.
 
I tried FreeNAS on a couple of home servers, you'll be forced to keep tinkering if you go beyond the usage of only a NAS server (plugins of Torrent, plex, etc). Secondly, i found NAS4FREE which is more oriented to home users, the interface is way and far easier to use than FREENAS. As for the raid setup, since you just have 2 drives, the options are kinda limited, i went with ZFSRAID1 in both FreeNAS and NAS4FREE.
 
My personal preference is QNAP over Synology, a little cheaper and they also have a fantastic GUIs. You can't go wrong with either when it comes to a Home/SMB setup...

Honestly, in business with storage as cheap as it is, you should only be using raid 10. The days of a SMB server are pretty much over with hosting as cheap as it is, and all virtualized environments are typically running off a 10 GB SAN running SSD's on RAID 10. ;)
 
Yea... 100% agree

I run multiple locations across the globe.... Corporate IT is literally Modem/Switches/Firewalls/VM Host for Print/File Server/VOIP & Local facility security systems.
The P2P tunnels between offices also have P2P to AWS, it makes managing corporate IT bonehead simple. An entire office goes down and as long as people can tether off their phone you give zero fucks.
Google G-Suite / Office 365 for mail/doc sharing and you are good to go

The rest is 100% hosted in AWS :)
 
I hated the interface of MyCloud, but I really like to tinker. I ended up using a Java command to hack into the box and get root access. I then wiped out the software and installed linux on it, because why not? Its actually not half bad if you want to run a web server or something low key off it. That all said, if you have the money go with a QNAP or Synology box as they will treat you much better.
 
Question - Thinking about making a NAS

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