Computer Geeks - Home NAS - opinions/options

[DrGonzo]

So this week I my Desktop had a pretty bad failure. It was pretty old and way past due. Both of my 9800gtx cards went out at the same time, took out the DVI input on my monitor and have caused other random issues on the ASUS MoBo. I had a drive get corrupted also but it was mirrored so it was recoverable. I ordered all new parts to build a new Desktop and was thinking I may need to build a dedicated NAS also. I was using the old desktop as sort of a NAS by sharing media and files on the network. So it stayed on more than it should have and being about 10 years old wasn't the best thing. So figured it was time to build, a NAS for the house.

So I dug through my stash of machines "As everyone gives me their's when they upgrade" and found an HP p6510y in a small case that looked good enough to handle the job. It has an AMD Athlon II x4 630 in it as 2.8 ghz, I was able to scrounge up enough PC3-10600 ram for 8gb "Non-ECC" and fire it up. Has a built in gigabit LAN card and it runs super quiet and cool. Perfect for this set-up.

My next issue was drives. I have a ton of drives here ranging from 40gb to 800gb Most are untested.... So my first priority was going through and finding a decent sized small drive to use for the OS. Found a 160bd Laptop drive that tested perfect so I swapped that in. Then I found a good 800gb drive to use for storage. For the time being this set-up is all for testing and configuring. I didn't want to spend time building a RAID pool and have issues due to settings/configuration.

For software I went with FreeNAS as it is a little familiar as I have used TrueNAS in the past. Both are made by the same company just one is a free version "FreeNAS" made for the Home/Small office/Media server, and the other is enterprise grade "TrueNAS". They both have a lot of common features and FreeNAS is packed full of usefull stuff. FreeNAS does not run on top of another OS like Windows/Linux. It is it's own OS but from FreeBSD. You download the software .iso, Burn it to a disk or make a bootable USB and you off. You can actually install FreeNAS on a USB and use the flash memory for the OS which is recommended, but I don't like the though of someone pulling a USB stick out and killing my NAS so I opted to install it on the 160gb HD.

Now the cool thing is that even though I am just using a 800gb drive now. I can add in my new drives later on, mount them up, build a RAID pool from them and have two different storage pools on the NAS. So using just the single drive now will do me no harm when adding in the others later.

The only issue I have is that when using NAS you want to use ECC RAM to ensure no data corruption. ECC RAM is useful if you are doing a lot of reads/writes to the same files over and over again. Most of my files are static and just sit there until they are read "Media Files. So I wasn't too worried about it. Plus the MoBo doesn't support ECC Ram...LOL

So I spent about an hour and got it all configured, Pool added, Users and permissions set up, FTP and SSH configured, ETC. Started doing some bench testing on transfer rates and was sad to see it was doing less than 10 Mbps transfer speed. Both the NAS and the computer I was using where gigabit enabled. Come to find out I had a crappy CAT5 cable... Dropped in a CAT5e and BAM!!! 85 Mbps transfer speed. Now when doing small chunk file transfers it was throttling about 20-30 Mbps which is typical as they are all small files moving. Checking on the NAS reporting shows it was pretty much idle through 70gb transfer. So I fired up FTP to really stress test it and did another 70gb's of data with 10 concurrent connections.... Load was about 25% on the NAS. So it is plenty strong to handle the load and is very stable.

I love the fact that it has a very nice web based GUI to control everything from. The GUI itself has a built in Shell terminal so I don't need to keep a monitor or anything hooked up to it unless there is an emergency. it just sits under the computer stand in the corner with power and LAN cables, Nothing more. Pulls about 12-55w at idle so it's not power hungry at all.

My next step is getting some WD Red Hard Drives to start building the RAID1 pool. Probably going to be doing 2TB for the time being and if need be I can add more to the pool later on.

So anyone have a home NAS or built one? What are you using? Likes/Dislikes?

[DocWalt]

I don't have one yet, but I don't want/need all of this storage in my PC. I need to get it out into a NAS so I can more easily and safely share my collection of media with my family.

Thanks for the info on FreeNAS, looks like good stuff.

[CoopKill]

About to embark on the same sorta setup myself. I as well seem to be a magnet for storage of others upgrade fodder.

I need to see what processors I have. I know I have some old coreII duo, and an i7 mobile, but the MB might be on the way out of that laptop. If nothing else I may throw the coreII in, and grab some ram. Thanks for the OS suggestion.

I was using my Netgear's NAS capabilities, but became unreliable at best. For now I am using my laptop, Plex, and an external 1TB drive.

[CoopKill]

Oh, if you have comments on the differences (pro/con) of FreeNAS vs Plex please chime in.

[Jimvr4]

I had a NAS for 10 years but junked it last year. Write speeds were terrible and my drives were in need of upgrade due to age.

I built a new main rig with a 256GB M.2 boot drive booting Win10. The M.2 uses 4 lanes of PCI Express to deliver up to 2500MB/sec read speeds. For storage I'm using the built in Storage Spaces service with 2 4TB drives in a Raid 1. Storage Space supports Raid 5 if you want. I chose Raid 1 for mirroring and fastest rebuild in case of error. You can easily add more drives at any time to expand the array.

The array has a share for Media including pictures, music and movies and is accessible over Wifi-AC. I run Kodi (formerly XBMC) for viewing my ripped DVDs but may be changing that to Plex.

I used my NAS for file sharing and backup. The backup ran daily and required a sort of ballet where the NAS turned on and waited, the PC turned on and ran Acronis, and mostly it worked but sometimes something would fail and hang the PC and the NAS would time out and shutdown on schedule. With Storage Spaces I never have to schedule backups - they aren't needed because every file is on the Storage Space. I still use Acronis to periodically run a disk image of the M.2 boot drive but that one only changes when I install programs. I keep the disk image backup of the M.2 on Storage Spaces as well. So no NAS for me.

[Chris@Rvengeperformance]

Raid 1 is mirroring, 0 is a stripe set

[LeRoyDL]

Proc usage should be super low using freenas or any other San using zfs. Zfs is flipping awesome, feed your array a good ssd zil and make your nic scream for mercy. However if you really care about your data DO REPLICATE and scrub often! Zfs runs entirely in mom so get it to 16gb or more if you want any real performance out of it..

[Mikes2nd]

save yourself days of work...

WD My Cloud EX2 review - CNET

[DocWalt]

save yourself days of work...

WD My Cloud EX2 review - CNET

In my case... Nowhere near big enough capacity.

[DrGonzo]

Oh, if you have comments on the differences (pro/con) of FreeNAS vs Plex please chime in.

I have actually never used Plex. Thought about playing with it some but never got around to it.

I had a NAS for 10 years but junked it last year. Write speeds were terrible and my drives were in need of upgrade due to age.

I built a new main rig with a 256GB M.2 boot drive booting Win10. The M.2 uses 4 lanes of PCI Express to deliver up to 2500MB/sec read speeds. For storage I'm using the built in Storage Spaces service with 2 4TB drives in a Raid0. Storage Space supports Raid 5 if you want. I chose Raid 0 for mirroring and fastest rebuild in case of error. You can easily add more drives at any time to expand the array.

The array has a share for Media including pictures, music and movies and is accessible over Wifi-AC. I run Kodi (formerly XBMC) for viewing my ripped DVDs but may be changing that to Plex.

I used my NAS for file sharing and backup. The backup ran daily and required a sort of ballet where the NAS turned on and waited, the PC turned on and ran Acronis, and mostly it worked but sometimes something would fail and hang the PC and the NAS would time out and shutdown on schedule. With Storage Spaces I never have to schedule backups - they aren't needed because every file is on the Storage Space. I still use Acronis to periodically run a disk image of the M.2 boot drive but that one only changes when I install programs. I keep the disk image backup of the M.2 on Storage Spaces as well. So no NAS for me.

From my understanding of FreeNAS, it uses RAM as a buffer/Cache when writing. Holds onto data being written to stream it in faster which can help if the system has certain hardware bottlenecks. I was able to copy 70Gb's to the NAS in less than 10 min when backing up a drive over the network. To me that if flipping awesome and I couldn't ask for more. I am sure that once I get the RAID1 set up it will slow writes down some due to mirroring, but with the combination of 8gb ram cache I don't think it will be too noticeable.

Proc usage should be super low using freenas or any other San using zfs. Zfs is flipping awesome, feed your array a good ssd zil and make your nic scream for mercy. However if you really care about your data DO REPLICATE and scrub often! Zfs runs entirely in mom so get it to 16gb or more if you want any real performance out of it..

Yeah, That was one of the main things I went for was the ZFS. After I got the drive set up first thing I did was set up the SMART and SCRUB scheduled tasks.

save yourself days of work...

WD My Cloud EX2 review - CNET

That is pretty much a entry level unit. Plug and play simple to use and comes with not advanced features/functionality. It is also dead slow compared to the NAS I built. It stores in standard NTFS which has really no data integrity or reliability. It comes with only a 1.2 ghz processor and 512 mb of ram, so it is not memcaching any data so typical reads/writes will be slower than normal. Using WD Red Drives in that is actually pointless, Blue or Green drives would be better since the unit only really has SMART testing available to monitor drives. Only reason they used Red Drives was for the increased Cache to compensate for the lack of ram in the system. It has the basics of file browsing, FTP, Web Access, ETC. It doesn't have support for LDAP, Active Directory, DLNA serving, VPN, RADIUS, ETC. I don't even think it support SSH at least I'm not seeing anything about it.

I actually hate prebuilt units like that. They usually have minimal features until you get into the higher end class and more money. Closest compariable I can find to what I have is:

Robot Check

Has about the same functionality software side, it has a better processor, supports 4k (which makes no sense to me) and a couple other bells and whistles. But in the end I would win cost wise... Tight now I have $0.00 dollars invested, After getting the hard drives I'll be about $350 in. The QNAP TVS-671 is $1,500 without any drives.....