Home NAS

[ddrueding]

If all you want is a backup solution, just go for USB and use the computer it is connected to to "pull" the data from the various machines. Centralized management is a good thing.

If you want to step up to a NAS and centralized storage, I really like the Synology products. Of course at that point the NAS is no longer the backup, it is the source. You'll need to backup it to somewhere else (USB drive on a workstation). So it doesn't actually fix the problem you have at all.

 

[Howell]

...unless your only desktop is wireless.

 

[Howell]

I'm slowly thinking my way through similar solutions except with all sporadically mobile laptops.

 

[Chewy509]

Thanks for the input. Been doing some research on a lot of the smaller NASes, and basically they all have issues (some more severe than others) but the Synology range seems to have the least issues and most liked.

Any of the single drive solutions are basically POS, crippled with slow CPUs, low RAM and too much software running (FFS, TwonkyMediaServer on a 400MHz ARM CPU with 128MB doing media conversion on the fly hosting a DLNA server in addition to SAMBA, light_httpd, ftp, etc)! Not going to happen. Incidentally the Seagate GoFlex Home is actually liked, not because of what Seagate has done, but because you can load ArchLinux (ARM edition) on it and build your own NAS with it. Seagate firmware is s^&t, but building your own firmware actually turns into a respectable device (case in point, Seagate firmware, at most 2MB/s on GigE, ArchLinux based firmware, around 15MB/s on GigE with CIFS). Likewise the WDC My Book Live has a small following since it comes with Debian 7.0 (full OS installation, not a cutdown/custom) so customising it is rather easy... but the CPU/RAM is the limiting factor, so not really worth it.

Since we don't have a huge budget for a self built NAS, I'll just stick with a USB drive for the time being...

 

[LiamC]

I'm surprised you don't have some old hardware lying around. Page two of this thread has my explorations of what old hardware will do.

 

[Chewy509]

I wish, but I've always been good in getting rid of old stuff not in use. Our current list includes:
HP ProBook (wifes) - i5, 6GB RAM, 750GB HDD.
HP xw4600 (mine) - C2Q-Q9400, 4GB RAM, 2TB HDD + 250GB HDD
Asus 1015PX netbook (mine) - Atom N570, 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD
2x Asus 1001HA netbooks (kids) - Atom N270, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD.

And that's it, and it's all in use. The only spare stuff I have is dead except for some RAM sticks (2x 2GB DDR3 SODIMM) and a bunch of smaller HDDs (160GB-500GB, mix of IDE and SATA).

 

[Howell]

I have an Athlon 1700 I'm going to start with. I'm sure it will have adequate power but the heat, electric efficiency, and fan noise are sure to get under my skin at some point.

 

[Mercutio]

A decent start for your NAS project.
It's as much CPU as you need and you can run it off a 120W PicoPSU along with several drives. You'll probably have to add a SATA controller, but your Athlon board would need one too.

 

[Howell]

Very cool. And cheap! Any idea the minimum class of ram acceptable? Vendors are only showing me what's available which I'm assuming is overkill.

 

[Mercutio]

It's going to be a file server anyway, man. Two or four gigs probably isn't unreasonable.

 

[timwhit]

It's going to be a file server anyway, man. Two or four gigs probably isn't unreasonable.

Except for ZFS.

 

[Howell]

In my case I'm using it as a collector for files going to crashplan. I may not even run raid on it.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm going to start building and reselling Plex servers. My basic setup will be a Lian Li PCQ25B, initially with 3 2TB drives, an H61 motherboard with a Pentium G630 and 4GB DDR3, re-sold with as many set top clients (Pivos Xios or the like) units as requested.
My cost on the basic system is $630 including the STB, but I already have four of them sold at $1000 a pop.

A decent Core 2 Duo (E5200) can keep up with modest transcoding of a single video stream but it chokes and dies on two; the G630 can manage two reasonably well.

It strikes me that this is a pretty damned sweet NAS setup even putting aside the dedicated video server functionality. A lot of homes are laptop and tablet-only at this point. There isn't really a central disk storage repository and the cute little box in the corner would serve that need pretty well.

 

[Adcadet]

In my case I'm using it as a collector for files going to crashplan. I may not even run raid on it.

What do you mean, as a collector?

I'm using Crashplan, and my backup destinations include a FreeNAS share symlink'd to trick CrashPlan into thinking its a local drive.

 

[Adcadet]

Also looking at Plex as a replacement for my Win7 Media Center HTPC, which is too slow (suspect it's the WD 20EARS in it), too loud, too hot, and has too many buttons for little fingers. Love the idea that I can stream shows to an iPhone, iPad, PC, or TV. But what would be the simpliest way of recording TV from my cable provider with the system you're talking about selling? Can you put a TV tuner card into the server and tell it to record shows from any device running a Plex client?

Also thinking about moving some of my storage into a dedicated file server in a smaller form factor - that Lian Li looks pretty nice. 5 hot swaps, wow. Is there a formal (i.e., without using duct tape) to mount a sixth HD/SSD below the hot swap bays?

 

[Adcadet]

...yup, looks like you can cram up to 8 hard drives in that little Lian Li.

FYI, here's a nice show that includes some info on Plex: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/39292/media-streaming-on-linux-las-s27e07/

 

[Mercutio]

Simplest way to get TV recordings? Bittorrent/NNTP over a nice VPN connection.
I know there are super slick automation systems like SickBeard and Couch Potato for getting content if you want to go that route. They pretty much rely on RSS feeds to make sure your stuff is up to date.

Doing it LEGALLY? Christ. No idea. BeyondTV or MythTV, probably. You could probably leave whatever you're doing in place and just transcode the files you're generating in to a more useful format. TV recording is a huge PITA if you want anything besides over the air stuff. But the pirates have you covered for everything except sports and honestly other than PBS/PBSkids there's no game in town as kid friendly as Netflix anyway.


The Lian Li case is supposed to accept seven 3.5" drives, but you'll never find an ITX motherboard with that many SATA ports. Even if the bays weren't all there, I'd have no problems just sticking a small SSD on the floor of the case, maybe with some double sided velcro to keep it in place. It's not like those machines are going to get moved around much.

 

[snowhiker]

Just some reviews on newegg about the Seagate option, basically it's a POS to be avoided...

Are you referring to the "reviews on newegg" being POS or the Seagate?

/sarcasm

 

[CougTek]

The Lian Li case is supposed to accept seven 3.5" drives, but you'll never find an ITX motherboard with that many SATA ports.

Ehh hmmm...



Also, there's enough 6-SATA-ports mini-ITX boards to call those mundane.

 

[Mercutio]

Six ports does seem to be the realistic limit, weird FM2 board aside. On the plus side, one thing we can say at this point is that both Intel and AMD have perfectly adequate video decoding and output options, so it's not like someone couldn't stick a 4-port SATA controller in a PCIe slot to make full use of what's available in that chassis.

 

[Howell]

What do you mean, as a collector?

I'll run crashplan headless on the storage box and send my backups from the laptops to the storage box.

Or I'll run the mobile clients normally and run the headless client as a local crashplan copy.

 

[Adcadet]

Doing it LEGALLY? Christ. No idea. BeyondTV or MythTV, probably. You could probably leave whatever you're doing in place and just transcode the files you're generating in to a more useful format. TV recording is a huge PITA if you want anything besides over the air stuff. But the pirates have you covered for everything except sports and honestly other than PBS/PBSkids there's no game in town as kid friendly as Netflix anyway.

Yes. I like to record many things from PBS, the news, and a few other things. Same with the wife.

 

[Adcadet]

My basic setup will be a Lian Li PCQ25B, initially with 3 2TB drives, an H61 motherboard with a Pentium G630 and 4GB DDR3, re-sold with as many set top clients (Pivos Xios or the like) units as requested.

Why not an Ivybridge-based Celeron? Looks like the G2020 is $3 cheaper and it's TDP is 55W vs 65W for the Sandy-based G630.

 

[Adcadet]

I'll run crashplan headless on the storage box and send my backups from the laptops to the storage box.

Or I'll run the mobile clients normally and run the headless client as a local crashplan copy.

I found it easiest just to use symlinks to trick Crashplan into thinking that all my backup locations were local (on my Win7 machine), where in reality I have one going to a ZFS on Linux RaidZ1 and one going to FreeNAS (ZFS, stripped as I needed to make two 2 TB disks into a single >3TB pool). No need to fool around with getting the Crashplan client to work on Linux (not hard, but a little fiddly) or FreeBSD (I hear it can be done, but is not officially supported). Plus, I find it easier to just keep a single Crashplan client on my main PC as I experiment with different backup destinations. Probably need to stop changing my backup destinations more than I change, well, nevermind...

 

[timwhit]

Getting Crashplan to run on Linux takes about 3 minutes, at least on Ubuntu based distros.

 

[ddrueding]

...so it's not like someone couldn't stick a 4-port SATA controller in a PCIe slot to make full use of what's available in that chassis.

I have had small, single-slot motherboards where as soon as anything was connected to the PCIe slot the onboard video disabled itself. Running headless still wasn't an issue, but I had to get it set up correctly first.

 

[Mercutio]

Why not an Ivybridge-based Celeron? Looks like the G2020 is $3 cheaper and it's TDP is 55W vs 65W for the Sandy-based G630.

In my experience, Ivy Bridge CPUs are a crap shoot with Intel H61 chipsets. They can usually be made to work with a BIOS flash but then you have to go through the fun of keeping a Sandy Bridge chip around to flash the BIOS in the first place.

 

[CougTek]

They can usually be made to work with a BIOS flash but then you have to go through the fun of keeping a Sandy Bridge chip around to flash the BIOS in the first place.

I had to do that to make my GigaByte P67X-UD3-B3 to accept my i7-3770 Ivy Bridge.

 

[Howell]

I found it easiest just to use symlinks ...

You think the crashplan Linux client is fiddly but you are a-ok with running Linux ZFS and FreeNAS?

 

[Adcadet]

You think the crashplan Linux client is fiddly but you are a-ok with running Linux ZFS and FreeNAS?

It was fiddly in OpenSuse, I think because of systemd. In Ubuntu i had to pay attention to installing as user or guest. And I see no benefit to installing the Crashplan client vs just mapping he drive - I'd happily fiddle with it if I thought there was a reason to.

ZFS on Linux (Mint/Ubuntu) was straight forward to set up, as was FreeNAS. Just follow the nice documentation.

 

[Mercutio]

I don't feel like starting a new thread for this but I could see how someone or other might be interested in reading it so...

I had occasion to test a Drobo 5D last night. The 5D is a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) that operates over Thunderbolt and USB3. Mine is set up with four Hitachi Ultrastar 7k4000s (effectively a RAID5, whatever Drobo calls it) and a 240GB Crucial M4 mSATA cache. I connected it using Thunderbolt with a Gigabyte Z77X with 16GB RAM and its own 240GB Crucial m4 and ~10TB of data spanned across a four Seagate ST3000DM01s in RAID0.

I saw reads on the Drobo happening at ~160MB/sec and writes at ~190MB/sec, just looking at the Windows file transfer dialog (I was copying stuff off the internal RAID so I could repurpose those drives). Those aren't exactly SSD speeds, but are very close to what I've observed a single 7k4000 can do; there doesn't seem to be any kind of performance penalty for having drives in a RAID5. Granted there's $2000 worth of hardware in that set-up, but I can see how something like that would be really useful as a portable data vault or to use with systems in form factors that don't work with a proper disk array.

 

[CougTek]

The inclusion of a BBU (battery backup unit) is a nice feature, likewise for the mSATA slot in order to add an SSD. The lack of Thunderbolt support for something else than Mac OSX is less impressive though.

 

[Mercutio]

Thunderbolt worked for me.

 

[CougTek]

Then they should update their website, because their product page states :

NOTE: Thunderbolt is currently supported only on Mac OS X.

 

[Mercutio]

It worked. I have a single disk Thunderbolt enclosure as well and as I recall it was a royal PITA to get working, but the Drobo was fine.

 

[Mercutio]

Today I learned that iSCSI targets can be added to Windows Storage Spaces just like any other fixed disk.

 

[Mercutio]

... And just to play with the Drobo a little more, I yanked out one of the drives after I finished copying data to its destination on another system. It says it's going to need ~75 hours to rebuild my array. Yikes.

 

[Handruin]

Wow...nice rebuild times.

 

[CougTek]

BTW, I would NEVER use RAID5 in a mutli-terabyte array. The reason is that most consumer drives are rated for one unrecoverable error every 1014, which is once every 100TB. In your case, with a 20TB RAID5 setup (parity counts : screw the parity, screw the array), you have one chance out of five to lose the array every time you rebuild it. In enterprise drive, like the HGST Ultrastar, the unrecoverable error rate is once every petabyte, which in your case, would equal to a 2% chance to lose the array during a rebuild.

RAID5 is obsolete. Use RAID 1, 10, 6 or 60, but forget RAID5. Unless you like the idea of wasting 75 hours of your time...

 

[Mercutio]

"RAID5" is essentially the default setting in the Drobo's management software. I just didn't bother changing it when I set the silly thing up in the first place. I'm aware of the deficiencies of RAID5 for large individual member disks and you can rest assured that there was zero chance of a data loss; the only reason I used the Drobo at all is that it was faster than initiating a network data transfer.

Essentially all my data is ~30TB RAID6 arrays. I have at least two copies of every file plus a large number of loose drives that contain a meaningful subset of my media collection AND two sets of tapes.