I need a NAS with around 10-12 TB of storage. Not sure how it should be configured though...
I would like it to have enough drives to do duplicity (through raid), so maybe 8x3TB drives?
I also want some SSD caching, around 512GB to 1TB SSD.
I will be using it for the following:
Storing and editing many many TB's of videos and music.
Storing personal pictures, movies, and other media.
Storing games and other software on (just installers).
I wont be using it like a computer, but i will need an OS to run everything. (not sure on what OS is best)
Also don't worry about budget, as long as it's reasonable for what i get.
Also i would like it to have maybe two Ethernet ports for extreme use cases.
I don't care much for it's appearance / case.
Let me know what you guys come up with!
If you are editing very large files you might want to be doing that on a local drive rather than a network drive due to slow speed of gigabit lan (unless you are putting down the money for 10Gbit NICs), bit late here but you will want to build a PC and implement your own raid inside a consumer case.
You want to have matching drives, it should be noted that the STX000DM001 drives for instance have read/write capabilities (and I believe are the fastest) well in excess of the onboard Gigabit NICs, any sort of SSD caching over gigabit lan connections is pointless as you are already bottle-necked by lan speeds with fast HDDs. Additionally SSD caching is poorly implemented, you are basically limited to a few (like 2-3?) software level caching which have numerous downsides, but which should work within a raid environment. It should be noted that one of the downsides can be silent data corruption though I believe write-through mode, perhaps however a better usage of caching would be to use a large 3TB drive in such mode so that you can attempt to reduce drive spin-ups which I assume cause fairly reasonable wear-and-tear.
Raid will work through sort of striping the data across drives, so it is not a 1:1 ratio of usable drive space to redundant drive space. So for instance raid 5 has 1 drive redundancy so you would have 4x3TB drives + 1 3TB drive in reduncy (providing a speed of about 10Gbit, subject to how full/fragmented drive is, and performance of raid hardware), however you cant just add drives onto the raid, so you need to make it the right size to start off with, I would recomend raid 5 or 6. Its a bit late here, there should be some people here with lots more experience with raid than me. I am currently running a raid array myself though.
I am also not sure about raid recovery in event of failure, I think you might need a card that is the same or some such thing? Alternatively there are various forms of software raid. You will also want to make sure that you spend alot of money on the psu, and by that I mean by a bloody good PSU with a like 5+ year warranty, and put it behind a surge guard, you don't want to loose your data. I have a 650W HX Corsair branded PSU which I believe is made by seasonic(one of the best, if not best PSU manufacturers), and it comes with a 7 year warranty for I believe its rated power and maybe (I can't quiet remember) replacement cost of dammaged parts. So its not going to break..
Additionally if using onboard raid, you could run your OS off of a small USB drive to save internal sata slots, keep in mind that the internal sata ports could be run off of different chips (often denoted I believe by being a different colour), in which case I don't believe you can run raid across the ports controlled by different controllers, for cases I believe the fractal define R4 has 8 internal 3.5 drives, which coincidently is about the number of drives you see on the upper end motherboards (not sure though if they are on same controller, and if controller supports raid 5/6, and how good it is), being priced at about 100USD in the US, I believe the drive cage is detatchable and relocatable allowing for a few additional drives if another cage could be procured.
There was one case I believe showed at pax or something that had a ridiculous ammount of HDD slots, perhaps someone here could tell us what it is.
You can use FreeNAS as the OS. Read up on ZFS, a filesystem FreeNAS can use. Particularly RAIDZ, ZIL, and L2ARC vdevs. RAIDZ is an improvement over RAID-5, and using SSDs for ZIL and L2ARC vdevs will get you the caching for improved read/write performance. Of course, lots of RAM is the fastest cache device :)
http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Requirements#ZFS_Overview
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/filesystems-zfs.html
ZFS does everything hardware RAID can do, it does it better, and it does way more on top of that. Just don't enable dedup on any big dataset...
WATCH THIS VIDEO
Awesome video! I might use this!