Hello, first time poster long time fan VIVE LE LEVEL1!
As per the title I'd like some community input,
I'm in the process of purchasing a house with parter (ho ho!) and its currently being built, I've talked with the builders about running cat5/6 cables about the house and they've no issue with it.
So I'm currently of the mind to run a cable from one of the upper storey wardrobe (a closet for those across the ocean) to each of the rooms in the house. The plan being to put a server (or two) in this closet and the choice of the wardrobe (closet) is itll be an easy run to transfer the hardware into the attic when I eventually get it all converted and floored etc).
I've visions of a beautifully cabelled rack with a pf sense router, switch linking the house to a storage server, however baby steps, the storage server is the top priority, and I'd like some advice on whether to build a server from an old enterprise / business thing off of ebay, or would i be better to just puy a net gear or thecus or other branded NAS thing a ma jig. (Personally I'd like to build one, but I'll listen to advice)
TL;DR buying a house, need storage server, not sure wheter to build an server from an old enterprise unit or buy a big nas.
I started off with a single drive (1TB) Lacie NAS about 6 years ago because that was going to be all the storage I ever needed. Less than a year later I upgraded to a dual-bay (2x 2TB in RAID0) prebuilt NAS because I didn't have enough space. Less than 2 years later I ran out of space again and bought a 4-bay enclosure to go for 12TB of storage so I could house my Blu-Ray rips on there and access them from whatever device I wanted to watch them on.
Fast forward another 2 years and I ran into corruptions on one of the drives, meaning that all my data was messed up. At that point I built me a proper NAS in a Fractal Define R5.
Right now I am using 12 out of my 20TB (32TB raw space but I have plenty of redundancy in case of drive failure) and I am pretty pleased about the fact that I won't have to replace it anytime soon. Eventually I'll just start swapping out drives or adding them, a luxury I didn't have with some of the prebuilts.
However (and now we're getting to the important bit after this lengthy intro) I still have almost 800EUR worth of old prebuilt NASes that are no longer used and are simply taking up space in my parts closet. I know I'm never going to sell them for anywhere near what I paid for them. Building the NAS was expensive, but I would have saved me quite a bit of money if I had built it right away instead of messing around with prebuilts.
So the lessons I learned are : - have a good idea of your space requirements and how much it is likely to increase over the next 5-10 years. Don't think in terms of "I am going to need this much space", you want to be thinking more along the lines of "I might want to use it for such-and-such, and for that I would want to have this much space". Then multiply that number by at least 1.5 to get the amount of usable space you'll need. - build big and in such a way that you can upgrade easily should the need arise. In your case that translates to : think about how you plan to expand the amount of storage when you start running out of space, then see if your plan works with the rack you're looking into buying. - Don't trust RAID0 or JBOD. With large amounts of data, you're going to have to invest in 2 or maybe even 3 extra drives inside the array so you have proper redundancy going on.
I personally built my own freenas server using raidz2 (2 drives able to fail). I was also deciding whether not not get a prebuilt or even old enterprise server.
Enterprise level: loud and draws lots of power but pretty beefy specs wise. Good if you can find deals on eBay, etc. Prebuilt: pricey for low power hardware, not much tinkering/setup required. Self built: upgradable, use spare parts if you have some collecting dust., More setup required, BUT FUN
Start small and then expand. Currently I have 2-3TB drives in RAID1 on a USB3 external enclosure. That was fine for the last several years. Now that I am going on to bigger and better things(which I won't get into detail here), but I need a larger system. I already had a 4u rack mount case lying around and decided to franken-puter that one together with some older hardware. The case is capable of housing 12-3.5in drives, which is 36TB at full capacity provided I stick with 3TB drives. That should be plenty for a while. I also plan on putting them into RAID5 when that system gets built.
Depending on the direction you want to go. Building it will be much cheaper. Enterprise parts will cost a bit more for their robust nature. A prebuilt NAS is prettier, more expensive, but IMO, not as reliable or expandable as most buy them to meet their current needs. Again, that is all based on the direction you go. For me, I prefer expansion. The rack mount I am building will start out with 4-3TB drives and the more storage I need the more drives I can add at a later date.
First off at this point in time I'd be looking at running cat 7 to just future proof it. I'd also run at least two drops everywhere again as it is much cheaper to do it now.
Big thing would be what you are storing on it and how your backup solution works. I think personally I'd go with a quality nas to start off with for most uses.
I was building a NAS for the first time and from scratch it costed me around 1000 EUR but it is probably the most future prof machine i ever build.
HW: ASRock EP2C602-4L/D16 Xeon E5-2670 32 GB ecc ram 6x3TB hgst NAS (running of MB sata ports) 2xSamsung EVO 850 PRO 240GB (for caheing and log) EVO 840 120GB (OS drive) X-Case Value 24-bay rack case Noctua server cooling
Software: Debian Jessie with ZFS managing my drivers in a RAID 6 (raidz-2) conf. Using Samba as NFS was horrible in my case dont know why...
I don't see how you can go wrong with custom builds. Then again this is my first EVER experience of enterprise hardware. And it was F*****G fun.
Thanks for all of the input folks much appreciated!
As the house isn't palatial in size I think cat6 will do for the runs but if someone knows where I can find some decently cheap cat7 in the UK / Ireland point me in that direction!
Seems like the general feel is to build a frankenserver these are the kinds of units I've seen and have in mind the uk site is awash with these types of things.
Any advice in terms of the hardware to avoid and look out for will again be appreciated.
General use scenario I see as being mass storage (duh) for an ever expanding HD - 4k video collection as well as high bit rate audio.
I'd like the server to have the horse power to stream multiple pieces of media to a few devices say, TV, tablet, phone, speakers about the house simultaneously however I don't want the thing to sound like concord on take off either...
It will also probably be my first foray into running Linux in a big way.
Also they'd probably be majorily overkill but how'd something like these do as a pf sense box?
Thanks again,
When I eventually get into the house and get the networking up and running I'll start a progression thread.
Raid 6 or ZFS Z2 for 3TB drives, trust me you'll likely regret raid 5 or Z1 with singular drives that large. Your chance of 2 drives failing during a rebuild with 3TB drives in raid 5/Z1 is ridiculous high, Z2 / raid 6 mitigates this.
I'm using a quad core celeron J1900 at 2ghz as my pfsense box and it doesn't even sweet a 90mb down 12mb up connection, and if the cpu utilization scales linearly as speeds increase it will be fine for a 1Gbps connection. Dual old Xeon's would be MASSIVELY overkill.