I’m in the horrible state of not having any backup system at home. So I’m thinking about getting a NAS next month, since I finally finished university and finally can save up for a NAS.
My expectations:
I need just a simple network storage with an automated backup system. I’ll probably access the storage rather seldom, since it will be a storage server for media like music, photos, videos. As I said, it will be primarily a storage and backup server.
My budget is about 1.000€.
So the question is, should I build my own NAS, or is it enough just getting a QNAP or Synology NAS?
QNAP and Synology look fine to me. Low power usage, about 600€ for a built system + 4TB HDDs -> ~1k€ would still be in my budget.
I’ve read a few posts here about building your own NAS with FreeNAS etc.
Sounds finde to me, since I love building systems on my own. But all of the threads here had much higher budgets and since I “only” need a storage server, that is seldom accessed, do I really need a beefy system for that?
Also, can I save some money and just build my own NAS from old hardware? I’ve got some old mini-ITX parts and I’m planing to build a new desktop system around Ryzen. So I could use my old computer for a NAS build (no ECC though).
My current PC has:
CPU = AMD Phenom II X4 945
Motherboard = GA-MA770T-UD3P
RAM = 2x 2GB OCZ + 2x 4GB G.skill (I know, I’m a heretic for mixing two types of RAM. Forgive me!)
PSU = Be Quiet L7-530W
GPU will go to the new system. NAS doesn’t need any GPU, does it?
Your current hardware will be a adaquate NAS, assuming your system idle power cost doesn’t work out too high in your region. The one thing I highly advise you get for it is a UPS… it only needs to last long enough it shuts off cleanly, but it could save you big headaches… ECC memory would be nice, but its probably not worth buying a new system for unless you have something where bitrot is a critical factor.
I’ve took a look at the FreeNAS mini cases, they look quite nice.
Strangely I can not buy them from a german distributer, so I would need to import them, I guess. Not sure how far over 1k€ it would go.
So I’d rather find an alternative. But thanks for telling the chassis, it is pretty nice.
In general, the data will not be very important. A loss would be annoying, but not the end of the world
Getting a UPS is a good point, thanks. Although I’ve never experienced power outage.
I guess, I’ll test my current hardware what the idle power consumption is and consider building it into a NAS, when I’ll build the new desktop system.
Build your own.
You can’t trust hardware vendors to be around, warranty their parts, or not change things over time, or have other hardware related issues.
If you use bog generic x86, you can’t go wrong because it’s standard, replaceable parts, and software. Plus it’s cheaper.
You’d have to be crazy to paint yourself into a corner with these stupid storage appliance thingys when generic hardware and common software (FreeNAS) exists.
Build your own.
The main reason is that when it breaks you can work on your own hardware. Not have to pay $100 plus shipping and wait for a week and still maybe not get your data back. With open source tools 1 night, 3 espressos, a good playlist and the wiki and you will be back up in running. If not you will know when to rebuild. Also FreeNAS is great kinda the best thing ever.
If wouldn’t mind sharing what you end up doing and where you get your parts (if that’s the way you go), I would love to know. I am moving back to Germany soon and am not sure which companies are the best to buy from. A new Ryzen and NAS build are my goals.
Edit: By companies I meant resellers or sites other than Amazon
Your current PC is a good candidate for re-purposing into a new build. The only hangup I see is that you idealy want a lot of ram. FreeNas is what I’d personally recommend, for its versatility and data integrity checks that are done by FreeNas’s file system, ZFS. FreeNas is kind of the goto for build-a-nas, but it is a ram hog. The recommendation generally is that you want:
8gb as a minimum
1gb for every Terabyte of USABLE space (so 1gb of ram for every 1TB of available space after you take away the space needed by “raid”)
ECC memory is also nice, but definitely not a requirement. I ran my FreeNas system with normal ram for the longest time, and had no issues.
As for the GPU, you will need one for setup, but might not need one to going forward once you’ve configured your system. Some motherboards will not boot unless there is some kind of video adapter on the system, but some motherboards allow you to run “headless” which is basically just running without a video card. You’d have to test this with your specific board, and also dig around in the settings to see if there is anything on the lines of “disable video adapter check”, “headless mode”, or anything else that sounds of just running without a video out.
If you do decide to go down the route of building, do keep in mind the cost of hard drives. So say you want to make a 9TB array. Well, you need to actually get more than 9TB of hard drives. If you use hard drives bigger than 1TB, you really should have a raid 6 (known as Raid Z2 in ZFS terms) setup. This means that you need 2 hard drives that are there for redundancy, on top of the drives you have for data. So to get around 9TB usable using 3TB hard drives, you actually need five 3TB hard drives. This means you have 3 drives worth of data, with 2 drives worth of redundancy. So you can actually have 2 of your 3TB hard drives die, and the array can rebuild the full volume of data. The minimum number of drives in a raid 6 is four, but the more drives the better just in terms of usable space per dollar.
Thank you for pointing out the redundancy aspect. Indeed I’m aware that HDDs always have less “effective” space than they claim. And RAID modes is something I still have to learn more about. I barely know the basics, that there are a few different modes etc.
Since I’m looking for about 3 - 4 TB to start with, I guess I’ll need the double space for redundancy backups. So about 10TB in total with about 9 TB effective Space, I guess.
The 12GB RAM in my current system should suffice for this task, I hope
Sure, I’ll try to remember reporting here. It will take at least a month until I’ll start building it though, because of financial reasons. For starters, I can tell you my favourite vendors for computer hardware. Alternate.de or Mindfactory.de are two options, that I like to use for price comparisson. I’ve bought all parts of my current system at mindfactory. In general, I also like to use geizhals.at/de. Great comparison site, where you find other vendors.
Just keep in mind, with ZFS you can’t expand an existing vdev without wiping all of the data from the drives and reforming the vdev. It most definitely makes adding capacity to an existing vdev difficult. So if you plan to start with a 3 to 4 TB pool and then move to a bigger one, it might be better to just build a bigger array now and not worry about upgrading it later.
This is a good article that talks about the challenges of increasing capacity of a zfs array:
You can add disks to an existing pool, you just can’t add them to an existing vdev. So if you have two mirrored disks you can add another two mirrored disks to that pool to expand the space. Same goes for raidz and z2.
Caseking is the third on my shortlist. And always look if you can get away with buying a used Xeon on ebay for cheap. Especially since used regECC DDR3 is a lot cheaper than any DDR4 memory.
I have heard that Raid2 is a good option with your nas, and you can build a script to back up your nas to another system. Depending on the severity of the data you’ll also want a sneakernet backup of your most precious files off-site at a friend’s house. I’ll post a vid later explaining a bit more in case I straw manned any of the concepts.
For a backup system, performance doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t have to feel as fast as local storage, it can be much slower.
Get a router in the $100 range like wrt1200ac, put LEDE on, attach a 10T harddrive to it over USB3 and you’re done.
If you want to run your computer diskless, or need your NAS to perform as good as, or close to a local drive, because you want to use it for general processing of stuff, you’ll need a more powerful computer on the other side.
