So I'm thinking of building a NAS but I have a lot of questions. So here we go
Software-
Advice on an OS would be helpful, I'm thinking FreeNAS because of all the tutorials and guides.
How easy it to access a NAS (let's assume freeNAS) from different OS's? For instance, in my household we have lots of PC"s, Android tablets, iPads, ect. My main concern here is the Apple stuff. How well will I able to stream video from it? Also, what file types work best with streaming? I have lot's of .mkvs and converting them would be a pain. Also, I'm thinking of setting it up to download torrents, anybody try this before?
Same idea with music, I'm thinking of dumping all of it to the NAS and setting foobar's music library to be the NAS, essentially streaming music from the NAS. Anybody try this?
Also, I'm thinking of setting up Raspberry Pi to stream stuff to the living-room TV, anybody have experience with this?
Hardware-
Fractal Design Node 804 MSI 760GMA-P34 AM3+ AMD FX-6300 Vishera 6-Core 8GB Corsair Vengeance WD 2TB Red (Will add more as needed) Corsair CX 500 PSU
I'm a bit unfamiliar with the AMD side of the house, not sure if this combo is strong enough for the NAS I wan't to build. Looking at it already I"m thinking I need more RAM and maybe a bit better CPU. Some guidance would be great.
My thoughts here are scattered but hopefully somebody can help me out.
I'm no more qualified in NAS building than you are, but I keep hearing that ECC is a good idea for memory just for stability and longevity. Thankfully Vishera supports ECC out of the box. Just be sure you have a motherboard that recognizes that support.
Not actually giving any advice here, just putting some info on the table. Others can feel free to correct it if necessary.
Accessing the NAS from different devices is easy, just set up samba or SMB which is the windows network sharing protocol, it's supported by pretty much everything but you can use other methods aswell if you have a device which won't work with it. You can also set up a DLNA server like plex to share media with DLNA supporting devices.
Adding disks later might be harder than you think and with only one disk you won't have any redundancy.
I wouldn't use a CX power unit get a better quality one from seasonic or a brand that uses seasonic. buying one hard drive and adding more later is not a practice I am familiar with. Meaning idk if it works and with one disk you have zero redundancy as kane has said.
You can do it, but not if you want to use ZFS or RAID which will require you to rebuild the array whenever you add a disk, this means you will need to format it and replace all the files.
In my file server I use AUFS to pool the disks and snapraid to create redundancy. It isn't real-time like ZFS or RAID or things like that, you have to run a snapshot which makes it good for static storage like media libraries but not good for things which are modified frequently. The advantage is I can add and remove disks without have to rebuild the array.
It's a good idea to come up with a plan for your storage, like how much you need, what sort of redundancy you want and how you're going to handle expansion. If you want to set up a ZFS array in freenas then I'd suggest you get enough disks to create an array of whatever size you need with however much redundancy you want now rather than trying to do it one disk at a time.
I'll have to plan things out, I don't see myself using more than 4TB.
What would be the best method of backup? I've heard that RAID isn't the way to go? I was thinking along the lines of dumping to an external or something? Thoughts?
@Fouquin I think the EEC memory is a bit overkill. @Urworstnit3m3r I've never ran into problems with Corsair PSU's but I'll keep that in mind.
Not all corsairs are "bad" just the cx line, a lot of users here say not to use that line from them. also if this is to store critical data, have more than one backup.
SMB and NFS will make file sharing a non issue. FreeNAS also supports Time Machine so you should be ok. For Media streaming I would just use PLex since it is super cross platform.
Owncloud and Pydio are self hosted cloud servers which I would use because the mobile apps are easier than trying to connect an iPhone to Samba share or FTP.
If you don't want to bother with ECC (not really needed for a personal NAS anyway) open media vault and rockstor would be decent avenues to look at. But if you go above 4 drive you will want Freenas ZFS.
Fractal Design Node 804 <-- Neat! MSI 760GMA-P34 AM3+ <--- cool but I would find a board with more 6GB/s SATA ports. That only has 2. AMD FX-6300 Vishera 6-Core <-- also nifty. 8GB Corsair Vengeance <-- I would double to tripple this. WD 2TB Red (Will add more as needed) <--- use ZFS, but I would consider adding more drives to start, to ensure a level of reparability. 3 drives minimum 2+1 (1 drive is for parity, so you can lose a drive and still recover your data) Corsair CX 500 PSU <-- should be good unless you end up with a TON of drives.
ECC memory is only a viable option if you get a CPU that supports it.
The reason you want ECC memory is it will error check things before you end up writing it to the drives. In the case of a Large RAIDZ setup, the filesystem is dependent on your memory to make sure your data is correct when it is written to disk.
I'm looking at all the plex and freenas stuff, I have an old laptop around that I might throw it on just to test the waters. Looks like what I'm looking for though.
The hardware, I think this fits the bill better for a mobo, has 6 SATA6 ports and 4 RAM dimms instead of 2. - ASRock 970M Pro 3
Trying to find a 32GB kit for cheap, this is the cheapest I have found- 32GB (4x8GB) GSkill 1866Mhz for 185 bucks
That's better than my 1600Mhz 32Gig kit.... lol! Same brand I got.
The ASRock board isn't bad. It will make a great first edition NAS, and when you realize you want more, you can always turn it into a living room streaming machine, and migrate your DATA to a higher end NAS system with ECC memory and such.
Yeah, when I initially thought of doing this project I didn't think things could get so pricey so fast. I think this will be a solid start. The price is worrisome though, I will have to test this out with some low end hardware. Just to be sure I want to dump this much time/ money into it.
You must have one monster of a NAS then. You ever setup ripping/ trimming on it? I think it was a Tested video where they talked about it. You could set your NAS to auto rip a bluray and trim it with something like handbrake automatically. I was thinking of doing something like this later down the line, but it would require more power.
Looks like you've got all your answers so I'll throw in what I built to maybe give you a few ideas.
I built a FreeNas box last winter (actually two boxes, one as a file server and one as a media server, I had reasons to build two boxes) but for the media server I used a Asrock server/workstation board with a Intel Atom CPU (2550 I think it was) 16 gig of standard ram (it's a media collection nothing mission critical) and 5 3tb WD red nas drives in a raid Z2 pool.
What I was looking for was a low wattage unit that could run 24-7-365 and not break the bank in utility costs, but yet be robust enough to serve content to more than one device at a time and this setup works great, I think the total wattage draw under load was around 85w so it sips power doesn't require a big fancy PS but I did use a quality 400w 80+ PS.
The server of course runs on FreeNas, and takes advantage of the jails and uses all the content aggregation software to acquire content that comes with FreeNas, I use Plex as a front end for my media devices and to be honest as long as this works I'll never have cable ever again.
The other box is a file server that does house mission critical files for my wife's graphics business which is why I decided to build two totally separate boxes, while it would be tragic to loose my media collection the graphic files are something that can not be replaced, to be honest they are stored on two different locations and locally on her work PC, the hardware in it is very close to what you are proposing including the 6300 but with 16g of again standard ddr3 (I like to roll the dice...lol) It has 5 2tb Seagate Nas drives (I know) again in a raid z2 pool. While the server is used for storage it is like I said not the only storage for the files but really serves as a convent location on the network to save and pull files from any of the workstations. This box surprised me in it's wattage draw even though I think the CPU is like 95w the total draw under load was only like 155w so the two servers together use a little more electricity than a couple 100w light bulbs and less than a couple 150w flood lights.
The only thing I might add is if your going to use the server as your only source of data storage it would be smart to use EEC memory from a stand point of bit rot, ZFS is pretty resilient and I think it's a great file system but if the server was going to house my only copy of data I'd want all the protection I could get. My media server see's lots of reads and writes and I move data on to it and off of it frequently so the possibility of bit rot happening is very high on that server but then again it's a media file if a couple bits get flipped and it's a glitch in the video or audio for a nano second I'm not concern.
I think Qain gave you most of the info you need but if you have any questions just ask.