Streaming to other devices (TV, PC, phone) - over the network or wifi
Support for Plex, Transmission torrent
idea is to be able to send torrent links to my server to start downloading them while Im at work and my home internet connection is not in use
VM support - it would be really great if I could run Centreon monitoring software in background
Snapshots of my PCs - for some extra protection in case something goes wrong
Encrypted data - even tho I will not store any corporate confidential data there, I will be storing my private data that I value very much, so everything has to be encrypted
Future proof - additional features are always welcome
I have fairly conservative budget of a $1000 and Im thinking of something power efficient (100 W/h max) - that are the main reasons FreeNAS is not the number one choice for me, as it seems to be quite power hungry and I would need to buy more powerful hardware to run it.
So with all that, what OS would you recommend me to use? Personally, I really like the idea of unRAID, but there has not been very much information about it here so far. Does anyone have personal experience? If so, how do you like it? Would you recommend it?
If there's any information missing I will do my best to supply it.
I personally have only used FreeNas and I had a few hiccups with it originally but have since ironed everything out with the awesome guys over on their forum.
I just repurposed an old Dell XPS system. (i7 2600 w/ 16gb ram). I just bought a smaller case, gold rated PSU and several WD Red drives. Depending how many hard drives you want $1000 might be hard to build a new system. ECC Ram and NAS drives will be a good portion of that budget. Mind you I obviously don't have ECC Ram or a server grade motherboard.
I run it for almost identical use case minus the torrents. My fiance runs a photography business out of our home so all of her current photos are stored on a Raid 1 set up for backup purposes. I run a single 5tb drive strictly for my movies/music for Plex.
I have seen several torrent plugins available but no experience running them. I'm pretty much a FreeNas noob when it comes to the majority of its functionality.
I'm not sure if you follow Linus but he always seems to favor unRAID.
If you're considering unraid I'd have a look at snapraid too, I use it and can recomend it for media storage. http://www.snapraid.it/compare snapraid isn't an operating system but can be used on pretty much anything, I think there's a plugin for open media vault. On my server I use snapraid with AUFS for disk pooling on ubuntu server. Open media vault is a good choice if you want something more general purpose than a dedicated NAS as it runs on top of a standard debain install so you can do anything you can do on debian on it.
I'd also have a look at rocktor, it uses btrfs which I've used a little and really like, it doesn't have the same steep hardware reqirements that freenas and ZFS have.
Well, yes. Linus video was how I noticed unRAID software to begin with. But Im afraid that Linus seems to favor whatever those companies sponsor him with and he was not even close to level of detail @wendell put in his FreeNAS video. Thats why Im asking this community for help and your opinion.
How many hard drives will you be using? Do you still need to buy those?
I paid around your entire budget on everything but the storage. Case (Define R5), Intel server board, i3-4170, 16GB of Kingston ECC RAM, LSI HBA card, BeQuiet PSU and CPU cooler.
With 8 HDDs and 2 SSDs the NAS is almost using 100W during heavy writing and 50W on idle. You will probably be able to get it all cheaper second-hand, I bought it all new except for the PSU which I already had. I did include its price in my calculation though, and it was a high-end 650W which is way more expensive than what you'd actually need.
Right now I've got 2x 2TB WD RED, so I would need one more to set up and RAID5 (2 disks for available storage, one for parity). Thats what I plan to use at the beginning. Later on I can buy 3 more bigger disks as my media collection grows. I was planning to use motherboard controller of ASrock or Intel server board to plug disks into. All that in Fractal Define Mini case.
Reason why im asking about what software to use first is to be able to build around it and not have to spend 2000$ on beast machine that will idle 90% of the time just to get FreeNAS working correctly with all that ZFS features.
I am not sure if they noticed or not, but they came dangerously close to losing a lot of data because they had striped three raid 5 volumes without really understanding the underpinnings of massive amounts of storage, the fact that raid controllers don't always pass status/smart info to the host, and that controller glitches/buggy firmware can often be "just as likely" if not "more likely" to cause and/or compound simple drive failure. Also the fact that windows software raid is "lols k" at best when dealing with > 3 spindles.
The new enclosure Linus' team went with is the iStar enclosure we looked at when we went to Computex, which provides a built-in SAS expander on the backplane. Only ZFS and to a lesser extent BTRFS and ReFS can provide the appropriate level of software redundancy necessary to detect and correct the types of errors that can creep into a many-drives array. Though the LSI HBA they were using did not appear to have adequate cooling.
unRaid has you covered for drive failure. It doesn't have you covered for drive corruption. Faulty controllers can introduce corruption in a lot of places simultaneously.
I'm not sure if they yet realize that the HBA needs to also support giving SATA drives multipath capabilities normally found on SAS drives only. This means if a controller dies, a secondary path to a secondary controller kicks in and takes over. for the failed primary path/controller. This ensures if you lose a controller, you don't lose a whole swath of drives.
One thing I'd like to test soon is if Windows 2012R2 Storage Server as a VM with VirtIO drivers from VirtualBox can actually perform at SMB3.02 speeds. Samba doesn't yet support SMB3.02 protocols, which would be more ideal for SMB/Samba storage to windows clients. Otherwise, the most performant option is iSCSI but you'll have to buy a special proprietary driver that would allow multiple clients to have (sane) access to the shared block device advertised by iSCSI. NTFS doesn't support that. At all. (Most normal filesystems dont-- xsan does). I haven't tried xsan on windows in years, but that might also be an option for a shared iscsi device (vis a vis smb).
Joyent's SmartOS May be worth looking at. Its turn key to enterprise style cloud in a box. You do need to choose your hardware wisely if you go this route. Would be happy to provide inputs if that's the case. Its not for everyone, but I fell in love with the way this system runs.
I was confused at the chart on
I can add disks to my ZFS pool all day long. You just can't down size the pool without a creative rebuild of the pool.
I also like the read benefits from ZFS in the mirrored 'raid' you get twice the read speed and the amount of disks in a pool increases write speed... for example one box i built was 14.9TB with 16 mirror pairs of spinning disks and two hot spare drives Performance at 50% read, 50% write, 80% cache hit and 8k blocks roughly 14,400 IOPS
I think it's referring to adding disks to a RAID array rather than the pool. I don't have any experience with ZFS but I was under the impression that if you had 3 disks in a RAID5 equivalent that you couldn't add another disk, but you could create a second RAID and join the two.
Perhaps, I'm still a little confused, but I know those guys wouldn't put up info with out reason. ZFS RAID is of a software nature but its integrated as part of the running system. The hardware configuration of the system is typically raw disks JBOD connected to the pool. The pool can then be configured to the particular RAID level, depending on your needs. In ZFS the RAID5 idea exists as 'RAIDZ', its the same parity idea.
To be honest, I don't have any experience with snapraid. I'll have to fix that :)
I would skip freenas and just build a linux box with KODI or something with BRTFS. Heck just have shares on my gaming computer. Freenas fanatics are just too anal about "ECC RAM only", "intel cpus only", "Intel/LSI only controller cards" blah blah, you end up building the same PC as every FreeNas nutjob. I think even Linus had a machine being a server + gaming PC in his recent vid.
Initially I was headstrong on using FreeNAS but I've been looking at unRAID a lot, as my current box wouldn't take advantage of ZFS IMO (cannot run ECC RAM), and the unRAID UI looks like even my newb-ass could maybe make it halfway work. I know unRAID wouldn't be the winner for data integrity and availability, but it looks user friendly and also looks like it could make my tower be an 'all in one soluion' (run various VMs, pass-through the GPU for a gaming VM, RAID with some redundancy, owncloud, media storage, cody, plex etc). I've been reading about FreeNAS, NAS4free, Openmediavault etc, but again I need something newb friendly.
But I've been reading that unRAID does not maintain a repository of a lot of the apps people have been contributing and using in dockers, so these things often break when the contributor's dropbox runs out of bandwidth, gets deleted etc. That would get really annoying.
Haven't seen Rockstor until now. Looks pretty nice, if they get some more documented VM support I'm really interested- my goals are not piratical, just one of those guys thats like a dog and a bone, right now I'm really into HyperConvergence and that is why unRAID caught my attention. If I were a DeusQain or Wendell, I could probably make my own HyperConvergence out of a hodge-podge of stuff, but my newbness requires something easier.
For 1000 dollars, I would build 2 systems. One like the Asrock C2550D4I, and an other older ML110 G6 or something like that to host my vm's. If you tweak your systems you can get 100 w/h. But don't expect that if you running the vm's full speed.
As much as I like a 'one box does it all' solution, it would be nice to have some redundancy if separating some tasks. A used box that is server grade and can support ECC RAM is appealing. But I just keep getting pulled back to utilize what I already have with just a few add-ons (hard drive bay) and have an all-in-one solution. Current rig is an i7, 32 gigs of RAM, 500gb SSD, 1 TB disk. Add the HDD bay, maybe the need for a raid controller and the right software and its trucking away working as my VM lab, NAS, Plex etc.
When I found that unRAID does not support raid6, I started to look elsewhere. I checked out SmartOS, and am trying to keep tabs on btrfs but now looking at enterprise stuff. Talked to a systems architect at work and he mentioned a two-birds one stone approach, meaning I should try to use ESXi, Windows server etc. so that in trying to accomplish my home setup goals, I also gain experience using software that would develop my resume. Makes a lot of sense... if my hardware ends up not playing nice, then I guess I will have to play around with various alternatives, one of my goals is a level of redundancy that raid6/raidz2 provides.
This is going to turn into one of those builds where at the end, I should have just bought now hardware (server grade, xeon, ECC etc) haha.
*edit, so Proxmox has ZFS support- having trouble getting licenses for ESXi, so now really looking into Proxmox hard (no thanks to Wendell's video haha).