It’s not entirely clear if you’re looking for help with the hardware, software or both. But I have two workstations and the files for both are served from a third computer which is an NFS server that also runs virtual machines for things like mail. There is no noticeable performance difference in working with NFS files vs local disk files, with a 6 disk software RAID 10 and a 10Gbe network.
If all your clients are Linux, and security is not an issue:
NFS on any modern linux distro (ie. Debian 10/11)
Software Raid 10 with 4 or 6 disks (partition sizes must match even if disks don’t). Look up mdadm.
If you want to invest in hardware:
10 Gbe cards. 10Gbe switch. Network speed is important for NFS. I was never happy with NFS performance with a 1G network. If you just want to store stuff and not work off of it all day, you might be ok with a slower network.
If using a consumer (“gaming”) motherboard and SATA throughput is a concern (ie if the board chokes trying to I/O 4 drives at once), you can use a PCIe SATA (not RAID) card. About $50 and can control up to 8 drives. This usually requires a breakout cable.
You would need two PCIe slots free for the 10Gbe card and the SATA card for the server, and one PICe slot for the 10Gbe card on the clients.
I’m asking for help both with hardware (although I already have some parts to use) and software.
My other clients are Windows 10.
I don’t need to constantly work from the NAS: it’s mostly backup or long term storage.
My clients are spread out 3 floors, and 10Gb may be hard to cable.
Moreover, the NAS will use HDD, and not even the most up to date ones, so I don’t think that 1 Gb Ethernet will ever be the bottleneck there.
The motherboard is Asus P7H55-V.
Question no. 0: What OSes will be used to connect to the NAS? (Will assume Windows and SMB)
You are approaching this at a very odd angle, which makes it hard to give advice. Most people tend to build their NAS as a fortress, with no openings except the ones provided by the sysadmin.
I recommend freeNAS for easy user access configuration and connections. This makes the NAS part easy, of course some configuration will be required on the client / windows side of things still.
Now, you need a backup option; easiest here is using a cloud storage from a trusted provider, be that Amazon, Microsoft, your Neighbour, your online hacker friend or any other entity you are comfortable leaving your data with. If, like me, you are NOT comfortable with handing away your data, the second best thing is a portable hard drive (and make sure it isn’t an SSD!) that you store away from your computer. Ideally in a shed or at your workplace or something like that. Bring it home once a month or week, back up on that. 8TB HDD storage is dirt cheap nowadays, and they last a LOOOONG time in cold storage.
As for the hardware itself… Looks like you already have a good enough setup there. Raid is not strictly necessary since ZFS is like a RAID5, but supports discs of different sizes.
Above all, do. Learn. Repeat. Take your time. Getting it perfect takes time, effort and above all, a few attempts. See this as learning.
For the most part totally agree with @wertigon (good job)
I just want to say one thing - RAID is not backup.
Some raid setups have some reliability build in, but RAID is, and never been, build as a backup system - its a way to maximize throughput and drive speed, specially when spinning drives was the only option.
To have a 2nd form of actual backup, like on a external drive or in the cloud, thats backup.
Snapshots is also backup, but defeats the purpose if the snapshot is put on a RAID disc
Mirrored RAID is sort of backup, but not actual backup, as it in some cases also copies the errors
We use few OSes at home: Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Ubuntu 20.04, Lubuntu 20.04 , PopOS! 20.04. And there are Android devices, too.
What do you mean by that? No access from outside the local network?
There’s a specific reason why I’m asking if that kind of access is doable and secure enough: my university is far from home, therefore I’m most of the time offsite.
I’m at home now only because of the pandemic, which I hope it doesn’t become the norm.
Anyway, if there is no way to make the offsite access secure enough, I’m OK with only local network access.
Thanks. FreeNAS was the option I had in mind after seing the latest developements in both OpenMediaVault and FreeNAS. Any suggestions for guides online?
Yeah, I know I need another form of backup. I already have piles of external hard drives, but there’s so much fragmentation that it’s hard to remember to backup everything and it’s even harder to keep the backup files organised.
So I just put the drives in the system and then set up a kind of “virtual” RAID thanks to ZFS?
I’ve heard that ZFS is heavy on resources: is i3 530 + 8GB RAM good enough? (I managed to get 2 more 4GB sticks since I first started this topic)
I study Physics at university, which requires a lot of learning and critical thinking.
In the meantime, I’m working on music of my own and trying to learn HTML and CSS (to start making my own website and possibly do websites for other people to get some money in these hard times).
I’m all in on learning, but I hope to have enough time learning how to do this stuff properly.
Yes, I know RAID is not backup, but RAID 1 or RAID 5 increase reliability, as you mentioned. Considering that I’m using used hard drives, I think it’s necessary not to lose data.
I have 0.6 Mbps of upload speed, so backing up on the internet would be very hard. I tried backing up my personal data… I’ve started back in May and it hasn’t completed the upload for months (leaving it uploading at night).
The idea of the snapshots was only to have some deletion-error protection, so that we don’t accidentally delete data
Try this basic guide, it’ll get you encrypted volumes and super reliable and super flexible btrfs setup on top, that you can easily unlock remotely over ssh if you have a power cut or need to reboot.
There’s instructions for getting things going in hyper-v if you want to test and play with stuff before doing it on real hardware.
For your different spaces, you can use btrfs subvolumes and qgroups.
For network file/share access you can setup samba (there’s a separate guide on these forums).
More like, no access to your fortress, period. Except for the giant hole you just opened by drilling in the wrong spot. “But I was just gonna make a small window…”
As for RAID, there are two reasons to use RAID - Speed, and reliability.
If it’s speed you need, these days you will get much less headache by buying a couple of hot-swappable 1TB NVMe drives. Not quite as cheap, but cheap enough to bring your speed to where it needs to be. Not even a 16-drive RAID0 can top that.
As for reliability, RAID5 or RAID6 are the most reliable, but then you are better off with ZFS which covers pretty much everything RAID5 does.
Also, keep in mind that even with RAID1 (mirroring), you have less reliability (but better data integrity). The reason being, instead of one component with a 1% failure rate, you have three components with 1% failure rate (two disks and one controller) - that means 0.990.990.99 or roughly 0.97 reliability for the system as a whole.
Not saying RAID is completely worthless, but there are caveats for sure, and the primary RAID use cases - speed and reliability - are both evaporating quite rapidly for most people, compared to NVMe and SSD storage. You are welcome to experiment with the technology if you want to. Good luck!
All right… now I need some hardware recommendations. Now I need:
A reliable and possibly efficient PSU that is able to power the old CPU and the different hard drives (6+)
A PCIe LAN card to put on the Asus P7H55-V and get fast connection to the local network
A PCIe SATA card that can support all the drives that I’m gonna put into the computer
The local network at the moment is limited by some cable and switches to 100Mbps, but I’m gonna redo the cabling and put newer switches.
Do you have any switches suggestions? Switches faster than 1Gbps are quite expensive here in Italy on Amazon, but maybe there are better options…maybe from the server used market? IDK
Seasonic is one of the best brands, but I’d say get a gold PSU and be done with it. The number of watts you need is whatever your CPU draws + 50-100W for drives + 50-100 extra for any increased storage. So a 300W CPU with plenty of SATA power cables should be able to serve you just fine here. And if you need more SATA power, get a splitter cable.
Not hard to find one, but I do recommend intel-based circuitry. Those are 20-50% more expensive though, so not great.
You can go PCIe Gen 3.0 with 8 ports, which should cover pretty much all requirements you have. Do note you will most probably never saturate your 10Gb NIC with spinning rust drives, even a 1Gb NIC is too fast for that.
Yeah, they do great PSUs. I know also FSP does good stuff, as an OEM too.
Thank you very much.
Are there any good 300/400W 80+ Gold ATX redundant options? I was thinking redundant for this use case…
Thanks for linking me that model… has it good compatibility with Linux? I decided to use FreeNAS on this machine.
That said, the hard drives speeds will be slow, the local network will be wired up to 1Gbps and the Ethernet card you linked me costs 4 times as much as I’ve spent for the rest of the computer, so… I don’t think I need to spend all that money to get a 10Gbps card.
Any cheaper suggestions? Maybe for 1 Gbps Intel hardware that I can look for on Amazon or the used market?
Figuring out how to do stuff in the EFI shell was the hardest part for me when I flashed the controller in my NAS, but that was just because it was the first time I’ve really done anything in it. Otherwise, it’s just following one step after another from your guide.
“But I was just gonna make a small window…”