NAS - Does this situation need more than local storage?

Hardware Build a PC
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Hello all,

Firstly, the Level1Techs YouTube videos are excellent, always get a thumb up from me! It’s partly their fault I’ve chosen to register to this forum :slight_smile:

I know this is my first post, but I would really appreciate any and all comments, I’m just curious to know if I should do things better.

My current computer has an NVMe 260’ish GB primary and then 5 x 3TB drives, Red when times are good and green when they’re not so good (self-employed). I think there’s a ‘in case I need it’ 2TB drive which is quite old but works as a scratch disk. They’re used as follows:

In cloud folders on the primary:
Work related (that I can’t lose)
inactive work related (that I’d prefer not to lose)
recent personal (photos, videos, etc., but not many as cloud storage is around 120GB and most is used for work)

On the 5 x 3TB drives:

  1. Work related, old but may be useful stuff
  2. Personal stuff, more pictures/videos and old images of past machines going back 15+ years.
  3. friends and relatives PC images kept for that ‘just in case’ moment.
  4. Motorcycle videos (via my helmet camera), kinda kept for legal reasons but few are watched.
  5. Did have a use, but I got rid of the files…can’t remember what but I put my digital foot down and deleted them!

I’ve got online backup configured for most if not all drives (Back Blaze), and a laptop which has my cloud files on it and I turn that on every few days or when needed. So to my mind the important workie files are safe.

Now, to this point I thought that I shouldn’t get a RAID and put all my eggs in one basket so to speak, I was also concerned about the cost of the drives. The ones I do have, have been gradually bought, one every few years and ‘as and when needed’.

Over the last few months though, I’ve been watching Wendell and Friends’ videos about FreeNAS and ZFS and so on, and wonder if I should do this instead? I believe my current main computer is above the minimum spec for this task, and my spare/emergency computer is good enough for my main work.

So, what would you do? Please be kind as I’m not in the tech industry, I just have an interest in it and in the distant past I was a bit of a nerd.

If you do recommend the FreeNAS route, I guess I’d need more drives :frowning: There’s a chance that I might even move the new NAS to home, as I’d love to have Plex or similar. Wouldn’t be too helpful for work files, ha!

Thanks in advance!

Chris

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Welcome to the forums! I hope you enjoy your stay here :slight_smile:

While L1T has been showing large implementations of FreeNAS, you can use as few as 1 drive with it. 3 is the minimum for ZFS though, and 4 is a much better place to begin with.

One of the main advantages of a NAS is that multiple clients can connect, as well as the more robust features that come with something like ZFS. Administration is also potentially easier. That said, it may not be “worth it” for you. However, I would still recommend putting a small system together if you can. Understanding the way that ZFS works is important to understanding if a FreeNAS setup is what you’re looking for, or if you would be ok with RAID or JBOD or other setups. You’re already doing the most important thing, backing up offsite, RAID or ZFS just offers an extra buffer against data loss.

Looking at RAID/RAIDZ, the first thing to understand are the varying levels. For RAIDZ you have RAIDZ-1, RAIDZ-2, and RAIDZ-3, RAIDZ-1 and 2 are roughly equatable to RAID 5, RAID 6. What these levels mean at the simplest level is how many parity disks you have in the array. Lets assume you have a RAIDZ-2 setup with 6 HDD. In that situation, Any of the 2 drives can fail before you lose any data. Using the same example for a RAIDZ-1, you could only lose a single drive. This is not like a RAID 1 setup, where there is a specific disk that mirrors the data, but rather the parity partition is spread across all of the disks. This parity partition works as a sort of map to all the other disks as to what data is where, and how to rebuild it if a disk is lost. Raid offers up to 2 parity disks in a RAID 6 configuration, ZFS offers up to 3 in RAIDZ-3. ZFS also offers a number of other features other than RAID, such as protection against bit rot, but I feel less qualified to speak on those. There are certainly others on the forum that could chime in, and will be able to explain this much better than I can.

On the FreeNAS side of things, there are a number of advantages. The OS is very easy to use, very simple to setup, and offers a large amount of extensions to expand the use of the NAS. You can run a plex server, nextcloud server, sickbeard or couchpotato, you can run a torrent client on the machine, allowing you to send the torrents directly there so you dont have to run a client, and then the server can operate as a seedbox, all kinds. And of course if you want to get more into it you can have even more advanced features, like the steam cache that was mentioned in the latest video. There are a number of other features as well, like the NAS can email you if there are any issues or drive failures, you can schedule maintenance tasks, you can set the system to save a copy of its configuration daily, as well as a create daily snapshots of data, so that if there are any issues unrelated to hardware failure in theory you can roll back a day or two and be fine, a lot like shadow copy on windows. Also, I wont get into it, again because I’m not as confident about it and I know there are others here who know, but Jails are awesome, and that’s something that FreeNAS offers you wont get in a standard RAID configuration on your desktop.

For you, I think that a small NAS makes a lot of sense. You wont be “putting all of your eggs in one basket” at all, if anything this prevents you from losing any data locally. A small 4 drive NAS with RAIDZ-1 or 6 drive RAIDZ-2 would be excellent (and I would definitely recommend RAIDZ-2), and give you one more layer of protection. In that case, you would have to lose more than 2 drives in the NAS, as well as your backup to lose any data. I’ll post some links to helpful resources about ZFS and FreeNAS below. Definitely check out the FreeNAS forums, however be aware that they’re pretty hellbent on “doing it right or not at all” over there. The information is invaluable, but also in may cases the recommendations are completely overkill. Grain of salt. Also, be sure to check out the FreeNAS website, there are a lot of answers to common questions there, and if you cant find the answer on the site, the forum will likely have it as well. There is also plenty of good content on youtube from other creators.

https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html



https://doc.freenas.org/9.10/freenas.html

1 Like
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Sir @The_Drugs

I’m overwhelmed with the effort you’ve put into your response and sincerely hope that at least some of it is copied and pasted and not just for me! If the latter, thank you so much.

As at present I’m the only one accessing the data, there’s little urgency with having a good system. I do find the idea of having non-MS based data storage interesting as well as practical. I have casually looked into ZFS / FreeNAS and although it’s a big subject, I feel comfortable approaching it. At least I’m doing the right thing with off-site backup, something driven into me by my early jobs as an employee (20 years ago) when I was responsible for tape drives…I set them up to work and restore when needed, nothing more!

If I made a system, it would be greater than 6 HDD’s to allow for 2 drives failing…not because I have money to throw around, but I’m just not very lucky in general! I really liked the idea of getting an email when a drive fails, I watched a Wendell video today (I don’t think it was released today though) which did mention the maintenance tasks. For instance checking that all the data was in good shape during low usage intervals. I like things like that, because SMART is something I’ve never entirely trusted…should I, I wonder? I have heard references to Jails, sounds brilliant, I think I’d be inclined not to go near a standard RAID config. I’ve helped friends (very small biz) with RAID servers, they’ve then been a bit short of cash and didn’t maintain them. 2 years later, both drives failed in a mirrored 2 drive config. Luckily I had set them up with offsite, just took a good while for them to get all the files back. That’s one experience where things went wrong, several others went quite well.

I’ll going to take your advice I think, and at some point get a small NAS (6 drive). Only if you’re motivated, could you confirm what pool size (yes, I have read/listened to a few things already!) I would roughly get if I had another 3TB drive, giving 6 x 3TB = 18TB? Please don’t answer if you’re busy or have something better to do, I’m sure I can find out somewhere. By chance I’ve already wondered over to FreeNAS forum already, but noticed how people were sometimes approached when they had little knowledge on the subject. Thought I’d do some research first - thank you so much for the links.

What I might do (comments welcome) is get some low capacity cheap drives and have a play - I’m more hands on than reading…not quite sure if that’s a good or bad thing. I’ve seen a few ‘new’ 250GB drives for £10-15. Something which I hope will help is that it won’t cost me too much money, just time. I’m hoping that my current machine will do the job (details below, looking over them would do me a favour!). Thank you again though, really really appreciated and I’m going to click your links now for further bedtime reading :slight_smile:

Spec:
10 bay large tower with 6 x hot swap caddy do-dars (Startech STA-102210)
Mobo: X99-E WS (has 2 Ethernet ports which is supposed to be nice)
CPU: E5-1650 v4
RAM: 2 x 8GB ECC 2133MHz Reg.

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No problem at all! I don’t know a lot, but I’m more than happy to share. Everyone starts somewhere, and knowledge is meant to be shared. :slight_smile:

Yeah, the offsite backup is really important. Old saying is something along the lines of “if it isn’t backed up, consider it lost”. As for the number of drives, 6 is nice for raidz2, as it is an “optimal number” for the configuration, as well as fairly efficient. As for the size of the pool, the usable space would actually only be 12tb (you have to subtract 2 disks worth of space that will be allocated across the vdev for parity). Also, I failed to mention this, the drives should all be the same size in a zfs array. If you use 3 2tb and 3 4tb for example, the 4tb drives will only work as 2tb drives, afaik. I think getting a hold of a couple of older drives, low capacity is a great way to learn, check on ebay for hard drive lots, you can usually find some pretty good deals on a number of drives. then all you need is a flash drive to install FreeNAS on, and a system to run it on.

The automated checks and maintenance can be for a lot. Error emails, scrubs, chron jobs, all sorts of things. Pretty powerful and nice stuff. Combine that with snapshots and saving a system image everyday (both of which can be automated, and automated to delete snaps/images over x days/weeks old) and this takes a lot of the worry or work out of managing the system. You can even use rclone to automate backups to backblaze.

As for the hardware you picked out, its a good pick, but for a much larger system. The additional power of a 2011 socket CPU will be wasted on FreeNAS, at least if you dont plan on running multiple clients with 10gb connections and/or something like a plex server. Especially when connecting to windows clients, that will use samba which is very single thread oriented. Take a look and see if you can find a good deal on a old supermicro lga 1150 motherboard, that will let you use ddr3 as well, which is significantly cheaper than ddr4 right now. You can even snag some used server memory off of ebay really cheap, just do a little research before hand to make sure it’ll all work. This is the board that I personally used in my NAS, Try to stick with Asrock RACK or Supermicro, as other boards are a bit hit and miss on support sometimes. Certain Ryzen boards may also work, but unless you can get 100% confirmation I wouldn’t mess with it, especially given the great prices of the older 1150 stuff and the high prices of ddr4. The cheapest CPU you can get for that system that supports ecc is actually an i3. About 60-100 on ebay right now, just double check that it supports ECC on intel ARK. I’ve been using a 4160 for 4 years now without a hiccup. Last bit of hardware advice is to be aware of the “power saving” features on WD greens, you will want to disable that for NAS use. I’ve never messed with this, but it is a documented issue that often kills the drives quite quickly, especially in a NAS setting. The WD reds you have are built for this kind of use, however. Check this link for information on how to do it (I think).

I completely understand being apprehensive about getting on the freeNAS forums. Those guys can be dicks sometimes and not really newbie friendly, even if you have done some homework. Luckily there is plenty on the internet about all this! No worries.

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Well, you know a hell of a lot more than me @The_Drugs -)

This is certainly one of those subjects where you think you’ve got the jist of, and then you find out that rebuilding an array could cause an additional drive to fail…jeez!

6 drives it will be then. Crikey, 12 TB of space, that’s brilliant as I thought I’d be reduced to 2/3 x 3TB drives. Completely understand about the drive size. Glad the idea of having a play is a good start, it’ll allow me to make mistakes…and then figure how I’d correct them!

The automated tasks sound superb, I like any avoidance of repetition, the snapshots sound great although I can see how they would take up a lot of space. Looking at my data, I have around 7TB I’d say, although now I’m talking about the actual system, when I should probably concentrate on a little test.

I’ll definitely look at the supermicro and 1150 options, although if possible I’d like to re-use what I already have and one day I’m sure I’d like a home system with plex and some extra trimmings, so the setup I have could be used for that may be. I work in construction so I could wire the house (when/if I have one!) with 10gb friendly cabling throughout and get the hardware when funds permit. Supermicro is cracking hardware though, I very nearly got it but then I saw the X99-E WS board and saw all the possible uses it had. Very important point you made about the Green WD’s, I’ll definitely note that, thank you!

Something I have noticed so far and the reason for taking an interest in more reliable storage, is because I’ve witnessed a little data degradation over the years. The odd video not playing here, the odd corrupted image there. So far it’s occurred to files that aren’t that important, or that I have other copies of, but I’d hate for it to happen to something of importance! I thought about a simple mirror at first, then I read/heard/watched something about how an error can occur on the primary and then that error just gets copied to the clone. Can’t see much benefit there!

Ha, I suppose there are dicks on every forum for every topic. I ride a motorcycle and sometimes someone might ask which controls do what. I don’t mock them or make them feel foolish for asking, I just answer someone who has the guts and determination to ask in the first place! Also, we were all young once and (in my case) mostly stupid :slight_smile: Thanks again mate :slight_smile:

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Oh, i thought you intended to purchase these parts. If you already have them by all means use what you have. It’ll work just fine. Only thing to look out for is making sure that your SATA controller will be supported in FreeNAS. Just check the freeBSD driver support pages, I don’t think it’ll be an issue. If it is, the go to card is a IBM ServeRAID m1015 flashed to IT mode. That lets you pass the drives through in JBOD to the system for freeNAS to use.

10gb is getting surprisingly cheap. You’ll have to decide if you want to go 10gbe or fiber, typically fiber is SFP+. The only thing to watch for there again is support in FreeNAS. Typically support is something like chelsio>intel>matrox iirc, at least for used server cards. Newer cards I think intel might have slightly better support. ymmv. Just do some reading on the freeNAS forums and servethehome and you should be able to find a good NIC though, and then make sure you use cables capable of 10gb speeds at whatever distance you want. Potentially you could run conduit with something like cat6a and then change the cable termination when you’re ready to go to 10gb to prevent having to run cables again,

And this is where ZFS really shines!

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Ah, yes indeed I already have the parts - sorry if I didn’t make that clear. It’s my workstation which I’ve used for a while now, it annoys me a little with small glitches, probably because I forced Windows 7 on the NVMe drive :-/ So I made another machine which seems to be working well, so I figured when money permits I could turn the old one into a server. Thanks for confirming that it’ll be OK though and for the tips, I’m sure they’ll save me a good amount of time.

Blimey you’ve provided someone like me with some really useful information concerning fibre / cat, etc. Really appreciate that. Time and Money permitting, I’ll start with converting my old machine into a server and see how I get on. If I can pick it up relatively easily, I’ll investigate into the speed I can potentially get across the network - I think I’d probably go for cat6a because (I’m guessing) that fibre isn’t backwards compat’ with a normal network (RJ45’s)?

Thank you again!