I am building a NAS for a friend to replace their drobo box in their photo studio. I would like to use ZFS, probably with FreeNAS/TrueNAS. The NAS will also be an FTP server most likely.
I’m trying to use used server components to get the most bang for the buck, but at the same time I don’t want to get completely obsolete stuff…
So the CPU/RAM/Motherboard/SSDs combo would come to approximately $350, not too bad. However maybe there is another option (with ECC memory) that would work? I know a NAS with a maximum of 2 users doesn’t need to be all that powerful, but being able to add capabilities down the road would be nice… What do you think, reasonable, or complete overkill?
I use FreeNAS for my backups - I have 2 pools in mirrored mode (ZFS mirror) - all software “RAID”. I have it configured so it is accessible via SMB. On paper - easy. In practice - not an easy feast for total beginner to set up but managable. Especially the resilvering part of a broken drive for a new one for the mirrored pool is not as straightforward as you’d think.
I went used for motherboard, CPU and RAM:
i3-3245
2x4Gb DDR3
P8H77-I ITX motherboard (it supports 6 x SATA, 2 of which are SATAIII)
Old but never used case: Chieftec Arena!
and new for drives:
2 x SSD Crucial MX500 for boot and OS.
2 x WD500 GB
2 x WD 1TB
and NEW PSU (very important! DO NOT use old, unreliable PSUs)
Corsair VS450 - not great, not terrible - good enough for the build.
You might want to add some drive bays accesible from the front, so that you can replace drives easily. No need to go super expensive there.
Add fans for airflow - especially if the NAS is supposed to run 24/7
Maybe add a UPS to prevent suddent power cut-outs.
It’s very “ghetto”, mind you, but it works fine. I get more than 110 MB/s of transfer speeds when copying large files over a 1 Gbit network.
True, I could go with new hardware, but new hardware fails too. I am planning to use new HDDs, SSDs and possibly ram.
Thanks for the pics of the build. I was planning to (re)use a PSU from another computer I had, but a new one probably wouldn’t hurt. I have a spare 750W I could use.
If you trust your old PSU and it is a decent one (good brand too) and not too old (say 2 years old, not 5 years old), you could re-use it.
I don’t think more than 400W is really necessary for a build like that - also don’t get too rogue with motherboard and CPU. FreeNAS/TrueNAS just flies on older Sandy/Ivy Bridge-based machines. The only problem with those is they are really ageing now. I used one, because I had some just laying around and it’s a personal build, not a corporate one.
So you can definitely go newer or completely new for sure and cheap too - with some Ryzen G stuff from Team Red or Pentium/Celeron from Team Blue. Just don’t get too expensive platform-wise. Use the money for decent drives instead.
Also remember: you need a monitor output and physical keyboard/mouse just for the first configuration, otherwise is Web-GUI based.
Remember about fast connection too - 1 Gbit at least.
This is what I’m trying to address! Right now there are PILES of individual HDD enclosures (Gtech,LACie,etc) that don’t have backups in place.
If we could get a NAS to hold all of that data, sort it, and set up off-site cloud backups. Also considering using the drobo NAS as an onsite backup.
Planning on using 2x mirrored ssds for boot drives. For storage, I am still not sure what would be best in terms of vdev/pool arrangement, still have some reading to do. But we’d like to reuse the 6x 6TB drives from the drobo DAS to start off the array.
I’m not sold on the idea of used drives for NAS purposes but if you decide otherwise, please check them THOROUGHLY - and I mean THOROUGHLY. Not only for obvious warnings but also sings for possible future warnings (even if tresholds are not exceeded), such as raw read/write errors which should be 0 and it happens that they are not. That is never a good sign.
Guess I should replace it to be safe.