Any ideas for an SSD NAS Case???
I am considering building a SSD NAS / staging server / development box. I would like at least 6 ssd, so I could have 1 boot, and at least 5 disk raid5. I am thinking ATX, because I want to get a motherboard with thunderbolt, so I can cheaply have serious bandwidth to my iMac.
I like the short cases, and have a node 304, but I don't think this is possible for ATX. The Cooler Master HAF series might be an option... I think you can get 4-6 2.5"
Any ideas or tips?
RAID's like dead man, go freeNAS with ZFS
Otherwise they're SSDs, so like you could literally take any case, and just use stick on Velcro to mount them all anywhere in it
The Coolermaster N200 is a pretty nice low cost case, although the HAF XB might be useful to you since it has 2 hot swap bays on the front of it.
Course if it's speed you want, you should go M.2 those drives can reach 1gbps
Yep thats the plan.
Ubuntu 14.04 + ZFS
Yeah I don't think I will find any benefit in my workflow from m.2.... The SSD are mainly going to be serving VMs or Video Editing.
Well what's your budget?
For the case, I would guess I could do something under $200.
Naw for like the whole thing
I don't know exactly.... I'm hoping I can get by with like a 2 core pentium...
Hopefully buy
CPU - intel g3258
Case
PSU - gold
Memory - maybe 8gb to start
under $500
I have the drives already.
You mostly want the G3258 because it has ECC support, and if you care at all about your data, you'll want ECC memory, just gotta find a board with 6-8 sata ports and ECC support.
Also apparently some AM1 motherboards support ECC memory, and those are nice low power quad cores for NAS builds
You would just need a PCI-e to sata card for the additional ports, since AM1 boards max out at 4 sata ports
And you'll want a UPS for a battery back up on the server
Have you considered using something like http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=192 ?
takes up one drive bay only, so choosing case might be easier .
This thread is kind of drifting,
but it's going to come down to networking. I'm avoiding 10gbe right now.
At least the gigabyte thunderbolt boards tend to have two ports, so I could actually share with two computers. That's all I need, and I can easily get by with gbe for offloading to my "glacier" storage. The SSD NAS was meant to be lot a big SAN, or way to edit more streams of video, or better VM availability.
I did not know about ECC support, but that's awesome.
I have two of them already, and they're really usable. I would recommend them to anyone wanting to build a NAS. REALLY fast. Like it can handle 6 plex streams, easily.
I'm probably not interested in ECC for this project. I know smarter people than myself have really good reasons for why it's important. I don't think I would spend more on it (server board, ram), seeing as ZFS does do checksum. I know ZFS pretty much passes everything through RAM through RAM to calculate parity, which is essentially where these weird universal forces effect the data, so I might have to reconsider. Just a way to avoid a server board, or extra cost, but IPMI might be worth it's weight for a headless beast. I guess it's something I will have to consider. My current NASes don't have ECC, and haven't had a problem in almost a year. I've maybe caught 10 errors from scrubbing between 3 separate pools.
Feel free to pass along a nudge or if you have better information, that you think I should consider, I am totally open to get my learn on, but I also don't completely believe the hype. I think the NAS market is kind of gaining traction with enthusiasts, so we're seeing a lot of features get marketed pretty well in the general consumer space. If I was building a XEON system, I would totally pop for ECC. Just a different sort of game I guess.
That SOC Asrock board Logan now has for his production NAS might be one of the cheapest ways to get it done. Doesn't have thunderbolt though. I'm avoiding 10gbe infrastructure for a while. It's like $500 alone for a thunderbolt 10gbe. I wouldn't be surprised it if broke through, or if something big market wise happened in the next year or two. That's probably well I'll be getting a new desktop.
NO! that is really awesome, I completely spaced that out.
I was looking at a build with like 9 5.25" slots, filled with 3- 5 bay hot swaps (3.5"). Those are really smart. Could build a pretty high density box with some of these simple ATX cases.
The Iceydock strikes me as better quality than you're average hot swap.
I forgot about your thunderbolt need, gotta go intel then
Although don't most motherboards with thunderbolt run a fair amount of cash?
What's the capacity of the drives you bought?
$179 ECC Super Micro Board
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182820
You may be able to find something cheaper, but it's easily worth it to go ECC for a NAS, the extra cost really isn't much in the long run.
I think I was looking at this boart...
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4781#ov
I've picked up a bunch of 255gb intel SSD, over the course of like 1 every 2 weeks for a few months.
I'll do the same with larger drives in a few months or a year...
I like the raid for redundancy for production stuff, more so than speed.
Otherwise it would be cheaper to get like a single 1 tb
You probably should have just saved up a butt load of cash rather than buying those SSDs one by one.
Redundancy is nice, but it doesn't replace a proper back up naturally.
And like are you sure you couldn't live with just a Gigabit connection with like a thunderbolt adapter that I'm sure probably exists? Because like you said you aren't really doing this for speed
I definitely offload backups to discreet disks.. I use a drive dock, toaster type thing, and backup to a un mounted hard disk once a project settles down, or something big happens. But I also use the NAS to basically have quick access. Like to keep as much on the network as possible. The ZFS raid gives a bit more durability, and bigger volumes.
I have a pair of 5-drive NASes on gigabit, and I can basically edit 4:2:2 HD video off gigabit. But with scrubbing, or multiple streams, or anything on the network I run out of bandwidth. And SSDs are more durable for this kind of thing, they don't sleep, so access is usually quicker, especially over usb or thunderbolt. Most of my projects are only a fraction of a terabyte, so my SSDs are doing good right now.
I'm not usually one to save for massive purchases though, I would rather part things out, and make decisions like pick up a case with lots of free bays, so I can max it out over a couple years even.
Ya, but like, if you'd saved up you probably could have found a sale on SSDs at some point and picked up a lot of them on a discount.
Either way, your plan looks fine I suppose, your data isn't going to like you very much without ECC though.
I take it there's no simple solution of just like hooking them up directly to your main rig and running the RAID from there? Wait, iMac...
Actually I did sort of catch a sale.
I was watching BestBuy.com on my local store, and the price would literally fluctuate day to day. Some times as much as $20
I got a ton of intel 503 series (240gb) for as low as like $105, maybe 8 months ago now.
Not a bad deal, considering they were going up to like $120 - 130