Making my own NAS - Internals?

[pmprog]

A few months back, I wanted a NAS to back up all my photos. I was tempted to make one, but instead bought a QNAP 253 PRO. It had HDMI out and said it could play media and have virtual machines for full linux environment, so it sounded pretty good, and thought it'd save me hassle. Anyway, the VM didn't work as I expected (you couldn't put it on the HDMI) and you couldn't really just add any program to the NAS (I wanted to put some emulators on there). So I was a bit disappointed.


It got worse... I've only had it 4 months, and it started rebooting on it's own accord the other day and now no longer switches on.


I'll be a bit pissed off if they don't repair it, but I'm half tempted to put together another "NAS" on my own regardless. So I thought I'd see if anyone could recommend a board to make one out of.


My requirements are:

• Full Linux (Debian or Mint) install
  
• HDMI out
  
• Ethernet port
  
• At least 2 USB ports (keyboard/mouse combo and joystick adapter)
  
• 2 SATA ports
  
• Realitively small footprint (including the drives)
  
• Play movies (I don't watch much, but would be nice to support 1080p)
  
• Run a few emulators, but nothing really beyond Megadrive/SNES/Amiga
  

I thought about using a Pi or some other hacker board, but I'd have to use USB HDDs, and I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure if I'm bothered if it's ARM or x86 really; so could look at a mini-itx; but not sure.


Anyone got any suggestions?

 

[benoitb]

I own an HP Microserver generation 7.
 It requires an extra GPU to have HDMI. It runs Debian perfectly.


You might want to have a look at the current Generation 8, it may have HDMI built-in ? Not sure about that.


edit: I checked, it doesn't. So you may pair it with a low profile GPU or look for something else.

 

[___]

I own an HP Microserver generation 7.
 It requires an extra GPU to have HDMI. It runs Debian perfectly.


You might want to have a look at the current Generation 8, it may have HDMI built-in ? Not sure about that.


edit: I checked, it doesn't. So you may pair it with a low profile GPU or look for something else.

I saw these at a local second hand store and they are cheap as heck and really robust. Screw the HDMI out. Get one! If you can add a gpu yourself, that is a bonus! And use it to run FreeNas as a distro if you want the full linux experience plus easy to configure web-gui. I also own a Qnap NAS and have regretted not building my own quite a few times. Qnap are a*holes, their support stinks, they force push firmware updates and have been caught releasing broken firmware updates to important security updates that actually brick systems (kind of like synology). I will never buy a NAS made by a chinese crapware company again. The linux that runs on those systems is weird too. Lots of custom hacks and really really bad decisions, and if the user connects via ssh to make changes, they have to play a guessing game of how things work. Apparently the people at qnap are idiots, they can't even run their website right. It took them close to two years to get the redirection right and if you were living outside china you'd have huge connection problems when trying to reach their forum.

 

[TrashyMG]

You could use a standard Mini-ITX motherboard, even cheap ones still come with 4 SATA ports. You can find fairly small foot print cases out there for Mini-ITX motherboards, I don't have a small footprint system for my NAS storage as I re-purposed my old desktop gaming machine and just have it thrown on a shelf no monitor hitched up as I can remote in. My new Linux gaming machine is using a mini-itx in a small case with a handle bar though. 

 

[ThinkPad]

Just get some old Workstation with old Xeon and ECC memory in it,


Put some new SATA drives in it with a good warranty (WD Red in example)


Install FreeNAS with ZFS and you are ready to go.


In order to use it properly, for every TB of space you need 1GB of ECC memory.

 

[lunixbochs]

In order to use it properly, for every TB of space you need 1GB of ECC memory.

This is incorrect. Leave deduplication off and there is basically no fixed RAM requirement.

 

[Wally]

I second the HP Proliant MicroServers. 

They're cheap, reliable, quiet and you can install what you want!

 

[ThinkPad]

This is incorrect. Leave deduplication off and there is basically no fixed RAM requirement.

In general, the ZFS itself loves ECC RAM. The more is the better.

 

[lunixbochs]

In general, the ZFS itself loves ECC RAM. The more is the better.

I'm intimately familiar with the inner workings of ZFS. In many workloads increased L1ARC (ZFS RAM cache) will increase read performance of frequently and recently accessed data, but you should also consider having a large L2ARC SSD. As a filesystem, ZFS also has no feelings either way about ECC, which mostly just makes failing RAM banks more obvious. In the absence of failure, ECC means nothing. You also encounter diminishing returns when increasing cache size (RAM), especially if your access patterns aren't particularly cacheable (consider for a moment that hard drive caches, CPU caches, etc are usually very small).


The 1GB/1TB "requirement" is only with deduplication enabled which I would absolutely not recommend except for very specialized workloads. You probably don't have as many duplicate blocks as you think. Hardlinking is easier to manage and won't impact your performance.

 

[pmprog]

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll have a look around

 

[benoitb]

I'm intimately familiar with the inner workings of ZFS. In many workloads increased L1ARC (ZFS RAM cache) will increase read performance of frequently and recently accessed data, but you should also consider having a large L2ARC SSD. As a filesystem, ZFS also has no feelings either way about ECC, which mostly just makes failing RAM banks more obvious. In the absence of failure, ECC means nothing. You also encounter diminishing returns when increasing cache size (RAM), especially if your access patterns aren't particularly cacheable (consider for a moment that hard drive caches, CPU caches, etc are usually very small).


The 1GB/1TB "requirement" is only with deduplication enabled which I would absolutely not recommend except for very specialized workloads. You probably don't have as many duplicate blocks as you think. Hardlinking is easier to manage and won't impact your performance.

Sorry to hijack, but I am really ignorant and at the same time really interested in ZFS. You seem knowledgeable, can I ask a few questions ?
Can I use ZFS on Debian in a safe maner or do I need to switch to BSD ?


Would ZFS work well on a 2GB console-only system ? I'm interested in protection against bitrot mainly.


My current setup is an HP microserver. 2GB ECC Ram, 4TB data drive, 2TB data drive, 250GB system drive. All formated as ext4, no Raid, nighly croned rsync of my important data from the 4TB drive to the 2TB drive.

 

[pmprog]

I own an HP Microserver generation 7.
 It requires an extra GPU to have HDMI. It runs Debian perfectly.


You might want to have a look at the current Generation 8, it may have HDMI built-in ? Not sure about that.


edit: I checked, it doesn't. So you may pair it with a low profile GPU or look for something else.

Hmmm, my work has a Microserver Gen8 that they can't sell... I was going to ask if I could take it, but apparently you need SAS drives which are twice the price of SATA drives. Still, that might offset the cost of a new case, mini-ITX board, cpu, ram etc.


Doesn't have HDMI, but does have VGA - which is fine. When I said HDMI I'm only really bothered about video (and audio) out... hmmm, didn't check if there was audio. Can't imagine there being on a server though

 

[benoitb]

On mine I use a USB DAC (Fiio E10) for music playback (MPD server).


I really think you use SATA drives even on the Gen8. On my Gen7 it's standard SATA 3.5 inches drives. The SAS might be the connector from the mobo to the board where the drives get plugged.

 

[thatgui]

Don't know if this feasible (due to cost,space, functionality restrains)but how about splitting it up: some RaspPi (or similar device) for playback for all sorts of things (including games) and a dedicated system for the Network Attached Storage part. For the NAS part I can recommend the Dell PowerEdge T20* or a Synology Diskstation if you want a system thats not as flexible but only needs 30min to be fully operational. That makes two devices but you would be a lot more flexibel regarding possible usage scenarios.


*I even know one that wants to sell his for a good price (~170€+shipping), but shipping costs from mainland Europe to UK will probably be not very cheap.