How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 1: Introduction

[Spiken]

Article link

Thanks Tim for this first part of how to.

I ve a question, is WHS available for customer ?

 

[Zwoerdkop]

This is just the beginning!

Hey, I read you article as if I hadn't eaten for years! It is such a good idea: building your own NAS. Why not? All components are freely available, and you can tune and tweak it as you like. It may as well become a hype, just like the DIY HTPC rage.

Your first explorations were not fully satisfying, as I have read. This takes some time, of course. I guess we'll have a "Full SNB Certified NAS" in a few months!

I have a few suggestions:

Do not tend to bigger cases. Four disks is enough. The Chenbro case looks fine and using an external PS is not a shame. I Think that a NAS shouldn't have the dimensions of a full PC nor look like one. There are also lots of Intel-based Mini-ITX mobos available. And how about Linux? Maybe develop a dedicated, turn key NAS distro?

Last but not least: I think that low energy consumption is a factor. All decisions should be made taking this in regard.

I would like other readers here to do some more suggestions!

Keep up the good work!

 

[vfreak]

Look forward to the next parts of this saga Tim! I really regret chucking out an old Desktop PC I had lying around, I probably could have used it (for a server I run as well!). I had no monitor (and not much room) for it though, that's why I binned it.

 

[thiggins]

I ve a question, is WHS available for customer ?

Yes it is.

 

[Unregistered]

hi there

Once you have the machine up and running a installation of and comparison with Freenas would be great. Not sure if the hardware will be compatible though.

 

[scotty]

I'm really looking forward to the other parts of the Article, Tim. This is one of the biggest questions I've been wrestling with for the past while - how a more or less standard 'PC' fares against consumer NAS's. I just picked up a couple 1TB Seagate drives to throw in an Athlon64 3200 system, so I'm anxiously awaiting the results.

 

[KFring]

Case and PSU

In your article you asked for opinions about (semi)silent psu. I'd suggest an Antec Earthwatts, which are very near silent and a good value if you can find a rebate. I personally have a 430w I purchased for $40 quite some time ago. Also, SeaSonic makes a series of very highly regarded PSU's for silent computing.

For a case, I would recommend Antec's P180 or Mini P180. They are well made, quiet, a joy to work with and can be had for under $60 shipped. P180 black - Mini P180

 

[odoketa]

I think that low energy consumption is a factor. All decisions should be made taking this in regard.

I couldn't agree more! While initially, trying to get maximum bandwidth is the key, I would definitely be interested in knowing if we could also get that bandwidth in half the wattage.

 

[Dennis Wood]

We're getting 50MB/s (actual measured transfer over a 5GB file set) from an older c2d workstation with 3x320GB WD digital drives in RAID5, the ICHR7 chipset, and Windows XP SP3. It uses the onboard dual gigabit LAN, trunked through the switch, but I'm pretty sure this is irrelevant.

I'm thinking Tim you should easily exceed that read/write level with a newer box and RAID0 (or 10) on Linux. You definitely should test a vista workstation as a client in your test setup as its SMB2 variant is testing faster than our XP workstations.

Cheers,
Dennis Wood

 

[scoob]

some suggestions

Hello Tim.
Thanks for the article. You asked for some suggestions concerning a silent PSU.
I built a home NAS which I wanted to be whisper silent. As a matter of fact, I built a few mostly silent pcs and here is what I used:

PSU: Antec Earthwatt 380 (came with a case, nice and mostly silent)
Nexus plus efficiency 500W (super nice, modular and SILENT)
Seasonic M12 series PSU are also well known to be good and silent.

CASE: Antec SOLO!!! - this is the BEST case ever. There is TONS of space,
4x 3.5" internal disk bays with soft rubber suspension (no vibrations),
and an extra 4 external 5.25" drive bay (you buy a 5 bracket and you
can add more 3.5" internal disks).
I put in 6 x 3.5" SATA disks and a 2.5" ATA (to run the boot/system)

MOBO: Asus P5B-E + 2 Gig ram + Intel core duo E4400

OS: Ubuntu server (8.04) using software raid 5 and webmin for easy management.

Config: 4x WD 500G SATA disks in RAID5
2x 750G WD and Samsung as individual mounts / export
SAMBA to export CIFS (aka windows accessible).

The system now runs headless and w/o keyboard or mouse.
It just runs (and it runs very fast). I could not be happier with this system.

 

[thiggins]

Yup. FreeNAS will be one of the distros I'll be looking at.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for the suggestions, Kfring. I also purchased an APEX MJ-16 from NewEgg, which I like much better.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for the info, Dennis. Using a Vista workstation as the iozone client is part of the plan and is likely to become the new iozone test platform along with a PCIe NIC, which makes a big difference.

I suspect that RAID0 charts will also be added.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for the suggestions, Scoob. Did you put your OS on a separate drive?

 

[Dennis Wood]

Tim, I hear you on the PCIe issue (and great article there btw). The fastest we're seeeing to the two XP test workstations using PCI gigabit cards is 33MB/s ... which makes sense. The main test machines use the P5W DH motherboard (asus) which has dual Marvel PCIe gigabit ports. I've downloaded the teaming driver from Marvel and are running the dual ports in their teamed configuration. The corresponing switch ports are trunked and the Marvel driver reports them as running in "static" mode.

Based on our Vista vs XP tests here, you'll definitely want to explore SMB1 vs SMB2 in your testing. A few more results to compare to:

1. Fastest gigabit transfer over the LAN: 58MB/s between two XP workstations (RAID0 on both). Note that the initiator links are always slower than the sending (remote link) due to the inherent nature of the network mechanics.

2. Fastest gigabit transfer from the Intel NAS: 45.49 MB/s to an Asus G2S laptop running Vista SP1.

3. Fastest transfer: ESATA to Intel based RAID0 at 69MB/s

If I was to guess at an ideal server/client config right now, it would be a Vista SP1 workstation with PCIe connected gigabit and RAID0 local drives connected to a server supporting SMB2. Can we get to > 60MB/s real world performance over "budget" gigabit?

 

[scoob]

Boot drive and using FreeNAS vs Ubuntu

Thanks for the suggestions, Scoob. Did you put your OS on a separate drive?

Hi Tim.

To answer your question, I currently run the OS from an old 5Gig 2.5" laptop ATA hard drive. I figured, I have the unused ATA connectors so I might as well use that instead of wasting a valuable SATA connector.

The ASUS P5B-E has 4 built-in SATA ports (2 more on a micron controller which I don't use as it doesn't have the greatest support on Linux at this time).

I also purchased a SYBA SD-SA2PEX-2IR PCI Express SATA II Controller Card ($20 at newegg) and it just plain works! Cheap and works out of the box, you've got to love it!

Concerning the OS, I did quite a bit of research into it before settling on ubuntu. I initially installed FreeNAS which is a really sweet little distro with a nice polished look (and it can run natively from a USB stick or SD card).

The reasons I bailed out of FreeNAS were:

• Poor hardware compatibility
• Poor documentation
• BSD specific disk format and RAID format
• my lack of experience and comford with freebsd vs linux

After a lot of reseach and futsing around I finally got the freenas box working (swapping parts until I got all of them compatible... good luck finding a clear hardware compatibility list for FreeNAS!). It worked nicely, looked polished but digging into the documentation I could not easily find clear answers to important questions such as: How do you recover from a failed disk in the RAID array?

So after a while, I decided to go the slightly less integrated but much more tested and safe road: ubuntu server!
Soooo easy:
- install ubuntu server
- install webmin
- install samba
setup your raid with mdadm (software raid - no complications, you can add as many disks as you want to grow the array, easy to recover easy to manage). Webmin provides a simple gui to manage it all headless.

The only downside of ubuntu is that the distro does not lend itself to running from a thumbdrive or a SD card (some have found ways to make it happen but don't report the utmost os statility running under those conditions). Hence, my running the OS off an old 2.5" laptop hard drive.
- Christian

 

[thiggins]

Lots of good info there, Christian.

I spend a lot of yesterday trying to get FreeNAS running on Intel's Atom board. It doesn't support (even the latest nightly release), the onboard Realtek 10/100 NIC. But I wanted to test gigabit Ethernet, so added an Intel PRO/1000 MT board, which it did recognize.

Futzed for over an hour with the sparse and outdated documentation and finally managed to get a RAID0 array set up. (There are too many incompatible choices presented and the array setup process should be more automatic.)

So I'll definitely look at Ubuntu server. Thanks!

 

[wynsam]

Please persist with the Freenas build. I would love to hear how that system works with Freenas on it! i am sure many other Freenas user or potential users would love to hear about it.

Does this help?

http://www.freenaskb.info/kb/?View=entry&EntryID=143

 

[Bart]

I'm really looking forward to this series of articles Tim!

Meanwhile, a week ago I gave Windows Home Server another try. As some of you might have read, I tried it before and my experiences with it were not good. But now there's Powerpack 1 and I decided to give it another try.

I'm glad I did, because PowerPack 1 made the world of difference for WHS. I get the impression that now it works as the creators intended it to work. Gone is the endless balancing of disks. Instead, the system now only balances its disk for a couple of minutes every hour. Gone is the slow access when copying files from share to a different share.

I'm also archieving excellent speeds, like 70 to 75 MB/s. This is on a Gigabyte P35 motherboard with 2 GB RAM and an Intel E2200 CPU.

The only thing I find missing from the server now is an FTP server really... but the setup of the system itself with one giant storage pool instead of drive letters somewhat probitits that. (it seems there is a plugin now which gives WHS some sort of FTP access, but I have yet to try that).

WHS still misses the ability to be able to backup the entire server though. What I also miss is the ability to copy files right on/off the server itself (in case things need to go REALLY fast...), but I guess this is also a result of the giant storage pool thing and the lack of drive letters. WHS is really built for headless use. Working directly onto the server can only muck it up.

Still, I'm reasonably satisfied with it now, when before I found it to be utter cr*p. So I guess the product is improving. As always with Microsoft products, it pays not to be an early adopter, but wait for the first Service Pack (in this case PowerPack) instead.

I'm still curious how the other NAS distros will fare though...

 

[thiggins]

I'm also archieving excellent speeds, like 70 to 75 MB/s. This is on a Gigabyte P53 motherboard with 2 GB RAM and an Intel E2200 CPU.

Thanks for the update, Bart.

Is that for write and read? How did you measure and what filesizes?
Are you using PCIe NICs on both the WHS server and the client?