new DIY NAS project, lots of questions!

[ghostdunks]

Hi all, I'm looking to build my own NAS and would appreciate some thoughts or comments on my proposed build. Am posting this in several forums which all have their own specialty(ie. silent computing specific, network, australian, etc..), so looking to collate everyone's thoughts and hopefully come up with a good system. Been lurking around and reading all sorts of threads and articles and these are my thoughts so far.

I haven't built my own computer for a while, so forgive me if I'm asking particularly stupid or newb questions, as technology seems to be advancing faster than I can keep up. I've done quite a bit of reading on this on a lot of different sites, so hopefully I'm asking the right questions.

Basically, I'm looking for a NAS that I can build myself with a minimm of 5 hard disks, that will run relatively quiet and is power efficient, as it'll be on 24/7. Will be running the starting point of 5 disks in RAID5, hooked up to a gigabit LAN and I want to go with software raid of some flavor rather than hardware raid.

System specs so far:

CPU:
Been hearing a lot of good things about the new sandy bridge processors, especially with regards to power efficency and also because they come with integrated video(a must for me for low power consumption). So I've basically picked the cheapest SB processors(LGA 1155) which looks like they're more than powerful enough to run a NAS.

i3 2100T
i3 2100
G620T
G620

Still doing my research on the T models(the designated ultra low-power processors) and whether it is worth the price premium over a normal chip. A lot of opinions on the web I've seen seem to indicate that the T versions aren't worth it, mainly because the SB chips all seem to idle at the same power consumption, and that the normal chips can just be undervolted or underclocked to match the T versions. Also, tossing up between the Core i3 processor or the Pentium G620 processor line. As I think the Pentium G620 chip seems to be more than powerful enough, I'm leaning towards that one as its the cheapest.

Am I right in thinking that any Socket 1155 motherboard that will accept a Core i3 chip will also accept a G620 chip, or are they fundamentally different other than clockspeeds and cache ram, and I need specific 1155 motherboards that will accept them?


RAM:
Was just going to whack any old sticks of 2 2GB DDR3 RAM in there for a total of 4GB, which should be plenty I think.


Case:
I was initially going to go with the Fractal Design Array R2(http://www.fractal-design.com/?view=product&category=2&prod=42) but I think I'm leaning more towards the Fractal Design R3(http://www.fractal-design.com/?view=product&category=2&prod=48) or even the XL version(but that might be overkill). Reasons why I picked the much bigger Design over the Array,
- The Array seems purpose built for a DIY NAS box, and has room for 6 HDs, but to me, it seems that all the drives are all crammed into a small space. Having lost HDs in the past due to heat issues, I'm erring on the side of caution and putting my HDs into a much bigger case where its easier to cool quietly. Also, with the Design case, it means I can expand the number of disks in my array a lot easier as there's room for 10+ HDs. As this NAS box I'm building is not going to be anywhere near the TV or living area, I don't mind if its a big box I can just toss into the corner somewhere out of the way
- The Array is significantly more expensive than the Design, especially in Australia



Hard drives:
Was just going to get a bunch of Western Digial Green 2TB hard drives(WD20EARX, the SATA3 versions, no particular reason other than they aren't much more expensive than the SATA2 versions). Everyone has their likes and dislikes of particular brands, but I've had HDs of pretty much every brand fail on me before, so much of a muchness. Mainly looking for low power high capacity drives, so these will do for now. Have been reading though that the WD green drives aren't particularly suitable for NAS so I'll have to research that a bit more.


Motherboard:
Now this is where I'm completely out of my depth... would appreciate any advice on this. Looking for the following features,
- low power and power efficient. From what I've read, Intel made boards use the least power, is this true?
- sata ports - Need at least 5 internal SATA ports so I can hook up 5 2TB drives to it. Would love to have more but doubt many motherboards out there have more than 6. I'm assuming that if I want to add more drives to my RAID later, I'll have to buy an addon PCIE SATA host adapter card that provides more SATA ports?
- esata - would like to have one esata port
- USB3 ports
- gigabit ethernet - that supports jumbo frames
- integrated video - for low power, I'm assuming then, that it has to be a H67 or H61 board.
- would be nice to have firewire but not a dealbreaker
Any suggestions on this would be great, at least as a starting point.

Power Supply:
Again, no idea on power supplies other than I want to get one that's silent, efficient, and powerful enough to run at least the CPU, motherboard, and 6 internal SATA drives, and it would be good if it could ultimately run 10 drives(if I add more drives later)


OS:
Was just going to toss freenas or ubuntu a spare usb disk and boot off that. Not much experience with either but I think it'll be good experience to try both and see what they're capable of. Any other suggestions here too would be good.


Not sure if its possible but would be good if a rig like this is capable of running 20-30w in idle.

Any and all feedback and comments would be appreciated! Would also be a lot easier if the parts are easily sourced in Australia(although I'm probably going to buy the cpu/hard drives in HK while I'm here), but if need to get them from US, thats still an option.

 

[Hydaral]

The WD EAR drives use 512k emulation for their 4k sectors, this may limit performance significantly on some OSs and FSs, so check for compatibility first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format#Advanced_Format_512e

Any particular reason you are not considering an Intel Atom board? If all you need the machine for is a NAS then it should have plenty of power. They only consume about 30 Watts. You would most likely need a SATA card though as most Atom boards only come with 2 SATA ports. Also, I think most SATA cards come with an eSATA port.

 

[GregN]

Atom also

The WD EAR drives use 512k emulation for their 4k sectors, this may limit performance significantly on some OSs and FSs, so check for compatibility first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format#Advanced_Format_512e

Any particular reason you are not considering an Intel Atom board? If all you need the machine for is a NAS then it should have plenty of power. They only consume about 30 Watts. You would most likely need a SATA card though as most Atom boards only come with 2 SATA ports. Also, I think most SATA cards come with an eSATA port.

I too recommend a D525 ATOM board, in particular the Supermicro X7SPA-H-D525 Mini-ITX Server Which has 6xSATA, and SuperMicro has never led my wrong. Intel Dual gig LAN; USB2 instead of three - how important is that?

I know the green WD drives are tempting, but they have only a 1yr warranty and there are alot of reports of compatibility issues. On my most recent build I went with Hitachi for only a few dollars more.

I really like the R2 case, I'd probably go with a separate PSU ( Warranty, and can prob. go smaller ).

I've been doing eSata by putting in a bracket off of the MB or controller, but a cheap marvel based sata card could do that for you.

 

[ghostdunks]

Yeah thanks for the headsup on the WD drives, I've been doing a bit more research into that as well once you pointed it out. Seems there are some fixes for them, such as turning off intellipark, and aligning partitions, so its not too bad. Still, I've had quite a few responses recommending the Hitachi drives, so I'll consider them as well.

Part of the reason I like the WDs are that they are very easy to source, and they also seem to run the quietest and with least power. Based on the spec sheets I've seen, the hitachis seem to draw a lot more power while idle. I'll have to balance that with the good experiences people have had with hitachis.

I thought the WDs come with 3years warranty? Am I missing something obvious?

I was also looking at the Atom platform initially, but heard so many good things about the new sandy bridge chips I figured I might as well try em out. Also, it gives me an easy upgrade path if I ever want to just pop in a more powerful chip if I repurpose the box for more than just a NAS. Hehe, I know myself, I'm just going to start off with a simple NAS, but I like to tinker, and I can see myself using it to run VMs and other things as I start fooling about with it more. That Supermicro ATOM board that was linked is quite interesting though. I didn't realise they had such boards with features for the Atom platform. Might dig into it more just for curiosities sake.

Thanks for the feedback guys, everything helps.

 

[Jesse B]

As you said, all 1155 CPUs will work in an 1155 motherboard; 100% compatible. The only difference between the Pentiums and i3's are that the i3's support hyper-threading, while the Pentiums do not.

I like Samsung's F4 2TB drives personally. They're low RPM (aka low power), but still have excellent performance. My mirrored array of two F4's gets over 100MB/s write, and around 180MB/s read. Hitachi drives are also supposed to be fantastic.

You'll definitely want an Intel NIC as well. Some other NICs (*cough*Realtek*cough*) don't really allow you to achieve full Gbit speeds. For how much they cost, a very cheap investment.

If you're concerned about power draw, make sure you get a high-efficiency PSU as well. 80Plus Bronze is quite affordable (Antec EW 320W or Seasonic SS-300ES... off the top of my head) are <$50 80Plus Bronze units.

 

[Hydaral]

Yeah thanks for the headsup on the WD drives, I've been doing a bit more research into that as well once you pointed it out. Seems there are some fixes for them, such as turning off intellipark, and aligning partitions, so its not too bad. Still, I've had quite a few responses recommending the Hitachi drives, so I'll consider them as well.

There are two problems with the EAR drives, one is the alignment and the other is the sector sizes. the alignment seems to be easy to fix, as you say, with the WD tool, but the sector sizes cause problems that can't be overcome on some OSs.

Due to the fact that the drives lies about its sectors, it can cause significant slowdowns for writes (orders of magnitude slowdowns), if only they told the truth everything would be fine. I did read a comprehensive description of the problem somewhere, but I can't find it now, so you are just going to have to take my word for it.

Some comments from various places about 4k drives with ZFS: http://sigtar.com/2010/06/06/4k-sector-hard-drives-and-zfs/

 

[ghostdunks]

Hmm yes...that sector size issue seems to be quite a bugbear... I'll have a look at the Samsungs and Hitachis, thanks. Slightly higher power consumption is a small price to bear for the drives to work properly!

I've pretty much settled on an efficient power supply too. Managed to source a Seasonic S12II-330Bronze on my holidays here in HK for just about 40 bucks, should do the job until I get around to fooling around with pico psus

The intel motherboard I'm thinking about getting, the DH67GD, should come with Intel based ethernet, so I think that'll be fine on that front.

I still don't know what ZFS is, but had quite a few responses on various forums which commented on it, so think I'll have to brush up on it.

 

[ghostdunks]

Did more research on the drives issue. Definitely looks like the WD Green drives are out of consideration for my NAS.... Actually saw on the spec sheet that WD say its fine for RAID0 or RAID1, but anything more complicated than that, its not designed for it(and have seen some posts from WD support that verify it).

Looked at the Samsungs, and they seem quite good too, but some users have reported issues from the 4k sector size, so think I'll just go with the Hitachis. They seem to have the least problems out of all the drives. Jesse's running in RAID1, so the 4k sector size may not be an issue there.

Might still buy some of the WD Greens for backup reasons. They seem fine as long as they're not used in a RAID array.

 

[Jesse B]

ZFS is a very advanced file system generally used for software-RAID arrays. It has numerous features (such as on-the-fly checksumming, deduplication, and dozens more I won't get in to). It's very high performance, and actively prevents data corruption. Pretty nifty

It's available on Solaris-based OS's, and has been ported to BSD as well. There is a port for Linux as well, although I haven't tested it personally yet so can't speak of its performance.

Also for the record, I know many people running the Samsung drives in a RAID-Z (ZFS's version of RAID5) with zero issues. There is some alignment and tuning stuff you can do if you feel the need to as well that will further increase performance with 4k drives.

 

[ghostdunks]

Just a quick update on my build and experiences with the components I ended up going with:

Intel G620 cpu
Intel DH67GD motherboard
2 sticks of 2gb Kingston RAM
Fractal Design Define R3 case
Seasonic S12II-330Bronze 330 watts 80plus power supply
5 Hitachi 5K3000 2TB drives(5900rpm low power drives)

As I was aiming for low power draw, I had a powermeter measuring consumption with different OSes, options, and found out something interesting.

Win 7 Ultimate:
- Booted off an external eSATA drive. Without the 5 HDs powered up, at idle, the rig drew 23W. This was just to give a baseline for system power consumption of just the CPU,motherboard without drives hooked up.
- With 5 drives powered up, and idle, it drew about 46W
- With 5 drives powered, but spundown(ie. after hard drive inactivity for x mins), drew about 29W.

FreeNAS 7(freeBSD OS)
- Booted off a usb disk. Running the lastest distribution, the system had problems recognising the Intel Gigabit Ethernet built-in to the motherboard(82579V controller). After I managed to find a test distro with the latest intel drivers compiled into the kernel, I then ran into another problem as I found that the drives hooked up to the SATA6 ports wouldn't be recognised. Again, put it down to old drivers not supporting chipset. Gave up on FreeNAS7, even thought that was my first choice for features,etc. What I did find was that power consumption of the rig at idle running Freenas7 without the hard drives hooked up, it was about 31W, even with the power saving management features turned on. Played around with it a bit more, but couldn't get it down. Seems the power saving management of freeBSD(powerd) consists mainly of throttling the cpu. Even after my cpu was throttled to 350Mhz, there was negligible power savings. Seems that the sandy bridge cpus seem to not need to throttle down the cpu speed to save power....but I concluded that maybe freeBSD was missing perhaps the same power management features as other OSes, as I could never get it down below 31W.

FreeNAS 8(freeBSD OS)
- Booted off a usb disk. Drew about 31W at idle without drives hooked up(same experience as with FreeNas7, couldn't get it down further)
- drivers in latest freenas 8 seems to work with my config, ethernet controller was recognsed properly, and so were all the drives.
- With 5 drives powered up, and idle, it drew about 53W
- With 5 drives powered, but spundown(ie. after hard drive inactivity for x mins), drew about 37W.

Ubuntu 10.04(Linux OS)
- Booted off a usb disk. Drew about 25W at idle without drives.
- With 5 drives powered up, and idle, it drew about 48W
- With 5 drives powered, but spundown(ie. after hard drive inactivity for x mins), drew about 30W.


Conclusion I drew from all that testing was that, surprise surprise, Windows 7 was the most power efficient OS... That was really surprising to me as I expected Windows 7 to be comparatively bloated compared to the FreeBSD and Linux distros. Ubuntu wasn't far behind it in terms of power efficiency, just 1 watt or so diff. The freeBSD distros however....drew a fair bit more power than both Win7 and Ubuntu.

However, as I wanted to run this box as a NAS and boot of a USB disk, I had to write off Win7 as the OS of choice, and went with Ubuntu Server, as that allows me to boot the OS off a usb flash drive, and is quite power efficient as well, idling under 50W with 5 drives, and once drives are spundown, about 30W, which I think is quite good.

Also, with the case I got and power supply, with just the stock fans(1 intake, 1 exhaust), I can't hear the machine, and the temps all look fine(CPU at about 28 degrees and HDs about 30-33 degrees). Under load, temps go up a bit, but not much noticeably and machine is still quiet