Aerom Xundes
New Around Here
I'm looking to build a new NAS for my home of seven family members. I feel the highest priority for it is to be easily expandable so it can start with a relatively small amount of storage and grow as we find the need for more.
Current setup:
Each family member has at least one computer (desktop and/or laptop) along with a FreeNAS box and an Astaro firewall box. All told, there are probably 15-20 devices, once all the phones, tablets, and other devices are counted. An HTPC for playing movies is on the list to get some time within the next 6-12 months. While the firewall and file server are *nix based, our household is all Windows based. I've contemplated switching to a Linux box with Win7 VMs on my desktop, but it probably won't happen for a while.
The FreeNAS box just has old IDE HDDs I picked up over the years: it has never been a serious storage location due lack of space—more of a convenient place to put files for access across the house. The brunt of the storage needs is met by sharing the 2TB on my desktop (almost all video and music).
Streaming TV shows from my desktop is the biggest usage of storage from my family, along with music. Pictures are handled by having multiple copies on different machines.
One small, but important item is centralized access to school software. Our homeschool software has CDs for the course content; the software can access that data from a hard drive or mapped network drive. Max theoretical users concurrently accessing this data would be four. It is not a large amount of data (probably <5GB), and it's not a large throughput application, but it is important enough to list. We currently have some of the CDs copied on one computer and share them through Windows so we can have two people working on the same subject simultaneously.
What I want to do:
I want to migrate off this haphazard mess of storage with a new NAS box. It should have a bare minimum of 3TB to start (5TB ideally) and easily expandable to 10TB or more for future needs over the next few years. "Easily expandable" to me means I can shove a new drive in the box, change the config so the NAS can use the new drive, and be done with it—similar to the WHS Drive Extender.
The budget for this project has an absolute limit of $1000, although the target is $750. Only the box needs to be considered; keyboard, monitor, and other accessories are already on hand. Hard drives are also included in this budget.
Most of the data is "replaceable" (TV shows and movies), but would be a big enough pain to do so to justify a RAID-like setup to be resilient to a drive failure. The sensitive data stored on this box should be backed up to an external drive on another computer or something similar. Perhaps this could be solved by a folder or separate share designated as [reasonably] disaster proof.
Performance, while always in mind, isn't a large concern. After all, all of our switches are still 10/100 speed. We are looking to upgrade the network infrastructure to 1GbE, but other than the infrequent large file transfer, we just aren't normally waiting around for files to be transferred so it is hard to justify replacing all the switches.
ZFS, RAID, and OS
Unless my understanding of RAIDs is flawed, I'm not looking to implement a traditional RAID-5 or similar since I want to be able to seamlessly upgrade the storage capacity over time.
From what I gather, expandable, RAID-like redundancy is one of the many features of ZFS. With such a small workload, is ZFS ideal in this scenario? If ZFS is chosen, are the memory requirements really as high as people claim them to be? Or, are these memory requirements from the enterprise sector with much different performance requirements?
Does ZFS have multiple modes like RAID does? I've seen raid-z mentioned, but I'm not sure what that means.
While I have asked several questions about ZFS, it isn't a feature I'm dead set on having. It just sounds like it would work for what I need. If there are any other solutions that would work as good or better, please let me know.
I'm already familiar with FreeNAS (version 0.7.2, but I'm sure the newest isn't radically different), so it is a natural choice; although, I am open to other OS suggestions.
After writing most of this post, I researched unRaid and it looks like it would work for what I want. I see the free basic only supports 3 drives: are the premium packages worth buying? Is running on a flash drive sustainable? I've read about flash drives being prone to fail, especially from all the log writes.
Hardware
Does anybody have thoughts on using the new WD Red drives? If they deliver what is claimed, they sound like a perfect fit for my needs. Reviews I've seen were cautiously optimistic about their use in home or small office usage scenarios.
After the issue of the ZFS RAM requirements is settled, the motherboard and case are the only items I would ask for suggestions. I know once the mobo is set, CPU and other things fall into place.
The case I'd like to be able to reuse for the next NAS if possible. Noise and lights are not a concern as it is going to be tucked away in a closet. As many hard drive slots as is practical.
If anybody has a link to a build that would do everything I want it to do, I'd be very appreciative. I'm not asking anybody to spec out a system just for me; merely asking if the work has already been done—laziness FTW
.
Thanks
I've been browsing these forums quite a bit the last week or so. The info you guys provide has been very useful and quite clear. Thank you.
Current setup:
Each family member has at least one computer (desktop and/or laptop) along with a FreeNAS box and an Astaro firewall box. All told, there are probably 15-20 devices, once all the phones, tablets, and other devices are counted. An HTPC for playing movies is on the list to get some time within the next 6-12 months. While the firewall and file server are *nix based, our household is all Windows based. I've contemplated switching to a Linux box with Win7 VMs on my desktop, but it probably won't happen for a while.
The FreeNAS box just has old IDE HDDs I picked up over the years: it has never been a serious storage location due lack of space—more of a convenient place to put files for access across the house. The brunt of the storage needs is met by sharing the 2TB on my desktop (almost all video and music).
Streaming TV shows from my desktop is the biggest usage of storage from my family, along with music. Pictures are handled by having multiple copies on different machines.
One small, but important item is centralized access to school software. Our homeschool software has CDs for the course content; the software can access that data from a hard drive or mapped network drive. Max theoretical users concurrently accessing this data would be four. It is not a large amount of data (probably <5GB), and it's not a large throughput application, but it is important enough to list. We currently have some of the CDs copied on one computer and share them through Windows so we can have two people working on the same subject simultaneously.
What I want to do:
I want to migrate off this haphazard mess of storage with a new NAS box. It should have a bare minimum of 3TB to start (5TB ideally) and easily expandable to 10TB or more for future needs over the next few years. "Easily expandable" to me means I can shove a new drive in the box, change the config so the NAS can use the new drive, and be done with it—similar to the WHS Drive Extender.
The budget for this project has an absolute limit of $1000, although the target is $750. Only the box needs to be considered; keyboard, monitor, and other accessories are already on hand. Hard drives are also included in this budget.
Most of the data is "replaceable" (TV shows and movies), but would be a big enough pain to do so to justify a RAID-like setup to be resilient to a drive failure. The sensitive data stored on this box should be backed up to an external drive on another computer or something similar. Perhaps this could be solved by a folder or separate share designated as [reasonably] disaster proof.
Performance, while always in mind, isn't a large concern. After all, all of our switches are still 10/100 speed. We are looking to upgrade the network infrastructure to 1GbE, but other than the infrequent large file transfer, we just aren't normally waiting around for files to be transferred so it is hard to justify replacing all the switches.
ZFS, RAID, and OS
Unless my understanding of RAIDs is flawed, I'm not looking to implement a traditional RAID-5 or similar since I want to be able to seamlessly upgrade the storage capacity over time.
From what I gather, expandable, RAID-like redundancy is one of the many features of ZFS. With such a small workload, is ZFS ideal in this scenario? If ZFS is chosen, are the memory requirements really as high as people claim them to be? Or, are these memory requirements from the enterprise sector with much different performance requirements?
Does ZFS have multiple modes like RAID does? I've seen raid-z mentioned, but I'm not sure what that means.
While I have asked several questions about ZFS, it isn't a feature I'm dead set on having. It just sounds like it would work for what I need. If there are any other solutions that would work as good or better, please let me know.
I'm already familiar with FreeNAS (version 0.7.2, but I'm sure the newest isn't radically different), so it is a natural choice; although, I am open to other OS suggestions.
After writing most of this post, I researched unRaid and it looks like it would work for what I want. I see the free basic only supports 3 drives: are the premium packages worth buying? Is running on a flash drive sustainable? I've read about flash drives being prone to fail, especially from all the log writes.
Hardware
Does anybody have thoughts on using the new WD Red drives? If they deliver what is claimed, they sound like a perfect fit for my needs. Reviews I've seen were cautiously optimistic about their use in home or small office usage scenarios.
After the issue of the ZFS RAM requirements is settled, the motherboard and case are the only items I would ask for suggestions. I know once the mobo is set, CPU and other things fall into place.
The case I'd like to be able to reuse for the next NAS if possible. Noise and lights are not a concern as it is going to be tucked away in a closet. As many hard drive slots as is practical.
If anybody has a link to a build that would do everything I want it to do, I'd be very appreciative. I'm not asking anybody to spec out a system just for me; merely asking if the work has already been done—laziness FTW
.Thanks
I've been browsing these forums quite a bit the last week or so. The info you guys provide has been very useful and quite clear. Thank you.
