Home built NAS

EDIT: FYI, FreeNAS doesn't support lighting up of LEDs for drive failure. So if you buy iCYDOCK you'll need to either go add that yourself (either with iCYDOCK software for FreeBSD) or by writing a program yourself. FreeNAS gives you each drives serial number which is what I use to identify a drive. Drives don't fail too often afterall and this isn't a corporate NAS it's a home NAS.

Budza said:
I love these threads. Always dream of building a dream NAS machine. Backup the interwebz.

I can't afford it though, and am also not too sure what'd be worth all the effort. If it's all for personal use...

Still- I enjoy checking out your setups. Pics would be appreciated!

And shot! I assume you're the okes providing/seeding all the stuff I need ;)

R14k worth of internet can go a looong way. I back up in the cloud :D
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I didn't spend R14k ;)

I had a extra system, just bought a different case and hard-drives. Total cost was ~R4900 for 10TB of storage. Still the setup I posted without iCYDOCK would be closer to R8-9K with 10TB of storage, depending on where you buy.
 
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iCYDOCK hotswap bays are really expensive :( More than a grand a piece and that setup has two.
 
The part about FreeNAS not supporting RAID is incorrect! I have an Adaptec 5805 (i think that's the model) RAID card and FreeNAS running quite happily on my NAS as I type this - have had it running for a year now...?

Gnome said:
No.

RAIDz (One of the software RAID implementations available on FreeNAS) > Hardware RAID.
FreeNAS doesn't support hardware RAID.
Click to expand...
 
CriticalConsumer said:
The part about FreeNAS not supporting RAID is incorrect! I have an Adaptec 5805 (i think that's the model) RAID card and FreeNAS running quite happily on my NAS as I type this - have had it running for a year now...?
Click to expand...

Are you running HARDWARE RAID? (eg. actually using the onboard RAID capability)

Anyway, FreeNAS doesn't officially support hardware RAID. However the RAID controllers are supported provided they are supported by FreeBSD. If indeed you are running hardware RAID it is purely supported because FreeBSD supports it.

You would be one of the few people who run hardware RAID, especially on FreeNAS...
 
Gnome said:
Are you running HARDWARE RAID? (eg. actually using the onboard RAID capability)

Anyway, FreeNAS doesn't officially support hardware RAID. However the RAID controllers are supported provided they are supported by FreeBSD. If indeed you are running hardware RAID it is purely supported because FreeBSD supports it.

You would be one of the few people who run hardware RAID, especially on FreeNAS...
Click to expand...

Actually, many people run hardware RAID with FreeNAS :) And FreeNAS does support hardware RAID, as long as the chipset is support in FreeBSD. I have had great success with 4port & 8port SuperMicro cards (which generally use LSI) on FreeNAS as well as Adaptec & PromiseRAID.

FreeNAS recommends not to use hardware RAID since ZFS is superior (to some degree) and gives you more control. Generally you can't change the RAID type (i.e. from RAID 5 to 6 or 10, for example) when using hardware RAID, but with software RAID it can be changed very easily Although if you manage to install the RAID management software then you could change the RAID types very quickly as well.
 
wish I had seen this thread earlier, then maybe could have gone a different route with what I ordered.

but I enjoy "test runs"
 
Intel i3 540
Intel H55TC
2x 1gig DDR3-1333
2x 2TB Samsung F4
Lian-Li PC-Q08

sadly had to work in 3 new routers into a R10k budget otherwise could have wiggled in some other stuff.

wondering if I shouldn't maybe change the Lian-Li for the Centurion that Gnome and others recommend.
 
Well I am running HARDWARE RAID :)

I did quite a bit of research on the RAID card, the motherboard and the NICs with regards to its support for FreeBSD etc. before building my NAS using FreeNAS.

Gnome said:
Are you running HARDWARE RAID? (eg. actually using the onboard RAID capability)

Anyway, FreeNAS doesn't officially support hardware RAID. However the RAID controllers are supported provided they are supported by FreeBSD. If indeed you are running hardware RAID it is purely supported because FreeBSD supports it.

You would be one of the few people who run hardware RAID, especially on FreeNAS...
Click to expand...
 
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Correct.

I was lucky in that when I built my NAS, I had selected the Asus Crosshair II mobo and the Adaptec 5805 RAID card FreeNAS recognised the chipsets without a glitch. I currently have my setup in RAID 10 with 6 x 1,5TB drives giving me a total of 4TB of usable space.

I have not installed the MAnagement software - have been wondering how to get that working on a workstation PC to talk to the NAS box...maybe I am just lazy to read adn get it sorted, but so far no issues. Hold thumbs!

SoftDux-Rudi said:
Actually, many people run hardware RAID with FreeNAS :) And FreeNAS does support hardware RAID, as long as the chipset is support in FreeBSD. I have had great success with 4port & 8port SuperMicro cards (which generally use LSI) on FreeNAS as well as Adaptec & PromiseRAID.

FreeNAS recommends not to use hardware RAID since ZFS is superior (to some degree) and gives you more control. Generally you can't change the RAID type (i.e. from RAID 5 to 6 or 10, for example) when using hardware RAID, but with software RAID it can be changed very easily Although if you manage to install the RAID management software then you could change the RAID types very quickly as well.
Click to expand...
 
With regards to FreeNAS do you guys use a dedicated small sized hard drive and install it on that or do you partition on of the 1.5 or 1 TB drives? Whats best?
 
_Mikie_ said:
With regards to FreeNAS do you guys use a dedicated small sized hard drive and install it on that or do you partition on of the 1.5 or 1 TB drives? Whats best?
Click to expand...

Seeing as it's 100MB, I run it off a flash drive.
 
CriticalConsumer said:
I did quite a bit of research on the RAID card, the motherboard and the NICs with regards to its support for FreeBSD etc. before building my NAS using FreeNAS.
Click to expand...

In my case I've built quite of few of these boxes. So my recommendation is based on previous experience.
But I'll post my experiences here for others so you can make up your own mind when building a setup:
My very first setup ran using the onboard NIC on a Asus M2N32 SLI Deluxe motherboard (think it is Realtek or nVidia NIC). Anyway that setup got around 20-40mb/s sustained speeds. Thereafter I used the M2N32 in another computer and moved to a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R. That setup definitely has a Realtek NIC. Once again, only got 20-40mb/s sustained.

At that point I did a whole bunch of searching and saw many others were having the problems also and switched to Intel Pro 1000 adapters which solved their problems. So I bought an Intel Pro 1000/GT and voila, 70mb/s+ sustained read/write speeds.

So far I've built 4 FreeNAS boxes (IIRC). So far the CPUs that I can remember have been Pentium Dual-Core E5300, AMD 6000+ and in my current NAS, Intel Pentium Dual-Core E7400. None of those ever hit 100%, The E5300 spikes around 70% under heavy copy operations, hence my recommending a low power CPU but not Atom.

As for the memory recommendation, that is based on observation and also searching the internet, it is commonly known that the more memory you have the better for ZFS.

So far the hard-drives I've used when building NAS for other people: Western Digital Green Power 2TB (WD20EARS), Samsung 2TB 5400rpm (from Esquire) and Seagate LP 2TB (from Esquire).

None had better or worse performance, haven't had failures on any of the drives yet (except 1 Samsung that was behaving strangely, that I was told about, but suddenly it is ok again? Weird).

For a home NAS, get the cheapest you can afford because with 4x2TB Seagate LPs I still got 70mb/s sustained Read/Write. (that is 70 megabytes not bits). Pretty darned good for a home NAS IMHO. If however you want to max out at 100mb/s based on reviews online you'll need WD Raptor drives.

Please keep in mind I am talking about sustained speeds. The way I tested sustained speeds is by copying 100GB over Gigabit LAN. When I just copy 4GB or so it'll copy at 100mb/s.

stroebs said:
Seeing as it's 100MB, I run it off a flash drive.
Click to expand...

Yes that is also the recommended setup by the developers. Flash drives are far more reliable than hard-drives. Nothing is written to the flash unless you make configuration changes or upgrade the OS. If it is really an issue that you MUST have 100% up time then I would rather do RAID 1 on the flash drives than use a hard-drive.



As a final disclaimer, I think that setup I posted above will be great, I haven't built one like that however, but I will be setting one up like that in a few months (once the whole issue with Intel chipset has been resolved). So if you are afraid of compatibility issues, rather wait until then...

I'm thinking of writing a guide, there are so many things I haven't mentioned here. Things I noticed that should be set, etc. Among them are the hard-drive settings to prolong drive life, how to get it working without a screen, how to setup SMART tests on a schedule, tuning ZFS, etc. All of them important, everything online but it was months worth of testing and running on which I based my settings...
 
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Gnome said:
I'm thinking of writing a guide, there are so many things I haven't mentioned here. Things I noticed that should be set, etc. Among them are the hard-drive settings to prolong drive life, how to get it working without a screen, how to setup SMART tests on a schedule, tuning ZFS, etc. All of them important, everything online but it was months worth of testing and running on which I based my settings...
Click to expand...

oooo, will be keeping an eye out then.
 
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