Looking for NAS.

[JokinenK]

Heya, Im trying to find myself a decent NAS enclosure for my home network. At the moment I am sharing USB HDD with my secondary desktop PC and that doesnt work too well (noisy, power hungry and all that basic stuff)

Can someone recommend some nice piece of equipment or is this ok: DS212j Products - Synology Inc. Network Attached Storage - NEW NAS Experience ?

[StamatisX]

How much are you willing to spend?

[JokinenK]

~250€ is pretty much as high as I can go at this point, and to consider these are the prices without HDD's

[Michael]

Take a look at qnap dual drive appliances. Veeery good quality, been using one for about 3 years already and only have good stuff to say.

Also fits your budget pretty nicely.

There you go http://www.qnap.com/useng/index.php?lang=en-us&sn=862&c=355&sc=526&t=694&n=12501

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

[JokinenK]

Whats the model you have? The page you linked is for pro models and those are for sure out of question for me. The 'home' versions do seem nice.

[Michael]

sorry, that was from a cell phone, the model i meant is QNAP, Inc. - Network Attached Storage (NAS) - Products - Products - Storage - Home & SOHO - 2-Bay - TS-212

[timohour]

I have been looking for a NAS too lateley and I think that it is not worth it to buy a pre-built NAS device.

Building your own DIY NAS is cheaper and more fun + it gives you the ability to make your system flexible.

Use a zacate motherboard with soldered CPU, 1 or 2GB DDR3 RAM and up to 4 SATA 3 (6gbps) hdds (depends on motherboard and PSU) and small case. Total cost will be less than 150€.

Specs:

Asrock Socket BGA-413 E35LM1 (or equivalent) 60€

1GB (or 2GB) DDR3 10€

PSU Corsair Builder 430W 80-plus Bronze (or equivalent) 45€

Total cost : 115€.

Use the rest to grub a fancy case such as the

CoolerMaster Elite 120 for ~50€

or use the old midi tower you have laying around

Install FreeNAS on a USB flash drive following an on-line guide and get it going.

You can even make it 802.11n capable if you add a USB wifi n dongle

[JokinenK]

I would agree but the form factor is somewhat important to me, as is the noise levels & power consume. I've had linux box just for that

[edit: fix the stupid typo]

- - - Updated - - -

Does anyone have any experience with Zyxel NSA325? I already love the specs on QNAP but it's always nice to have options

[Michael]

zyxel does look as a good competitor to the qnap.

both offer vefy nice features, i personally would trust qnap as NAS is their main business.

[chmod1337]

+1 for freeNAS. I currently have plans that involve migrating to another Storage solution and freeNAS is a really impressive solution.

One thing I found out, is that NAS solutions (even ones that come in rack form factor) tend to have weak cpus.

[chmod1337]

Also +1 for RAID > 0 and regular Backups

[JokinenK]

Maybe I turned that idea down too fast. I've been reading about the freenas since the first post it was mentioned and as I keep reading, the idea seems more and more appealing.

What comes to the power consumption, those AMD E240/E350 processors doesnt seem too bad.

This is going offtopic now but does anyone have first hand experience on the filesystems on those? Is the ZFS worth buying ~8gigs of ram?

[chmod1337]

Is the ZFS worth buying ~8gigs of ram?

Can't tell you this (yet). But I can tell you how btrfs performs with little memory.....sleeping turtles move faster.

Also, given the fact that RAM is cheap today, I'd say it can't hurt. (or you go with 4gigs and an upgrade option).

[timohour]

Is the ZFS worth buying ~8gigs of ram?

In my personal view you won't be needing more than 2gb or RAM...

Also since you care about looks and consumption you could get a smaller case with ext psu such as

the LC-13XX series or Hantol HCITX02 etc.

You could use at least two 2.5'' drives without a problem.

(1TB 2.5" drives are most of the times 5-10% more expensive but they also have better power consumption

[JokinenK]

Thanks all for the feedback! I went with the custom built route in the end. I might have it up & running next week if anyone is interested to hear how it turns out.

[Aweb]

I personally think you should use FreeNAS. I'm following their project since a year and it has matured a lot. If you want to download files you can install pyload, and for usenet sabnzbd with couchpotato/sickbeard makes the perfect combo.

Good luck!

[chmod1337]

Let us know, we are curious to see how well it works.

[JokinenK]

Update:

I received my first set of parts (everything else except 2x2TB drives).

The parts I ended up are following:

MB & CPU: SAPPHIRE TECHNOLOGY PURE White E350

RAM: 2x4GB DDR3 (1600MHz but MB can utilize it as 1066, oh well it was the cheapest set of 8GB)

HDD: 2x Toshiba DT01ACA (2TB)

CASE: Cooler Master Elite 120 (As Timohour suggested)

PSU: One noisy leftover from dead computer - will be replaced soon

After receiving the parts It became quite clear that its too shiny to put in some closet so I tried to figure out how to utilize it completely so I went with custom OpenMediaVault setup (with Ubuntu 12.04 because Debian Squeeze dont seem to support VA-api with AMD). Currently I have it up and running pretty nicely, just waiting for the actual HDD's. If this doesnt work well in 'real life scenarion' I might just go back and install FreeNAS to it.

All the feedback is appreciated!

[Michael]

How about some pics?

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

[JokinenK]

Sorry I dont have a decent camera (the one on my phone is just awful).

[offtopic]

Just a quick update: Don't ever go with ATI/AMD if you want to use linux & hw acceleration in flash. Spent whole day trying to make it work without success... popped in old Nvidia G210 and it all works pretty much out of the box.

Even the multi channel PCM works great on Nvidia

[/offtopic]

[fabihabie]

The Synology DS213+ is a good NAS System it have a lot of power it has a Dualcore 1 GHZ processor and got a write/read speed from 80mb/s

[chmod1337]

Installed two ds812+ recently at work and working good so far (30d+) . They are a bit weak concerning cpu, we knew this and it won't be a problem for our application, even in the future. But sometimes we see another application for our synology NASes and realize that those two we have are certainly a good storage solution, but not more.

Personally I prefer to have a more open and upgradeable system, but the works-out-of-the-box argument is pretty convincing and the system can be maintained by an average computer user, making it an ideal solution for us.

During our evaluation, we came across a few systems that only differed in cpu and memory and I wanted to share my thoughts about those aspects.

You might think why is cpu such an important factor for a NAS? What we figured is that RAID can be extremely cpu consuming (Software RAID implementation), especially 5 and 6. While Raid 5 rebuild time was ok, the raid 6 rebuild (same system) took about 2.5 times longer which was definitely too much. Sometimes you come across systems with reduced amount of memory and they are quite a bit less expensive, but keep in mind that the OS also uses RAMand only the rest can effectively be distributed to your applications. So I would estimate, that depending on the configuration you can easily triple the assignable RAM by doubling the total amount of physical RAM. Even if you don't run any applications (vpn, webserver, sql, ...), the free space is used as disk read cache, so you definitely benefit from having more RAM.

I mentioned the RAID rebuild time and We also talked a lot about freeNAS in this thread, so I would like to point out one technical advantages freeNAS with ZFS as file system has.

Imagine that one of your drives fails and you replace it or that one of your drive becomes unresponsive (trying to recover a bad sector) and the raid controller decides to kick that drive out of the array and later adds it back as the drive became responsive again (a very likely scenario with desktop drives (google for TLER if you want to know more)). In both cases the raid is now in reduced redundancy mode or even without redundancy and the disk load high due to resync, chances are that another drive fails because of the additional stress and performance (from the user perspective) is certainly not very high. So you want to to speed this process up as much as possible (write intent bitmaps can (likely not used in your nas) cover the case where a disk becomes responsive again and allows only to sync what has changed, but at a terrible performance or hardware cost and you still haven't covered the drive dies scenario). Resyncing a 3TB Raid with 50MB used space takes as long as syncing a 3TB RAID with 2.8TB full with traditional raid implementations, because file system and RAID are two abstracted layers and do not exchange information. No so with the RAIDZ implementation that ZFS has to offer, you only sync what you actually used.

So if for me storage systems cannot (only) be characterized by the amount of information they hold and I strongly recommend looking at the following points:

[security]

-Backups, you better buy 2 NAS with regular Backup than rely solely on RAID, think of RAID as a Availability feature

-Redundancy, double parity isn't paranoid (or you can call me paranoid) if you consider that HDDs from the same batch tend to fail at the same time and there is extra stress during rebuilds.

-Rebuild time, TLER is nice if you can afford enterprise grade HDDs, consider Write intent bitmaps on a fast SSD (certainly not on the same disks)

-uninterruptible power supply, so you do not have to rebuild after a power loss

-Enough CPU power for a quick rebuild

-A robust and common file system. There are robust files systems that have advanced methods and techniques to ensure data integrity on the disk, but are vulnerable to bit flips that occur in the RAM (enterprise grade servers have ECC, so no big deal there)

[Disaster Recovery]

-Well Documented and Standard RAID levels and certainly no proprietary implementation. Hardware raids might only be rebuilable with that specific contoller/motherboard

-Common and mature File system have the most and best tested recovery tools

[Performance]

-CPU, especially for the double or triple parity RAID levels, for compressed and encrypted remote backups and all the applications and protocols you are planning to use.

-Memory, for Disk caching, because it is so cheap you simply cannot afford it to become your bottleneck.

-Second level cache (10k,15k or SSD (Raids)) for all the performance maniacs.

Maybe this post has become a little too big, but I wanted to lay down a fundament for this thread and bring some new input.

I do not claim to have implemented all of the above points perfectly, nor do I think that this us the ultimate and complete list, but I think that these are points you should definitely consider if you are planning on building/buying a storage solution and I'd be happy to hear more from you guys.