NAS for home use

RAMADAN

I have been trying to get specs and prices for a 4 bay SATA NAS for home use. Can anybody point me to a review or reviews?

The_Thing

Hi RAMADAN,

Before you go out and spend any money take a look at FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD?

At the moment I have it set up on a Toshiba laptop and so far I'm quite happy with it. Like any good NAS these days it also works as a media server and I am using it as such to copy \ stream content to my PS3.

I'm planning on building my own multi-terabyte NAS sometime in the near future and this is what I'll be using. If you have a spare PC lying around I would suggest you give FreeNAS a try before you splash the cash as it might fulfill your needs adequately.

Hope my suggestion has been of some help to ya.

kdouglas

I'd like to give an absolutely massive +1 to the above.

Just built myself a system running FreeNAS and absolutely love it, great piece of kit. Here's the specs;

Gigabyte motherboard
Celeron Dual Core cpu (2ghz)
2gb Ram
Dabs Value Case+PSU
2 x 1TB Seagate Low power drives
---- All of the above ordered from dabs.ie for 280ish euro incl delivery

All relative cheap and low powered components, but just serving out disk shares and running some basic web apps does not take that much processing power. The cheap dabs case and psu is handling the job fine for now, the case fan was a bit noisy at 12v, so I dropped it to 5v, PSU fan is a little noisy also, will probably do the same with that when I get a chance.

The entire system runs very cool on stock cooling and cpu speed, I'm also contemplating under-clocking the cpu to reduce the need for cooling, but even at the moment, the air coming out the back of the case is not even warm.
The hard drives are 5900rpm (instead of the usual 5400rpm or 7200rpm) and from reviews, seem to have good speed for a low power drive. I went for the low power because fast disk access is not really a priority here and the drives will run cooler and last longer.


Miscellaneaous; (All bought on ebay, for about 20-30euro total)
Molex->2SATA Power Adapters
IDE->Compact Flash Adapter (mounts into pci back plate, lets you quickly plug/unplug CF card)
512mb compact flash card (had it lying around, you could use a smaller too I think)
Round Sata/IDE cables (for neatness)


I was looking for a 4bay nas that I could put several 1tb disks into and build over time, adding more disks and migrating the raid level as I went along. I also wanted to do this on a budget. I found that realistically, I couldnt get a decent 4 bay NAS for under euro400-500, and that was without any hard drives.

The purpose of the compact flash card is to be the operating system drive, which freenas runs from. It is installed in embedded mode which means it boots from the compact flash card, but runs primarily in memory, this is to prevent the cf card wearing out over time or becoming an i/o bottle neck by keeping most of the active operating system in ram. Any changes you make through the interface are saved back to an xml file on the card for next boot.
There are several different types of IDE->CF adapters on ebay, I got the one that mounts into the pci slot for convenience.

FreeNAS is very nice to install and has every feature I could possibly need/want straight off, with the ability to install extra features/write your own at a later date if you choose.

I set up the 2x 1tb drives in a mirrored raid array for now, plan is to buy another 2 1tb drives next month, along with a adaptec sata raid card off ebay (such as this one) and then move to raid 5.

Catches;
The gigabyte motherboard I bought has a realtek onboard nic which is not currently supported in FreeNAS, however it appears to have some support under freebsd 7.1 (which is what freenas is based on) so should filter down sooner rather than later, or alternatively you could install it as a seperate module/driver. For now, I was lazy and just threw in an old intel 100mb nic that I had handy, and since my home network is 100mb and not gigabit, this makes no difference to me for now.

The raid card I linked to has a maximum array size of 2Tb, so depending on what way you set up your system, drives larger than 1tb are a bit pointless. e.g. 3 x 1tb drives in a raid 5 array will yield 2tb, which is grand, but 3 x 1.5tb drives should be 3tb but with that card you can only do 2tb. It is possible to set up a second array using the remaining free space, but i'd rather just keep the array's straightforward incase something goes wrong and I have to recover it.
However with 6 ports on that card, my plan is to eventually have 6 1tb drives in 2 raid 5 arrays giving a total capacity of 4tb with the ability to lose one drive from each array and still have a working system. Realistically though, I'll keep it at 2tb for a good while.

Freenas also has a built in bit torrent client which i found useful, along with setting my modem/router up for remote access.

The next step (other than more drives) is to look into installing a dvd drive with a script that will automatically rip the contents of the dvd when inserted. This would make migrating my dvd collection to divx quite easy, and great for future purchases too. I like to have original dvd's, but the convenience of having it available digitally is great.

RAMADAN

The_Thing wrote: »

Hi RAMADAN,

Before you go out and spend any money take a look at FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD?

At the moment I have it set up on a Toshiba laptop and so far I'm quite happy with it. Like any good NAS these days it also works as a media server and I am using it as such to copy \ stream content to my PS3.

I'm planning on building my own multi-terabyte NAS sometime in the near future and this is what I'll be using. If you have a spare PC lying around I would suggest you give FreeNAS a try before you splash the cash as it might fulfill your needs adequately.

Hope my suggestion has been of some help to ya.

That's very useful thanks. I have 4 x 250Gb drives and an old PC though I need to check if I can get them into it.

RAMADAN

kdouglas wrote: »

I'd like to give an absolutely massive +1 to the above.

Just built myself a system running FreeNAS and absolutely love it, great piece of kit. Here's the specs;

Gigabyte motherboard
Celeron Dual Core cpu (2ghz)
2gb Ram
Dabs Value Case+PSU
2 x 1TB Seagate Low power drives
---- All of the above ordered from dabs.ie for 280ish euro incl delivery...

Thanks a million for the detail, it is extremely helpful, I'll certainly look at going that route if I don't get the current redundant PC box going. I'll let you know.

The_Thing

I'd like to give an absolutely massive +1 to the above.

Thanks, kdouglas. I appreciate that, especially coming from a moderator

For my NAS build I am planning on getting 4 of these - > SATA-I-and-II-Mobile-Rack-Removable-Hard-Drive-Kit as they will add a bit more functionality to the overall specs of the device.

Another neat feature I've used it for is in (a) - saving to FreeNAS, and (b) - serving up from FreeNAS, any Hard Drive images that I've created with Acronis True Image.

@ RAMADAN:
For the time being I wouldn't worry too much about getting all the disks into the case - you can always add them at a later stage. For now I would suggest you just get FreeNAS up and running so you can get a feel for the basics.

As well as the FreeNAS forums, you might find some helpful advice \ info here on http://serverfault.com/ @ http://serverfault.com/questions/tagged?tagnames=freenas&page=1&sort=hot&pagesize=50

Let us know how you get on.