Cheapest way to have fast and secure 6TB?

Comandante_J · May 12, 2014

Hi all.

I'm planning to build a home server to replace the one i actually own (just an old PIV HT with 2Gigs of DDR333 and 500gb IDE HDD).

The server will be on 24/7, just like the one i have now, and i want to add a Little capacity, for movies, domestic videos and photos.

The only way to acces it will be via Gigabit Ethernet, so i will be limited to the speed of that, most of the data will be transferred from our home computers, wich have SSD's.

Most of my movie collection is composed of DVD and BluRay Rips, so if i lose the data, i can always rip it again, but photos and domestic videos are irreplaceable.

I'd want 6TB total capacity, 4TB for movies, focus on write speed, enough to satúrate the Gigabit Connection, and the other 2TB, secured, i dont care if it's slower.

So, what is the cheapest way of doing it? I'll be using a 1150 board for the new server, probably a i5 with 16Gigs of RAM.

What RAID level/levels do you reccomend? And what drives?

Thanks in advance!

maddogfargo · May 12, 2014

Several years ago I built a whitebox NAS using Nexenta community edition ( SUN ZFS ) and 8 x 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives. 2 clusters of 4 drives in RaidZ1 (Raid 5) netted me ~6TB and would do 60-100MB / sec writes over Gigabit Ethernet, depending on file size and mix of random -vs- seq writes.

You could do the same with FeeeNAS or similar and 4 x 2TB drives.

Just be aware not all HDDs support RAID. Certain manufacturers cripple RAID functionality in the firmware to force you to buy their more expensive drives. So do your research before you purchase.

rhysiam · May 12, 2014

Is this literally a NAS box and nothing else? FreeNas with a ZFS Array would be perfect, particularly if you're prepared to throw RAM at it. Also, if that's the case there's really no point going with an i5, it won't be that performance hungry.

When you say 'secured', do you mean against drive failure? That's actually redundancy. Security would usually refer to encryption or measures for physical security. FreeNas gives you encryption options so you can create one volume with encryption for your 'secure' data. In this case I might revise what I said about the i5, you'd have to do some reading because encryption would definitely impact performance.

To get exactly what you're asking for you'd be look at:
Your video/moves 4TB -> 2x2TB drives in RAID0 (striped, 4TB usable) - max performance, should easily saturate 1Gbps for large files like moves. No redundency - if one drive dies you lose all the data.
Your 'secured' 2TB -> 2x2TB drives in RAID1 (mirror, 2TB usable) - slower writes, (still close to maxing 1Gbps though). If one drive dies, you can replace it and rebuild the array... data remains accessible throughout (unless of course both the drives die before you've replaced and rebuilt).

However, if you're going FreeNas, it'd probably actually be cheaper to do a ZFS Array with 3x3TB drives. That would give you 6TB usable with redundancy (any 1 drive can die without losing data). I think you'd get pretty damn close to maxing gigabit Ethernet. In one sense it might seem a little silly as you're effectively putting all your recoverable movies etc on a redundent array, but I think you'll find that 3x3TB are cheaper than 4x2TB in most cases.

WD Reds are a good option, they're cheap and specifically designed for NAS/RAID setups. You could go WD Blacks for a little extra performance, but the price hike is significant and I think the Reds could get close to maxing your Ethernet connection anyway. In this case you'd probably be better off putting a cheap SSD cache in there.

rhysiam · May 12, 2014

Oh and btw, don't forget to run backups too. Redundancy, (RAID, ZFS or whatever) protects you against disk failure and only disk failure, there are a host of other possible causes of data loss. If you're spending all this on a nice storage server, grab yourself a cheap 4TB USB drive too and chuck the occasional backup onto that... and store it offsite if you have data you really care about.

Comandante_J · May 12, 2014

Thanks for the answers, i'll explain myself a little more.

The server will be used for other things, apart from storage, it will run what i run now (WAMP with a wiki, and Owncloud), a TeamSpeak3 Server, a Minecraft Server, and whatever i see fun to do with it (i love playing with these things LOL)

That's why i want an i5, to have power if i need it.

I'll be installing Win Server2008.

So, WD Reds would be enough? What about 2x2tb WD Red for movies, and 2x2TB WD SC-4 for important files? It's overkill? I have a pair of 2tb USB drives for backup.

Thanks again for your explanations, and yes rhysiam, i meant redundaancy

rhysiam · May 12, 2014

When you say an "SC-4"... do you mean a standalone NAS? If you're running WinServer on decent hardware it'll perform better than most standalone units... and then you're not locked into proprietary arrays.

If you're prepared to have close to, but probably not quite a gigabit, I stand by my recommendation of a 3x3TB Raid5 (seeing as you can't use ZFS), giving you 6TB usable space.

It's cheaper, though slightly slower, but gives you the added benefit of having redundancy on your movie collection too.

RAID 5 does have it's critics, particularly around the long rebuild times, but you should be keeping all your important data backed up anyway, so even the worst outcome is only lost data since your last backup.

Comandante_J · May 12, 2014

rhysiam :

LOL, i was talking about work related stuff whiule writing and i used the wrong term. I meant WD RE-4, the Enterprise HDD.

Comandante_J · May 12, 2014

So, the thing is either two volumes, one in RAID0 plus another one in RAID1, wich will use a total of four 2TB drives, or one volumen in RAID5, using three 3TB drives, wich will be protected against failure...

What's the tolerance to failure in RAID5? The same HDDs are recommended, WD REDs? And future scaling options?

rhysiam · May 12, 2014

Sorry to be that terminology geek again... But I'm suggesting a single RAID array (3x3TB disks) with, if you want, 2 different volumes on it. You can have multiple volumes (or partitions) on a single physical disk or RAID array.

Google RAID 5 for more info. You can lose one disk and the array remains live. You can then replace the faulty disk and run a rebuild. The data remains accessible throughout, though running a rebuild will dramatically reduce the performance of the array while the rebuild is taking place. The main problem you have with RAID5 over ZFS is the rebuild time. It used to be fairly acceptable but with a 3TB drive you could easily be looking at 48hrs + for a rebuild. Lots of business are moving away from RAID 5 because of that... particularly as it hammers the disks during the rebuild which then increases the risk of another drive dying before the rebuild is complete... if that happens it's complete data loss.

While I completely understand why businesses have some doubts about RAID5, with mission critical data and hundreds of drives, I personally think the risks are overblown for home users. And given that you need to back up anyway, it shouldn't ever be catastrophic.

In terms of performance I run a software RAID5 array (3x2TB) on Ubuntu for my NAS. I use WD Green drives which are really badly suited for that role (they're slow and I had to mess with command line tools to stop them dropping out of the RAID array, but I was given them so I'll take it). If only 1 write is occurring I get ~90MBps over gigabit ethernet. It's gets smashed by multiple simultaneous writes though. I can easily get down to 4-5MBps if there are 4+ simultaneous writes competing on the array. I suspect a large chunk of that problem is the green drives. But you could probably get to similar situations on RED drives too. If your use case is usually 1 transfer at a time, then RAID5 is a good choice.

WD Reds are cheap and ideal for NAS, including RAID5.

Comandante_J · May 13, 2014

Ok, so, i'll buy 3x3tb Reds, in RAID5. Just one last thing, do you recommend any 1150 board for this job?

Thanks fir your answers, youve been really helpfull

rhysiam · May 13, 2014

Glad to be helpful and thanks for best answer. I realised I hadn't answered a couple of your questions:
- IMHO you don't need to go the RE drives, the Reds are fine.
- Future scaling options with RAID 5... very little! A RAID5 array can have many disks and you only lose the capacity of one drive, so you could go to, for example, a 6x3TB Array with 15TB usable storage.... BUT, You can't add a disk to an array with Windows software RAID or cheap onboard hardware RAID controllers. Your only option is to transfer all your data somewhere else while you remove the array and create a new one from scratch with the additional disks added. In other words, unless you've got enough space somewhere else for all your data while you build a new array, you're kind of stuck with whatever you start with.
If you need to expand down the track you might be better off adding additional drives (without redundancy) and moving your movie collection off the RAID array onto your new drives. As long as you're happy accepting the risk of data loss on the non-RAID data.

Motherboards? I wouldn't spend too much.
Some of the new h97 boards look good. I'd probably go this one myself: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157512 - 6 SATA 6 ports and Micro ATX, so it's smallish.
If you're interested in having the option of M.2 or SATA Express down the track, some of the new H97 boards have that on offer. Still, if you're only ever accessing the drives over the network then SATA will not be your bottle neck!

Good luck.

smitbret · May 13, 2014

I would think that 12 x 1TB WD SE drives in a RAID 10 would be the easy answer here.

Just the fastest and, at the same time, most secure.

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