General NAS questions

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Sjoerdoh

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Good afternoon everyone,

As of late I have been more and more worried about my backup situation, with the ammount of important files and family photo's increasing in the household I thought a NAS would be perfect to take care of this, while at the same time making filesharing between laptop and PC easier.

Now while I do have experience building a regular desktop PC and was able to find an abundance of information and know-how on the internet on this topic. But building a NAS is an entirely diffrent story it appears. Finding good sources on what to look out for is difficult and tiring. And some sources differ in opinion on some topics. Therefore I will ask some questions I have in this topic.

Now you know my situation lets talk problems:

ECC Memory, some sources mention it as essential for these type of builds, while other sources tell me that it's really only for more professional use. I know the risk of corruption is greater with non-ECC memory, but is the extra price tag for compatible motherboard and cpu (arround 400€ I figured) worth it?

Raid, I've read and looked up a bunch of options, but which is the best for storage, I am planning on getting three or four 4TB Red hard drives. How much effective storage will I have?

Hosting other things, what if I wanted to host my own website, would this be possible. Ive read and seen many great things of FreeNAS and it seems pretty good, will this be possible, should I use it or use something else?

Thank you all in advance, if theres any NAS pro's out there you should totally make a complete guide/video somewhere!
 
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ECC is overrated for home nas, it is a nice to have but you are not running the level of file transfers and things like live database applications to warrant the need or cost of ECC.

RAID is very good if used correctly, and very poor if not used correctly. There many different versions of raid for different uses and many times people will be confused about the pros/cons of raid. For backup purposes, in a very generic nutshell RAID gives you redundancy at a higher cost per TB.
RAID 0 (Stripe): This means you take 2+ drives and make them appear as a single drive and you get double the read and write speed. The massive downside to this that if one drive dies you loose ALL the data as fractions of each file are on each drive.
RAID 1...
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boosted1g

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ECC is overrated for home nas, it is a nice to have but you are not running the level of file transfers and things like live database applications to warrant the need or cost of ECC.

RAID is very good if used correctly, and very poor if not used correctly. There many different versions of raid for different uses and many times people will be confused about the pros/cons of raid. For backup purposes, in a very generic nutshell RAID gives you redundancy at a higher cost per TB.
RAID 0 (Stripe): This means you take 2+ drives and make them appear as a single drive and you get double the read and write speed. The massive downside to this that if one drive dies you loose ALL the data as fractions of each file are on each drive.
RAID 1 (Mirror): This is a 1-to-1 clone so you have 2 drives with the exact same data. Problem is that many people think this equals a backup but the reality is that if a file gets deleted or corrupted then all you have is a duplicate of the same issue. This ONLY helps against drive failure.
RAID 0+1 (also called RAID 10): A combo of 0 and 1 so if you have 4x 4tb drives then you have 8TB of storage with a clone of that 8TB of data
RAID 5: This gives you a middle ground. This uses what is called a parity bit where it uses XOR to calculate the combined value of each data point of each drive, and from this calculation you can determine the value of that data if a drive fails. So with 4x4TB you get 12TB of storage and 1 drive lost to the parity calculation. You also get 3x the speed of 1 hard drive. The downside to RAID 5 is that it should really only be executed with enterprise grade hard drives (or WD Red PRO) and usually requires a separate RAID card for the system. The other downside with RAID 5 is that it can often destroy another drive while trying to rebuilt the data from a failed drive (and at the point 2 die you are screwed and all the data is lost).
RAID 6: Raid 5 with 2 disks of parity. In your 4x4TB situation you have 8TB as 2 drives dont count. Now if you have 8x4TB then you still only subtract 2 drives so you have 6x4TB in space so 24TB.

As far as determining what RAID you need, I would really need to get a good understanding of what kind of data you need to store (and the quantities of it).
I would much rather buy an additional hard drive and have a real secondary backup then putting my system under the stress of RAID 5/6 if possible.

In regards to website are meaning a website like a traditional website, or a web gui that allows you to access your files?

Turning a PC into a NAS is a very simple process of just setting up your drives and permissions the way you need them to.
The extra features (like web guis) is where it gets more complicated

Now there is also NAS boxes like Synology and QNAP that are pretty good and all you do is throw in the drives, use the configuration tool and you are off. The only real downside to these is that a PC can be repurposed or you can use it as a NAS server AND other functions; with a NAS box it is just for file storage and the features it comes with is what you got.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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The first thing you want to consider is....build one or buy one.

Build one can be done with pretty much any PC. And it does NOT need ECC RAM.
My previous house server was a low end Pentium G840, 4 or 8GB RAM, and a bunch of drives.

In looking to rebuild/upgrade that last year, I ended up looking at the prebuilt NAS boxes. Qnap, Synology, etc.
In the end, I got the Qnap TS-453A.

I had originally specced out a very nice PC to do this. Current mid-level CPU, 16GB RAM, Server2013 or 2016 OS, etc, etc.
Feature for feature, dollar for dollar....it beat what I could have built myself. Simply put...it just works.
Originally, put in a random collection of 4 x 3TB drives I had around. Upgraded those to 4 x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives last month.

These newer NAS boxes are no longer just a little box with a crappy OS and a bunch of drives...but rather a full fledged PC, that does a lot of other things as well.

For backup scenarios, read this thread:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html


Hosting your own website at home is a whole other thing, which we will get into later.
 
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Sjoerdoh

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Thank you guys both, ECC memory now seems to me like a luxury that I simply do not need at this point. Regarding the backup system I think I will fetch some scrap materials I have lying arround the house and slap a little thing together with a bunch of drives. A nice case should make it look somewhat professional at least.

For the website I was talking about I meant small projects as I do quite a bit of (web)development and my little personal website is currently hosted through Github and I wouldn't mind it being hosted in a more user friendly way. But I guess I should just use an old PC to host that if I want to.

The problem that I have with pre built NAS boxes is, while they are really nice, I find them quite expensive without the drives. And since I'm only just a student I thought I could save a couple of bucks by making one myself.

From what I understand right now is that I should just pick up a low powered, cheap system, put in a bunch of RAM, a nice network card and my hard drives and install FreeNAS. Regarding the RAID setup I'd rather go with RAID1 since its super safe, and doesnt appear to need alot of computing power.

And again guys, thank you so much for your help
 
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boosted1g

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In regards to website you can host it on your computer but you still need DNS pointing the site to your IP, you need security to prevent hackers from getting access to your other PCs through holes in your website, and the other large hurdle you face is that most residential grade ISP plans block port 80 and common networking ports so they can force more people to get the business plans.
When you put all of the costs together, especially the security concerns, this makes hosted website much much cheaper. Most providers in their second or third tier package have it so you can have one hosting plan and unlimited websites.

If you have parts on hand then a build your own nas box is cheaper, if you have to get everything from scratch then a NAS box is not any more exepnsive

For your needs I would just put a standard OS (windows or linux) on it instead of FreeNAS which will provide more features overall and wont require the ridiculous amount of RAM that FreeNAS suggests.

Also, dont bother with RAID1. If you want redundancy then just have your data from one drive auto copy to another (syncback works great for this on windows). This way you have a second copy to protect form drive failure, but you also have a second copy of the data in case of corruption/deletion.
If you go windows OS i would suggest SyncBack SE ($30) as you can save previous versions of files).
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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If you're also going to host a website for outside access, you have to be really, really, really careful with security and access.
My NAS box gets several hits every week, trying to gain access through the default (completely deactivated) admin account.
Russia, Finland, Venezuela, Ohio, Portugal, Tor, etc, etc...another one just this morning at 0253 from Russia.


For the actual box...as suggested above, if you have some/most of the parts, building it is the cheapest way to go. If you're buying all new parts, the cost is a wash either way.
 
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Sjoerdoh

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For your suggestion on backing away from freeNAS, I like to fiddle arround with things and seriously doubt that RAM is the issue if you're not getting ECC. After all 2x8GB DDR3 ram is availble from arround 120€ right now, though I've bought some before for €60. If I can't get it to work I can always switch to something else later, though I'd probably have to format all my disks again. I'd keep your suggestion in mind though in the case I get really frustrated. On the topic of website hosting, yeah I didnt think it involved that much security and I'll just keep on using Github then, and XAMPP for offline dev.

Buying a used lower power PC or possibly even picking up one for free in some cases may be a good idea, though I might get compatibility issues with the ammount of drives and RAM I'm trying to use, what prebuilt NAS units do you guys recommend, preferably 4 drives or more
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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As mentioned before, my 4 bay Qnap TS-453A.
There are cheaper and more expensive ones.

With an inexpensive PC, number of drives can be worked around. I also have a 4 bay USB 3.0 enclosure which works quite well. Connect it via a single USB port, PC sees 4 individual drives.
 
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boosted1g

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A super cheap or free PC is just fine, you can always swap to a different case in it.
I know Synology and QNAP make good stuff but have never researched to purchase them so I cant tell you specifically which models are better.

FreeNAS recommend is 1GB pr TB of drives. This is of physical drive TB, not of actual TB. So if you had 2x4TB in RAID 1 which means 4 usable TB, you still need 8GB of memory.
Since you are not trying to run a software raid ZFS I still suggest going with a full OS instead of FreeNAS.
FreeNAS also strongly urges you to use ECC ram which will greatly increase your costs. Apparently with the way it handles the file system, without ECC memory you run a high risk of data usage.
In short, FreeNAS is good for setups 6x bigger than yours, but for your purposes it is getting a semi-truck to haul what could fit in a standard pickup truck bed.
 
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boosted1g

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FYI my home server (handles files, backups, media, downloads, kodi database, ftps, security cameras and some http web guis) is in a fractal design r4 case which is a mid-atx case that has 8 3.5mm hard drive bays (and i have 2 5.25 bays I could put more drives in if needed).

So as stated, there are plenty of ways to fit a bunch of drives into a desktop case.
 
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