My wife recently knocked my external hard drive off the desk, destroying it. I have an old HP Microserver N40L which hasn't been used in years. I would like to repurpose that as a proper NAS. It seems ideal as a small, low power device with 4 drive bays (5 if you include the optical bay) and an internal bootable USB port for a USB stick. But I'm torn between which NAS software to use. I don't mind paying for Unraid if there are clear benefits for using it over the free options. But I'd be interested in what other people use and why they settled on that software. Thanks.
Unraid, FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault, etc...?
- Thread starter Hades
- Start date
Don
Unraid is probably the most sensible option out of those, with say 4 data drives and a 5th parity drive in the optical bay.
- FreeNAS/TrueNAS is too CPU intensive for the early Microservers imo
- OpenMediaVault is held back by it's single developer
- FreeNAS/TrueNAS is too CPU intensive for the early Microservers imo
- OpenMediaVault is held back by it's single developer
Thanks
Soldato
Unraid user here and I can't recommend it enough to be honest, does everything I need it to with a minimum of fuss - and I'm probably only using it to about 10% of its potential!
Good to hear. Thanks.
Associate
Unraid user here. I faffed about with the free version as a try out, eventually taking a punt on the more expensive licence to allow ~12 drives ( i use 5 drives in total at the moment ).
Worth every penny imho.
For me, I want a shared / backup style network drive space for machines in the house to be able to access, and a machine to run CCTV. Unraid has been rock solid in providing that function. I have no interest in streaming, plex, blah blah blah etc ... just HDD space which has a bit of resilience. Unraid does that without any fuss.
Took a little fettling to get right with the CCTV etc ( Zoneminder ), but there is a ton of content out there which helps.
Regarding old machines: I have an old R520 rack server - dual CPU, 8 core total, 2.4GHz, 32Mb ram and the drives. With it recording the CCTV, and idling visible on the network, it sits at around 11% CPU usage. The display on the front of the machine says it idles at 70W. At that usage, it would take me a long time to pay back the cost of changing it to a newer self built machine which might idle around 30-50W? ( and I would be losing the enterprise quality build on the hardware front )
Whilst some other software *might* bring down the idle power usage a little, its not going to be worth it in my case. For me, its just one of those things I've setup and forgotten about as its just been so reliable.
Worth every penny imho.
For me, I want a shared / backup style network drive space for machines in the house to be able to access, and a machine to run CCTV. Unraid has been rock solid in providing that function. I have no interest in streaming, plex, blah blah blah etc ... just HDD space which has a bit of resilience. Unraid does that without any fuss.
Took a little fettling to get right with the CCTV etc ( Zoneminder ), but there is a ton of content out there which helps.
Regarding old machines: I have an old R520 rack server - dual CPU, 8 core total, 2.4GHz, 32Mb ram and the drives. With it recording the CCTV, and idling visible on the network, it sits at around 11% CPU usage. The display on the front of the machine says it idles at 70W. At that usage, it would take me a long time to pay back the cost of changing it to a newer self built machine which might idle around 30-50W? ( and I would be losing the enterprise quality build on the hardware front )
Whilst some other software *might* bring down the idle power usage a little, its not going to be worth it in my case. For me, its just one of those things I've setup and forgotten about as its just been so reliable.
Thanks. Similar usage to what I am looking for. I just want resilient shared HDD space that isn't a faff to setup or change later. I don't need anything else like plex. Just simple to use resilient storage that I can upgrade over time. I see you can upgrade an Unraid license so you're not stuck with the basic 6 drive license if you add more in the future. So I think I'll just start with that.
Thanks all.
Associate
At the moment I have 3x 2tb drives to give me 4tb space as my main storage pool. Whilst I could add more drives, I think I’ll go down the route of swapping out each of the drives in turn and keep it as a 3 drive pool as some of the drives are old now. (50k hours)
might be an approach for yourself to keep under the license limit.
might be an approach for yourself to keep under the license limit.
Yes I think I will try to keep within the smaller license. It's not the license cost, but simply that I don't want to end up with dozens of older small disks over time. I would probably keep within the confines of the HP N40Ls's drive bays; 4 main 3.5" drives and possibly a converter in the optical bay (although I seem to recall there may be some restrictions when using that bay). So over time just replace the smaller drives with larger ones like you have.
I'm quite impressed with unraid so far (just using the trial license to see if it does what I want). I also like the fact you can set it up headless, so you don't actually need a monitor on the NAS device to set it up the first time.
These older microservers really are ideal for this kind of thing. I happened to have an old one from years ago with some smaller 2tb and 3tb disks and upgraded 8gb memory. So reusing it is a no-cost option apart from the unraid license cost. But I've seen them sell for £60 on ebay (cheapest sold was actually £30). They are small compact devices, low power, take 4, possibly 5 drives, have an internal USB header to boot from and have Wake on LAN. It even has a low profile PCI slot so if I really did need to add more than 4 drives in the future then an external multi bay eSATA enclosure connected to an eSATA PCI card should also work. The drive bays and internal USB header are accessible simply by opening the front lockable door. It seems perfect as a NAS.
Looking at the costs, assuming I had to buy the N40L rather than having one laying around:
N40L from ebay = £60
6 drive unraid license = £50 ($59)
That's £110 for a bare 4 bay NAS device with what seems like pretty decent software. That seems to beat the pants off anything commercially available for consumers.
EDIT: A quick look around shows 4 bay consumer NAS devised to be £400+ unpopulated. That's quite a saving. No doubt those devices may have some advantages and I expect faster throughput speed than unraid on the N40L. But for simply holding a lot of data this solution looks good so far.
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Associate
Totally agree. If your looking for straight storage, old machines make for compelling solutions.
One thing which I’ve found ( but accept) is the write performance isnt always amazing. If you have a cache, then it’ll write to the machine at full speed (112MB/s over gigabit Ethernet), but if you fill the cache ( or don’t have a cache drive ) then it drops markedly to about 40-60MB/s as it has to parity calculations and stuff like that to the data you send it.
but beyond that , its fine .
One thing which I’ve found ( but accept) is the write performance isnt always amazing. If you have a cache, then it’ll write to the machine at full speed (112MB/s over gigabit Ethernet), but if you fill the cache ( or don’t have a cache drive ) then it drops markedly to about 40-60MB/s as it has to parity calculations and stuff like that to the data you send it.
but beyond that , its fine .
Thanks for the heads up on the cache drive. Yes I could use an existing 250gb 2.5" drive in the optical bay for that.
Don
It's worth noting that the SATA ports are only 3.0Gb/s, so will cap any SSD at approx 300MB/s
I thought I would give an update on my experience so far, in case others searching for similar find it useful in the future. I appreciate those above who helped me probably know the below information anyway.
Overall I'm very impressed with both Unraid and also the N40L as a dedicated NAS. The only downside has been that write speeds are quite slow. Without a cache drive they were woeful (5 or 6gb/s) which improved to just about acceptable with a cache drive (~50gb/s). I know the N40L is capable of much more because in the past when I was running Ubuntu Server and opened a simple Samba share I was getting around 80gb/s. I have read in quite a few places that Unraid isn't the fastest system, particularly with write speeds. But the cache drive helps make it just about acceptable.
But everything else has been great. It was simple to setup, especially as no GPU was needed (just install onto a USB stick and then boot the N40L from it). Two slight complexities were understanding how parity drives worked and then later how to add a cache drive. Unraid doesn't use RAID like most NAS systems, which is both a pro and con. The con's are that you must always use the largest drive as the parity drive and that it seems to be the cause of the slow write performance. But the pro is that you don't need to add drives in pairs in the same way you would with RAID 1. So longer term this may be a far more convenient and cost effective solution.
When I added the 3tb parity drive it took 6+ hours to build the drive. Adding small cache drive instantly improved write speeds.
The N40L is a really good device for this kind of NAS. In theory there are some limitations on drive sizes etc and I'm sure being an older device there will be other downsides such as the CPU speed being a bit slow for running VM's etc. The fan is also quite noisy and never spins down. So this wouldn't be ideal for a living room (I've heard you can replace the fan for a quieter one). But for a cheap device (£60 on ebay if I didn't already have one) it really has everything needed; It is small, has an internal USB header to boot Unraid from, 4 easily accessible HDD bays inside a front door, the optical bay can take another HDD which is perfect for a cache drive.
Although I'm still evaluating it, I am almost certain to pay for an Unraid license as it seems ideal for what I needed. Thank you to everyone above.
Overall I'm very impressed with both Unraid and also the N40L as a dedicated NAS. The only downside has been that write speeds are quite slow. Without a cache drive they were woeful (5 or 6gb/s) which improved to just about acceptable with a cache drive (~50gb/s). I know the N40L is capable of much more because in the past when I was running Ubuntu Server and opened a simple Samba share I was getting around 80gb/s. I have read in quite a few places that Unraid isn't the fastest system, particularly with write speeds. But the cache drive helps make it just about acceptable.
But everything else has been great. It was simple to setup, especially as no GPU was needed (just install onto a USB stick and then boot the N40L from it). Two slight complexities were understanding how parity drives worked and then later how to add a cache drive. Unraid doesn't use RAID like most NAS systems, which is both a pro and con. The con's are that you must always use the largest drive as the parity drive and that it seems to be the cause of the slow write performance. But the pro is that you don't need to add drives in pairs in the same way you would with RAID 1. So longer term this may be a far more convenient and cost effective solution.
When I added the 3tb parity drive it took 6+ hours to build the drive. Adding small cache drive instantly improved write speeds.
The N40L is a really good device for this kind of NAS. In theory there are some limitations on drive sizes etc and I'm sure being an older device there will be other downsides such as the CPU speed being a bit slow for running VM's etc. The fan is also quite noisy and never spins down. So this wouldn't be ideal for a living room (I've heard you can replace the fan for a quieter one). But for a cheap device (£60 on ebay if I didn't already have one) it really has everything needed; It is small, has an internal USB header to boot Unraid from, 4 easily accessible HDD bays inside a front door, the optical bay can take another HDD which is perfect for a cache drive.
Although I'm still evaluating it, I am almost certain to pay for an Unraid license as it seems ideal for what I needed. Thank you to everyone above.
A bit of both
I've stuck with Unraid on the N40L and did buy a full Unraid licence. But recently I stopped using it as my main online storage solution and started using it as my backup in a wider storage setup.
My primary online storage device is now a very low power Dell Wyse 5070 NUC with a 5tb USB 2.5" hard drive. That is running Nextcloud. I am still extremely happy with the N40L and Unraid and continue to use it as my backup solution.
I did this for several reasons:
1. Having learned Unraid I wanted to learn Nextcloud too. It was a new toy to play with
2. The Dell Wyse 5070 is silent and consumes less power than the N40L. The 2.5" hdd is also near silent. So I can leave them on all the time without noise and with a lot less power consumption. I now only turn the N40L on when I need to use it or back things up (e.g.backup Nextcloud).
3. I have setup Nextcloud to be accessible through my own domain name so can be accessed anywhere in the world. I have also set my phone to automatically backup photos and videos to it overnight instead of my Google storage. So it works in the same way that Google storage, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc works but with a large capacity that I don't need to pay a monthly fee for. I'm self hosting cloud storage. I suspect Unraid could probably do this too with plugins.
If I could only have one of the two storage solutions it would be the N40L with Unraid. But it is now part of a wider storage solution that I use instead of it on its own. When I have time I will be setting Nextcloud to automatically backup to the N40L Unraid.
Very happy with both solutions.
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Soldato
How much RAM do you use in your Unraid servers? Thinking of putting a NAS together but can't really work out how much RAM I need. 8GB? 16GB? More? I'd just be using the NAS for storage of files, no media or anything like that. Do I need a certain amount of RAM per TB of storage I'll be using?
Depends on the system. For infrequently serving a couple of machines over a 1gigbit network from a few tb pool, 4gb is probably plenty. A 50tb ZFS pool with a bunch 10gigabit connections then probably more like 64gb.
Soldato
Cheers. It'll be at least 3 desktops each with a 2.5GB connection and then a few laptops either using their onboard 1GB connections or I'll use them on wireless for the most part and then use some 2.5GB dongles for transferring bigger files. Had 32GB in mind so might go with that and see how that does for me.
