Advice on distro for a NAS

uncle_rufus

uncle_rufus

uncle_rufus

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Hey all,

The past few days I've noticed my server/NAS (cheap little intel Atom system running Ubuntu 11.04 in a Fractal R2 Array) was making a lot more fan noise than usual and checking top it seems that the "kworker" thread/s are going a bit haywire using 100% CPU all the time. Reading around this seems like a bit of a kernel bug people have run into, and I guess it makes me think maybe this is a good time to do a clean install... Especially since the system currently contains the remains of a few abandoned/failed bits of testing I no longer need (teamspeak, mediatomb, tf2server, apache etc).

I've realised the system is too weak to be effective as much more than a NAS, which I'm fine with, but the question is what is the best distro to stick on there?

At the moment I actually only have 1 drive for storing data (1Tb) plus a little old 320Gb for the OS to sit on separately... so until I gather the funds to populate it with a set of 3+ 1Tb or more drives I need to just continue to use the existing 1Tb and I need to do it without losing any data...

I really like the look of freeNAS, especially all the ZFS stuff which I think I would eventually want to use when I have a set of big drives (like 4 x 2Tbs in a RAIDZ with some redundancy)... but would freeNAS be suitable to transfer to in the meantime - can I configure it to pick up the existing drive as-is (I've nowhere temporary to move the data on the drive so I can't afford to format it)... Anyone got any advice?
 
FreeNAS will work with NTFS/EXT3 etc but perfomance is sub-par on anything other than UFS or ZFS, but still enough to saturday 10/100mbps ethernet.

Its also work bearing in mine ZFS is very ram hungry and 1GB per 1TB stoage is recommended.
 
Frozennova said:
FreeNAS will work with NTFS/EXT3 etc but perfomance is sub-par on anything other than UFS or ZFS, but still enough to saturday 10/100mbps ethernet.
Click to expand...

Hmm, okay... I hadn't appreciated that ZFS was really a central part of FreeNAS - perhaps this will be a better option once I have the new drives to work with

Frozennova said:
Its also work bearing in mine ZFS is very ram hungry and 1GB per 1TB stoage is recommended.
Click to expand...

This could be a problem for me as I only have 1GB in the machine... Technically this should be okay as I only have 1x1TB drive at the moment but I'd like to expand later... I've been thinking of one of the HP Microservers actually if the cashback deal comes back around again
 
Ideally you want ZFS if using freenas, however you can also use UFS which doesn't have the performance issues but doesn't have the powerful raid options/drive scrubbing etc.

HP Microserver/Similar is ideal.

My FreeNAS/ESX box is

A Seperon X2
gigabyte 78LMT-s2
8Gb Generic 1333mhz DDR3
Corsair CX550w

with it throw in an old case with my exisiting storage drives, and a spare 2.5" drive for my ESX datastore. Its a larger footprint than a microserver but a lot more expandable and set me back a similar amount (~£125)
 
All good suggestions and although I agree expandability is good I've come to realise what I really want is a dedicated NAS that just does that and that alone... Then I could later build a different server machine which is more designed to actually perform more intensive tasks/hypervisor/development and messing around
 
Then a microserver is perfect, and as your only stoage is currently 1TB drive even a 4x1TB raid5 away should take you a while to fill.

I went this route as there was no cashback deal and I think I'd outgrow a microserver pretty quick as I'm gaining around 1TB of data every 3-6 months
 
Frozennova said:
Then a microserver is perfect, and as your only stoage is currently 1TB drive even a 4x1TB raid5 away should take you a while to fill.

I went this route as there was no cashback deal and I think I'd outgrow a microserver pretty quick as I'm gaining around 1TB of data every 3-6 months
Click to expand...

My god :eek:

To be honest I'll probably replace this 1Tb drive as it was 2nd hand when I bought it and I'm not too sure how old it is etc... Seems the sweet spot in drive prices at the moment is 2Tb so I'll probably look out for a deal for 3 or more 2Tb drives together (I really want Raid5/Raidz)... though I suppose if I can only find 2 drives I can go with a simpler Raid1/mirror type setup in the meantime
 
I'm only runnning a 2 drive pool at the moment, but will expand to 8x2/3TB RAIDZ2 for the parity, Z2 two to reduce the data loss probability if a drive fails as its more likely 2 will go in an 8 drive array.

With raidz you cant add extra drives to an array...but

Say you start with 3x1tb drives for ~2tb useable space and you fill the drives. What you can do is in turn replace each drive with 3 tb drive and rebuild the parity block. Once all three are replaced/rebuilt you then have 6TB usable.
 
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