Build own NAS?

mediamatt

mediamatt

mediamatt

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15 Nov 2010
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676
Hi,

Running a Mac for video editing and want to build a NAS drive. Looking for recommendations on which software to use for the cloud and also what NAS drives to use. Will be wanting to buy my own hard drives and mirror raid them. Also will want it to stream the videos in full 4k quality if I want to show people on my phone. Finally the cloud software will need to have an IOS app , unless you can do it another way on iOS?

Budget not huge so wouldn't want to be spending thousands

Thanks for any help/advice

Matt
 
I'm looking at getting a similar solution for my photography work. If I can edit directly from the NAS then so much the better so very fast network connectivity is a plus. Anybody here use a similar setup?
 
I have heard unraid is a good way to go if you have existing hardware, otherwise Synology.

I personally use MS storage spaces and Plex to present media.
 
Micro ATX board + low power CPU + 16 gb ram + extra NIC + case that can a shed tonne of drives


= Ultimate NAS (potentially running on a virtualised partition) + plex server + router + whatever you need.


Pre built NAS are seriously limited by the number of drives they run IMO. Their benefit is clearly plug & play, and compact footprint which if are features that appeal then grab one.



The main reason I wanted to go for own server was I wanted to use Drive pool, as I can back up key files on allot of drives(think photos), but downloadable media I do not want any redundancy, other than a drive failing only losing its files and nothing everything else (read RAID). Also no rebuild times if a drive fails too, just eject it and continue on.
 
As far as drives go, if you're going to be running multiple drives in RAID, you definitely want drives rated for NAS use, regardless of which brand you decide to go with. Our current lineup in this space is called IronWolf & IronWolf Pro.

NAS environments generate a lot of heat, vibration, and are ideally on-demand round the clock, so it is a good idea to have drives rated for 24x7 use with a high data rate as well. For example, most desktop drives like our BarraCuda, is rated for 8 hours a day x 5 days a week use and pushing 55TB of data per year, whereas the IronWolf is rated for 180TB per year and 24x7 use, with the IronWolf Pro is up to 300TB per year. The IronWolf's firmware, dubbed AgileArray, is also engineered specifically with NAS use in mind, taking into account temperature management & vibration concerns which can otherwise effect the performance of the drive (vibrations making the needle jump around tracks, etc) and longevity of the drives as well as error recovery time limits so that the drive doesn't get bogged down trying to correct an error when the controller can simply pass it on to another drive in the array and keep performance snappy.

Thank you for considering Seagate, regardless of which brand/drive you decide to go with in the end!
 
I bought a full AMD AM1 setup off the bay for super cheap. These chips consume like 25w at absolute max load and even less at idle. Chucked in a 4 port and 2 port PCIe sata card for extra drives and installed it into an Antec P50 with 6 disks and 1 ssd for cache. Runs perfectly and never really stresses the Sempron 3850 and the 8GB of memory. Running xpenology which is a copy of Synology's DSM, I would highly recommend this but unRAID or FreeNAS are also very good options.

As for drives, all mine are 2nd hand so Raid 5 and cloud backups of valuable data (Photos mainly) are essential but the system runs like a dream. I even have an iSCSI drive set up on the 4TB disk I pulled from my PC which has all my games on it. No more mechanical hard drive noise from my PC and still get very good performance for single player games (MP games are on an SSD in my PC).

If all you're doing is serving files, then any old CPU will do. Heck even a Raspberry PI would do but you're limited to USB2.0 disks. I've seen Intel Atom SOC boards on the bay for under 20 quid and they have enough sata ports for a good set of drives. Those things sip power.
 
seagate_surfer said:
As far as drives go, if you're going to be running multiple drives in RAID, you definitely want drives rated for NAS use, regardless of which brand you decide to go with. Our current lineup in this space is called IronWolf & IronWolf Pro.

NAS environments generate a lot of heat, vibration, and are ideally on-demand round the clock, so it is a good idea to have drives rated for 24x7 use with a high data rate as well. For example, most desktop drives like our BarraCuda, is rated for 8 hours a day x 5 days a week use and pushing 55TB of data per year, whereas the IronWolf is rated for 180TB per year and 24x7 use, with the IronWolf Pro is up to 300TB per year. The IronWolf's firmware, dubbed AgileArray, is also engineered specifically with NAS use in mind, taking into account temperature management & vibration concerns which can otherwise effect the performance of the drive (vibrations making the needle jump around tracks, etc) and longevity of the drives as well as error recovery time limits so that the drive doesn't get bogged down trying to correct an error when the controller can simply pass it on to another drive in the array and keep performance snappy.

Thank you for considering Seagate, regardless of which brand/drive you decide to go with in the end!
Click to expand...
Can you feed back it would be nice if the non pro Ironwolfs were all rated at 5900rpm rather than 7200rpm? In a home NAS environment (which I guess they are kinda aimed) the extra noise from the 7200rpm is noticable on the Ironwolfs which is why I had to switch to the WD Reds.
 
jeff83nz said:
Can you feed back it would be nice if the non pro Ironwolfs were all rated at 5900rpm rather than 7200rpm? In a home NAS environment (which I guess they are kinda aimed) the extra noise from the 7200rpm is noticable on the Ironwolfs which is why I had to switch to the WD Reds.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback. Capacities of the non-pro IronWolf 4TB and lower are 5900, with larger capacities being 7200 RPM, so we see what you mean. Part of what our team is trying to do in becoming more present & involved with the online community is to take in suggestions/feedback, and make sure you guys have a voice and get heard. We will pass it along.
 
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