Soldato
- Joined
- 26 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 9,584
- Location
- Milton Keynes
Hi Guys
Hoping you guys might be able to give me a bit of advice, based on your own experiences, as whilst I do have SOME NAS experience, it's really not ALL that much.
I'm currently in the middle of prepping for a NAS upgrade for family, as the drives are so damn old I'm terrified they'll fall over at a sneeze (oldest has ~11 years of power on hours...). In line with this, my current plan is to leave the current NAS running UNTIL the new NAS is running OK and data has been successfully migrated, so if anything goes wrong, it's not game over. Safer to duplicate first, tamper second! The old NAS was also not TERRIBLE but nothing special, i3-2110, and 8GB of RAM, utilising 4 internal 2TB drives, 1 internal 4TB drive, and an external 500GB drive.
Thanks to some members here, I've managed to put together an i5-3570k, 24GB of DDR3 running at 1600MHz (the RAM is 1333MHz but runs fine at 1600MHz, I have literally run memtest for days on end on the thing across multiple sessions of multiple days at a time to ensure the memory is not generating ANY errors), and 8x 3TB drives. They're used, but the oldest of them is a less than a 3rd of the age of the current oldest drive, and half of them are even younger, so feel like they have a few years in them at the least, especially as this time around they're older CMR WD Reds NAS drives which seem to be fairly well known for reliability. By contrast the old drives are quite literally JBOD! I am however planning to pull the 4TB drive from the old NAS and just move it over, as it appears to be considerably newer than most of the other drives, and likely has a bit of life left in it. It'll take me at least a few days to get through doing a surface/sector check on all the drives one by one just to be sure they're 100%, but hoping to get started on the build proper end of the week.
The old NAS OS is OpenMediaVault (albeit a much older version, I believe 3/4, and it seems to be on 6 now), using a combo of EXT4 and NTFS formatted drives. They are being shared over a home network only via SMB.
As I've used OMV myself before in the past, my first thought is to just use that again, as at least I should be able to get my head around it if the current version hasn't changed too much since the last version I used.
However, as this machine is now rocking a quad-core, and a LOT more memory, I wondered if maybe it'd be worth looking at a more powerful solution as OMV at least in the past was more about the basics done well, relatively simple and relatively light, I see Rockstor and TrueNAS also seem to get pretty decent ratings?
To help narrow down, ideally what I'm looking for is:
1) Something relatively easy to administer/maintain/setup, I've been a computer hardware enthusiast for decades at this point, but have never been big on networking/NAS/Linux, so ideally easy to install and GUI all the way, no/absolute minimal Linux CLI required.
2) Samba shares, so windows has no issues accessing (configured as full guest access so no login/password required)
3) Best performance possible, considering SAMBA
4) Ideally, I'd like to use the 4 youngest of the 8 newer HDDs, to essentially 1:1 replace the 2TB drives of the old server with larger 3TB drives and absorb the 500GB into the additional capacity of these drives to reduce the amount of disks in use at once for power efficiency and SATA connection limitation purposes, whilst still offering a noticeable uptick in capacity (extra 3TB roughly after absorption of the 500GB previously on the external USB drive)
5) The remaining 4 drives would be either kept around as spares, OR dependent on the complication of doing so and the OS used, maybe the first 4 drives could be setup as a pool and the 1 or more of the extras used as parity/mirroring drives to prevent data loss if a either a data or parity drive fails and that is easy to setup?
The new machine has 8 total SATA (https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z77X-D3H-rev-10#ov) 2x SATA 6Gbps/4x SATA 3Gbps Intel PCH, 2x 6Gbps via Marvell 88SE9172 so was thinking the 4 main 3TB could all go on the SATA 3Gbps ports for a combination of tidiness and just being relatively easy to work out what was connected to what at a later date, the 4TB could go on a PCH 6Gbps along with the ODD, and that leaves the 2 Marvell 6GBps (apparently this controller is actually fine unlike some of the earlier Marvell SATA controllers) for either parity drives or so I could wire up the case's front external Hotswap SATA bay.
6) The 4TB from the old NAS (EXT4 formatted) would be transferred over wholesale (once the new server is working and the 2TB/500GB drives have all been duplicated to the new servers 3TB drives). I'd like this drive to just be picked up and usable by the new NAS with no reformatting etc, just pop in, setup up the SAMBA share on the pre-existing data and move on, independent from whatever the solution is for the 3TB drives.
7) Plan is for OS to live on a USB stick, usually isn't an issue for NAS stuff, but wanted to mention just incase.
Thoughts?
Hoping you guys might be able to give me a bit of advice, based on your own experiences, as whilst I do have SOME NAS experience, it's really not ALL that much.
I'm currently in the middle of prepping for a NAS upgrade for family, as the drives are so damn old I'm terrified they'll fall over at a sneeze (oldest has ~11 years of power on hours...). In line with this, my current plan is to leave the current NAS running UNTIL the new NAS is running OK and data has been successfully migrated, so if anything goes wrong, it's not game over. Safer to duplicate first, tamper second! The old NAS was also not TERRIBLE but nothing special, i3-2110, and 8GB of RAM, utilising 4 internal 2TB drives, 1 internal 4TB drive, and an external 500GB drive.
Thanks to some members here, I've managed to put together an i5-3570k, 24GB of DDR3 running at 1600MHz (the RAM is 1333MHz but runs fine at 1600MHz, I have literally run memtest for days on end on the thing across multiple sessions of multiple days at a time to ensure the memory is not generating ANY errors), and 8x 3TB drives. They're used, but the oldest of them is a less than a 3rd of the age of the current oldest drive, and half of them are even younger, so feel like they have a few years in them at the least, especially as this time around they're older CMR WD Reds NAS drives which seem to be fairly well known for reliability. By contrast the old drives are quite literally JBOD! I am however planning to pull the 4TB drive from the old NAS and just move it over, as it appears to be considerably newer than most of the other drives, and likely has a bit of life left in it. It'll take me at least a few days to get through doing a surface/sector check on all the drives one by one just to be sure they're 100%, but hoping to get started on the build proper end of the week.
The old NAS OS is OpenMediaVault (albeit a much older version, I believe 3/4, and it seems to be on 6 now), using a combo of EXT4 and NTFS formatted drives. They are being shared over a home network only via SMB.
As I've used OMV myself before in the past, my first thought is to just use that again, as at least I should be able to get my head around it if the current version hasn't changed too much since the last version I used.
However, as this machine is now rocking a quad-core, and a LOT more memory, I wondered if maybe it'd be worth looking at a more powerful solution as OMV at least in the past was more about the basics done well, relatively simple and relatively light, I see Rockstor and TrueNAS also seem to get pretty decent ratings?
To help narrow down, ideally what I'm looking for is:
1) Something relatively easy to administer/maintain/setup, I've been a computer hardware enthusiast for decades at this point, but have never been big on networking/NAS/Linux, so ideally easy to install and GUI all the way, no/absolute minimal Linux CLI required.
2) Samba shares, so windows has no issues accessing (configured as full guest access so no login/password required)
3) Best performance possible, considering SAMBA
4) Ideally, I'd like to use the 4 youngest of the 8 newer HDDs, to essentially 1:1 replace the 2TB drives of the old server with larger 3TB drives and absorb the 500GB into the additional capacity of these drives to reduce the amount of disks in use at once for power efficiency and SATA connection limitation purposes, whilst still offering a noticeable uptick in capacity (extra 3TB roughly after absorption of the 500GB previously on the external USB drive)
5) The remaining 4 drives would be either kept around as spares, OR dependent on the complication of doing so and the OS used, maybe the first 4 drives could be setup as a pool and the 1 or more of the extras used as parity/mirroring drives to prevent data loss if a either a data or parity drive fails and that is easy to setup?
The new machine has 8 total SATA (https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z77X-D3H-rev-10#ov) 2x SATA 6Gbps/4x SATA 3Gbps Intel PCH, 2x 6Gbps via Marvell 88SE9172 so was thinking the 4 main 3TB could all go on the SATA 3Gbps ports for a combination of tidiness and just being relatively easy to work out what was connected to what at a later date, the 4TB could go on a PCH 6Gbps along with the ODD, and that leaves the 2 Marvell 6GBps (apparently this controller is actually fine unlike some of the earlier Marvell SATA controllers) for either parity drives or so I could wire up the case's front external Hotswap SATA bay.
6) The 4TB from the old NAS (EXT4 formatted) would be transferred over wholesale (once the new server is working and the 2TB/500GB drives have all been duplicated to the new servers 3TB drives). I'd like this drive to just be picked up and usable by the new NAS with no reformatting etc, just pop in, setup up the SAMBA share on the pre-existing data and move on, independent from whatever the solution is for the 3TB drives.
7) Plan is for OS to live on a USB stick, usually isn't an issue for NAS stuff, but wanted to mention just incase.
Thoughts?
Last edited:
just a case of whether I duplicate the system on a newer version of OMV, or whether one of the alternatives