NAS revamp

[champ222]

Hi All

I currently have an HP Microserver (N40L) and i noticed the fan being a bit noisy the other day. It probably needs a cleanout as it runs 24/4. That got me thinking about making it fanless, or building something that is (i love a PC build)... then i put that aside for a while to consider what i'm running on it.

I'm running Freenas 8.3.1. I didnt update it further than that because i currently use UFS. any later than that and i was forced to switch to ZFS, and to me, it didnt seem worth the effort, and the need for loads of RAM.

I must have thought about it at some point because ive got 8GB Ram in the server.

The main reason everyone was going on about ZFS at the time was drive pooling. unless i have misunderstood (which is highly possible), this is was having one big drive space that all the drives make up? i avoided this, because i have a bunch of external HDDs that i use to back up the data from the server. so i just copy drives to drives and all is well. If i have a drive "pool" wouldnt i need a backup "pool" also?

its used for media storage and file storage. For media, i use Kodi, libreelec at the moment i think. Kodi can have many paths for movies and TV etc, so it works fine with media spread across multiple drives.

Freenas 8 has been rock solid and works like a charm. The only things i'd like is to have the drives spin down when not in use (i'm not sure if they do this at the moment or not) i'd quite like to run a plex media server, but i had one running on a nuc before, so i could access media when i was away. I didnt use it often, so its not essential.

i'm not good with the Linux stuff, but i can follow a guide if its detailed enough. Like the current system, i want to set it up and leave it.

The current system has the OS running off a usb stick, and 5x HDDs, 4 in the trays and one in the slot at the top.

Ive seen Freenas, truenas, open media vault etc, does one of these stand out as the obvious choice for me? if i start again from scratch, which file system should i be using?

Thanks

 

[BigT]

Well you've got some good solid choices there. Not free, but I'd throw UnRaid into the mix. Drives of any mix are one big pool and you setup shares and can introduce your external drive backup as a share >> external disk mapping rather than disk >> external disk. Or you can still do it disk to disk but you'd need to setup your shares to only use specific disks in the array for it to make sense - all doable and all protected from one drive failure through parity. I'm no Linux guru but found the WebUI really easy to get on with and absolutely loads of support and videos online to help. Docker containers are a cinch on it too via their app store.

Hardware wise, one of my Unraid servers runs on a fanless ASRock J5040-ITX in a Fractal Node case with some nice slow spinning almost-silent case fans. Six disks plus an SSD for cache all fit in a nice small footprint (although not as small as a Microserver). I'm not a particularly heavy user. It's lots of terabytes of media files and a few terabytes of local machine storage copies/backups similar to you. Filesystem is XFS in the array. It runs the *arrs for downloading and Plex server as docker containers. I rarely have more than two streams going from it simultaneously and don't really do 4K and it doesn't break a sweat. I haven't had to reboot it except for OS updates in maybe about a year now. My second older UnRaid server is the same story with regards to set and forget for about three years now.

UnRaid isn't the fastest for write speeds without using cache if that's important to you. Spinning drives down is default out of the box and configurable. You need to think about this though. If you have a "chatty" process, in my case it was Apple Time Machine backups, then you need to make sure the network share the application uses is restricted to one disk otherwise it spins everything up with its near constant backups.

If you're going to embrace Plex then consider your media selection carefully. If your use case will involve remote access then only holding 4K remuxes will place unnecessary demand on the server transcoding when probably your bandwidth is limited anyway. Better to hold a lower resolution copy that can direct play by the client.

 

[steinooo]

Hi All

I currently have an HP Microserver (N40L) and i noticed the fan being a bit noisy the other day. It probably needs a cleanout as it runs 24/4. That got me thinking about making it fanless, or building something that is (i love a PC build)... then i put that aside for a while to consider what i'm running on it.

I'm running Freenas 8.3.1. I didnt update it further than that because i currently use UFS. any later than that and i was forced to switch to ZFS, and to me, it didnt seem worth the effort, and the need for loads of RAM.

I must have thought about it at some point because ive got 8GB Ram in the server.

The main reason everyone was going on about ZFS at the time was drive pooling. unless i have misunderstood (which is highly possible), this is was having one big drive space that all the drives make up? i avoided this, because i have a bunch of external HDDs that i use to back up the data from the server. so i just copy drives to drives and all is well. If i have a drive "pool" wouldnt i need a backup "pool" also?

its used for media storage and file storage. For media, i use Kodi, libreelec at the moment i think. Kodi can have many paths for movies and TV etc, so it works fine with media spread across multiple drives.

Freenas 8 has been rock solid and works like a charm. The only things i'd like is to have the drives spin down when not in use (i'm not sure if they do this at the moment or not) i'd quite like to run a plex media server, but i had one running on a nuc before, so i could access media when i was away. I didnt use it often, so its not essential.

i'm not good with the Linux stuff, but i can follow a guide if its detailed enough. Like the current system, i want to set it up and leave it.

The current system has the OS running off a usb stick, and 5x HDDs, 4 in the trays and one in the slot at the top.

Ive seen Freenas, truenas, open media vault etc, does one of these stand out as the obvious choice for me? if i start again from scratch, which file system should i be using?

Thanks

Following with interest as I'm in a really similar position. Don't really need to upgrade my HP Microserver but feel it will surely die soon. In looking at replacement cases I came across this which looked good to fit loads of drives in, may help you "Fractal Design Node 804"

Question about the NAS software you've mentioned.....is there any of that software which can take advantage of a faster drive in any way? Say to use as a faster layer of storage for example?

Holy weird formatting batman! On my phone, sorry!

 

[casper_uk]

The node 804 is a great case. Just put one together and it seems a well built case that's easy to use considering how small it is. Just wish I could find some decent hard drive deals to put in it!

 

[Quartz]

Question about the NAS software you've mentioned.....is there any of that software which can take advantage of a faster drive in any way? Say to use as a faster layer of storage for example?

I've seen videos from LTT and Craft Computing showing that you can get Unraid and TrueNAS to use certain drives (typically SSDs) as cache drives.

 

[BigT]

UnRaid can use any type of drive for cache. It’s tuneable too so you can use it for some shares and not others. So for example I use it for the shares my sabnzb docker uses. This means it unpacks the compressed downloads much more quickly. But my media shares don’t use it because once a file is written who knows which of the many TB of media I’ll play at a given time and I can’t have all of it in cache because of the size. Ironically, UnRaid by default uses RAID1 if you want with two SSDs to offer some protection of drive failure in your cache array. You can also have different SSDs in different cache arrays if you have the need for lots of flexibility.

 

[champ222]

thanks guys. Yeah ive seen the fractal node cases, i'm actually using the Fractal Core 500 for my Gaming PC, which is good as it supports full size GPUs and PSUs, but will fit on the TV stand in the living room (just).

I'll have a look into unraid when the time comes.

Cheers