Planning an advanced, upgradeable NAS/Home Server Solution.

rjk

rjk

rjk

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Hi Guys

I am planning a new build soon, the plan is for a high powered, upgradeable home server to act as a NAS and mediahub for the house.

Stuff I have:
  1. Bitfenix Prodigy
  2. Corsair 60GB SSD
  3. 8GB or 16GB DDR3
  4. Gigabyte Z77N-WIFI
  5. Choice of two CPU coolers
  6. 1TB Samsung F3
  7. 2TB ST2000DM001

Stuff I plan to get:
  1. Seasonic X-Series 460w FANLESS
  2. A CPU
  3. More HDDs

I realise the memory is probably huge overkill but is cheap.

I need a suggestion for a low power 1155 CPU for this server, my initial thoughts was to go with a quad but I feel that it may be overkill, maybe a Intel Pentium G620?
one of the coolers i have could potentially be ran passive with a low power cpu. this would be ideal as the only noise coming from the unit would be the HDDs


I have a few storage drives already so may as well use them, what drives should I be looking at for additional storage here? are WD Greens still the best idea?


the big question i have is what operating system should i run.
This is where i really have no knowledge

Initial thoughts were to install free nas? what are the pros and cons of this?
I also have copies of 64bit XPpro/Vista ultimate/7 ultimate and windows 8

would an MS operating system offer me more customisation than freenas?

any other suggestions in this area would be very welcome.
 
Do you really need "power" for a NAS/Homeserver?

I think you are right to look at low power consumption components.

I use Plex on Windows Server as there is an inbuilt client for my Samsung TV.
 
I'm planning something similar, I'm going to get an i3 3120 - I'd recommend also getting a LSI card and WD Reds, nice bit of extra performance and reliability.

Still undecided with regards to OS, but possibly swaying to Ubuntu server and just setting up the storage myself (samba\iSCSI) - although after playing with WS2012 and the improvements in NFS, I might virtualise Linux and use NFS to do to it and get my Linux-y bits to write back to a NFS share.
 
You need to decide what you want do with it, from there you can decide on the OS. From there you can determine the spec of the server needed to run the OS and then channel most of your resources on the important parts? If it sits in a bedroom, then you may want to spend on a sound damping kit for the case. If it’s on 24/7 then you need to look at using low powered parts.

I’m currently using NAS4Free, FreeBSD based NAS OS. It only needs a low spec'd machine to run well. I have it running on a AMDx64 (single core, 6year old HP machine), 2Gbytes of DDR2 RAM and 10Gbyte IDE disk as the boot drive. I have 2*1Tbyte and 1 2Tbyte drives installed. I've stuck it in the garage out of the way so noise isn't a problem for me either.

I use it for media streaming (HD and SD to my PS3 and TV's), iSCSI host server (to my ESX servers), network shares for general storage and backups. It is possible to use it as a print server, but you need to understand FreeBSD to do this as it’s not part of NAS4FREE core build/offering. The best of all is NAS4FREE is FREE and easy to setup with loads of tutorials on Youtube.

If you can stretch to a decent network switch (layer 2, not a standard switch) you could look to putting dual NICs (or more) into the server and teaming them to improve network bandwidth. But this is only needed if you are hammering the network, which I do with iSCSI to my ESX server and VMs.
 
OldCoals said:
Do you really need "power" for a NAS/Homeserver?

I think you are right to look at low power consumption components.

I use Plex on Windows Server as there is an inbuilt client for my Samsung TV.
Click to expand...

low power is key here.

I assume Plex is a windows based app?

what are its limitations?

MasterPlan1 said:
I'm planning something similar, I'm going to get an i3 3120 - I'd recommend also getting a LSI card and WD Reds, nice bit of extra performance and reliability.

Still undecided with regards to OS, but possibly swaying to Ubuntu server and just setting up the storage myself (samba\iSCSI) - although after playing with WS2012 and the improvements in NFS, I might virtualise Linux and use NFS to do to it and get my Linux-y bits to write back to a NFS share.
Click to expand...

I want something i am familiar with really, or at least something really easy to use.

ASE001 said:
You need to decide what you want do with it, from there you can decide on the OS.
Click to expand...

It will be for data storage, media streaming, NAS functionality essentially.
I want something that works on par with a very high end NAS unit [synology/qnap]

ASE001 said:
If it’s on 24/7 then you need to look at using low powered parts.
Click to expand...

hence why i am looking at the pentium parts.
 
I would just go with a low power pentium or i3.

Something along the lines of a i3-2100T, you could run it off a passive cooler with just the 120mm fan in the rear.

I would go with WHS 2011 as it allows backups, which are easy to manage.
 
rjkoneill said:
Hi Guys

I am planning a new build soon, the plan is for a high powered, upgradeable home server to act as a NAS and mediahub for the house.


Stuff I have:
  1. Bitfenix Prodigy
  2. Corsair 60GB SSD
  3. 8GB or 16GB DDR3
  4. Gigabyte Z77N-WIFI
  5. Choice of two CPU coolers
  6. 1TB Samsung F3
  7. 2TB ST2000DM001

Stuff I plan to get:
  1. Seasonic X-Series 460w FANLESS
  2. A CPU
  3. More HDDs
I realise the memory is probably huge overkill but is cheap.
Click to expand...

For CPUs take a look at the 620T, i3-2100T/2120T or if you have the cash then an E3-1220L v2. The E3 Xeon is on the boards supported list and only 17W where as the others are 35W. You also get all the Xeons bells and whistles centered around Ivy Bridge tech, rather than Sandy Bridge.

Another option would be to wait and see how the new Atom S ('S' as in Server) boards pan out. The first 3 processor models were officially released this week. These three are aimed at microservers. There is also due to be another 3 released next year (Briarwood) which are specifically designed for storage solutions (NAS / SAN) with multiple hard drive connectivity and parity offloading.

rjkoneill said:
I have a few storage drives already so may as well use them, what drives should I be looking at for additional storage here? are WD Greens still the best idea?
Click to expand...

I personally do not trust Greens as I have had quite a few fail on me and would not put them in any sort of array. As someone else has mentioned, WD Reds are 'tuned' for consumer storage arrays. I personally use 2TB Seagate Barracudas (current gen) and have 8 over two raid 5 arrays with no issues yet seen. WD Blacks I have also had in arrays sucessfully although for the difference in price, you may as well look at WD RE4s (enterprise SATA) which are only a little more expensive.

rjkoneill said:
the big question i have is what operating system should i run.
This is where i really have no knowledge

Initial thoughts were to install free nas? what are the pros and cons of this?
I also have copies of 64bit XPpro/Vista ultimate/7 ultimate and windows 8

would an MS operating system offer me more customisation than freenas?

any other suggestions in this area would be very welcome.
Click to expand...

FreeNAS / NAS4Free / UnRaid are all turnkey appliance solutions and generally have quite a big following. Using something like Windows Home Server or Server 2012 gives you availability to the other Windows compatible solutions in the 'Windows ecosystem'. Win Server is not as tailored for NAS type solutions and can be more resource heavy depending on what you wish to use it for.

The other option, is to try something like Hyper-V or vSphere and then create virtual machines on it and try out the various options. You could even have multiple VMs with different OSs for different taskes if you wanted to get in to that.

If you want to have a look at hard drive connectivity suggestions, have a quick search for my posts as I have made suggestions and given an overview in a number of threads in this sub-forum recently. The Windows Software sub-forum has a WHS 2011 thread which is good reading, this sub-forum has an ESXi (vSphere) thread which may also be helpful.

RB
 
I use nas4free as it has load of options. One thing I will say is that if you plan on using ZFS (you really should) you need a fair chunk of memory. The one drawback to nas4free over freenas is that nas4free doesn't "do" hardware raid, so setting up a raid is pointless, you have to do software raid from within nas4free, which isn't such a drawback as it sounds.
 
Plex is pretty chill, just started using it today - and also Win8\2012 have added Storage Spaces too don't forget, which sounds interesting but still in teething stages last I checked.

Win8/2012 with the apps (sab\sicko\plex) you want on there with a hardware RAID5. Especially seen as though you're wanting something you're used to.
 
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