NAS Server: Recommendations

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LER

LER

Supporter / Pub Member / Server Weenie
Original poster
Sep 28, 2003
7,061
31
Round Rock, TX US
I'm looking to either buy or build up a Network Attached Storage server.

Pros/Cons from folks that have them welcome.

I'm looking to be able to put 5-10 TB into it, with RAID, and at least one hot spare, and the ability to expand it beyond that.

Prefered way to build one would be FreeBSD with ZFS.
 
what raid level since that influences the case a bit if you are doing a straight mirror or raid 5, 6, 01, 10 etc. Kind of assuming raid 5 or more since you said a hot spare and capacity stated, but I've seen some odd sata port replicators that allow some impressive mirrors.

Not a fan of the software, but these setups are nice if you added a proper raid card since lime uses a software raid. At least you have a nice starting point on hardware.
http://www.lime-technology.com/products/rb-1200-server
MD-1510
 
Last edited:
We got in a Data Robotics Drobo at work the other day. It's incredibly flexible in using whatever SATA drives you may have laying around to create a RAID array. The only thing I'd want would be a SAS connection, but we ended up using the iSCSI interface instead.

We got it for a pretty good price, but I'm sure you can build a Linux-based rig for a lot less.
 
SMB and NFS currently. AFP will be supported in v5.

Everything you want to know (and then some): FAQ - unRAID

One of the things that sold me on unRAID was the amazing community support. There are some very smart folks out there.
 
I'm not a big fan of unraid. The single spindle limitation can be quite a bottleneck if you have multiple requests hitting a spindle.

Zfs is very simple to manage...

Is cost a big object? If not, the prebuilt solutions like Ready NAS, Drobo, Black Armor, Link Station etc are good without much effort.

I had a solution with ZFS that was very easy to manage, but I'm rebuilding soon to cut down spindles and power consumption.



Moar gees with gginggerbread and tapatalk!
 
The case has space for two 2.5" drives and a slimline dvd apart from the twenty 3.5" removable caddies.

OS on mirrored 32GB SSDs ;)





Moar gees with gginggerbread and tapatalk!
 
Thanks, John. Need to figure out what to do for OS drives, and how much $$ I really have to spend on this.

And then what MoBo/Controller(s), etc to do for it.

I'm still up in the air between my normal FreeBSD(ZFS) and an unRAID system.
 
Honestly, go with small mirrored SSDs or a small (low rpm) 2.5" drive.

Heck you could theoretically run it on mirrored SD cards. You won't boot often and your os will only be lightly used.

8 or 16bg for lots of cache space too ;)

Moar gees with gginggerbread and tapatalk!
 
Diogen,

I don't know how aware you are of LER and my CVs but we both have significant experience in large scale systems installations.

Having used unraid I'm not a big proponent of it. Its strength is mixing and matching drives. Its weaknesses are throughput and an inability to span multiple drives. This creates volume proliferation... Volumes = spindles - 1.

Nothing is perfect, but my professional experience says ZFS.



If you





Moar gees with gginggerbread and tapatalk!
 

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