Comments on my 32TB NAS idea

[StefDK]

Hi all.

My boss asked me to build a cheap NAS with highest possible volume. It's gonna be used mainly as video archive, and occasionally 1 or 2 people might stream some of the videos for use in editing on a local workstation.
It's not critical to have very high transfer rates or 24/7 up-time, keeping the archive safe is the number one concern, along with affordability.

I was thinking about going with this:
14x Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB
8 of them running off of a IBM ServeRAID M1015 (with 2 mini SAS SFF 8087 -> 4x Sata cables)
6 of them running off of the MSI Z68A-G43 motherboard.

Core i3 I3-2120
Kingston ValueRAM 2 x 4 GB
Fractal Design Define XL (with 3x 5.25->3.5 adapters + the one adapter included by Fractal)

The OS will run off of a
Transcend JetFlash 770 - 8 GB
connected internally with a
Akasa AK-CBUB06-60BK

Corsair Enthusiast Series TX650 V2 + some molex->sata cables.


Can I expect any problems with having some HDDs on the IBM controller, and others on the MB - or is this just totally gonna work? :)
I haven't decided the raid configuration yet, would it be best to have a 14 drive RAIDZ2 ("Raid 6"), or 2x 7 drive RaidZ spanned ("Raid 50") - both for a total of 36 TiB useable space?

Apreciate your inputs.

 

[Brosif_My_Nif]

More Ram if you want better performance. Rule of thumb is 1GB for every 1TB. You could probably get a 32GB ram kit relatively cheap. Everything else should be fine.

 

[FireWire2]

Here is what I did...
http://www.mpcclub.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22898&page=4

The reason that I go for 5x drive driver-less hdd controller, because:
1_ If a HDD fail, the rebuilt only happen in 8TB - 5 drives cluster.
2_ 180W of power consumption
3_ my MB only needs 23W when it runs

BTW you don't have to use the SPM394, SPM393+ PCI bracket would do just fine.
I just like the LCD panel thingy :p

I can do easy over 200MB/s for one stream, but 5~7 1080p streams , no sweat

Just another input

 

[StefDK]

More ram, roger.

Looks very nice. However I can't seem to find any rackmounted cases at a resonable price (in Denmark), and 3 of those multipliers costs much more than the M1015 :/
So I'm pretty much limited to 14 drives which is the maximum I can fit inside a normal ATX tower.

Are the ST3000DM001 fine, or should I go for WD RED drives?

 

[toddos]

I wouldn't bother with WD Red drives. The only benefit they carry is a longer warranty period. Otherwise, they're exactly the same hardware as WD Green drives, just with firmware that doesn't put them to sleep so aggressively. IMHO, they're WD's money grab at the burgeoning home NAS market, and do not justify the price increase.

 

[StefDK]

I'm still left with the question of doing RaidZ2 or 2x RaidZ ... Any thoughts?

 

[bollar]

Some Sun/Oracle bloggers say best practice is to keep the number of drives under 10, so I'd go with 2X RAIDz. This will also give you a bit of a speed improvement and faster resilver times over a single z2.

 

[paleoN]

I'm still left with the question of doing RaidZ2 or 2x RaidZ ... Any thoughts?

Actually, you want Option C.

A 14 x disk raidz2 array is a bit too wide, particularly with 3TB drives. A 7 x disk, RAID-5 like, raidz1 array is, IMO, a bit stupid with 3TB drives.

I would suggest 2 x 7 disk raidz2 array.