Howdy! Planning to build a 8x4TB NAS, What do you think?

[Clayton]

Hello everyone! Sorry for the long intro post!

I’m fairly new to the world of storage tech and I felt it's time I dive head first into my first build. I am a Virtualization engineer by trade, working with hypervisors such as VMware/XenServer and a little Hyper-v mostly relating to Citrix Xen~ solutions. Typically my expertise stops there and I have the storage team pick up where I left off. Now after working with so many enterprise solutions over the years I feel the price/performance and usefulness of a personal NAS has become a worthwhile investment and not just any standalone plugin-play NAS device will do so here I am.

My first experience with FreeNas was installing it on an HP DL360 g5 server with 4x (less than 200GB) drives, each configured in raid 0 then using ZFS to raid them together and 16GB ram. Tested BTSync, PLEXmedia server plugins. This looks to be a solid POC so I went ahead and researched/ordered my hardware.

My uses for building my own NAS will be as follows.

1. Personal Network shares “CIFS”
2. Sync volumes (tested BTSync and looks to be a viable solution to replace my Dropbox)
3. Media storage / media server (tested PLEX and appears sufficient)
4. ISCSI / NFS for shared storage repositories for XenServer/VMware hypervisors

I have already went ahead and purchased all my hardware and currently just waiting for it to come in. Went with what I would assume is a pretty generic build, one which was designed by “Linus Tech Tips” titled “Insane Compact NAS 2014 - 48TB of Network-attached Storage”. I purchased it though Newegg with the only differences being I am only using 8x4TB drives and 32GB ram. I used this combo deal and only multiplied the hdd and ram. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1934854

Would anyone have any recommendation for this build? I expect to use the 8xSata3 connectors for the 8 drives which will leave me with 4xSata2 for more hardware if ever added later. The though crossed my mind about a cache disk but the documentation pretty much said cache wouldn't help any for ISCSI or CIFS which I think is what my main use case would be. Not sure how to stretch my performance further. My network would only be gigE on the receiving end so best I can do would team the nic’s but that probably wouldn’t help push passed the 111MB theoretical single lane limit.

I was thinking I wanted to do a raidz2 configuration giving me a little extra protection from drive failures. That should give me about 24TB of usable space which I think is pretty good.
I would also implement snapshots to help protect data. I know this is only protecting the data from myself…accidental deletion or corruption of files outside of the NAS’s control. Can I do snapshots for just my BTSync/CIFS shares? Both files stored via BTSync and network shares I would consider valuable data and would want some protection while media and ISCSI/NFS I wouldn’t worry about.

I would love to hear your feedback! Thanks ahead of time!

 

[jgreco]

I always shudder a little when someone takes a random hardware list and tries to apply it to FreeNAS.

Be aware that the Marvell expander ports on the C2750 might be problematic - reports vary.

You can snapshot any dataset, so make sure you don't just throw it all together in the main pool.

iSCSI and NFS will be slow with so little RAM and will be even slower if you are doing RAIDZ. Do not expect stellar performance, but I imagine it'd be just dandy for a home lab. If you could bump that up to 32GB, you'd have somewhat better performance. We don't usually recommend L2ARC (what you're referring to as cache) until a system has at least 64GB, although my own opinion is that one can carefully dabble in that at 32GB - a 60 or maybe 120GB SSD could help read performance (the 60 is more of a sure thing, whereas the 120 could hurt you).

 

[Mike Hope]

The docs say 8 drives is not optimal for RaidZ2. Thats why i went for 6 x 6TB giving 24TB of usable space.

I think the C2750 boards are overpriced, you get decent server boards plus cpu for almost the same and have a more powerfull cpu. Ofc you then only have 6 SATA ports from the chipset and need a HBA if you want more. Add $80 for that ...
So unless you really need a very compact, very low power system, you might reconsider your choice.

 

[jgreco]

The thing is that the average NAS today can do very well on a low power CPU. You don't necessarily want or need a wattblaster.

While the C2750 may be somewhat overpriced, it /is/ a one-time expense and once you have it, ... sweeet.

 

[Clayton]

Thanks for the Input! I have the system built and currently doing my burn in. (48 hours in) I can't say much about the build other than I setup S.M.A.R.T. emailing and I am getting message of one of my HDD is running around 47c, while everyone else is below 40c and I have yet to find any bad blocks. Taking the side filter off the case did lower my temperatures considerably but can't help but feel that the filter was there for a reason. I do notice of the 8 drives, 2 of them do seem to vibrate much more then the others. ill have to keep an eye on those.

 

[Mike Hope]

The thing is that the average NAS today can do very well on a low power CPU. You don't necessarily want or need a wattblaster.

Sure. But when PLEX shall stream and transcode to multiple clients things might look different.
The interesting part will show once PLEX will be able to deal with h265, allowing video file space to be reduced be 50% and still be able to stream to "old" clients that are only capable of h264 playback ...

And Haswell systems have pretty low wattage in idle, too.

Anyway the TO is using the system as is and hopefully will give feedback about PLEX performance.

 

[jgreco]

Sure. But when PLEX shall stream and transcode to multiple clients things might look different.
The interesting part will show once PLEX will be able to deal with h265, allowing video file space to be reduced be 50% and still be able to stream to "old" clients that are only capable of h264 playback ...

And Haswell systems have pretty low wattage in idle, too.

Anyway the TO is using the system as is and hopefully will give feedback about PLEX performance.

Well, yeah, I did say "the average NAS." Your average NAS doesn't run Plex transcoding. ;-) The C2750 can manage some moderate transcoding but isn't going to be a champ at that. Of course, neither are many of the lower-cost i3 options that people would be looking at as competitors to the Avoton. You want large-scale transcoding? Definitely the Xeon.

But the Avoton C2750 is going to be extremely attractive as a small-footprint option that has a lot of oomph for the size.

 

[Mike Hope]

Your average NAS doesn't run Plex transcoding. ;-)

The TO mentioned PLEX explicitly. Thats why I commented on it.
I'm also going to try out PLEX (using Kodi atm).

 

[jgreco]

Yes, but Plex and Plex-requiring-transcoding are two different beasts. A lot of people have been just fine running Plex on relatively low-powered NAS boxes (incuding a lot of non-FreeNAS gear with SoC-class CPU's which are completely incapable of any meaningful transcoding).

You are the person who introduced the word "transcoding" in this thread.

The C2750 will be able to handle some basic transcoding and the Plex forums have the discussion on that; as with any transcoding, given a sufficiently high bitrate, I can cause a CPU to fail to be able to handle it.

The fact that it can handle transcoding at all differentiates it from most average NAS products.