Where to start to build a NAS & routing & server device?

[cubytus]

Hello community,

as my first post, I want to find a starting point for a rather ambitious goal I have of replacing outdated (slower) and integrating (still good and useful) parts, currently connected by a forest of cables and power supplies. I am going to list them all here in order for readers to get a better overview. I gave them simple names to tell them apart.

First part: hardware owned:
Storage
Blue HDD: 250GB, SATA
Orange HDD: 250GB, SATA
Green HDD: 500GB, SATA
Appz HDD: 500GB, USB 2.0 (internally it is IDE)
Toshiba 750: 750GB, eSATA (internally SATA)
TM: 1.5TB, eSATA (internally SATA)
"floaters"
WD470, 500GB, USB. Movie and song archives. Now rarely moved, but still useful.
G670, 750GB, FireWire 800. Houses virtual machines, mainly. Often gets hauled for demos.
HIT500, 500GB, USB. Currently backup, storage and "large USB drive" for quick debugging of incompatible machines.
Empty FW800 2.5" enclosure

Network devices
Linksys WRT54GL, modded and overclocked.
5-ports gigabit switch

Others
Samsung ML 2510 printer

Second part: what it will be used for
Here, I will list expected usage frequency for each task as +++, ++, or +. All tasks have been combined and numbered for easier reference.

1. File server for LAN (+++)
2. Backup target for Time Machine (+++)
3. General storage for large applications I hold licenses for (+), movies (+++), archived documents (+). AFP protocol.
4. BitTorrent client (+++)
5. email SMTP server (+)
6. SFTP server (no FTP) (+)
7. videosurveillance H264 encoding & local storage (backup will take place through real-time upload to distant SFTP server) I haven't had much luck with ZoneMinder on Ubuntu Server however. (+++)
8. 802.11n (minimum) router, seamless with current gigabit switch. Must have WAN port (+++)
9. Able to saturate the gigabit link given proper HDD setup
10. All hard disks will be encrypted. This needs to be enable-able progressively as data would be moved from old setup drives to newer setup.
11. Simple swapping of hard drives (+). Note that hot-swap is not strictly necessary, but a new, unformatted drive must be accepted, the system restarted, and the new drive formatted, encrypted and be ready for use with a few clicks in the web interface without disrupting others.
12. Print server. Not mandatory, but if included, will be (+++)

Third part: Hypothetical system would have:

1. Low power consumption with aggressive power management to save on noise and UPS power. That must not compromise HDD reliability.
2. No noisier than an off-the-shelf NAS (18dBA, from Synology's website). Ideally fanless.
3. Power from laptop adapter would be ideal (19V), or 12V general purpose power supply. Must be tolerant of brownouts as my apartment has only two circuits and voltage varies from 119V down to 107V under full load. No change to electrical circuit can be made.
4. RAID 0, 1, possibly 5, or JBOD-compatible since drives are not assorted.
5. automatic update
6. Completely self-reliant. Must be able to power down by itself if it senses UPS to go low without needing any monitor or keyboard. Must power up at the press of a button to a working state without having to use a keyboard, mouse or monitor. This includes checking and correcting HDDs if an unexpected power failure occurred.
7. Full Gigabit Ethernet. No crappy Ethernet-USB dongle that cut performance in half.
8. Able to be installed without external monitor (I don't have any) but directly through a network connection.
9. Can't decide yet wether to run the NAS-router OS itself from a SD-family card or one of the HDDs. The former seems to be best.
10. being able to change hardware at will shouldn't be necessary. I don't expect to change anything except HDDs as long as performance is satisfactory.

Expected issues to be solved
Vibration, heat. All these HDD in a confined space will heat up and vibration decrease their lifespan. I guess there's a reason why Western Digital made a special drive series for use in NAS.
Form factor. Needs to be small, or very flat, 1U server-rack style.
Described as is, it may appear that I am looking for an AirPort Time Capsule on steroids, and you would be right. However, it seems to be too limited for the high price it costs, and still doesn't solve the issue of putting all these drives back online, and doesn't have any data security, etc. Synology NAS would provide a good part of these, but is expensive, and less flexible.
I know it all sounds like a very ambitious and costly project, but if deemed necessary, I could separate the actual network routing and leave it to dedicated hardware running Tomato firmware, for example, and keep the rest on another machine should I want to move it around.
So I came here to welcome your advice on hardware & software combination meeting those requirements, ask questions, suggest alternatives, etc. This is really exploratory as I am completely new to NAS and just made a summary of my current usage. I don't even know if FreeNAS is the right software to run it. Expected timeframe to build depends on price, but I feel it could remain useful for those who have good pieces of older hardware lying around.

 

[cyberjock]

Nice writeup. Very clean and organized. But, you aren't like to get a response like what you are hoping for. You'll get responses if you post the hardware you plan to use and let us critique it. If you want someone to build it on paper for you, you aren't going to find people that are into that stuff here.

My advice, experiment in FreeNAS in a VM for a while. See if you can figure it out(some people can't.. and you'll be unhappy if you drop money on hardware and then spend weeks or months trying to get it to work for you). Then read our stickies. They are written mostly by mods because we're sick of people complaining about slow performance and or losing their data from common newbie mistakes. We hate seeing people sad when they lose their data too. Then, come back with a hardware build you would be willing to purchase and let us see if there's anything obvious you don't want to do or maybe have a slightly better recommendation.

All the non-server stuff is beyond the scope of this forum. You are welcome to ask in the off-topic section for recommendations for routers and other random things, but take the advice as being off-topic. It could contain errors, things that really aren't "good", etc.

 

[pirateghost]

Based on your requirements. FreeNAS is not for you.

You are wanting contradictory items here. You want silence, but you want 1U. Uh, thats damn near impossible. Fanless too? Are you trying to cook your drives?

Laptop power brick to power a FreeNAS server? NOPE. FreeNAS requires some POWER to run.

You want router functionality from the server? or are you asking for router recommendations? FreeNAS will not run router duties. Not even in Jails.

SMTP server? Nope. Not unless you start understanding the Jails system.
Print server? Nope. See answer for SMTP server.
Automatic updates? Nope.
Install the system without monitor? Sort of. You can install the OS to a USB thumb drive (READ THE DOCUMENTATION, THIS IS THE RECOMMENDED WAY TO RUN FREENAS) from any computer, and boot the server with it. Heaven help you if you need to troubleshoot your hodgepodge server build from the console....


You should get started with the documentation as it contains a lot of useful information about what you are asking. For the rest, lets see how open you are to a combination of devices...

 

[cubytus]

Let's not confuse words here. I don't want 1U, I suggest 1U, hence the "style" at the end of the sentence. I was referring to flatness, not a precise case. By laying the drives side by side with an open top, I assume the could remain cool enough not to require any fan. Usually forum rules recommend to post a goal, then let the more knowledgeable people sort the best way to reach it, instead of starting the wrong way then try to get help on that.

Silence is mandatory as I must sleep near it. Of course spinning drives do make noise when accessed, but should spindown whenever possible. Autoupdate refers to security patches that may be issued during the lifetime of the FreeNAS install. Low power consumption is also a plus as I don't want to build an auxiliary heater. From the documentation, even non.ZFS, it seems that FreeNAS is very RAM-hungry, which would exclude miniITX solutions. It seems better suited to large installations in a professional setting, but less to home-users.

Experimenting with FreeNAS in a VM makes sense. I could reproduce each drive 1/10th scale, trying to connect and disconnect them to get an overview of its functionality. However, VirtualBox doesn't allow to specify what connection it should simulate (except for internal SATA and IDE), does it?

I guess it would be best to separate the NAS from the actual routing hardware, but a good-performing, reasonably future-proof router costs about $200 (Asus AC66U, out the top of my head). That's not exactly cheap. Since both should be upgraded and that I do not have an enterprise-level budget, some compromises must be made. It may well be the case FreeNAS wouldn't be the right choice for a low or no-maintenance NAS/router, but in that case, what OS would do that? Some router OS with NAS functionality?

 

[pirateghost]

I would say have a look at open media vault, nas4free, or something like zentyal, or clearos. See what they have to offer. If you are looking for something low powered, and with most of those feature requests, FreeNAS isn't for you

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

[cmfisher4]

Sent from my Nexus 5?! Lucky!!

 

[pirateghost]

Sent from my Nexus 5?! Lucky!!

Haha

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

[cubytus]

From what I could read on other NAS software, they don't seem to differ much from FreeNAS, yet list much lower requirements, particularly in RAM. So what is the difference, why would FreeNAS require so much?

 

[cyberjock]

"other" isn't too specific.

Random answers to this question from others in the past include:

1. ZFS eats RAM, so that could be one reason.
2. FreeNAS also has a lot of features that others don't that use ZFS.
3. And their requirements aren't necessarily significantly lower when you start talking about large servers, which is what FreeNAS is geared towards. In some cases their performance sucks unless you put in as much RAM as FreeNAS recommends anyway. So it just looks lower on paper.

 

[JohnK]

You didn't specify your space requirements?
I use two Bufallo Linkstation with a dedicated Buffalo DriveStations backup for simple 5TB network storage. It doesn't provide router functionality, but then those are completely different type of technologies that I wouldn't try to mix. I do have a Buffalo Airstation, as an access point and it can do some of the functionality you are looking for, but I wouldn't even think about setting up bit torrent on it.

Only now that I'm looking for even more storage am I'm building my first FreeNas server. I would recommend looking at what people recommend for parts and if necessary start from scratch.

 

[cubytus]

Thanks, it wasn't so clear from the homepage that FreeNAS was more an enterprise OS than a home one. Requirements are not based upon space, which I have enough of, but on putting different hdd back online, with a faster and more practical connection than simple USB2.0. The whole point of the topic was, indeed, to get recommendations on hardware, but it seems I missed an obvious point, FreeNAS not being geared toward small networks.

I had an eye on the Asus AC66U (out the top of my head, correct me if wrong) which does support BT, but is very expensive for a router.

 

[cyberjock]

Thanks, it wasn't so clear from the homepage that FreeNAS was more an enterprise OS than a home one. Requirements are not based upon space, which I have enough of, but on putting different hdd back online, with a faster and more practical connection than simple USB2.0. The whole point of the topic was, indeed, to get recommendations on hardware, but it seems I missed an obvious point, FreeNAS not being geared toward small networks.

Correct. It can work on small networks but is designed and targeted for very large servers. ZFS was originally pitched as a "zettabyte file system", which is 1 billion TB. Of course, ZFS actually can handle 256 quadrillion zettabytes(a whole cubic boatload of TB) So not small by any stretch of the imagination. There are people that have simple 1TB pools and are very happy with it. Others have 100TB+. I believe that the last time I read about ZFS' limits, if you took every hard drive every made since they were made and put them all in 1 big pool ZFS' maximum size limit is still bigger than that.

But, if you want to monitor and prevent corruption of your files, there is no beating ZFS for storage. FreeNAS does have excellent performance and reliability regardless of server size.

Good luck in whatever choice you make.

 

[cubytus]

In that context, only one application from those I lested would need to be checked for corruption, and that's a 1.5TB volume. And if it happens from defective sectors, I am not sure ZFS would do the trick. I rely on checking HDD for bad sectors from time to time, and would replace it if they are detected.

 

[Yatti420]

In that context, only one application from those I lested would need to be checked for corruption, and that's a 1.5TB volume. And if it happens from defective sectors, I am not sure ZFS would do the trick. I rely on checking HDD for bad sectors from time to time, and would replace it if they are detected.

Haha really? I don't understand what you mean.. http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Main_Page

See the ZFS wiki.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

 

[cubytus]

I get it's auto-repairable formatted in ZFS? On the other hand, doesn't it uses a great deal of resources from the server?

 

[jgreco]

It's a NAS. The whole purpose for the resources existing is to reliably store and serve your files.

If you don't want to provide the resources for reliable storage and fileservice, then I suggest that external USB drives are available at Walmart, Best Buy, etc.

 

[cubytus]

There is a difference between using a $500 machine resources, and absolutely requiring a $10k machine just to run right.

NAS literally means "Network Attached Storage", nothing more, and I interpret it as such. From the start there has been no implication of the presence of any mission-critical files that would need to be backed up thrice at least in different physical locations that would require, unless otherwise noted. This topic already clarified that FreeNAS architecture couldn't mix routing and NAS business. Here it was said that it requires really powerful machines, while another single voice said he runs FreeNAS satisfactorily on an old P4 (Though probably not in ZFS). When an ZFS-formatted hard drive fails, whatever the filesystem on it, files are dead.

To someone who never built this actual, physical machine, this is indeed very confusing, and my only conclusion so far is that FreeNAS is much too heavy to be used in a typical home/SoHo setting.

 

[cyberjock]

To someone who never built this actual, physical machine, this is indeed very confusing, and my only conclusion so far is that FreeNAS is much too heavy to be used in a typical home/SoHo setting.

Well, if you look at the actual technological requirements for ZFS, some would agree with you. ZFS wasn't exactly designed for small servers in your basement. There's nothing stopping you from using it as such so long as the cost is acceptable. ZFS isn't for everyone. And for the people that think that ZFS should be redesigned so they can use it in their home with cheap hardware, their naivety shows.

If you read my noobie guide I say something in there about FreeNAS not being for everyone.

 

[jgreco]

There is a difference between using a $500 machine resources, and absolutely requiring a $10k machine just to run right.

And there are in fact NAS systems that require a $10K machine just to run right. Fortunately FreeNAS ain't one of them. You can actually build a NAS platform with FreeNAS for about..., what, $500 plus the cost of drives? That's actually better than the cost of most vendor-provided 4-drive NAS units (Synology DS412+ currently around $600 and limited to 4 drives).

NAS literally means "Network Attached Storage", nothing more, and I interpret it as such.

Then that's your mistake. Network Attached Storage has a clear meaning in the industry. Do you consider Seagate Kinetic to be NAS? Because by your definition, it is... it is storage that is directly attached via ethernet to the network. There's a good Wikipedia on what NAS actually is. I am not willing to entertain a discussion over what you think NAS ought to mean.

From the start there has been no implication of the presence of any mission-critical files that would need to be backed up thrice at least in different physical locations that would require, unless otherwise noted. This topic already clarified that FreeNAS architecture couldn't mix routing and NAS business.

Not couldn't. It absolutely could do it. The word is "wouldn't", because FreeNAS has not been designed to do that. You could absolutely design a FreeBSD based box that would do all that stuff. FreeNAS doesn't try to be everything to everyone because then it becomes very difficult to do the thing that it is supposed to do, well.

Here it was said that it requires really powerful machines, while another single voice said he runs FreeNAS satisfactorily on an old P4 (Though probably not in ZFS). When an ZFS-formatted hard drive fails, whatever the filesystem on it, files are dead.

That's just design fail. ZFS is intended to have redundancy available.

If I point a shotgun at my foot and pull the trigger, why, yes, my toes go away. Imagine!

To someone who never built this actual, physical machine, this is indeed very confusing, and my only conclusion so far is that FreeNAS is much too heavy to be used in a typical home/SoHo setting.

Not at all. The truth of the matter is this:

1) Vendor supplied "consumer" devices typically run lightweight busybox and ext3 on a drive, or a pair of drives. They will be cheap and moderately fast, but do not do much for data integrity. You are limited to probably about 4TB or maybe 8TB if you are sure you don't need redundancy.

2) Vendor supplied "SMB" devices typically also run lightweight busybox and ext3 on a pair or quartet of drives. You are probably limited to 12TB (4 x 4TB in RAID5), and this still does very little for data integrity. These stop being cheap though; the pair of drive devices are probably a bit less expensive than a small FreeNAS box, but the quartet devices are usually more.

3) Going past 4 drives, vendor NAS devices get pricey quick. FreeNAS devices do not get as pricey as quick. So if you have 16TB that you need to store, you will probably find by doing the math that a 6 4TB FreeNAS box in RAIDZ2 is cheaper than that 6 bay ReadyNAS RNDU6000 for $1000.