Building your own NAS?

[GJOB]

Has anyone got any experience of building their own NAS and if so could you advise on the positives and pitfalls?

Even better would be if anyone has built their own rack mounted version - is a bare bones rack just as easy to work with?

I've been looking at off the shelf solutions but I'll be regularly moving terabytes of data so need something really fast.

TIA
GJOB

[robpearson]

If you're moving volumes of data and want speed why are you looking at a NAS? Surely directly attached storage would give you many times the throughput? Someone bought a QNAP at work for use in cloning PC's and the network write speed is terrible, dug an old dell server out (6 years old) and it's considerably faster although still not as quick as USB3

[RichwiththeS2000]

For home, I got a HP Microserver, filled it with 4x 4Tb SATA drives. Cost less than £300 for the lot IIRC. RAID 1 the disks for protection, install linux + Samba. Speeds are good (it will max out a 100/100 connection, and it has spare PCI slots if you want to add faster network cards.

Job done, and it only uses about 100W of power on full chat so its not going to cost much to leave on.

Avoid the NAS 'appliances' you can get, they typically have really stty CPUs and NICs which makes the speeds terrible.

[GJOB]

Thanks guys, it's going to be used in a small office so direct attachment isn't really an option, we're working in the cloud so don't have servers on premise.

We already use a consumer NAS and the read/write isn't very good so I was thinking of may be building something using a desktop or rack mounted case.

Ta.

[TonyRPH]

Rack mounted kit is typically noisy, and also tends to cost more.

I would go for a Microserver with an HP P410i RAID controller (best performance / data security) with 4 drives in a RAID 6 configuration.

Depending on which O/S you want to use, RAM requirements could vary from 2Gb to 8Gb, although Windows Server 2012 will quite happily perform as a file server for a small office (~ 50 users*) with 4Gb RAM.

• Obviously this is influenced by other factors - this is a rough guide.

[bitchstewie]

It depends and I think we need more info on the use case.

The main thing is support - generally you build it you own it and rightly or wrongly, should you have a problem, there is an amount of comfort in being able to just pick up the phone and call EMC/HDS/HP/Dell or whoever supports it vs. "Oh he's on holiday isn't he, oh well I'm sure he won't mind if we call him as he built the thing".

[jjlynn27]

DS415+ and Link aggregation.

[GJOB]

It is mainly for Point Cloud data and large CAD files to be linked to or transferred between 8 CAD machines. Everyone else is using the cloud.

Just looking for the fastest read/write possible, looking at the specs on some of the pre-built systems they'll be laggy, we've got a gigabit switch to connect it all together.

[bitchstewie]

What capacity do you need and do you have any idea what kind of IOPS requirement you have?

What do you have now - how many spindles are in it and what's the layout?

[GJOB]

bhstewie said:

What capacity do you need and do you have any idea what kind of IOPS requirement you have?

What do you have now - how many spindles are in it and what's the layout?

This is where you'll start losing me!

If we have to reference several 2GB files we need the fastest possible speed - my understanding is the motherboard, CPU and RAM is key with a NAS, the drive speeds are less important: http://blog.brianmoses.net/2014/01/diy-nas-2014-ed...

Having looked on here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/nas/vi... and on other sites it seems not unfeasable to aim for 250MB/s or am I dreaming?

[jjlynn27]

GJOB said:

This is where you'll start losing me!

If we have to reference several 2GB files we need the fastest possible speed - my understanding is the motherboard, CPU and RAM is key with a NAS, the drive speeds are less important: http://blog.brianmoses.net/2014/01/diy-nas-2014-ed...

Having looked on here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/nas/vi... and on other sites it seems not unfeasable to aim for 250MB/s or am I dreaming?

Again, why would you want to build something that will inherently be less suited to the purpose and you'll have diff manufacturers pointing fingers at each other when things go wrong? That blog suggests to use wd green drives in a NAS. They are completely unsuitable. More hdds (spindles) = better performance. As before, get Synology of some description, stick NON-GREEN drives in (WD Reds are decent choice) or any enterprise class drives and you'll get better performance than anything that you can build for similar money.

[bitchstewie]

GJOB said:

This is where you'll start losing me!

If we have to reference several 2GB files we need the fastest possible speed - my understanding is the motherboard, CPU and RAM is key with a NAS, the drive speeds are less important: http://blog.brianmoses.net/2014/01/diy-nas-2014-ed...

Having looked on here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/nas/vi... and on other sites it seems not unfeasable to aim for 250MB/s or am I dreaming?

Drive speeds per drive play a part but quantity of drives is what makes the difference.

More physical drives in a disk array makes it quicker so in simple terms 10x HDDs in a RAID10 set will be much faster than 2x HDDs - CPU and RAM play a part but a reasonably small one.

Also you need to think about your workstations - what spec are they i.e. do you end up with an insanely fast NAS but you still have workstations with a single hard drive and 2GB RAM which become the bottleneck.

Generally I'd look at Synology as they're reasonably low cost, easy to use, and perform well - I just don't see the benefit in rolling your own in a business environment unless you either have some very specific needs or you're just constrained by budget so need to cut corners.

[TonyRPH]

GJOB said:

T
<snip>
We already use a consumer NAS and the read/write isn't very good
<snip>

Which NAS do you already have?

Maybe that would benefit from some newer / different disks or a re-think of it's configuration?

[GJOB]

Thanks guys, not budget constrained as such but was stunned to see that price doesn't always equal performance, looking at the figures on some of them you'd think they were the bees knees and then TomHardware wouldn't have scored them.

The links tot he blogs were only for opinion on what makes a NAS fast - On a gigabit network with high spec PC's (32GB RAM, 256 SSD, 7200 HDD, etc), spending £1500 on a NAS for it to "only" have a mediocre throughput concerns me.

I am not sufficiently technical in this area hence am looking for advice as to what config would give me a "mega NAS" suitable for sharing up to 12TB of large data files between PC's as fast as possible.

Don't have to build my own (I should have thought harder about the thread title) - I did see a video which I can no longer find showing an "ultimate" NAS by some American tech programme which got me thinking about it and when I saw on the Qnaps site the spread of performance between drives it really concerned me.

Will research the Synology brand further, they do seem to score high but it always seems to be on consumer testing rather the business side (does it matter?)

Cheers

[TonyRPH]

You can get a rackmount Synology and they are actually pretty silent until things start warming up (rare).

We have one here at work with 16TB in it and my son runs a smaller version at home - it runs quiet and cool enough to happily sit in his study.

[GJOB]

TonyRPH said:

You can get a rackmount Synology and they are actually pretty silent until things start warming up (rare).

We have one here at work with 16TB in it and my son runs a smaller version at home - it runs quiet and cool enough to happily sit in his study.

[theboss]

Performance varies enourmously in these systems because many people mistake high data transfer rates quoted for hard disk and NAS systems, with the ability to service a high rate of storage operations per second (IOPS as was mentioned above).

Buy a consumer or even SME 200MBps disk backed NAS unit and most of the time you'll smash it to pieces with not even 5MBps of completely random storage operations, for the same reason a single 1Gbps file copies far faster than 10,000 files consuming the same drive space.

Personally if you don't mind spending the money I'd buy a proper rack mount server with a decent storage controller with write-backed caching and stuff it full of SAS disks in RAID10. If money is no object substitute disks for SSDs. 12TB is quite easily done in a regular 2u server from HP/Dell. Try not to touch consumer level SATA disks with a barge pole.

[Digitalize]

I'd go for a Synology if I had the money.

I use a HP N54L with Xpenology (Synology's OS modified to work on other devices) and it works great. Interface is brilliant, fast over Ethernet and fairly quiet, although it's kept in the garage.

[TurricanII]

Whilst NAS boxes are great, do you need auditing of file access, or granular permissions on folders on the NAS? A lot of NAS boxes are skimpy in this important area. I personally would go with a Microsoft server for these features.

[jjlynn27]

Times when you could save worthwhile amounts by building your own are long gone. There are other makes (Seagate, Qnap, Nexsan) to name the few. All of them make units targeted at SME. My recommendation was based purely on experience.
Whatever you do, do not buy power saving (green drives). To further increase performance you can get couple of SSD drives and, if memory serves right, some Synology units can use them as cache.