Building your own NAS?
Discussion
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
b
hstewie said:
hstewie 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!What do you have now - how many spindles are in it and what's the layout?
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?
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
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
Something link this then: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-Rackstation-RS814...
Synology RS814 4 Bay 1U Rackmount Network Attached Storage
Dual Core CPU with Floating-Point Unit
Over 135MB/s Writing, 211MB/s Reading
Dual LAN with Failover and Link Aggregation Support
1GB RAM Boosting Multitasking Power
Scale up to 32TB with Synology RX410
Synology site shows up to 24TB capacity but I would look at WD Red 4TB x 4 and may be just get the case for £414...
Thoughts?
bhstewie said:
hstewie said: It's probably OK. The difficulty if you have no idea of what your IO requirements are.
4x Red drives in RAID10 is fine for sequential IO but it isn't a whole heap of random IO which is what you tend to get when you have lots of machines simultaneously accessing different files.
So it isn't a bad choice because it's a poor product, it might be a bad choice if your IO requirements mean you need more spindles.
Can you help by advising how I go about defining my IO requirements?4x Red drives in RAID10 is fine for sequential IO but it isn't a whole heap of random IO which is what you tend to get when you have lots of machines simultaneously accessing different files.
So it isn't a bad choice because it's a poor product, it might be a bad choice if your IO requirements mean you need more spindles.
Who knew it could be such a interesting topic!
What do I currently have: WD 6TB thing from PCWorld, cost about £300, Gigabit LAN
How is it configured?: I Plugged it in and switch it on
It may get set up to provide network storage of individuals files and as well as having shared drives for collaborative working. It will be mainly used by those with very large files that would a) hammer the bandwidth b) fill up the allowances on the users cloud account.
So the major will be very large files. We need them to open as fast as possible on a users machine, they may reference dozens of these large files at a time.
HTH
What do I currently have: WD 6TB thing from PCWorld, cost about £300, Gigabit LAN
How is it configured?: I Plugged it in and switch it on
It may get set up to provide network storage of individuals files and as well as having shared drives for collaborative working. It will be mainly used by those with very large files that would a) hammer the bandwidth b) fill up the allowances on the users cloud account.
So the major will be very large files. We need them to open as fast as possible on a users machine, they may reference dozens of these large files at a time.
HTH
jjlynn27 said:
more meaningful results would be gained from bonnie++ or similar. As for your 6TB WD box; if it's configured from 2x3tb drives, it's configured as r0 aka suicide raid. Failure of either drive will result in loss of all data.
This, it's a prosumer box, the older version of this http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/data-storage/hard-dr...It's RAID0 but it doesn't contain mission critical data at the moment, that's why I'm looking for some help - having checked the specs for what I thought I wanted I don't know if that will meet our needs and I don't want to keep sending stuff back...
...like someone said, chicken & egg ...
If we build something at least we can replace parts or re-purpose them if I spec something incorrectly - we ll that's the idea any way.
TonyRPH said:
We bought an RS814RP+ - slightly better performance.
I would highly recommend buying from Ebuyer as they install the disks and provide better warranty coverage because they fitted the disks.
You can find the spec for the RP814RP+ here
I have ours running with 4 bonded Gigabit ports to maximise LAN throughput (even though we only primarily use it for backups!).
Short spec:
Dual Core CPU with Floating-Point Unit
? Over 330MB/s Reading, 196MB/s Writing
? 4 LAN with Failover and Link Aggregation Support
? 2GB RAM for Boosting Multitasking Power
? Features USB 3.0 ports
? Scale up to 40TB with Synology
RX410
? Redundant Power Supplies Ensure
Service Uptime (RS814RP+ only)
? VMware® / Citrix® / Hyper-V®
Compliance
? Running on Synology DiskStation
?Manager (DSM)
Tony, so how do I tell if this is good? with 4 bonded connections what's the theoretical maximum read/write using 7200rpm disks? I would highly recommend buying from Ebuyer as they install the disks and provide better warranty coverage because they fitted the disks.
You can find the spec for the RP814RP+ here
I have ours running with 4 bonded Gigabit ports to maximise LAN throughput (even though we only primarily use it for backups!).
Short spec:
Dual Core CPU with Floating-Point Unit
? Over 330MB/s Reading, 196MB/s Writing
? 4 LAN with Failover and Link Aggregation Support
? 2GB RAM for Boosting Multitasking Power
? Features USB 3.0 ports
? Scale up to 40TB with Synology
RX410
? Redundant Power Supplies Ensure
Service Uptime (RS814RP+ only)
? VMware® / Citrix® / Hyper-V®
Compliance
? Running on Synology DiskStation
?Manager (DSM)
Edited by TonyRPH on Sunday 8th March 15:07
Would it help if the Ethernet card was 10GB?
What would the effect of a bigger processor or more RAM be?
Is there an ultimate NAS build?
Would something like this perform better of worse your system? http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.a...
Does FreeNAS/TrueNAS allow hot swapping?
Brain hurts. Back later.
I found the original video that got me thinking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycbq_gTqT5M
jjlynn27 said:
That link says R1 and the box has 'mirror' in the name, which points to that you'll have 2x6TB drives and data is written to both of them, so if one fails you'll still have data. Performance wise it'll be like (given efficient controller) writing data to a single drive.
Based on limited info, I'd get one of synology boxes, preferably 8/16 drive one and configure it as R10, and keep that box as a backup unit. As Tony suggested bond available network ports.
Based on limited info, I'd get one of synology boxes, preferably 8/16 drive one and configure it as R10, and keep that box as a backup unit. As Tony suggested bond available network ports.
jjlynn27 said:
That link says R1 and the box has 'mirror' in the name, which points to that you'll have 2x6TB drives and data is written to both of them, so if one fails you'll still have data. Performance wise it'll be like (given efficient controller) writing data to a single drive.
Based on limited info, I'd get one of synology boxes, preferably 8/16 drive one and configure it as R10, and keep that box as a backup unit. As Tony suggested bond available network ports.
Based on limited info, I'd get one of synology boxes, preferably 8/16 drive one and configure it as R10, and keep that box as a backup unit. As Tony suggested bond available network ports.
TonyRPH said:
He can back it up to his "WD 6TB thing from PCWorld"
But seriously, I'm not the guy looking after this day to day, I just bought the MyCloud when there were guys looking to share the same data that had been delivered to us on a HDD. Our needs have evolved and now we're ready for the next step. A few more people and we'll likely need someone at least part time to look after the hardware, network, backups etc.
If anyone fancies a part-time job in MK let me know
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