Building a home server

[martixy]

With the general trend of upgrading things on my computer these days, compounded by the fact my SSD perished right on christmas eve and now I'm twiddling my thumbs, waiting for the day stores are open again, I've been thinking about the things I want out of the home server I might eventually build.

Here's the story: I just upgraded my videocard and monitor, which cost me a pretty buck(one of which will continue to see use, the other I pawned off to a friend). In a month or two I will be upgrading the rest to something current gen(i.e. a Kaby Lake of some description).

This leaves me with what is essentially a barebones computer(a 2600K sandy bridge with 16GB of RAM and the related semi-expensive ASUS mobo). Which could be slapped in a cheap enclosure and delegated to other tasks.

The mobo features 6 sata headers - 2 sata2 and 4 sata3.
What I was thinking is creating a combo NAS/router, by running 2 VMs on the machine, hosting pfSense + FreeNAS in a 1/3 resource allocation.

How good of an idea is that? What are the potential caveats(like maybe does virtualizing FreeNAS require VT-d from the processor or somesuch, which this one doesn't have. Fie on intel and its silly market segmentation)? Is it a feasible plan at all? Like what would I use as the hypervisor, etc.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Vt-d makes things easier, but isn't an absolute requirement.

Otherwise, not a bad idea.

 

[Valantar]

I've been pondering a similar idea for when I upgrade my main desktop. From what i know, pfsense runs fine from a USB stick, which would leave you all of the SATA ports for NAS usage. I guess you'd need to invest in a multi port NIC (or two? Possibly 10GbE?) for your router?

Of course this would be total overkill for both NAS and router usage, but commercial routers are awful, and reusing hardware that you already have is smart on so many levels. Perhaps you should consider underclocking and undervolting the CPU?

I don't know near enough to be of any real help here, but I'll sure follow along for any tips that show up!

 

[poofyhairguy]

I wouldn't build a NAS solely out of desktop parts in 2016. The CPU is fine, but I wouldn't re-use the RAM or mobo.

Barely old ECC ram is just too cheap on Ebay to avoid it. Hell you need ECC ram for FreeNAS anyway. Combine that CPU, some ECC RAM and a compatible Mobo and you are set. For the Mobo Newegg still has some 1155 server boards that support ECC ram, or you can just get a cheap S1200BTL off of Ebay.

 

[martixy]

You're basically telling me to not reuse anything(the CPU does not support ECC ram). That's not the point of the exercise.
No matter how cheap old ECC ram is, not spending even that much is even cheaper. And there is nothing special about ZFS over any other filesystem that requires ECC.

Now, continuing the thread, as a system that will be used mostly for backup and storage, I was wondering what disks I should get.
My current dilemma is Seagate Archive vs WD Red. It seems to me that the usage pattern of occasional backups(1/day) + even rarer media writes + mostly reading fits the Archive drive.
It is conveniently quite a bit cheaper, but maybe there's something I'm missing.

 

[poofyhairguy]

You're basically telling me to not reuse anything(the CPU does not support ECC ram). That's not the point of the exercise.
No matter how cheap old ECC ram is, not spending even that much is even cheaper. And there is nothing special about ZFS over any other filesystem that requires ECC.

No that CPU does support ECC, just the motherboard doesn't. Basically I was advising you to sell your old mobo and ram and buy a cheap server mobo that can work with that CPU and some even cheaper ECC ram as you could maybe even make some money back or at the very least break even with better parts. ECC isn't about OS support, it's about data integrity. But I get it if you don't want to do that. My first Unraid server was made out of old hackintosh parts so I get the appeal of reusing stuff at first so I will drop it.

Now, continuing the thread, as a system that will be used mostly for backup and storage, I was wondering what disks I should get.
My current dilemma is Seagate Archive vs WD Red. It seems to me that the usage pattern of occasional backups(1/day) + even rarer media writes + mostly reading fits the Archive drive.
It is conveniently quite a bit cheaper, but maybe there's something I'm missing.

Backblaze data says HGST drives are the most reliable in the consumer space overall so I stick to them if I can nowadays. I am up to like 9 now. Reds are good too, I would get them over an equivalent priced Seagate any day. I actually use only the WD Blacks as parity drives in my bigger Unraid server because I trust them.

 

[martixy]

ARK says it doesn't.
The thing is, you can put ECC memory, and it will work. It just won't do any error correcting. So what's the point?

Also, I just found out that HGST is actually owned by Western Digital.
And which HGST drives would you recommend? I think Ultrastar are too expensive for me atm.
Found H3IKNAS40003272SE, i.e. the 4TB Deskstar NAS drive, which seems pretty good value to me. That any good?

 

[poofyhairguy]

ARK says it doesn't.
The thing is, you can put ECC memory, and it will work. It just won't do any error correcting. So what's the point?

Fair enough.

Also, I just found out that HGST is actually owned by Western Digital.
And which HGST drives would you recommend? I think Ultrastar are too expensive for me atm.
Found H3IKNAS40003272SE, i.e. the 4TB Deskstar NAS drive, which seems pretty good value to me. That any good?

I have five of those, they are probably my favorite drive for the price right now.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Simple answe: don't use FreeNAS and ZFS. Use something else.

 

[martixy]

Why not? ZFS seems to offer many benefits over regular filesystems for a NAS.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've used mdadm raid with great success on systems with and without ECC. Load up CentOS or other Linux OS and read up on mdadm (fairly simple to use and understand). Since you're trying to reuse hardware no point in starting to get a new mobo, then trying to find ram that is compatible etc... If it was a scratch build then I'd recommend starting with a Supermicro barebones and go from there and would definitly recommend ECC. But it's not a must. You'll want a case with hot swap bays though. You don't want to be trying to tinker inside a live server. The hot swap bays just make it easier to change drives as they fail. You can get retro fit ones that go in the cdrom bays of an existing desktop case.

As for drives I tend to go with the "high performance" line of whatever manufacturer I go with. Ex: WD Black. The Reds are good too. Avoid "Green" or any drives that go to sleep. Any raid will see that as a failure and drop out the drive. Drives that go to sleep are a pita in general anyway as they increase access time. HGST makes some good drives too. I probably would not bother with "enterprise" drives, but that's an argument for a whole other thread. I just feel they are too pricy for the potential small performance boost you might get.

Whatever you do, raid of sorts whether you use ZFS or mdadm is a very good idea. You obviously want backups too, but raid gives you uptime and convenience as you don't need to recopy/restructure/reorganize your data should a drive fail. You pop a new one in and good to go. A failure also won't interrupt any work you were doing. your file shares etc will just continue to work.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Why not? ZFS seems to offer many benefits over regular filesystems for a NAS.

Name one and explain how you'll benefit from it. ;-)

(Most people can't.)

You're the one who wants to recycle hardware. There's nothing wrong with that, but it does mean working with what you've got.

Most commercial small NAS boxes are using Linux mdadm to manage a software raid, and ext3/4 as a file system on top of that, and it works just fine for 99.9%+ of cases. It's solid, reliable, it works, no caveats or yeahbuts.

The impression I get is that some people think ZFS is some kind of magic bulletproof file system that means they don't need backups or something. It's not. Don't forget to back up your NAS. I recommend a crashplan subscription or something similar, for simplicity's sake.

 

[daxzy]

The impression I get is that some people think ZFS is some kind of magic bulletproof file system that means they don't need backups or something. It's not. Don't forget to back up your NAS. I recommend a crashplan subscription or something similar, for simplicity's sake.

There's a very vocal ZFS community that perpetuates this. Also, use ECC if you care about the data.

 

[simas]

"How good of an idea is that?"

Well.. the answer really depends on what you want from your "server" , its NAS functions or its "server" functions as those are somewhat contradictory. Right now you are asking a question similar to - I want the carrying capacity of 26 ft truck and agility/acceleration of race car, but I don't want to spend any money and have this old station wagon, will it work? Yes, to a point - you can carry things in your trunk and yes it would move forward, but it will not have the power of the real truck nor speed of the race car (but it would meet your cheap goal)... makes sense?

NAS - you want something that is very low power consumption, easily maintained, and comes with very good ecosystem. With pricing of 2 bay diskless units from major vendors (Synology, QNAP,etc) at barely over $100, you get great device automatically managed and patched and fixed, with very low power consumption, and strong ecosystem. This would run quiet, very low power, and be completely hands off. if you use same vendor you also get offsite backup for these , auto sync, and many other 'cloud' features.

Server - if your needs require real compute capacity than the number of cores you will want would be numbered in double digits and you most likely will be building. these would run hot, loud, drink power like crazy but would allow you to use something like 32 cores of SB for fairly cheap.

in my environment I have always on NAS units that handle my storage, media storage, and backup needs, and I have a server that I spin up when I want to test something different requiring real capacity. Server runs Hyper V 2016 and hosts various VMs (I do database architecture so I test/work with various versions of Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB ) . I also run very low grade consumer box (S510 from Lenovo) with cheap SSD and 32 GB of ram to use as my Plex server and various other needs .

and welcome to server land , once you arrive you will quickly see that your "needs" clearly require additional spending and the roads starts from here...