Building a PC-based NAS

[dave_the_nerd]

...and as a result, the danger is to the system executing, not to the system downloading.

Absolutely, except:

• it's an irrelevant distinction if the executing system is the downloading system
• most people mount network shares as R/W, which means malware on a client machine can wipe data off of the NAS too.

I don't practice what I preach 100%, but I prefer to be constructively paranoid when it's other people's data.

 

[Balforth]

edit: rant deleted. just trying to say i'm not a tech newbie and i'm obviously not just running a basic setup to steal stuff with bittorrent.

 

[code65536]

it's an irrelevant distinction if the executing system is the downloading system

It is still a relevant distinction. If the user uses the NAS box to execute downloaded content, it doesn't matter if the content was downloaded locally by the NAS or if it's on a mapped drive located on the dedicated torrent box--either way, the system executing is the one getting hosed, not the system hosting the file.

most people mount network shares as R/W, which means malware on a client machine can wipe data off of the NAS too.

This is irrelevant. If my laptop is infected with, say, CryptoLocker, which goes around wreaking havoc to anything accessible over the network, it doesn't matter if it came via a download on the NAS or a download on another box or a download locally--if it's connected with write access to a compromised system, it is in danger regardless of whether it did the downloading or another computer did the downloading. You think all those people who lost NAS-stored data to CryptoLocker used the NAS to download malware?


At the end of the day, it doesn't matter who downloads malware. The only thing that matters is who executes it. If the NAS executes malware, it going to get hosed regardless of who the downloader is. And if a hosed system has access to the NAS, the NAS is in danger of getting hosed regardless of whether the NAS was the one who downloaded it.

If you want to protect against malware, set up a VM and run every unsigned EXE in that VM before running it anywhere else. That is an infinitely more useful security measure than controlling which computer downloads stuff, which accomplishes nothing other than provide the illusion of good security practice.

This would be a great topic for discussion over in the Security forum, but lets try to keep this thread on-topic.

mfenn
General Hardware Moderator
http://forums.anandtech.com/forumdisplay.php?f=41

 

[code65536]

Well, Balforth, given what you're describing, you should just build a FreeNAS box using ZFS. It can provide parity protection like RAID-5 does. It is highly resilient. It even mitigates disk thrashing. And it will definitely provide enough performance to saturate GbE.

 

[aigomorla]

Well, Balforth, given what you're describing, you should just build a FreeNAS box using ZFS. It can provide parity protection like RAID-5 does. It is highly resilient. It even mitigates disk thrashing. And it will definitely provide enough performance to saturate GbE.

lol i said this in like the second post...

If you would like to build a Standalone Headless NAS... i suggest u look at FREENAS. Spend about 20 minutes on youtube and look at installation.

FreeNAS it... play with it...

The only thing i found a drawback to is, Intel Matrix RAID allows you to upgrade a Raid5 vol, without losing redundancy.
On FreeNAS you will lose redundancy if u expand your Raid-Z, unless its via disk swaps... u can not add a extra drive like you would in matrix raid.

 

[glugglug]

Torrents are accessed very randomly, keeping the disk pretty busy. Put the active torrents on a separate physical drive from the streaming media and the problem will probably go away. Ideally, the videos should have their own dedicated drive or pool.

 

[Balforth]

FreeNAS wasn't an option because I needed a Windows 7 machine to run Media Center Master. It has only resurfaced as an option because I've decided that it doesn't matter if my HTPC is serving as the torrent machine or not... the issue isn't the network. I can leave Media Center Master on it and just focus on the NAS.

I do not have any issue with performance while downloading torrents. The torrents are downloaded on my HTPC which is on a different physical network segment than my NAS. The issue is when Media Center Master moves completed downloads from my HTPC to my NAS while I'm using my HTPC to stream videos from my NAS.

Just looking for advice as it relates to performance. I appreciate the safety concerns but Media Center Master is configured to only download from known sources (99% is usenet, torrents is just a backup) and have never heard any one of the tens of thousands of users of the software complain about it pulling in a virus on their forums, nor has it happened to me in the several years I've been running it. I've lost irreplaceable data and seen servers get nuked as I've been in IT and software development for 20 years and perform automated daily backups of critical data.

Really just trying to isolate the bottleneck at this point, but it's still tough. One person will say it's the network, the next will say the drives, the next the NAS processor. At this point I'm not really sure what to think.

I do know that I'm running decent switches/routers, it's all gig-e, my HTPC isn't lacking in its specs, but the NAS has pretty crappy specs. The NAS is pretty much the one piece of equipment that can live in the basement and I never have to think about it, so I'm not sure if I want the hassle of having to build and maintain a PC or if I should just splurge on the Synology with fancy little menus and low power consumption...

blah

 

[aigomorla]

I do know that I'm running decent switches/routers, it's all gig-e, my HTPC isn't lacking in its specs, but the NAS has pretty crappy specs. The NAS is pretty much the one piece of equipment that can live in the basement and I never have to think about it, so I'm not sure if I want the hassle of having to build and maintain a PC or if I should just splurge on the Synology with fancy little menus and low power consumption...

blah

i used to think like you.. til my friend face palmed me...

then he made me order about 500 dollars more in network hardware, do funky configs on a 16 port managed switch... then setup LAGG on dual gig-e..
http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Link_Aggregations

There is a lot of things you can do with freenas and old hardware.
You dont even require a new system.

 

[Balforth]

So you're saying that it's a better idea to go the custom route with FreeNAS?

 

[glugglug]

FreeNAS wasn't an option because I needed a Windows 7 machine to run Media Center Master. It has only resurfaced as an option because I've decided that it doesn't matter if my HTPC is serving as the torrent machine or not... the issue isn't the network. I can leave Media Center Master on it and just focus on the NAS.

I do not have any issue with performance while downloading torrents. The torrents are downloaded on my HTPC which is on a different physical network segment than my NAS. The issue is when Media Center Master moves completed downloads from my HTPC to my NAS while I'm using my HTPC to stream videos from my NAS.

Just looking for advice as it relates to performance. I appreciate the safety concerns but Media Center Master is configured to only download from known sources (99% is usenet, torrents is just a backup) and have never heard any one of the tens of thousands of users of the software complain about it pulling in a virus on their forums, nor has it happened to me in the several years I've been running it. I've lost irreplaceable data and seen servers get nuked as I've been in IT and software development for 20 years and perform automated daily backups of critical data.

Really just trying to isolate the bottleneck at this point, but it's still tough. One person will say it's the network, the next will say the drives, the next the NAS processor. At this point I'm not really sure what to think.

I do know that I'm running decent switches/routers, it's all gig-e, my HTPC isn't lacking in its specs, but the NAS has pretty crappy specs. The NAS is pretty much the one piece of equipment that can live in the basement and I never have to think about it, so I'm not sure if I want the hassle of having to build and maintain a PC or if I should just splurge on the Synology with fancy little menus and low power consumption...

blah

If it only happens while copying files to your NAS, it is most likely your network. I am assuming the PC is on wired ethernet? (I saw that the NAS is). If not, wire it. And make sure the network adapters are all on full duplex.

I have seen the drive get bogged down enough to make video playback stutter when copying from a green drive over 1Gb/s LAN to a much faster PC/drive pool. So it is possible that you could have a disk bottleneck within the NAS during the copies. Or it could just be that the NAS has an inadequate CPU to handle the copying and streaming simultaneously.

 

[code65536]

So you're saying that it's a better idea to go the custom route with FreeNAS?

ZFS is an amazing file system, and the question shouldn't be "Why should I use ZFS?", but rather, "Are there any reason not to use ZFS?". Basically, these are the options:
* Prefabs like Synology for less technically-inclined users (or if a tiny case is REALLY important to you).
* Windows NAS if you need a do-everything system.
* FreeNAS if neither of the two above applies.

Given the higher cost of high-end prefabs and their inferior feature sets, the only reason to recommend them is if the user isn't up for building their own. And building is mostly an upfront thing--once built, you can largely ignore it. In terms of power consumption, if you use modern power-efficient parts (vs. re-using older, less energy-efficient hardware), a self-built system should be able to manage pretty power consumption, too.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

FreeNAS supports Torrent and PLEX plugins.

 

[Balforth]

If it only happens while copying files to your NAS, it is most likely your network. I am assuming the PC is on wired ethernet? (I saw that the NAS is). If not, wire it. And make sure the network adapters are all on full duplex.

I have seen the drive get bogged down enough to make video playback stutter when copying from a green drive over 1Gb/s LAN to a much faster PC/drive pool. So it is possible that you could have a disk bottleneck within the NAS during the copies. Or it could just be that the NAS has an inadequate CPU to handle the copying and streaming simultaneously.

It's cat 6 end to end, all gig-e. My HTPC specs are:

Corsair HX850W PSU
Intel i5-2500k CPU
ASUS P8P67 Deluxe Motherboard
2x4GB G.SKILL Ripjaws PC1600 DDR3 RAM
Gigabyte GTX-470 Super Overclocked
Crucial C300 SATA3 64GB SSD
WD Caviar 7200RPM SATA3 1TB HD

So it's not the most powerful gaming rig ever built, but I'm not exactly worried about its performance.

Given than the throughput of the ReadyNAS is 36MB/s, I'm absolutely convinced it's the bottleneck. There's no chance I'm saturating my wired gig-e network.

Looks I'm going the FreeNAS route! I've never built a low-power system before, so this should be interesting... I understand with ZFS RAM is king, but not sure where to draw the line with processor power or how important that is, if the intel/amd battle matters (I think I read FreeNAS works better with intel ethernet chipsets... Do you just run FreeNAS off a flash dirve, or is it recommended to use a dedicated hard drive? I guess I need a motherboard capable of supporting my 4 array drives (+1 if I use an OS drive). What about power supply wattages?

So many options! And that's before considering anything like LAGG? Which I know nothing about...

 

[aigomorla]

freenas is run on a flash drive.

freenas is flash drive dependant... not hardware dependant.

that means ur flash drive is your NAS.. if hardware breaks, u move the flash drive and drives to another system with freenas compatiable hardware and ur up again.

this is why everyone who uses freenas stays with freenas.

 

[mfenn]

Given than the throughput of the ReadyNAS is 36MB/s, I'm absolutely convinced it's the bottleneck. There's no chance I'm saturating my wired gig-e network.

Most likely what's happening is that the drive in your NAS can't service a mixed read/write workload at a high enough rate to keep the stream from stuttering. Read only workloads are much easier because the OS can read ahead on the disk and service network requests for a client out of RAM while doing the disk reads necessary for another client. With writes, it has to move the disk head "RIGHT NOW!!" in order to preserve data integrity.

It's safe to say that a multi-disk ZFS array won't have this problem because it's specifically designed to handle mixed read/write workloads.

Looks I'm going the FreeNAS route! I've never built a low-power system before, so this should be interesting... I understand with ZFS RAM is king, but not sure where to draw the line with processor power or how important that is, if the intel/amd battle matters (I think I read FreeNAS works better with intel ethernet chipsets... Do you just run FreeNAS off a flash dirve, or is it recommended to use a dedicated hard drive? I guess I need a motherboard capable of supporting my 4 array drives (+1 if I use an OS drive). What about power supply wattages?

Definitely run the FreeNAS image off of a flash drive, there's not enough data on it to justify a full mechanical drive. All you need are SATA ports for ZFS, no fancy RAID required.

As for RAM, people typically take recommendations from enterprise server ZFS deployments and try to apply them to home environments. This leads to wildly overblown RAM recommendations. 8GB is plenty for a home network with 1-2 users, you simply cannot request data fast enough to make an 8GB ARC choke.

So many options! And that's before considering anything like LAGG? Which I know nothing about...

Link aggregation is fun to play with if you have a managed switch and want learn about networking, but it is in no way required for your setup.

 

[Balforth]

Well everybody seems to say you can run FreeNAS on old crappy hardware and it rocks, but there's a sticky in the hardware forum over on the FreeNAS page about buying hardware, and the recommendation there is to not use any consumer-based hardware, only professional grade servers with xeon processors.

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/so-you-want-some-hardware-suggestions.12276/

Some of those rack mount servers are fairly reasonably priced, and I'm not sure that buying a fancy case with hot-swappable drive bays and a custom computer from the ground up would be much cheaper:

The SuperServer 5017C-MTF is probably the definitive prebuilt 4-drive, 1U small FreeNAS server based on C202, for around $525.

That's cheaper than the Synology that I was looking at, but I'd be real happy if I could get the price down another $100-$200.

 

[aigomorla]

OLD OLD sticky

freenas 3.1 uses the new FREEBSD core which has most of the modern consumer systems inside.

The one thing i do notice freenas appreciating is a real intel nic.

 

[Balforth]

It looks like that sticky is from April?

 

[aigomorla]

It looks like that sticky is from April?

then take it with a grain of salt...

ive installed freenas8 on both a Z and H chipset fine.

the real problem happens when u run into nic driver problems, usb3.0 issues but the realtek nic which is used on most boards now is in the new core.
I dont know how important USB3.0 is going to be on a NAS... as most likely u will only require 1 usb2.0 port and 1 or 2 ethernet ports ONLY.

Unless u would like to add additional USB3.0 drives.. i could see that as a problem, however if ur gonna use the internal sata ports, then i dont see why u would ever use the usb3.0 on a headless system.

u wont be able to install freenas6 per say, as that was picky as heck with hardware and required server grade parts.

But freebsd has come a very long way since then, and its a lot more friendly with hardware.


edit:ack i got my freenas versions wrong.... im thinking of another software...

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Well everybody seems to say you can run FreeNAS on old crappy hardware and it rocks, but there's a sticky in the hardware forum over on the FreeNAS page about buying hardware, and the recommendation there is to not use any consumer-based hardware, only professional grade servers with xeon processors.

It depends on which features you want to enable. FreeNAS >8 with ZFS uses a lot more RAM and CPU than older versions.

NAS4Free is an offshoot of FreeNAS 7 which is developed more with lower-end hardware in mind.

 

[aigomorla]

It depends on which features you want to enable. FreeNAS >8 with ZFS uses a lot more RAM and CPU than older versions.

NAS4Free is an offshoot of FreeNAS 7 which is developed more with lower-end hardware in mind.

i thought the new Freebsd core was a lot more flexiable with hardware which freenas 8.3 is on then the old core...

I cant think of anyone whose had problems installing freenas8 on a recient system using a H or Q chipset unless ur trying to get USB3.0 working without a hitch.

 

[Balforth]

So here are some parts I slapped together on Newegg for an initial build:

case - Fractal Design Node 304 FD-CA-NODE-304-BL Black Aluminum / Steel Mini-ITX Tower Computer Case - 89.99
cpu - Intel Pentium G3220 Haswell 3.0GHz LGA 1150 54W Dual-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics BX80646G3220 - 69.99
mobo - ASRock Z87E-ITX LGA 1150 Intel Z87 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Mini ITX Intel - 139.99
memory - ??? - 150
psu - CORSAIR TX Series CMPSU-650TX 650W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply & New 4th Gen CPU Certified Haswell Ready - 79.99

Grand total of $529.96. Am I on the right track? At that price point, is there some pre-assembled system that might be a better deal? Also, I'm not even sure how to verify memory is ECC besides counting the chips, but most memory has heat sinks across them now so you can't. A lot of the stuff I looked at on newegg didn't say whether or not it was ECC/parity.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

The motherboard has to support ECC too. So then you're looking at server board, and a couple hundred bucks more. Also, probably not ITX. The motherboard you have linked has a lot of SATA ports, which is nice, but a 4-port B85 board is way cheaper.

This is what I ended up with for my NAS. The Node 304 would be nicer, more drive bays, but... *shrug* My primary goal was just to get a RAID array on my network, not break the bank or have ALL OF THE DRIVES.

http://www.amazon.com/MI-008-Tower-B...dp/B001H0BA24/
http://www.amazon.com/Foxconn-Mini-P...dp/B00FCRTDEA/

+4GB RAM & 3 HDDs.

I would definitely consider an integrated Celeron-based system board like the one I linked. There's a whole (long) thread about them in Motherboards. There are a couple in the $100+ range that have more SATA ports too, but there are a number of SATA controller cards that FreeNAS has built-in support for as well.

If you're trying to fit a bunch of drives (4+) in the chassis, it's a lot more affordable to go with a smaller mATX minitower. You have a lot more motherboard options in that case as well. You can still stick an ITX board in them if you want.

You're way over-speccing the PSU too. 200-300w should be more than enough a CPU and a stack of HDDs.

 

[aigomorla]

dave i think he wants to have 6 sata slots which the asrock does.

however i have no experience installing freenas on haswell yet.
So i couldnt tell you how freebsd would handle on haswell.

Personally id go on a slightly older platform.. Ivy bridge processor and H61 or Z77 chipset if your after 6 sata ports.

You can see this thread too as the Z77 chipset is supported by freenas.
http://forums.freenas.org/threads/intel-z77-chipset-8-3-compatibility.11905/

but u will run into the USB3.0 errors i told you about earlier.

If you would like to try out the new Z87 chipset, i would do some google to see if anyone has attempted it and see what problems they run into.

 

[code65536]

You don't need a 650W PSU.

My server (Windows, not FreeNAS) with an Ivy Bridge Celeron, 4x4TB (Seagate 5900RPM), SSD, 2.5" drive, 2x4GB DDR3 1333 draws less than 70W from the wall under full load (that's me running Prime95 to load the CPU while writing to all 4 of the 3.5" disks at the same time). My PSU is rated for just 120W (though I'm not suggesting that you go that low).

A PSU is most efficient at about half load. When you're drawing substantially less power than the PSU's rating, you're going to lose a lot to inefficiency. The only reason to get a PSU larger than 400W is if you have a really large, beefy GPU that you need to power.

Seasonic, 360W, 80+ Gold:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817151117

Or the Antec 450W 80+ Platinum:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7474/analyzing-power-use-80-plus-bronze-vs-platinum

Unfortunately, quality PSUs below 300W are virtually non-existent, unless you're talking about external power bricks or custom PSUs.