File server vs NAS

[Tchamber]

Long time Anandtech reader, but this is my first post to forums!
I'm an avid amateur photographer and my photo collection is getting huge. As well I have hundreds of movies converted from DVDs on my desktop. I always read the NAS reviews with interest, but never see good reviews from users. Is there a reason I shouldn't build a computer and set it up for RAID instead of buying NAS?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

A nas and a file server are the same thing.

The consumer nas boxes anandtech reviews are, mostly, very low powered pcs (similar to a smartphone) built around their hdd bays, and running some customized version of Linux.

The only reason to build your own server is if you want a fairly high powered nas for servicing a lot of clients, or want file serving to be one of several roles filled by a single multipurpose server, and want to cheap out vs. buying a prebuilt server.

 

[Tchamber]

Thanks for the reply. Any thoughts on RAID5 on Windows? Suppose I bought an Asus board with RAID support and ran Win7 on it. Seems like it would be plenty stable, but the only experience I have is with my current setup, 2 Velocirators in RAID0.

 

[Anteaus]

As long as you realize that RAID 5 is not a backup and merely a system to maximize up-time then there is no harm in it. I will go further and say that unless you really need drive pooling, then in my opinion you would be better off with single drives with backups. The reason is because you can't just put any hard drive in a Raid 5 setup unless you want trouble. Drives with proper TLER support generally cost more than other consumer drives.

There are RAID advocates here and I won't presume to deny that they have good points to go that route, but in my experience the gains aren't worth the complexity. Depending on how much room you need, I suggest you purchase a 4 or 6 TB hard drive and an equally sized external to use a mirror backup. Then you can just add new drive pairs for capacity. You backups with grow equally with your storage needs and the drives can be read by any mainstream OS without worrying about arrays and whatnot.

0.02

 

[Cerb]

RAID 5 on Windows, without a RAID controller with a BBU and cache, will be SLOW to write to. Like, much slower than a single drive. Plus, rebuilding will be very slow, and failure-prone.

It'll be fine for just movies and music, but that's as far as I'd go with it.

RAID 10 would give you more performance than a single drive, all the time, and be much less prone to failure during rebuild, or while running degraded. But, of course, it also costs more, of course.

If you're looking at a 3 drive RAID 5 array, IMO, get a 4th drive and use RAID 10. If you're looking at 6-8 drives, it depends, but RAID 5 as basically a JBOD w/ URE resistance is fine, as long as everything is also duplicated.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

You need a Netflix box

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2392664

 

[Sattern]

If you want some space for your images Mega has a free offer of 50 gigs, just make sure you don't forget your password as they don't have a reset functionality for security purposes.

I use Mega and it is basically 10% of my current hard drive synced and accessible at any computer.

It is enough space to store my important documents and be able to use them at school without any issues or other complications.

Dropbox has I think 2gb and some extra if you do some of their offers (verify email, install mobile app, etc...)

 

[Micrornd]

OP - Just curious, but what is preventing you from just adding additional storage to your existing PC?

 

[_Rick_]

I'm running a Linux software RAID 5 (actually, two.) on my NAS, and it's plenty fast. Maybe Windows is a bit slower, but I wouldn't really recommend Windows for a NAS anyway.
There are some relatively easy to deploy NAS specific Linux and Unix distributions (the latter support ZFS, which can be nice to have).

Whatever you do, run a software solution, for price and fail-over reasons. Get a UPS as well, so the file system won't be corrupted.

Photography usually doesn't have such extreme storage requirements. I would go for a software RAID 5 as primary partition, a non-live but integrated backup (RAID 5, if you want make sure a rebuild from the backup won't fail because one disk fails out) and -- depending on the worth of what you're doing -- an off-site backup.

Full, spontaneous, unrecoverable drive failures are pretty rare these days, so a RAID 5 should be good enough from a reliability point of view, and it will keep you online and productive when a disk does drops. With regular surface scrubbing (checking for read errors, rebuilding the sector if there is one) you can maintain a high reliability FS. The backup will then be mostly for software or mis-manipulation issues.
Off-site adds protection against theft, fire or massive electrical damage. The last in particular is problematic, but can be reduced in probability by adding protection circuitry, or by physically unplugging the backup when it's not needed (hot swap bays aren't too expensive).

Oh, and use encryption, when you use RAID, so you don't have to worry about faulty drives leaking data, when you send them in for replacement, or eventually trash them.

 

[smitbret]

If you have spare parts lying around, an unRAID server won't cost you more than the HDDs you put into it and the license to run unRAID.

www.lime-technology.com

There are other options, but this plus a decent backup should treat you very well. There are faster setups out there but it will be more than fast enough to serve up photos and a couple of videos at the same time. Plus, you won't need to worry about TLER or enterprise grade drives, either. In fact, TLER only really comes into play if you are using a real hardware RAID controller.

In reality, you could just run something in JBOD and just make regular backups. I'd a drive crashes you won't have the uptime that a RAID server would, but for most people, it's not a crisis to take it down for a day, install a new drive and restore from your backup.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

In reality, you could just run something in JBOD and just make regular backups. I'd a drive crashes you won't have the uptime that a RAID server would, but for most people, it's not a crisis to take it down for a day, install a new drive and restore from your backup.

You've never seen my housemate when PLEX stops working. :awe:

 

[Red Squirrel]

Personally I like having a "file server" aka my own machine that I built and configured. While those NAS boxes are basically a file server they're proprietary and not really expandable. If by chance a model comes out that is expandable, these days they only make a certain model of something for a few months then stop, so by the time you do decide to expand they may not even make them anymore. With a custom built server you can use something like mdraid or zfs and pretty much any hardware that can fit as many sata drives as possible.

I have a 24-bay supermicro box which is nice. For a file server you also want redundant PSU. Perhaps one plugged into your UPS and one plugged into surge only, or another UPS. If you ever need to do power related work at least you can "walk" the power over to another source. Take down the file server, and you take down EVERYTHING including VMs and other stuff around the house that relies on it via NFS, iSCSI, SMB etc... So that's not a box you want to ever take down unless it's a huge blackout disaster and you have to shut down everything else anyway. The file server is the last server to be shut down and first to be turned on, in most situations. (in a bigger setting file server can also be a SAN)

If there's a box you want to be solid and reliable, it's the file server.

 

[smitbret]

You've never seen my housemate when PLEX stops working. :awe:

That's why I said "most".......

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Personally I like having a "file server" aka my own machine that I built and configured. While those NAS boxes are basically a file server they're proprietary and not really expandable.
*snip*

Some Synology units apparently have eSATA for that.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Actually I hear good things about Synology, if I was to get one that's probably what I'd get. If it has expansion that is standard such as esata then that's something you can depend on more from a future proof point of view.

 

[imagoon]

We use a Synology unit as our Veeam target. We beat the hell out of it also. Veeam targets -> Server 2012 dedup = those drives never take a break. It is attached to our iSCSI fabric with all the EMC big boys.

FreeSpace    SavedSpace   OptimizedFiles     InPolicyFiles      Volume
---------    ----------   --------------     -------------      ------
1.76 TB      9.44 TB      931                946                X:
1.87 TB      5.1 TB       359                364                Y:
2.99 TB      0 B          0                  0                  Z: