NAS feedback / recommendations

[Olivas]

Planning an upgrade to my current NAS setup and looking for a little feedback or suggestions in regards to plans. Usage is home only, wife and I (2 adults) and 2 kids. File storage and media streaming. Media files right now are primarily straight DVD rips using MakeMKV. Issue with current setup comes in the fact that have recently tried doing Bluray rips and NAS isn't strong enough to transcode them on the fly (Roku 3 + Plex) with occasional remote streaming via Plex mobile app (phone / tablet) as well.

Currently running a Synology 1513+ w/ 5x 4tb drives, configured in a RAID 5. Yields about 14.4tb of usable space, of which 5.5tb is used. Been great, rock solid, no trouble outside not being strong enough for Bluray. No backup right now (yeah yeah RAID is not a backup), but have kept a cold spare 4tb drive on hand in case of trouble.

Plans, custom NAS build using FreeNAS / ZFS. Fractal Node 304, Pentium G3470, Asrock E3C226D2I, 16GB ECC RAM. Will be re-using existing drives. Also, pick up an 8tb external drive to use for backing up data for the transfer. Hoping this processor will be strong enough for at least 1 HD stream and 1 DVD stream.

Been reading up about ZFS and haven't been able to decide on which type of configuration to go with (raidz v raidz2 v mirror). Planning to go ahead and make use of the spare already on hand to have 6x 4tb to fill the Node 304 (and still possibly pickup another to still have spare on hand).

The 8tb will then continue to be used for backup and then could also sign up for cloud service (been looking at the Backblaze service) for additional back.

Was thinking raidz2, but if have both the external and cloud service don't think may be necessary to have the 2 disk redundancy. Mirror, having trouble with the idea of losing half of drive space. May settle with raidz still.

Am I missing anything?

 

[frowertr]

Well I'm not a FreeNas/ZFS fan at all for a home NAS. I prefer a standard MDADM/LVM/XFS setup on Ubuntu or CentOS. It's how I've always done it and it's served me well for many many years. It's basically how Synology NASes also work.

If you're set on ZFS I'd suggest going RAIDZ2 (RAID 6) or RAID 10. That is a pretty big array you have and running it via RAID 5 is a bit risky due to UREs during resilver. I run a 6Tb RAID 1 mirror on my home NAS. When I run out of room I'll convert it to a RAID 10 12Tb setup down the road.

It's been a while since I built my Plex server, but I used an i3 to make sure I had plenty of power for transcoding. That is also quite a bit of RAM you have planned for. Unless using ZFS's dedupe you probably don't need all of that for a NAS. But RAM is pretty cheap nowadays as well...

 

[Olivas]

From what I've read about ZFS seemed to indicate more RAM the better, especially when storage array gets larger.

Been watching for any deals on I3 but haven't seen any lately. Worse comes to worse, desktop is currently running an I5 4670 that could upgrade and hand down, but that may be overkill.

 

[frowertr]

I'm no ZFS expert but I was thinking it was only the dedupe process that was the reason ZFS needed extra RAM. Perhaps I'm wrong there...

An i5 might be overkill but it just depends on how much use your NAS will get. I originally built my Plex server with a Celeron but quickly found out that transcoding via Plex was working it too hard and made doing anything else on the server slow to a crawl.

 

[XavierMace]

I'm no ZFS expert but I was thinking it was only the dedupe process that was the reason ZFS needed extra RAM. Perhaps I'm wrong there...

1) Read cache. This function is known as ARC. Estimate this at about 1 GB per TB of zpool.
2) Temporary Write cache. Incoming writes queue up here before being added to the ZFS Intent Log (ZIL), and then ultimately to the live filesystem. This is generally only 200-500 MB, but estimate at least 1 GB.
3) Checksums: ZFS performs checksumming on all blocks of data stored within the zpool, and those checksums have to be calculated and verified for each read and write. These operations use considerable CPU and RAM. Difficult to estimate.
4) Parity-Data: If your drives are in a RAID-Z configuration, then ZFS uses RAM during the calculation of Parity Data which allows the fault-tolerance offered by RAID-Z. Calculating parity data uses considerable CPU and RAM, and must be done in addition to the standard checksum operations. Difficult to estimate.

 

[frowertr]

^
Holy moly that a lot of stuff running in RAM just watch watch movie rips and listen to a music collection. So 16GB is definitely a good starting point then.

 

[XavierMace]

I'd have to check what my actual usage is at home but 1Gb per TB is the usual recommendation although if it's strictly media server, you can easily get by with less. Those above numbers are based of more business usage scenarios. But more is always better. I've got 48Gb in my primary.

 

[gea]

1 GB/TB is a good thumbnail rule for a professional ZFS multiuser setup.
Without dedup, Oracle claims a minimum of 2GB for Solaris where ZFS was developped for to be stable, does not matter a poolsize.

If you are satisfied with pure disk performance, this may be ok, more ist faster mainly due the readcache. At home, a barebone setup is ok with 4-8 GB RAM. If you want to virtualize the NAS beside other VMs ex on ESXi, you must add their needs.

 

[Olivas]

Well new system is up and running. All went pretty smoothly, just a little tight getting everything into the Node 304. Went with a ZALMAN FX70 fanless cooler for the CPU (and backs right to the 140mm rear case fan anyhow), and cooler is pretty large but fits. So far so good, FreeNas up and running, went with the RAIDZ2 setup. Plex running and configured, able to do 2 HD streams at once, so happy there. Got a script setup to copy files from NAS to external drive, and then Backblaze pulling from the external drive. Got a lot to still learn about FreeNas, but getting there.