Hey guys!!! Hello


At home I currently run a really crappy Xtreamer thing with 1 2tb WD red in it.
My lame excuse for a NAS It serves ok, but is loud, clunky and lacking in a decent
gui/support/features. I really want to update my home storage system to somethign more
efficient, more storage, and with the possibility of FTP,
and other forms of online acces for when I'm on the go.
I have two (possibly more, lets see how I go...) questions for all the knowledgable people here
1: Which NAS?
2: Which Configuration?

For number 1, I was looking at maybe buying a 4 bay QNAP, something along the lines of
This.

It has Dual gigbit LAN, two eSATA ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, seems pretty nice, also reviews
on the QNAP devices tend to have pretty positive things to say about them. Would this be a
good option for someone who wants to start with say, two 3TB drives, with the possibility to expand at a later date?

Now, for Question number 2, this is where I show my inexperience.
Back in my Athlon XP 1800+ days, I made my first ever raid. I think I kept it for about 6 months
and have since never even looked sideways at raid.
Link to Raid article on Wiki
Leaving redundancy out of the equation, would I be better leaving them as two drives? or Raiding them together into one?
A few notes to this question, if I do raid 0 them, and then later want to add another drive,
will (is it even possible) it be difficult to intergrate the new drive into the raid? The NAS
will generally be streaming to about 3 devices, mainly music, some documents and definitely 1080p video.
Would I get better performance if, say, all music was on one drive, and all video files on the other,
therefore allowing each drive to only concentrate on one function? I do know that Raid 0 increases performance,
but with regards to multiple people access multiple files simultaneously, I am quite unsure.

I assume that if I am going for redundancy, I would be best off with 3 or more drives and run a raid 5.

Thanks for grinning and bearing through my tedious questions. Hopefully if anyone else has any questions
about NAS's or RAID in general, this can be the place to ask them.


Bean 3930K on RIVE @4.5ghz - 16gb Gskill Ripjaw Z - 780 Ghz Edition - Corsair AX850 - assorted SSD's and Mech drives.

Which NAS
The QNAP TS-421 is definitely a very good NAS! When it comes to NAS for home useres, QNAP and Synology define todays state-of-the-art.

Which RAID level
1 Bay NAS
- Apparently, no raid

2 Bay NAS
- If it is performance you want: RAID 0 - Striping. But, and there is a big "but", RAID 0 makes no sense at all with NAS. The problem is the maximum throughput of Gbit Ethernet. Todays hard drives pump out sequential read and write numbers well above 100 MB/s. Gbit Ethernet is maxed out at 125 MB/s. Creating a RAID 0, which would offer you almost 200 MB/s sequentials would mean, you were increasing the risk for data loss by a factor of 2, but you won't even profit from higher throughput rates. If you have a NAS with two ethernet interfaces, which also supports teaming of interfaces, then the theoretical max throughput is 250 MB/s. Since people usually buy NAS to safely store their data, I would not recommend go for RAID 0.
- If it is maximum data integrity/security you want: RAID 1 - Mirroring. Drawback of RAID 1 is definitely, that you can only access 50% of the available storage in your NAS. One disk is being used for mirroring. On the other hand, the risk of losing data is very low, since it's highly unlikely, that both drives die at the same moment.

3 Bay NAS
- RAID 0: it's the same as with two drives, but you get the performance boost of another drive, still, the ethernet interface acts as a bottleneck.
- RAID 1: not possible with an odd number of drives. You can certainly make a RAID 1 with two drives and span a filesystem over the single drive you have left over.
- RAID 5: this level of redundancy, basically combines the benefits of RAID 0 and RAID 1. In case of RAID 5, one drive is being used parity. Basically, if one drive dies, you can put in a new drive and the NAS is automatically going to rebuild the RAID (lost files). Other than that RAID 5 also helps improving performance. Overall RAID 5 is almost always the way to go if you have between 3 and 5 drives in a RAID.
- RAID 6: in this case RAID 6 does the same like RAID 5. One out of the three drives is used for parity. Also performance gets improved.

4 Bay NAS
- RAID 0: same as before.
- RAID 1: possible again, since there is an even number of drives. Two drives/half the capacity, will be used for backup purpose.
- RAID 5: again, one drive will be used for parity and you're going to get the capacity of three drives. You also get a decent performance bump.
- RAID 6: two drives will be used for parity. This RAID level is not suitable for four drives. You're better off with RAID 5 in this case.

5 Bay NAS
- RAID 0: same as before.
- RAID 1: only possible with an even number of drives. You can certainly make combinations with two or four drives.
- RAID 5: again, one drive will be used for parity and your going to get the capacity of four drives. You also get a decent performanc bump.
- RAID 6: two drives will be used for partiy. Five drives are still a rather low number for RAID 6. Usually RAID 6 gets used more often with six+ drives (if they all need to be in the same RAID array).


Should I add more uscases for 6 bay, 7 bay, and 8 bay?


Adding drive to RAID arrays at a later stage
I googled a bit and with QNAP NAS it is definitely possible to add additional drives to a RAID 5 at a later stage: Link. It should also be possible with most other NAS.


Performance, concurrent access
Running several (about four) 1080p streams at the same time is not issue for. Accessing files at the same time as streaming movies, is also not issue at all, this is piece of cake for any NAS.


Did I manage to answer all your questions?

I'm planning on doing a custom NAS which will run nas4free (ZFS). If you want, you can inspire yourself from my shopping list: Digitec Shoppinglist

The base system costs about 550CHF (PSU, PU, mobo, RAM and CPU). Else is for convenience and better performance. The SSD is for caching and the disk controller provides better performance than the on-board cheap controller by Intel. In the future, you can add up to 2 disk controllers and two 4GbE NIC (so total of 16 disks and 10GbE of network connectivity). Also, I don't really like Red drives so I'd recommend to go with Se at least (if RE are too expensive for you).

EDIT:

What I recommend is RAID10 if you data is not so valuable, and RAID6/RAIDz2 for better reliability.

Quote:

I used to toy around with freeNAS. It's quite cool to actually build the stuff yourself, since flexibility is definitely a great point. If you'd like, I'd love to follow the development of your NAS. It would be epic if you were to open a separate thread on it!

RAID 10 is certainly a powerful and also highly secure option. Personally I couldn't live with the fact, that I'd be wasting soooo much disk space. That would seriously bother me

Quote:

I think I'll order my stuff by the end of the week. Everyday I find something new/to change so I prefer taking my time since I'm putting quite some money on the table. I also have a 24-port switch coming in soon, and a 4GbE NIC from Intel already.

RAID10 wastes 1/2 of your disk space, so when you have a few disks it's fine. When you begin scaling, RAIDz2 become much more efficient (space/$$, reliability, etc).

Quote:

Great reply man!! This little project of yours really needs it's own thread in the Projects/modding forum. I want to see how this thing comes along.
I've also thought about making my own mATX / ITX based NAS because of the Flexibility that comes with it. You need to convince me in your thread

Bean 3930K on RIVE @4.5ghz - 16gb Gskill Ripjaw Z - 780 Ghz Edition - Corsair AX850 - assorted SSD's and Mech drives.

@Bean: I'll do as soon as I get my stuff. First I need to get my money from some website, then I'll be able to pay the actual hardware.

Homemade NASes rock simply because it costs much less than a 10-bay QNAP NAS for example but also because it is highly modular. You can change almost anything in it to achieve what you need. That's why we build custom PCs and we should also build custom NASes.

hi,


Saw the pic,

A new ASUSTOR 4 bay NAS! Looks great!

It also looks like a great product. The fact that there is a fully fledged CPU inside is very appealing to me!

It mentioned 4K display, don't know how it will work. Will anyone get review on this?