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Old 03-26-2014, 03:16 PM   #1
Ryanms3030
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Questions about DIY NAS


I have some theoretical questions about hardware performance for my home NAS. Currently I have two old bus powered USB 2.0 drives hanging off my Intel NUC computer running as a Debian server with samba.

I am debating if I should buy some sort of out of the box NAS liek Netgear ReadyNAS

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822122130

or building a new DIY box that can hold internal drives so I can run some faster drives.

In theory getting a box that has drives attached by sata running 7200 rpm or faster will give me better performance then 5400 rpm drive connected by USB 2.0 to the server but are those things the biggest bottleneck for my performance or will my network speed be? In either scenario I'll still be attached by 1 gb ethernet to my router and in most cases I'll be using wifi connected devices and in cloud scenario I'll be connecting over the internet with more relays and performance bottlenecks.

So my question is the expenses worth upgrading to better hardware at home? The other important thing is that it would be nice to have raid set up for redundancy. The two usb drives are different sizes so I can't set up a raid with my current set up. And for the record the Intel NUC I'm using only has 1 internal drive bay
 
Old 03-26-2014, 03:43 PM   #2
jefro
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You didn't give us enough info.

One is cost of parts. Another is energy. Another is your use and need of speed. Lastly is the reason to have backup or raid. Different size drives could be used maybe in zfs or btrfs or lvm as a backup I think.
 
Old 03-26-2014, 03:54 PM   #3
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For what it's worth, if you had some/all of the extra hardware laying around, I would go the DIY route. It's more customizable to your unique situation, it's easier to upgrade, and it's more scalable. With a small investment in a gigabit NIC, a GOOD SATA raid controller, your HDDs (which you have to buy either way - but you won't be limited to (2) as with the ReadyNAS), and a download of FreeNAS, you'll be off to the races....
 
Old 03-26-2014, 03:55 PM   #4
Ryanms3030
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jefro View Post
You didn't give us enough info.

One is cost of parts. Another is energy. Another is your use and need of speed. Lastly is the reason to have backup or raid. Different size drives could be used maybe in zfs or btrfs or lvm as a backup I think.
Cost of parts: I am willing to spend about $500 for a build.

This is to have network storage in my house and accessible from the outside through something like Owncloud. I want a personal hosted replacement for things like Dropbox/Google Drive but I think once I get above $500 it doesn't make sense for me. I want a one stop bucket to store important personal documents, photos, writing and other projects I am working on and media. I would like some sort of raid so I don't loose everything if a drive dies. But I can also get 1 TB of cloud storage on MediaFire for $2.50 a month so it's hard to justify spending $500-1000 to build a diy solution.
 
Old 03-26-2014, 09:52 PM   #5
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For $500 I think I'd go with one of the premade nas systems. They run linux and have a lot of bang for the buck. They offer pre-made features like iscsi and other advanced setups. Some of the dedicated nas use some pretty small amount of electricity so you'd have to figure that in AC and energy bill.

Some of the off site companies are hard to beat. The big ones offer all sorts of disaster proof configs. You just use what you need. Still have to pay for bandwidth.

Last edited by jefro; 03-26-2014 at 09:53 PM.
 
Old 04-02-2014, 03:48 PM   #6
Ryanms3030
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I'm still researching this. I looked at some of the lower end Synology units and competitors. I'd really like something that I can run my own software on whether it's FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault or building something from a vanilla linux install and samba/nas.

Anyone know of any barebones nas box that will let you run FreeNAS or similar instead of being tied to the vendor's OS? I want to be able to have cloud access and torrenting at the least (which I guess Synology can do) but I would like flexibility. I only care about running 1 drive as my storage needs are not very high so one 3TB WD Red drive would work for me. Pricing out a DIY computer to run that with small form and low end specs still runs me at least $400 before the hard drives so if that is the only option I might as well get a Synology box for $150-200
 
Old 04-03-2014, 03:31 PM   #7
jefro
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Some of the atom based nas might have a way to change. Before I bought a nas to run some other OS, I'd just build one.
 
Old 04-03-2014, 05:23 PM   #8
Ryanms3030
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Originally Posted by jefro View Post
Some of the atom based nas might have a way to change. Before I bought a nas to run some other OS, I'd just build one.
Thanks, that's my debate. I can get a 2 bay Qnap right now TS-212-E for $11 which has a 1.6 ghz Marvel proc and 256 mb of ram. FreeNas recommends about 8gb of ram I believe. I don't need ZFS because I only want 1-2 drives but a custom build with case, mobo, proc, ram would be hard to put together for $110.

Main question is would I be missing out on anything with Qnap or Synology software over FreeNas or another free alternative.

Last edited by Ryanms3030; 04-03-2014 at 05:27 PM.
 
Old 04-03-2014, 09:27 PM   #9
jefro
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I wouldn't attempt freenas on marvel chip unless there are some web pages about it already.

Those two companies make a lot of nas and have some openness to the users. From a newbie who might need to get a system up and running fast, I'd suggest a nas. If you want to play and have some time and want to learn, you can go with freenas. As I recall the newest versions might even just force you to run zfs but it's transparent. Maybe the OS is on a bsd format and storage is on zfs. I've played with freenas. Some odd issues but it should work.

To be exact, almost any modern BSD, Linux and others could make a soho nas.
 
  


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