Author Topic: Anyone here use NAS (Network Accessible Storage) devices? (Read 9364 times)

shponglefan · « **on:** April 04, 2013, 12:18:21 pm »

I've been thinking about getting a basic two-drive one (probably to set up RAID 1). Looking at either the QNAP ts219p ii or Synology ds213, or maybe something else.

Mainly I just want to replace my existing aging file server with something more compact, energy efficient, and capable of using larger (i.e. 3+ TB) drives.

zanna5910 · « **Reply #1 on:** April 04, 2013, 01:22:26 pm »

Are you looking for advice? I have a NAS box at home. Make sure you run it with a good internal router to maximize access speed. My UVERSE built in router limits Wireless LAN traffic (sigh).

emphatic · « **Reply #2 on:** April 04, 2013, 01:46:06 pm »

I recently got myself a Synology DS DS212J and I love it. The app support is great (starting downloads from your iPhone, streaming our stored media to your iPhone - I'm sure apps exist for other mobile platforms as well) and the plugin for Chrome (you get a "Download with DownloadStation" link) works great too, even though it's sometimes hit n' miss with YouTube videos.

There's some functionality I'd love to have, but I'm sure they will get added with future updates to the O/S.

mlabrie · « **Reply #3 on:** April 04, 2013, 01:57:47 pm »

We have a synology ds713+ in our office. We use it as our main file server for an office of about 10 people. We have never had any issues whatsoever with it. I highly recommend their products. Just make sure to put high quality drives in it.

ChadTower · « **Reply #4 on:** April 04, 2013, 03:05:13 pm »

I run my media at home off a standalone single drive WD NAS. Almost entirely plug and play into the network, it's pretty nice, and so far has been rock solid reliable. I don't ask for much from it. Just serving files/media to the house from any of 7-8 clients (WDTV, PCs, phones).

lilshawn · « **Reply #5 on:** April 04, 2013, 04:32:09 pm »

I used to use a NAS (linksys EFG80 later an EFG120) but when they stopped supporting it (and still had issues to fix) I stopped right quick. (system going down, freezing, slow transfers)

If you can find something that isn't going to be vaporware and a company will continue support (or just works from the get go) it should work good.

I currently just host a massive share off my desktop and it seems to work okay. (3 computers and 4 video players)

DLinkOZ · « **Reply #6 on:** April 04, 2013, 05:12:33 pm »

My approach was slightly different - I used a PC with raid controller and installed openfiler. Then I carve out LUNs and client machines can connect via iSCSI. Technically, it's a SAN (not NAS), but close enough.

shponglefan · « **Reply #7 on:** April 04, 2013, 05:31:15 pm »

Quote from: zanna5910 on April 04, 2013, 01:22:26 pm

Are you looking for advice? I have a NAS box at home. Make sure you run it with a good internal router to maximize access speed. My UVERSE built in router limits Wireless LAN traffic (sigh).

Whoops, yes, should have been more specific in the OP. Basically I just wanted to know what people's experiences were with them, anything to look out for, things to avoid, etc.

I do have a Gigabit router, although the rest of my network is currently 10/100 due to older h/w (switches and NICs). I'll probably upgrade those sooner or later.

shponglefan · « **Reply #8 on:** April 04, 2013, 05:56:43 pm »

Quote from: emphatic on April 04, 2013, 01:46:06 pm

There's some functionality I'd love to have, but I'm sure they will get added with future updates to the O/S.

Like what, if I may ask?

ChadTower · « **Reply #9 on:** April 04, 2013, 06:03:02 pm »

Quote from: shponglefan on April 04, 2013, 05:31:15 pm

I do have a Gigabit router, although the rest of my network is currently 10/100 due to older h/w (switches and NICs). I'll probably upgrade those sooner or later.

I haven't had ANY issues with speed on my device. That includes streaming 720p video to two clients at the same time. My whole network is standard 10/100.

Dawgz Rule · « **Reply #10 on:** April 04, 2013, 06:59:27 pm »

Been running a Synology for a few years now and love it. Lots of nice features.

lilshawn · « **Reply #11 on:** April 04, 2013, 08:07:32 pm »

Quote from: shponglefan on April 04, 2013, 05:31:15 pm

I do have a Gigabit router, although the rest of my network is currently 10/100 due to older h/w (switches and NICs). I'll probably upgrade those sooner or later.

don't worry. as long as everyone is connected to switches, the 100 speed they get is lots. in a home network, it's actually pretty hard to saturate it unless you are for some reason buffering entire videos before playback. streaming is f-all.

edekoning · « **Reply #12 on:** April 05, 2013, 03:26:12 am »

I've have a Synology 110J. Its only got one bay, but I don't really need much storage, and did not want to use raid. After a few days the NAS started acting weird. I contacted Synology support about it, and they were very helpful. In the end it was my HDD that was faulty. After replacing it I have never had anymore problems. What is also great about Synology are the frequent software updates.

I use my NAS mostly for streaming photos/videos/music to my WDTV/Sonos/Xbox360, and some occasional downloading of large/slow files.

shponglefan · « **Reply #13 on:** April 05, 2013, 12:07:36 pm »

Thanks for all the replies everyone. It sounds like Synology is the way to go, so I'll see if I can find a DS213 soon.

For HDs I'm thinking a pair of standard 3TB or 4TB Seagate Barracuda's. Although it seems like the 4TB versions are only 5900RPM, whereas the 3TB versions are 7200RPM...

lilshawn · « **Reply #14 on:** April 05, 2013, 12:31:10 pm »

with data packed on the platters as tight as they are on the 4gb drives, it needn't go very fast to perform the same.

less RPM's usually means less heat too.

drventure · « **Reply #15 on:** April 05, 2013, 12:48:39 pm »

I put together a cheap machine, with the biggest HD's I could find, mirrored them, and stuck linux and Samba on it.

It can do more than just a NAS drive, maybe just slightly more expensive, easy to swap/upgrade drives, and it's accessible from windows just like any other network drive.

But I will admit that I was using an IOmega nas till it got fried by lightning and that thing worked quite well, with basically no setup (plug it in, set some permissions and done).

lordnacho · « **Reply #16 on:** April 05, 2013, 01:05:29 pm »

Quote from: drventure on April 05, 2013, 12:48:39 pm

I put together a cheap machine, with the biggest HD's I could find, mirrored them, and stuck linux and Samba on it.

It can do more than just a NAS drive, maybe just slightly more expensive, easy to swap/upgrade drives, and it's accessible from windows just like any other network drive.

But I will admit that I was using an IOmega nas till it got fried by lightning and that thing worked quite well, with basically no setup (plug it in, set some permissions and done).

Did the same and put freenas on it. Looking at my newegg part list now, spent about 350 before the 4x2TB drives I put. Reused a couple old drives, one was giving smart errors, so I replaced it. Pretty easy

If anyone cares, here's a couple of the parts:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112339 LIAN Li PC-Q25, drives just snap in. Kinda pricey but I've learned not to cheap out on cases over the years.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131843 Then this cpu/motherboard. Suprisingly can handle everything so far.

DLinkOZ · « **Reply #17 on:** April 05, 2013, 01:40:37 pm »

I built another SAN using two boxes and Ubuntu, some DRBD and heartbeat love and it's a quick and easy fault tolerant SAN cluster. When access to your data is 110% critical

shponglefan · « **Reply #18 on:** April 05, 2013, 02:11:43 pm »

I've done the Linux file server thing in the past (as mentioned i'm replacing my existing one). While it can be more flexible, I'm going the NAS route this time for ease of setup, lower cost and likely lower power usage.

Maybe it's just me, but I find the older I get the less time I feel like devoting to building PCs.

ChadTower · « **Reply #19 on:** April 05, 2013, 02:17:29 pm »

Quote from: shponglefan on April 05, 2013, 02:11:43 pm

Maybe it's just me, but I find the older I get the less time I feel like devoting to building PCs.

I hit that point a while ago. I just want to plug something in, configure it, and get on with my life.

lordnacho · « **Reply #20 on:** April 05, 2013, 02:49:53 pm »

I still like building my pcs....up until there's a problem.

edekoning · « **Reply #21 on:** April 05, 2013, 04:27:14 pm »

Btw, why do you want to use raid 1?

drventure · « **Reply #22 on:** April 05, 2013, 04:34:08 pm »

Quote from: edekoning on April 05, 2013, 04:27:14 pm

Btw, why do you want to use raid 1?

For myself, I did on my setup for an extra layer of redundancy (all those tagged MP3s and painstakingly downloaded roms I'd hate to lose).

Sure you can STILL loose both drives, but my iomega was mirrored, got hit by lightning, and I was able to completely recover everything off one drive even though the other was smoked.

Still, I have offsite backup as well<g>

shponglefan · « **Reply #23 on:** April 05, 2013, 11:19:49 pm »

Quote from: edekoning on April 05, 2013, 04:27:14 pm

Btw, why do you want to use raid 1?

Is this addressed to me?

At any rate, I plan to use it simply to guard against drive failure.

emphatic · « **Reply #24 on:** April 06, 2013, 04:19:24 am »

Quote from: shponglefan on April 04, 2013, 05:56:43 pm

Quote from: emphatic on April 04, 2013, 01:46:06 pm
There's some functionality I'd love to have, but I'm sure they will get added with future updates to the O/S.

Like what, if I may ask?

I miss uTorrent, basically. DownloadStation (the included torrent/etc client) does what it's supposed to, but there are features missing, like "remove torrent and data". If you remove 10 torrents in DownloadStation, you'll have to go to the file browser and remove the files yourself while remembering which ones they were. I think that's all I'm missing.

Howard_Casto · « **Reply #25 on:** April 07, 2013, 03:00:17 pm »

uTorrent is still around man. It's my primary torrent client.

ChadTower · « **Reply #26 on:** April 07, 2013, 03:08:56 pm »

I still use uTorrent.

kahlid74 · « **Reply #27 on:** April 08, 2013, 10:34:39 am »

I have a Synology (4 disk) and QNAP(2 Disk) systems. Both work well. I've also built FreeNAS and Openfiler system in the past (never again, their performance is so piss poor). I currently now run a 4U server chassis with an Adaptec card and Nexenta OS. I still use the Synology and QNAP for stuff like 3D printing archives/Laser cutting/MP3's but I've since moved all other services onto a new SAN I built. The speeds with the Synology/QNAP were still too slow for me.

For you, if you're looking for simplicity, you can't go wrong with Synology. QNap is a little pricier but they work very well too. Lots of features.

Be careful with size of disks right, a 2 disk mirror at 3/4TB could take days to build on one of these systems. Slower processors and fixed memory with resource containers preventing faster array builds/rebuilds. If you go 3/4TB make sure you backup your data.

shponglefan · « **Reply #28 on:** April 08, 2013, 11:59:54 am »

Quote from: kahlid74 on April 08, 2013, 10:34:39 am

For you, if you're looking for simplicity, you can't go wrong with Synology. QNap is a little pricier but they work very well too. Lots of features.

I ended up ordering the DS213; Synology sounds ideal for my purpose.

Quote

Be careful with size of disks right, a 2 disk mirror at 3/4TB could take days to build on one of these systems. Slower processors and fixed memory with resource containers preventing faster array builds/rebuilds. If you go 3/4TB make sure you backup your data.

Why does it take so long? Or rather, what is taking place that takes so long?

I plan to buy a pair of fresh 4 TB drives and set them up in RAID 1, so there won't be any initial data to mirror. Then I'm just going to copy files bit by bit until I eventually get all my necessary data onto the drives.

Insofar as data backup, I have an external 1 TB drive (USB 3.0) which I was thinking of hooking up just to backup more critical data like personal project files. Stuff that I really don't want to lose, as I realize RAID 1 won't protect against stuff like data corruption or accidently deletion. I'm hoping the backup features of the DS213 will allow for that option and that doing weekly backups will be enough.

Gray_Area · « **Reply #29 on:** April 08, 2013, 03:53:41 pm »

How does security work (differently) in this circumstance?

kahlid74 · « **Reply #30 on:** April 09, 2013, 08:49:25 am »

Quote from: shponglefan on April 08, 2013, 11:59:54 am

Quote from: kahlid74 on April 08, 2013, 10:34:39 am
For you, if you're looking for simplicity, you can't go wrong with Synology. QNap is a little pricier but they work very well too. Lots of features.

I ended up ordering the DS213; Synology sounds ideal for my purpose.

Quote
Be careful with size of disks right, a 2 disk mirror at 3/4TB could take days to build on one of these systems. Slower processors and fixed memory with resource containers preventing faster array builds/rebuilds. If you go 3/4TB make sure you backup your data.

Why does it take so long? Or rather, what is taking place that takes so long?

I plan to buy a pair of fresh 4 TB drives and set them up in RAID 1, so there won't be any initial data to mirror. Then I'm just going to copy files bit by bit until I eventually get all my necessary data onto the drives.

Insofar as data backup, I have an external 1 TB drive (USB 3.0) which I was thinking of hooking up just to backup more critical data like personal project files. Stuff that I really don't want to lose, as I realize RAID 1 won't protect against stuff like data corruption or accidentally deletion. I'm hoping the backup features of the DS213 will allow for that option and that doing weekly backups will be enough.

Think of it no different than a home router. Home routers come with fixed CPU's and memory. When you're bittorrented to 1000 seeds/peers your router will run out of memory to contain the FIB/Adjacency tables and begin dropping them. As it becomes over-worked it begins slowing down because it's no longer able to hold the table of contents of every session open.

The same is true for home/SMB based NAS devices. They come with a limited amount of CPU/Memory and "Resource Restrictions/Shares". So the idea is that the device must hold onto a portion of it's resources in case it needs to serve data. So the remaining portion of resources can be claimed by the array building service. Most Home/SMB NAS's want to Zero your array out before you start using it. Since they have limited resources and cheaper components (to contain price) they don't allow you to write to an array while building/re-building.

As the technology gets better, they work in features like writing to it while building/rebuilding an array or using all the resources available unless a higher priority request comes in. I can't remember off the top of my head if that Synology lets you do that but it was more of a "be aware of this" than a huge concern.

Here's what I'll say about your data, if it's important, back it up ( disk is fine). If it's Critical, back it up, Archive it regularly and store it somewhere else.

edekoning · « **Reply #31 on:** April 12, 2013, 09:10:53 am »

Quote from: kahlid74 on April 09, 2013, 08:49:25 am

Here's what I'll say about your data, if it's important, back it up ( disk is fine). If it's Critical, back it up, Archive it regularly and store it somewhere else.

Indeed, RAID / Backups / Archiving are all different things, so don't confuse them.

Quote from: shponglefan on April 08, 2013, 11:59:54 am

Insofar as data backup, I have an external 1 TB drive (USB 3.0) which I was thinking of hooking up just to backup more critical data like personal project files. Stuff that I really don't want to lose, as I realize RAID 1 won't protect against stuff like data corruption or accidently deletion. I'm hoping the backup features of the DS213 will allow for that option and that doing weekly backups will be enough.

Yes DS will allow you to backup to an external USB drive. You can just pick what folders you want to backup, and create a schedule for that job.

struisje · « **Reply #32 on:** April 17, 2013, 05:46:55 am »

I converted an old Fujitsu Scaleo Home Server (which came standard with Windows Home Server) to an UnRaid box
Now serving 8 TB of data.

shponglefan · « **Reply #33 on:** April 17, 2013, 12:41:37 pm »

To update, I got the DS213 and set it up about a week ago. Setup was a breeze. Took less than an hour from start of unboxing to copying my first files over. I particularly liked how easy it was to just download/install the latest OS for this thing. Far less time spent than when I previously set up my Ubuntu server.

Only issue I've run into so far is apparently a bug in which Windows service stops and restarts. Apparently this bug is in the latest OS and is known and expected to be fixed in the next release. Workaround is to just disable HD hibernation, so no worries there.

Other than that, I've been very impressed.

lilshawn · « **Reply #34 on:** April 17, 2013, 02:18:09 pm »

now i got the bug.

picked up a intel atom itx mobo with 2gb ram for next to nothing. between it's 2 SATA ports and the USB flash boot (with an 8gb flash chip i already have for the OS) i should be able to pull out my 2 main share drives from my desktop and plop them on there.

so... any one know if one these nas software solutions able to access NTFS drives directly or am i going to have to reformet and transfer all 2tb of data?

MonMotha · « **Reply #35 on:** April 18, 2013, 12:07:22 am »

Linux has very usable NTFS support these days. It's not fast, but it's pretty good (I dunno what the status of ACLs are - I just have it map everything to be owned by one user with fixed UNIX style permissions). So, if you can find a good "NAS Software" solution that is based on relatively modern (past few years) Linux and is flexible enough to let you actually use said NTFS support, then you should be good.

In the end, many commercial SOHO NAS systems are just ARM systems running Samba on Linux with a cheesy little web GUI. They just only support very minimal, fixed configurations.

lilshawn · « **Reply #36 on:** April 18, 2013, 10:45:17 am »

maybe i'll splurge and pick up a couple of 2tb drives and just run freenas. (also i'm lazy) i booted up the board with freenas on usb stick last night and it seems to work okay. plays well with the rest of the network. i'll have to download the CD version and install it to the usb flash.

Maybe i'l just pick up a couple of 2tb drives instead of reusing old hardware. probably better in the long run since these drives probably have a couple thousand hours on them.

lilshawn · « **Reply #37 on:** April 22, 2013, 09:09:55 pm »

ta da! ...well almost.

I set up freenas and tested it out a few days ago. since then, i burned the CD and installed freenas to the usb flash disk. it has an option to import an NTFS filesystem disk. I don't know if it works or not, but the option is there if someone is wondering.

i ordered a Coolermaster Elite 120 microATX case off newegg to house my disks and microATX board for 49.99+ shipping. It even comes with a couple of fans pre-installed to cool the mobo and the drives. It's a fair size as it accepts a standard ATX power supply, which in my opinion is much better than the smaller form factor power supplies. it also has room for 3 disks which will probably be more than enough. If it comes down to not being enough room for disks down the road, i'll pick up something else. I suppose i could have gone all fancy and bought a rackmount chassis with slots for 10 drives...but then i have to buy a rack, and on and on and on...

I opted to (for the time being) throw 2 old 500gb drives in there and set it up as some kind of JBOD as a test. after a bit of messing around (and a little freenas forum search) i set up the disks (stripe array) easily (I had to select multiple disks in the volume selection screen) and created a share for it on my windows network.

I'm currently dumping 700gb of video on it and will test it out over the next while and see how it goes.

Since I had most of the parts already, and freenas was well, free... the total spent on this endeavor was the board, which i got for cheap cheap off a buddy and the cost of the box, which I probably could have done without...but hey, might as well make it look nice. if this continues to work out i'll splurge for 3 new disks for it and set up a proper raid for data safety.

but, thumbs up so far for freenas.

nas porn photo below

lordnacho · « **Reply #38 on:** April 22, 2013, 09:21:28 pm »

My only complaint is the constant emails. It's now in my morning routine to check if there's an issue. Would be nice if in the subject it said there's a problem, then i could do some sort of mail filter on it.

Someone complained about throughput speeds, but for me it's fine. Streaming 1080p movies to xbmc in the living room works without any hiccups.

I originally hoped to set this thing up and work remotely off it, like My Documents would be running off freenas. I set up symbolic links but Windows pretty much hated it, random blue screens. So now I'm just using a file comparison to manually copy stuff over. Haven't gotten around to tinkering with rsync.

Other thoughts, I set it up as raidz2 and replacing a drive with smart errors was painless.

kahlid74 · « **Reply #39 on:** April 23, 2013, 10:37:14 am »

A quick note for those of you building NAS/SANs for your home. Be very careful when buying disks. Regular disks are not made to run in raid environments and have a lowered MBT due to the extreme conditions a NAS/SAN operate under. It's why a WD Green 1TB drive is 2-3 times lower than an equivalent "Raid" certified disk.

High level what does this mean? If you bought off the shelf regular disks for your NAS/SAN you better make sure you BACKUP your data fairly regularly. Those disks will fail faster than normal (inside a PC being normal where the disks are allowed to go to sleep)

drventure · « **Reply #40 on:** April 23, 2013, 10:51:51 am »

kahlid74 makes some good points, but for a home environment, I'm not sure it's worth the extra cost for full on raid certified drives. But YMMV.

One thing that IS important to point out is with raid, you have basically 2 choices (3 if you're willing to spend a good bit more $$$)

1) Take two drives and mirror them. You get faster read access, the same write access, and if one drive fails, you still have the other drive till you replace the failure.

or

2) take two drives and stripe them, you get faster read and write access, BUT if either drive fails, you're toast. So +absolutely+ make sure you have good backups. The reason this option is considerably more dangerous is that you now have 2 drives, but a single "system", so if either drive fails, the system fails. Since both drives have the same MTBF, this effectively means you're +decreasing+ the MTBF to half what it would be with only a single drive. In other words, the system is far more likely to fail earlier than using just a single drive.

The other option is striped with parity, but that usually requires 5 drives and is a bit more difficult to setup.

I've used a mirrored setup for years, with reasonably regular backups. The mirrors have saved my bacon more than once.

kahlid74 · « **Reply #41 on:** April 23, 2013, 11:25:15 am »

Quote from: drventure on April 23, 2013, 10:51:51 am

kahlid74 makes some good points, but for a home environment, I'm not sure it's worth the extra cost for full on raid certified drives. But YMMV.

One thing that IS important to point out is with raid, you have basically 2 choices (3 if you're willing to spend a good bit more $$$)

1) Take two drives and mirror them. You get faster read access, the same write access, and if one drive fails, you still have the other drive till you replace the failure.

or

2) take two drives and stripe them, you get faster read and write access, BUT if either drive fails, you're toast. So +absolutely+ make sure you have good backups. The reason this option is considerably more dangerous is that you now have 2 drives, but a single "system", so if either drive fails, the system fails. Since both drives have the same MTBF, this effectively means you're +decreasing+ the MTBF to half what it would be with only a single drive. In other words, the system is far more likely to fail earlier than using just a single drive.

The other option is striped with parity, but that usually requires 5 drives and is a bit more difficult to setup.

I've used a mirrored setup for years, with reasonably regular backups. The mirrors have saved my bacon more than once.

My apologies, my intention was never to say you have to buy raid certified drive, only to warn you that in most cases, those regular drives you buy will die faster in your NAS then in your PC. So make sure your data is backed up for the worst case scenario.

drventure · « **Reply #42 on:** April 23, 2013, 11:38:04 am »

Quote from: kahlid74 on April 23, 2013, 11:25:15 am

My apologies, my intention was never to say you have to buy raid certified drive, only to warn you that in most cases, those regular drives you buy will die faster in your NAS then in your PC. So make sure your data is backed up for the worst case scenario.

No worries. That's generally true. You +can+ setup nas drives to sleep as well (in my case, I'm running win7 on my "server" and just sharing the drives, so I can sleep them as you would a desktop PC). I've got some backup processes and other things that run on that machine, though, so I'm not sure how much they actually sleep.

NowI'm curious, I'll have to check that out...

shponglefan · « **Reply #43 on:** April 23, 2013, 12:28:15 pm »

I'm curious to know how much NAS drives really do run active vs desktop PC. In my case, I mainly use my NAS for storage, so I'm not accessing it all that much (certainly not as much as my regular PC), so I can't imagine they would see more 'mileage' on the drives. And I've got hibernation active again on the NAS, so...

I agree though that drives like WD Green which are designed to spin down to save power would be wholly non-ideal in a NAS, since they would be constantly spinning up/down. I use a WD Green drive as a backup on my main PC, and notice that behavior a lot. But now that I've offloaded my files to the NAS, I don't really need the WD as much...

MonMotha · « **Reply #44 on:** April 23, 2013, 01:15:25 pm »

I've not noticed particularly higher instances of failure, but my storage environments are more like normal PCs that just happen to run 24/7, so if you have one of those little SAN enclosures or something, things may get a bit hot or whatever.

What IS somewhat problematic is the handling of error reporting by the disk. Mostly for market segmentation, but I'm sure it makes them a hair cheaper, too, the "consumer" drives don't report errors very well. In many cases, they'll just return invalid data as though it were correct. This can be a real bummer when operating RAID arrays. If you have an optimistic read strategy on a RAID 1 (where you only read from one device rather than always read from them all and check the integrity), you could serve up bogus data. During rebuilds, you'll silently rebuild the array with bogus data. The "NAS grade" drives actually check for and return a read error when one occurs. It still won't save your data, but at least you'll know that you need to reach for the backups rather than having to endure silent data corruption that many go unnoticed for weeks, months, etc.

Moral of the story: RAID is not a backup in any case, and especially not when using cheap drives.

lilshawn · « **Reply #45 on:** April 23, 2013, 03:44:34 pm »

Wd red drives which are made for nas use are only about $20 more than equivalent blue drives.

MonMotha · « **Reply #46 on:** April 23, 2013, 07:55:33 pm »

Yes, the WD Red drives are one of your best value options in this particular case. They seem to work well, have the features you want in this application, and are of reasonable cost.

lilshawn · « **Reply #47 on:** April 23, 2013, 08:37:43 pm »

freenas has some power options built in to power down drives that aren't being used after a period of inactivity. every minute an HD spends not turning, is a minute longer it will last at the end of it's life.

if you can stand the couple of second delay of spinning up the disks, that's an option too.

lilshawn · « **Reply #48 on:** April 24, 2013, 01:32:36 pm »

well, i've ran into my first hitch.

the NAS dropped off the network last night. Was reading videos off it from 2 XBMC xboxes at the same time. they both came up and said the host was unreachable after about 3 hours or so. I just reloaded the videos of my desktop share to diagnose the issue no problems there... For the time being i've left it (crashed or otherwise).

i tried to ping the ip address from my desktop of it and wasn't able to reach it. I searched the network logs on my firewall to see if it had picked up a different IP address or something...didn't see anything new. did a few quick searches about the network drop issue and found a few people with multi port NICs that had issues, but one thing i did find was I think i might be a bit skinny on the RAM.

4gb seems to be the consensus for the minimum needed when you use the ZFS file system. (which i used to stripe the drives together.) having only 2gb of ram might be getting full with checksumming data, data, logging, read cache etc etc etc... so it seems this is the most plausible answer. info Ive found says ZFS typically requires a minimum of 8GB of RAM in order to provide good performance. The more RAM, the better the performance...a general rule of thumb is 1GB of RAM for every 1TB of storage.

I grabbed another 2gb to throw in there to see. (i left it as it was until i figure out the issue.) if it's just crashed then I'll reboot it and test it again with the 2gb and see if it happens again. if it crashes again i'll try with the extra RAM. if still...maybe an installation or configuration issue. Though i didn't stray too far from the standard installation. Hopefully 4gb of ram is good enough for my 1tb of storage. if not, i may have to rethink my file system used or the hardware i've chosen.

kahlid74 · « **Reply #49 on:** April 24, 2013, 03:21:45 pm »

Quote from: lilshawn on April 24, 2013, 01:32:36 pm

well, i've ran into my first hitch.

the NAS dropped off the network last night. Was reading videos off it from 2 XBMC xboxes at the same time. they both came up and said the host was unreachable after about 3 hours or so. I just reloaded the videos of my desktop share to diagnose the issue no problems there... For the time being i've left it (crashed or otherwise).

i tried to ping the ip address from my desktop of it and wasn't able to reach it. I searched the network logs on my firewall to see if it had picked up a different IP address or something...didn't see anything new. did a few quick searches about the network drop issue and found a few people with multi port NICs that had issues, but one thing i did find was I think i might be a bit skinny on the RAM.

4gb seems to be the consensus for the minimum needed when you use the ZFS file system. (which i used to stripe the drives together.) having only 2gb of ram might be getting full with checksumming data, data, logging, read cache etc etc etc... so it seems this is the most plausible answer. info Ive found says ZFS typically requires a minimum of 8GB of RAM in order to provide good performance. The more RAM, the better the performance...a general rule of thumb is 1GB of RAM for every 1TB of storage.

I grabbed another 2gb to throw in there to see. (i left it as it was until i figure out the issue.) if it's just crashed then I'll reboot it and test it again with the 2gb and see if it happens again. if it crashes again i'll try with the extra RAM. if still...maybe an installation or configuration issue. Though i didn't stray too far from the standard installation. Hopefully 4gb of ram is good enough for my 1tb of storage. if not, i may have to rethink my file system used or the hardware i've chosen.

The way Freenas works, you want 4 or more memory wise. It's highly inefficient in it's processes compared to streamlined systems. Freenas is fun for a while, but quickly you'll come to the consensus most of us have about it, which is it's not really worth the hassle and poor performance.

lilshawn · « **Reply #50 on:** April 24, 2013, 06:06:24 pm »

from what i understand ZFS is a real memory hog. if I stuck with straight UFS I wouldn't have an issue.

apparently it's something like this...

right off the bat ZFS leaves 1GB of RAM available to the OS automatically. That means the ZFS is assuming control of the remaining 1GB of my RAM right now. ZFS will use all the RAM you give it to try and improve performance...what happens if it needs more is unknown at this point, i would assume performance degradation, but i'm guessing I get what I had last night and the thing crashes.

copy paste from some other info on ZFS memory requirements... which sounds like ~2GB per TB of disk space.

Code: [Select]

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.

ChadTower · « **Reply #51 on:** April 25, 2013, 09:05:19 am »

Same idea as the discs in a DVR but for a different usage reason. They fail faster because they get worked much harder.

drventure · « **Reply #52 on:** April 25, 2013, 11:16:09 am »

Quote from: ChadTower on April 25, 2013, 09:05:19 am

Same idea as the discs in a DVR but for a different usage reason. They fail faster because they get worked much harder.

Definitely. If you're picking a drive for a DVR, you generally want one that's going to run cool. That usually means a 5000rpm drive vs the faster (but hotter) 7200rpm drives.

I know WD makes some large, slower speed drives specifically for DVR uses because they run quieter and cooler. I used one when I upgraded my Tivo HD. Haven't has a single issue in several years, and it's reading or writing almost continuously.

kahlid74 · « **Reply #53 on:** April 26, 2013, 02:28:26 pm »

Don't forget that real raid drives often times used different epoxies that have a longer shelf life. This translates to better life overall as they sustain hotter/faster speeds for prolonged periods of time without negative results.

Again, get whatever disks you like, BUT SPEND THE MONEY to have a backup solution. If you can't lose the data, B A C K IT UP!

lilshawn · « **Reply #54 on:** April 30, 2013, 03:12:14 pm »

a quick update...just for prosperity's sake, and as a note to anyone else who decides to attempt this as well...

i went ahead and popped in the extra 2gb ram (for 4gb total) and have had no problems at all.

this file system is pretty memory hungry. It's all in the name of reliability and performance, which is okay, but neither of which i really have interest in at this moment. It's basically that would be geared towards the corporate users...but it's a good learning exercise anyways. It's really only because I striped the 2-500gb drives together using ZFS to get a terabyte for testing. in actual practice, when i get a couple of 2tb drives, i think i'll go straight ufs and just do a simple dupe backup on it. that should reduce the memory footprint quite a bit that I could probably drop back to 2gb again. It's in there so i won't bother. I don't really need the performance and safety and checking of the ZFS since i'm just serving video off it. It's not imperative that data be available instantly.

but, so far so good.

wesbrown18 · « **Reply #55 on:** April 30, 2013, 05:33:22 pm »

I admit that I'm a bit of an outlier in this regards, but here's my home office NAS:

OpenIndiana
AMD Opteron 4334 (6 cores, 3.1ghz)
SuperMicro MBD-H8SCM Socket C32 motherboard
32GB of ECC RAM
LSI 9201-16i HBA
1x 64GB Crucial M4 as system disk (root)
2x 20GB Intel 313's as a write log disk (ZIL)
1x 256GB Samsung 840 Pro as a cache disk (L2ARC)
12x 2TB SATA WD Greens (will replace one by one with Seagate Constellations)
2x 10gbps Infiniband network connections
2x 1gige network connections

This gives me an effective 24TB of space that I can push at 10gbps across my network. Ironically, my cabinet doesn't use any of that -- I don't believe in having every game made to man available right on the cabinet, so it has a 64GB SSD. I do have a collection of games stored on there.

drventure · « **Reply #56 on:** April 30, 2013, 06:07:08 pm »

Damnation. That's a hell of a home server!

wesbrown18 · « **Reply #57 on:** April 30, 2013, 06:42:49 pm »

Quote from: drventure on April 30, 2013, 06:07:08 pm

Damnation. That's a hell of a home server!

Heh. Yeah.

I do it this way so that the rest of my test and development machines don't need any local disks. I have a pair of 12 core AMD 1u servers with Infiniband. They are disk less and bootstrap over TFTP and then access the disks via DMA over Infiniband. Nice thing about this is that with ZFS, I can snapshot images before making changes. Kind of like VMware's snapshot of VMs but with real hardware.

kahlid74 · « **Reply #58 on:** May 01, 2013, 09:54:53 am »

Quote from: wesbrown18 on April 30, 2013, 05:33:22 pm

I admit that I'm a bit of an outlier in this regards, but here's my home office NAS:

OpenIndiana
AMD Opteron 4334 (6 cores, 3.1ghz)
SuperMicro MBD-H8SCM Socket C32 motherboard
32GB of ECC RAM
LSI 9201-16i HBA
1x 64GB Crucial M4 as system disk (root)
2x 20GB Intel 313's as a write log disk (ZIL)
1x 256GB Samsung 840 Pro as a cache disk (L2ARC)
12x 2TB SATA WD Greens (will replace one by one with Seagate Constellations)
2x 10gbps Infiniband network connections
2x 1gige network connections

This gives me an effective 24TB of space that I can push at 10gbps across my network. Ironically, my cabinet doesn't use any of that -- I don't believe in having every game made to man available right on the cabinet, so it has a 64GB SSD. I do have a collection of games stored on there.

I'm glad you're replacing those green drives, that LSI card doesn't allow spin down, so you've effectively got a time bomb in that NAS/SAN. I'm assuming stripped disks as you say you've got 24TB of space? Kind of dangerous for that large of a chunk of data but as long as you've got it backed up/are okay with a complete loss of data no worries.

Good ole infiniband.

wesbrown18 · « **Reply #59 on:** May 01, 2013, 11:03:14 am »

Quote from: kahlid74 on May 01, 2013, 09:54:53 am

I'm glad you're replacing those green drives, that LSI card doesn't allow spin down, so you've effectively got a time bomb in that NAS/SAN. I'm assuming stripped disks as you say you've got 24TB of space? Kind of dangerous for that large of a chunk of data but as long as you've got it backed up/are okay with a complete loss of data no worries.

Good ole infiniband.

Real capacity is in the 14TB range -- I'm not crazy enough to run it in a JBOD striped configuration:

Code: [Select]

NAME                               USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
internal                          9.38T  4.88T   258G  /internal

Actually, the WD Green drives have spin down/timeout disabled. They were giving me performance issues with the constant spinning down -- with that many disks, it becomes a cascading spin down/spin up issues. Once spin down was disabled for each individual drive, which was a ---smurfing--- pain in the ass, as I had to hook it up to a motherboard where the utility could see it from DOS.

You're absolutely right about it being a time bomb still. Striped? Not exactly. They're configured as a pair of RAIDZ2's. I can sustain up to two drive failures per RAIDZ2. Regardless, I am replacing them with non-Green drives as personal funds are available. That's the nice thing about ZFS, that I can incrementally replace the drives. I am probably replacing them with 3TB or 4TB Seagate Constellations -- when all the drives in a RAIDZ2 are replaced, I get upgraded capacity.

Topology:

Code: [Select]

ZPOOL
   2 drive ZIL (20GB SSD)
   1 drive L2ARC (256GB SSD)
   6 drive RAIDZ2 - 4 data, 2 parity
   6 drive RAIDZ2 - 4 data, 2 parity

The funny thing is? I used to have a motherboard with a regular AMD in there. The lack of ECC RAM was causing ZFS parity errors on the drives, which I blamed on the WD. Which disappeared when two DIMMs in a row died and I replaced them. But I will never build a ZFS server on this scale ever again without ECC RAM.

That's why I replaced it with an Opteron-class motherboard and CPU with ECC RAM.

Infiniband is kind of like a high end sports car in that it needs constant tuning. I built a 40gbps Infiniband fabric for the HPC cluster at my $DAYJOB, and there is so much lore involved. But we push 8 gigabytes a second of data, continuous, across the entire fabric.

lilshawn · « **Reply #60 on:** May 01, 2013, 11:12:21 am »

Quote from: wesbrown18 link=topic=131546.msg1356340#msg1356340

I built a 40gbps Infiniband fabric for the HPC cluster at my $DAYJOB, and there is so much lore involved. But we push 8 gigabytes a second of data, continuous, across the entire fabric.

i'm too lazy/cheap to buy a gigabit switch for my network. still runnin' 100

MonMotha · « **Reply #61 on:** May 01, 2013, 05:55:21 pm »

I honestly don't know how people put up with 100Mbps LANs, anymore. I'm seriously considering upgrading to 10GbE. The only reason I haven't is that most of my storage at the moment is cheap and can't really go much faster than 1Gbps, anyway.

drventure · « **Reply #62 on:** May 01, 2013, 07:47:01 pm »

Gigabit's cheap. I don't know much about 10gb so I can't comment there.

shponglefan · « **Reply #63 on:** May 01, 2013, 08:13:21 pm »

Gigabit is definitely worth it over 10/100. I recently upgraded my network to gigabit; turns out I just needed to replace one 10/100 switch and it cost all of $30 to do so.

However, I can't see going faster. I find I top out my network speeds at about 40-45 MB/s (uploading to my NAS). Looks like HD speed is the limiting factor. I suppose if I had striped RAID on both ends, it would be faster, but honestly doesn't seem worth it at this point.

wesbrown18 · « **Reply #64 on:** May 01, 2013, 08:19:36 pm »

Quote from: shponglefan on May 01, 2013, 08:13:21 pm

Gigabit is definitely worth it over 10/100. I recently upgraded my network to gigabit; turns out I just needed to replace one 10/100 switch and it cost all of $30 to do so.

However, I can't see going faster. I find I top out my network speeds at about 40-45 MB/s (uploading to my NAS). Looks like HD speed is the limiting factor. I suppose if I had striped RAID on both ends, it would be faster, but honestly doesn't seem worth it at this point.

If you just replaced your switch, you should consider replacing the ethernet cabling with good quality Cat-5e. I've done extensive testing with Gigabit, and find that usually when we hit 50MB/s, it's an issue with the cabling. What's adequate for 100mbps isn't adequate for Gigabit.

You can get about 100MB/s to and from a consumer-grade NAS if you have about four drives. If you have it in a RAID-5, it's going to really slow things down.

My own setup pushes 400MB/s, but that's with aggressive caching, look-ahead reads, a caching SSD, and a pair of log SSDs for writes, and 32GB of RAM pretty much devoted to the NAS.

shponglefan · « **Reply #65 on:** May 01, 2013, 08:33:05 pm »

Quote from: wesbrown18 on May 01, 2013, 08:19:36 pm

If you just replaced your switch, you should consider replacing the ethernet cabling with good quality Cat-5e. I've done extensive testing with Gigabit, and find that usually when we hit 50MB/s, it's an issue with the cabling. What's adequate for 100mbps isn't adequate for Gigabit.

I can probably give that shot. I'd only have to replace two cables between my main PC and my NAS anyway.

MonMotha · « **Reply #66 on:** May 01, 2013, 10:35:12 pm »

I find that, with an SSD on one end but just a single, 7200RPM consumer grade revolving metal drive on the other end, the best I can do is about 70-80MB/sec, and that is indeed limited by the spinning metal. Using scp or sftp sometimes imposes other limits, depending on the CPU in the system on both ends, due to it not being able to run the crypto any faster. It should be noted that transferring something TO the machine with the spinning metal isn't necessarily limited by the speed of the drive since the OS is free to dump the data into the filesystem cache for later flushing, assuming write-back cache policy which is the default on most UNIXy OSes as well as modern Windows for fixed (non-removable) disks.

Obviously an SSD can go quite a bit faster. The Intel 520 series I have in my laptop is far and away limited by the speed of the SATA interface, which is only 3Gbps (the laptop is just a hair too old for 6Gbps SATA) less overhead of course. I typically see ~250MB/sec to/from it.

Gigabit ethernet is cheap as hell these days. Almost all PCs have NICs that'll do it, and reasonable switches can be had for about $10/port. Heck, you can even get a "mostly managed" switch for just a hair more (Netgear GS108Tv2 is going for ~$95 these days). 10GbE is quite a bit more expensive. NICs are a couple hundred used for SFP (+ add optics) or CAT6a PHY, pushing $500-700 new. You can get some old 10GBASE-CX4 stuff for <$100 on the secondary market. The switches will really nail you, though. Figure minimum $200/port. The cost of 10Gb combined with the fact that most of my systems lack the disk throughput to back it up has somewhat made my shy away from 10Gb.

Regardless, don't expect to hit 10Gbps right now even if you've got the network for it without relatively large disk arrays, striped SSDs, or transfers of predominately in-memory data. 1Gb link aggregates are still somewhat attractive for that reason, too. If all you need is 2-4Gbps and can afford to burn the extra ports and deal with the administrative overhead of the LAG, it's usually cheaper.

There are circumstances where disk throughput doesn't matter. Distributed file systems where the server does in-memory caching are a great example. You can have multiple systems with a coherent view of some files, and have it all run at very usable, essentially local speeds using commodity 10GbE hardware. It generally (but not always, if you consider used gear) works out cheaper than Infiniband. These applications are somewhat esoteric, though, and I doubt you'd ever encounter them in a home-use scenario.


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