Network Attached Storage

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Hello,

Been thinking about either purchasing one of these or building my own.

This will be for home use.

I was looking at the QNAP 451+ or building (DYI NAS) one with FreeNAS. I
also found that CentOS has a NAS project.

Not sure which way to go. They would cost about the same. One would be proprietary and the other open source. I like open source.

This for home use. Thought I’d start out with 2, 4TB drives, maybe 3 so I
could implement RAID 5. I have four computers to backup.

TIA

14 thoughts on - Network Attached Storage

  • I have a Qnap 251 that works fine as a nfs backup server.

    I figure that it probably uses less power than something I put together myself.

    I just use it as a nfs server. It can do a ton of other stuff that I have no need for and have never bothered to look into.

  • no need

    The QNAP does have a lot of features that I’d probably never use. The only issue I have is what would be the end of life support. Would that matter if it’s a backup device?

    Thanks

  • Personally, given the two options, I would go with DIY. Reasoning is the flexibility of hardware purchase which would allow for better expansion options. When I did mine, sometime ago, I had a mobo w/ 4 sata slots. At the time the board still had an IDE connection. The SATAs were used for the actual data storage, LVM in my case, and the IDE for the OS. Segregating the two is advisable IMHO. Fast forward to this century. A
    mobo with as many SATA slots as you can find plus an on-board USB slot would be fun. You can use a thumb-drive for the OS. I don’t think it would take a lot of R/W hits since most of the OS would be loaded to RAM. This leaves slots open for when you are ready to expand from your 2x4Gb start. Given that NAS is generally a configuration of the server services and users access, obvious I know so apologies, at it’s basic function and most
    “closed” sourced NASes use ASH as I recall; you only miss out on refinement in a purchased option.

    — Fred

  • Reviews of the QNAP 451 on newegg aren’t very encouraging.

    The FreeNAS Mini from iX Systems is a good deal more expensive, but the ones I’ve worked with have been reliable and well suited to running ZFS
    with good performance.

  • with At $999 w/o drives is kind of pricey. I do like the look of hot swappable drives. But how often is that needed.

    I think I am going the DIY route. I have a Lenovo TS130 I may use. I’ll need to buy a couple 5.25 to 3.5 drive adapters.

    The prices on a new TS140 w/o drives are pretty good. Both have the Xeon processor.

    Thanks

  • Keep in mind, this has to be backed up, too;
    because a RAID failure can happen …

    before implementing a RAID 5 with 3 disks plus hot spare, implement a RAID 6 with 4 disks;

  • Once upon a time, Gordon Messmer said:

    I just retired a TrueNAS (the iX Systems “enterprise” version of FreeNAS, on hardware they sold pre-configured), and I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about it. The hardware they sold was just SuperMicro, so nothing special (and with the standard SuperMicro problems).

    There are some good people at iX, but I wish I hadn’t had to deal with them so much.

  • yes when you have to change one HDD drive and doesn’t get same type or size and so there are mixed HDDs running a pseudo hardware/software RAID …

  • Chris Adams wrote:

    Apologies for coming in late on this, but I wasn’t reading the list over the holiday weekend….

    Is this just for a home system, or for an organization? And how much storage do you need? Where I work, we really like hardware from AC&NC. We have a good number of the JetStors (DAS or fibre). The hardware is *very*
    reliable – we’re looking, in the next month or so, at decommissioning one that actually SCSI, and has been in production for a *long* time…. On top of which, both their pricing is very good, and their service is good, including response time.

    mark

  • I suggest going with what you are, or or willing to become, most familiar with. The simpler the better. And expect it will break, therefore build a contingency for that breakage.

    In my case, I’m using an Intel NUC with a Pentium N3700, a dyconn USB
    3.0 hub, and a bunch of laptop drives in enclosures connected to that hub. Fedora 25 Server is the OS, Btrfs is the file system. The primary volume is just a single disk volume, using samba to share with Mac/Windows/Linux; and periodically the shared subvolume gets snapshot, and use btrfs send/receive to replicate the incremental changes to additional independent volumes (the USB 3.0 drive). There’s
    5 copies of the data locally; three of which are independent copies. An additional independent subset of that data is “in the cloud” so that it’s off site. It’s a very basic setup but it’s also been stable. But I’m also really prepared to lose any of the copies at any time. Even if I were using XFS on LVM, I’d still keep this many copies.

    Chris Murphy

  • I’ve been using a HP Microserver for the last couple years as my home file server, with FreeNAS, and 4x3TB drives.

    mine is one of the first generation N40L microservers, which I picked up on deep discount when they were on clearance. I put 16GB ECC ram in it, and its been working quite nicely.

  • That is a nice looking unit but pricey. They are $867 with no drives on Newegg.

    Think I’m going with the TS140. My TS130 has been pretty solid. I can get one w/o a HD, Xeon processor, for under $400.

    I tried installing freenas as a vm on virtualbox last night for a test run and got into a loop of reboots. I followed the directions in their documentation. Never got it working. After about a dozen tries, I gave up.

    It has me worried about buying all this hardware and not being able to get it setup.

  • That is a nice looking unit but pricey. They are $867 with no drives on Newegg.

    Think I’m going with the TS140. My TS130 has been pretty solid. I can get one w/o a HD, Xeon processor, for under $400.

    I tried installing freenas as a vm on virtualbox last night for a test run and got into a loop of reboots. I followed the directions in their documentation. Never got it working. After about a dozen tries, I gave up.

    It has me worried about buying all this hardware and not being able to get it setup.

  • one and got it his have Debian need to

    Thanks, I’ll take a look.

    I have run some debian vms. Its different but so is CentOS 7 compared to 6.8