Hello, I'm new here, I'd like to build my own NAS

[Quozlator]

This is my old computer, I have upgraded it to 16 gigs of ram since i first got it, I also added 2 low end video cards that each put out 2 signal paths since I wanted 4 monitors.
I've since built my own much newer more powerful daily driver and wanted to know if the rig listed below could be repurposed into a nas for backing up pictures, and more importantly, for watching 4K video on my 85" 4K tv.
I looked up the P67 and it seems to be a decent match for a NAS, but before i go down that route I wanted to check with people who have a lot more knowledge than myself.
(Pleaswe be patient with my poor typing skills I hzve degenerative nerve disease that causes me much grief withgo whole body, but hands and fingers the most!!!!)

I could buy a NAS but 2 things, 1 is that despite my limitations I like building my own stuff even though it takes me 5 times as long as it should due to dropping screws over and over. LOL
2nd is that beczause we have 2, 4k tvs I wanted somethiung that could keep up with the possibiulity of watching 2 shows at once.

Thank you for any and all help, I appreciate it very much.

Quozlator

 

[Tech Junky]

It would work just fine and the old GPUs will help with transcoding if needed.

The question would be if you plan on using Plex or some other media manager.

Also, storage is going to be needed. Looks like the case has plenty of room for 3.5 drives.

I run mine in raid 10 with 5 drives with one as a hot spare. This gets me 400MB/s across my network but, for streaming you only need ~20mbps per stream unless you're doing native 4k which bumps it closer to 60mbps

 

[Quozlator]

I'm planning on buying a couple of those green nas drives if this setup was goung to work. I've downloaded a copy of unraid and prepped a USB for it. I got a high quality samsung usb key for that part.
I've read a bunch and raid 10 sounds like what i want to go with as well. whats the minmimum amount of disk drives that i need to start? there is an SSD in the machine and I think hat might be what I'm supoosed to use to speed up the system? So 2 nas drives are my first needed purchase. I'd like to go as big as i can afford, does it make more sense to get two 10 TB drives, or more smaller ones?

 

[Quozlator]

I'm Canadian so I see these are my prices on amazon as of today, but it might be smarter for me to wait another week or 2 for xmas sales?

 

[Quozlator]

OOps also forgot to say yes, I'd probably use plex or jellyfin for media, I'd love to rip my collection of disks and be able to access them at will. My wife is stuck using basement tv as thats the one that has a dvd player hooked to it. So theoretically i could rip her fave tv dvd seasons and she could then watch from anywhere in the house? We could have wifi for tablets or since both tvs are hardwired to my switch and then router she could decided where to drop her butt and watch from there?
Thanks again for your super fast replies!!! Im jazzed about getting into this

 

[Tech Junky]

Disk Prices (CA)

Comparison of all hard drives and SSDs on Amazon, sorted by price per TB

diskprices.com

If you use something like Ubuntu you can use mdadm with the missing command and add more disks later. If you use unRAID I'm not sure if you have to blow away the array an then rebuild with more disks.

2 disks will give you at least a mirror of the data. Raid 10 needs at least 4 unless you use the missing flag Linux.

I would just use the SSD as the os drive and skip the USB option as they tend to burn out over time.

The bigger the drive the lower the per GB cost usually. Plus you can't mix and match sizes and grow capacity because raid will configure the space based on the lowest capacity. So, if you have 2x10tb and add 2 8tb drives later then you get 16tb of usable space rather than 18tb in raid 10.

Google diy NAS mdadm and there are some quick setup guides.

 

[eightiescalling]

Another alternative to marking disks as missing is use LVM. I tend to use it between the raid and file system for a bit more flexibility.

In this instance you could buy 2 disks now setup in raid1. Add those as PVs to a volume group. When you want to extend later you can make another raid1 array and add it to the same volume group.

It can also make it a bit easier to manage disk usage if you want to remove disks later or swap them out for bigger disks.

 

[Tech Junky]

Making a 2nd raid one is an option as well. Adding additional disks though in mdadm is possible as well.

There's a few ways to do things as with most things tech luckily with raid there's not a thousand of them.

 

[Quozlator]

thanks for your words....some of them don't mean as much to me as they should, but i'm teaching myself and will get there! I'm glad youtube is a thing now, as i'd be up a tree without it

 

[Quozlator]

ok, ive rebuilt the older computer, and i'm gonna put linux on it. my question now is about hard drives to start. I see that the 8TB seagate ironwolf is on sale right now. So i was going to just go ahead and buy a pair of them to get started. I have room for 6 possible spinning drives in the future, but am I making a mistake at starting at 8 TB? I have the above media, and won't be some huge server farm in the future. but adding a couple more disks is most likely in my future! Should i go smaller, or bigger for my drives? I want to play with the various software possibilities that make it easier to add disks, hopefully of different sizes as was mentioned above. So do I bite the bullet and get the 8TBs?

 

[L&LD]

Getting the best and biggest drives you can is never wasted. Although I would recommend WD Red Plus drives myself.

 

[Quozlator]

really? From what ive been able to read i seed that the red driuves are using inferior software

 

[Quozlator]

and i guess going raid 5 for backup would mean that i need to get 3 drives to start

 

[L&LD]

Where are you reading that?

I'm talking from experience (decade). Seagate drives fail first.

 

[Tech Junky]

8TB is a good starting point but, Seagate might be an issue since they tend to fail more often than WD. I use the WD Red drives w/o the Pro / Plus and they've been flawless for several years now.

With Linux though you can either use LVM or MDADM with --missing if your intent is to add more drives later. Or, just set it up now as Raid 1 for mirroring and later on convert it to a different setup by removing a drive from the mirror config and then rebuilding the 2nd/more drives into a different config and copying the data from the single drive to the new array and then adding in the source to the array when it's done copying.

R5 will give you parity / backup but, it doesn't give you speed if that's your goal.

 

[Quozlator]

well thats great info, thx so much guys
ill go for the reds then instead

 

[Quozlator]

Right now I have abouy 4TB of files i need to move over to the array. But then I'm going to download all my wifes photos form google photo, thenm I'm going to start adding all my DVDs and movies from other sources. So I think that 16TB wil,l probably keep me going for many years. at least I think so, in the case getting three 8TB drives and going raid 5, or another setup that gets me most data with safety should do. At least thats how3 I read it

 

[Quozlator]

I'm not running a business, its me and my wife, and possibly some family down the line, so max speed isnt my biggest consideration

 

[Quozlator]

Nice I see that WDRed only goes to 6TB for $125 each, so I could go for 3 of those, or even 4 if that works. I'm reviewing the various raid configs, and then will review Linux as well

 

[Tech Junky]

You should be able to hit about 200MB/s in R5 and 400MB/s in raid 10. Raid 10 with 6tb drives nerd you 10-11tb of usable space. But you get the speed and mirror out of it.