Simple, Fast and Power Efficient NAS...?

I'm happy with my Gigabit mini-ITX E350 motherboard. Replaced an much slower Intel Atom mobo. Running win 7; haven't tried Linux.

 

Want to build a simple & fast NAS just for serving data and backup storage for family; Low power consumption is preferable; Ability to fill a Gigabit Ethernet connection would be desirable.

Thinking about AMD Brazos (Zacate) E350 or Intel Atom (Pineview) D525; E350 seems to be a little bit more powerful and power efficient, but D525 boards are generally cheaper than E350 ones; The fanless Intel D525MW is available with 2 x SO-DIMM slots, supports max. 4GB of RAM, but no PCIe slot. The Foxconn AHD1S-K is also fanless, uses DIMM, supports max. 8GB of RAM, has a PCIe x16 slot, but costs 15% more.

Will be running off 2 x 2.5" HDD in mirror mode, which I have now, in the beginning to keep the project cost low (and HDD are real expensive these days, BTW)

Have some notebook PSU lying around but all those DC-DC PSU seem to be very expensive and I'm not that concerned about noise. So probably will go with any standard PSU.

The system will goto a secret place so I'm not even considering a chassis for now.

That's about it for the hardware I guess...

For software, thinking about Ubuntu Server or Debian with webmin. Tried Openfiler before but it seems too complicated. For the file system it seems ZFS is a good choice although not built-in like ext4. The OS shall be installed onto a USB flash with RAM disk backup for /tmp.

Cheers.

 

i got the the Supermicro X7SPA-HF Single Intel Atom D525, IPMI in my 1u firewall and it is really a good motherboard.
it got one full size 16x PCI-e lane that is running on x4. it also good 2gb ethernet connections and IPMI if you are interested in that.

i don`t have much experience on AMD but i can really recommend Intel Atom

one note tough even tho it got a passive cooler the heatsink gets very hot to the touch so i would recommend a case with some airflow (1 small low rpm fan) would be ok
what psu are you looking at? in terms on watt?

Edit: the HDD prices will go down quite a lot over the next month`s. as soon as they repair their factories that have been damaged. prices are 30%+ over normal many places. if you can wait you will save a bit of money

 

First time hearing about IPMI, glanced over the Wikipedia entry, sounds like something for enterprise installation...? Any practical use for a home user...?

Considering these Atom and Brazo systems consume <30-watt under load, and 3.5" drives takes 5-10W each, I think the total system load should be under 100W...?

Cheers.

 

IPMI is a remote interface to controll power settings on the system, can log in remotely and power on/off or restart it. it can be a handy tool for some

100w? well it may be but i would not go for anything smaller then 230W power supply.
the hardrives may be drawing less power when in use but you have to take start up in mind, the load could easy be twice the amount of when in use for a 10th of a second or up to 1-2sec depending on hardrive/system

a powersupply will be most efficient when being around 50-60% load (varies a little)
the hot subject about power use are something subjective and it do not have industry only standard when measuring "wat under load" and such so i would highly reccomend not to start counting in 5-10watt differences but more in 20-30 range, it just a variable that can vary a lot

 

is this DIY going to be preferrable to a $200, 20 watt NAS from Synology or QNAP?

 

the pre-build`t boxes will do just as good as one you build yourself if it can hold the amount of storage space you are looking for.
the bonus about building yourself are that you can pick parts and/or choose the software you want

 

Take a look at the on-line interactive demos of Synology and QNAP. You may not appreciate how much they do, and nicely, versus a generic file server.

 

Sounds interesting. The plan calls for administering the box through Webmin and SSH. Any additional benefit of having IPMI...? Or do they provide the same functions...?

A quick research gives me the impression that IPMI is more for big installations and it seems to be an overkill for home use...?

Ah yes, thanks for the reminder! So I'm going to look for a PSU that's around 200W.

BTW isn't there some "delay startups" functions for situations like this...? But maybe they're not available in low-end components anyway...

Very true! The time and effort involved are not free, that's why I just usually tell people to buy name brand computers these days. OTOH, the knowledge learnt and flexibility of a custom built system is not always easy to quantify.

Anyway, given the price of a quality pre-built NAS, I'm still leaning towards a custom built solution...

The current plan looks like this...

Mainboard (E350) - 100USD
1 x 4GB RAM - 20USD
PSU (used market) - 10-15USD
Something to put them in... - <20USD

Did I miss anything...?

As mentioned above, I don't really need a small chassis, and that gives me some flexibility. I can imagine if one needs a small chassis, pre-built NAS looks more attractive in terms of pricing because components specifically designed for (small) NAS are generally not cheap.

BTW, I've read that ECC memory is recommended, but couldn't really find a solution in the price range I'm targeting. And despite the praises for ZFS, the effort needed to get it running on Linux could be too much...

Please continue to comment, learning something new everyday.

Cheers.

 

Emphasis mine.

While it seems a good idea to have the expandability of a custom built solution, IMO most users probably won't need a >4-bay solution. Cause you aren't not going to add disks forever, but instead replace the old ones with new ones that are bigger in size.

Cheers.

 

suggest you focus on functionality you want in the NAS software in priority over storage capacity. That's what's behind the prior recommendation to look at the Synology and QNAP on-line interactive demos. Today's multimedia NASes are not simply file stores.

 

Thanks but I'm not considering pre-built NAS at the moment because of the acquisition cost.

Cheers.

 

Bought the parts and finished setting up the software.

Got a Soyo SY-E350-U3M mainboard instead of the Foxconn. Roughly the same price but the Soyo has 2 additional SATA ports, USB 3.0 support and a mini PCIe slot. It's also (undesirably) got a fan and a fan duct (see here for an overdone photo documentation) which I had removed. So far it's been running fine but the weather has been pretty cold these few days (and the fan outlet of the PSU is blowing at the heatsink), time will tell.

There's also a slightly cheaper E350 mainboard (JW-E350M-GT) from J&W. It's a mATX mainboard (larger in size), has more extension slots (x16 slot, x1 slot, PCI slot), but no USB 3.0 support. There are other E350 models which cost more... Anyway, at the end I picked up the Soyo.

Thought about getting a used PC too, but the cheaper ones (60-80USD) I found were of P4 architecture which, if run 24/7, is probably going to incur an electricity bill that will exceed the saved cost fast. The current setup, sans drives, draws <20W at idle according to my power meter.

The PSU cost more than planned though, as I couldn't find a used one of acceptable quality and availability at that price range, so I picked up a new one instead.

A 4GB module, a used 2GB USB stick and 2 used 2.5" drives round up the package.

Cheers.

The mess...



Placed in a carton box (with the cover removed for photo).

 

Setting up the software took much more time than I expected though.

Lots of the time was spent on installing the OS. Although there are many live CD/USB distros out there, it seems that installing from a USB mass storage device to another USB mass storage device is still kind of problematic. Tried Ubuntu Server, Zentyal (a variant of Ubuntu, formerly eBox) and finally settled on Debian.

The initial Ubuntu Server install went okay but then the system wasn't able to boot, and subsequent installs failed altogether. Zentyal's installer wasn't designed to be loaded on a USB stick (I have no usable optical drive) and it took me long to figure out how to make it work, then somehow after installation I wasn't able to login. The Debian install went awry at first, then I realized that one only needs to write the boot image (boot.img.gz (AMD64 arch)) using UNetbootin and place the netinst ISO image on the same drive and boot. There's one caveat though - The target USB stick cannot be plugged in at boot, it has to be done during the installation process, after the installer booted and before partitioning begins.

Some hours were spent transferring files out of one of the 2.5" drive, a few different strategies were used but at the end I just copied them to another PC, and copied them back to the server via Samba/network.

After some trial and errors, I've created a RAID-1 array (tutorials here and here), installed webmin and setup Samba. There was much confusion in the beginning as somehow I couldn't login the Samba server from my Windows 7 box - It kept saying that the credentials were not valid. There are some mentioning on the Net that says one needs to change some Security Policies or hack some registry values on Windows, and/or edit smb.conf to make it all work. Then a friend came to rescue (THANK YOU!) and advised me to use some "net use" commandlines to clean up the FUBAR and now it works. Apparently Windows (7?) do some caching or whatever that fouled up the whole credential stuffs, but can be cured by using "net use * /d".

BTW, the username has to be entered as "WORKGROUP\username", whereas WORKGROUP stands for the workgroup name, with the Samba default being WORKGROUP. Read that if the Windows username matches the Samba one, then everything would be silky smooth but anyway...

And besides the more generic webmin, there's a Samba (web) GUI called SWAT, which stands for Samba Web Administration Tool. I recall using it many years ago...

Unfortunately, my wireless router doesn't have a Gigabit Ethernet switch and the throughput is obviously limited by the network connection at the moment.

Cheers.

 

All-in-all, it's probably a better idea to get a pre-built solution from the likes of QNAP, NETGEAR, Buffalo and Synology if one is not into tinkering with these stuffs and/or have no time to spare.

OTOH, given that a pre-built solution of this capability probably cost >USD400, maybe I can start building some nofrill NAS with those 4-bay ITX chassis and sell myself. Is FreeNAS simple enough for an end-user to handle him/herself...?

Cheers.

 

If you DIY with Ubuntu (or ?) how do you get close to the suite of apps that Synology and QNAP have, with a nice GUI?

If all you want is CIFS and FTP, maybe it's n/a.

 

Of course, a $25 gigE switch would fix this.

 

If I wanted that, I wouldn't be posting in the DIY forum.

I don't get it, are you a vendor selling Synology and QNAP stuffs...?

Thanks for pointing out the obvious.

Cheers.

 

Sorry. No, I'm just me - keying off of the thread's title. Offering unwanted help, apparently.

 

FreeNAS at it's simplest is almost turn key, you shouldn't have a problem. It is ABC.

I agree with you, if you want to save money, have the inclination, and the time, DIY is the way to go. I generally recommend it primarily to folks who want higher capacity than what is offered by the consumer grade NAses.

Since the consumer grade NASes are quite competitive to homebrew prices (at best you save $100 and approach their performance), it isn't until you want much faster and/or much bigger that the payoff is really realized.