[ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

[DJ-Pfulio]

65W Pentium G3258 CPU with 4G of RAM.  MB and CPU was $99 total at
purchase 5+ yrs ago.  It can transcode one 1080p stream to 720p via plex
server.  It has over 24TB currently connected.

But I don't use it as an OS backup server. That goes to another machine
with a 2TB USB3 HDD.  I backup about 20 systems with rdiff-backup. It is
mix of VMs and physical. Generally I have 60-180 days of versioned
backups.  I don't backup media files via rdiff-backup and I don't backup
everything, just enough to recreate the system in 30-45minutes if
something happens.

Happy to share my backup techniques. Come to ALE-NW almost any Sunday.


On 12/1/18 11:52 AM, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
> Lots of votes for DIY NAS.
> 
> Assuming that I choose that route, I'd be aiming for relatively low cost
> (not including the cost of the drives, that's a sunk cost no matter the
> array).  To this end I don't need a machine that can transcode video,
> run fifteen application servers, VMs, or much of anything else.  I just
> need a box that can handle SMB/CIFS/NFS for file storage from remote
> machines (mix of *x, Windows, Mac), can run rdiff-backup over ssh (some
> of my smaller machines back up using rdiff-backup for simplicity), can
> send me an email if something is wrong, has two or more Gigabit ports so
> I can divide network streams (one coming from cameras on a VLAN, the
> other coming from the other machines), and the ability to support plenty
> of drives without much extra hardware (at least four plus an OS drive
> without needing a SATA card, more SATA ports is better though).
> 
> I wanted to avoid hyperexpensive motherboards.  I did some searching
> after all the input on this thread came in and most of the build guides
> for DIY NAS boxes max out the system so much so that you can run Plex,
> Xen, an email server, an IoT server, cloud synchronization and like
> fifteen other things, none of which I want.  I just want a giant file
> bucket.  I want to send big files/backups to the machine and, in a
> reasonable amount of time, have those files stored to disk and done.  At
> the same time, that much horsepower is also using a lot of electricity
> so minimizing that load would be great if I don't actually need it.
> That simplifies cooling as well as I'd be able to use passive cooling or
> slow fans.
> 
> The build guides were using things like $600-$1000 motherboards from
> Supermicro and such that had 10 GbE ports, one had SFP slots for fiber,
> another used a Core i7 processor and 128 GB of RAM, one even had a
> Radeon graphics card in it.  Half of them used over 100 Watts idle with
> a significant chunk going to the motherboard rather than the drives.
> Surely a simple file server does not need nearly that much horsepower to
> take data from an Ethernet port and shove it through a SATA port to a
> disk.  The most taxing application for this thing would be continuously
> recording multiple camera streams using H.264 (around 100-200 kBps on
> average) or MJPEG (500-600 kBps) to disk over one of its ports.
> 
> So for those of you that did DIY, how much horsepower did you seek out
> for the system and how little can I get away with for the most basic
> file serving application without drastically harming performance?