[ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

Alex Carver agcarver+ale at acarver.net
Sat Dec 1 19:02:17 EST 2018


I didn't expect the drives to spin down much (if at all) given the
streaming/recording of the cameras but I don't always have to do that.
Nominal power draw from an active drive is about 15 Watts so a 4x array
is going to pull around 60 Watts on its own not including the
motherboard.  That part is fine, I just didn't want a motherboard setup
that was also drawing an additional 100 Watts to power things I didn't
need.  I figured something closer to an Atom based board (but not one of
the C2x series with the hardware failure) might work better as that
would have a total power closer to 10 Watts.  I might be back to some of
the more expensive Supermicro boards to get the multiple GigE ports.

As part of the plan, I was going to use slower 5400 RPM drives and very
large, slow RPM fans to keep things quiet (and cooler) since this will
be in earshot of bedrooms (I don't have a better place for it to go).  I
don't mind if a backup takes a few hours since they'd go at night so I
wasn't planning on high performance file transfer, just a file bucket
that isn't super slow.

On 2018-12-01 13:34, Edward O. Holcroft wrote:
> If you're really just after a big file bucket, you won't need huge
> horsepower for transcoding and the likes. But FreeNAS likes lots of memory.
> 
> You can set the HDD's on FreeNAS to spin down or even switch of when not
> used for a preset period of time. That may help a bit with electricity
> consumption in a home.
> 
> My test box at home:
> Processor:
> AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 925 Processor (4 cores)
> Memory:
> 8 GiB
> 11TB of usable drive space (3x6TB RAID5) plus 1x6TB hot spare that is kept
> plugged in but offline.
> FreeNAS itself runs off an 8GB USB stick.
> 
> FreeNAS recommends 1GB RAM per TB of storage, so I am a bit on the thin
> side but it works fine at home. If there were lots of people connecting
> that might be a problem. Your IP camera might make things more demanding of
> resources, and not so sure about HDD standby mode being viable for a
> security camera scenario.
> 
> ed
> 
> On Sat, Dec 1, 2018 at 11:52 AM Alex Carver via Ale <ale at ale.org> 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?
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