Project: Home/SMB NAS Setup -- Need ur advice
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Okay... so I have been searching for a great home/smb NAS system.
For my home uses, here is what's driving it:
- Large family: 2 adult, 5 kids (means TONS of media -- videos/photography)
- My wife and I are both photographers (30-50mb raw image files)
- Plex Media Server (for our video library, plus family photo stuff)
- Possible corporate backup for my software company (big maybe here)
So... for home stuff, I want to be able to collect data from:
- 2 Macbook Pros (both with 1TB drives)
- 1 iMac (with a *1TB)
- Multiple iPhones and iPads (all with 128gb storage)
I want to do regular backups of these devices to the NAS, and have a central image/video repository for the family. In addition, we want a general file share... In other words, in some instances (like the video library, central fileshare for the family, or the image/video repository) this will be the primary copy of the data (we'll focus on funneling this content onto the NAS and then backing it up after. In other instances, like a timemachine backup of one of our main computers, the NAS is the backup.
My budget is fairly large for a home NAS setup...
I started by looking at standard solutions like Synology stuff:
But I sorta got turned off of Synology for some reason... their weird Hybrid RAID, CPU issues, etc... (even though I know people who love them)
Then I started looking at QNAP systems like:
Then I starting thinking about FreeNAS and a DIY route... I am a former software engineer (now in management)... so I love the idea of a project, but realistically I'm somewhat limited in my time. I've been stewing over a NAS solution for my home for months reading up on what I want to do, and then came across this forum and wanted to get ur advice. Would love your take @scottalanmiller...
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@markl Synology's recent offerings actually have very strong CPUs with them. The 17 series are mostly modern XEON, and the newest ones (DS1817+) will have the new AMD processors with even more cores to throw at workloads.
Still, I'd go with a server box if I had someplace to put it. I'm not sure where you're located, so I don't know if xByte is available in you're area. @xByteSean
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So the needs here are big storage, but not high performance (within relative terms), SMB protocol for the Macs, Plex.
My first thought there is Fedora. You have the option of software or hardware RAID depending on what you want to do. Software RAID is more flexible, hardware RAID is a lot simpler (drive fails, just swap it!)
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If you plan on running the Plex app from the NAS, you're not going to be happy if you have need for any transcoding unless you're running one with one of the Xeon chips. Anything else and it'll be much too anemic to transcode. You'll get nothing but stutter and disappointment. If you have a separate Plex server and all you want to do is serve-up the files from the NAS, you'll do fine.
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Something to consider is getting refurb enterprise server gear. This can give you high quality hardware RAID, good chassis, good components, CPUs that can do the transcoding without breaking the bank. For home, a tower server likely makes the most sense.
Check out xByte. We use them for most things like this. @xByteSean @ryan-from-xbyte @BradfromxByte @Lyndsie_xByte
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The way to get around transcoding is to stick to formats that your device (Roku, Apple TV, etc) can play natively, but I second @scottalanmiller on xbyte. My home server is an xbyte server.
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@travisdh1 I live in Utah... are you asking if xByte is local? Can they mail equipment?
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@markl said in Project: Home/SMB NAS Setup -- Need ur advice:
@travisdh1 I live in Utah... are you asking if xByte is local? Can they mail equipment?
They are US based and can easily ship anywhere in the US. They can ship outside of the US too, but they don't normally.
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@scottalanmiller So again, part of my ask here was related to my other thread on how you think of reliability when building a NAS platform (at least in terms of the example given). It sounds like:
a) You focus on the quality of the underlying hardware (hence the refurbed enterprise suggestion) -- cpu, chassis, power supply, etc...
b) You seem to favor hardware raid...You recommend Fedora for the OS (which I'd love to understand compared against Ubuntu or other distros).
So let's say I do that... the QNAP I was looking at supported 8 bays... originally I thought I'd just pay the diff to get some extra bays so that I had expansion room. I was thinking of starting with 4 x 6TB drives running RAID 10...
Does that input trigger any other thoughts?
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@markl said in Project: Home/SMB NAS Setup -- Need ur advice:
b) You seem to favor hardware raid...
Simpler, doesn't require the same expertise. If a drive fails, you just swap in a new one, that's the total process. I've seen too many people lose all of their data because of the high level of expertise needed to swap a failed drive in ZFS' software RAID. Get one command wrong, all is lost. Even people who do it full time in production accidentally waste those systems with some regularity.
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@markl said in Project: Home/SMB NAS Setup -- Need ur advice:
So let's say I do that... the QNAP I was looking at supported 8 bays... originally I thought I'd just pay the diff to get some extra bays so that I had expansion room. I was thinking of starting with 4 x 6TB drives running RAID 10...
At eight bays and larger, you are into rackmount sizes and while the QNAP will likely work fine, you'll pay more and get less than from an enterprise server. Although likely it will be more quiet.
An eight or twelve bay like an R510 is likely vastly higher quality, much easier to service and more power for less money. Although we'd have to check on the drive options.
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@markl said in Project: Home/SMB NAS Setup -- Need ur advice:
You recommend Fedora for the OS (which I'd love to understand compared against Ubuntu or other distros).
Easier for non-experts, doesn't play the weird LTS / Current game causing ecosystem support inconsistencies, better set of tools for server use (Ubuntu is exceptionally non-friendly to storage and high availability systems), better public documentation and user community, built with a more stability use case focus, etc.
Fedora is the rapid release sibling of RHEL. You want a rapid release because you want modern features. Ubuntu is not in the same class as the Red Hat and Suse families. It's not bad, but it's not on par. And as a non-expert / non-full timer you don't want to be introducing that complexity for no reason.
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I can suggest you to look into drobo, in particular the 5N2 model. It has a lot of ready-to-install applications (as Plex, Transmission, CouchPotato, NextCloud etc..), it is a NAS Bay with automatic RAID ("BeyondRAID
") essentially.Some friends of mine (a team of 8+ people) is using it to do backup + Plex + transmission, but I never used it, so I don't know if it suits your needs.
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@Giggiux said in Project: Home/SMB NAS Setup -- Need ur advice:
I can suggest you to look into drobo, .... it is a NAS Bay with automatic RAID ("BeyondRAID
") essentially.It's just a silly brand name for RAID 5 and RAID 6.
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Problem with the Drobo is that it is massively underpowered (that's why it doesn't offer NFS, it doesn't have the power for the protocol - that's straight from engineering) and only does parity RAID with just five drive bays. So you have to do RAID 6 as RAID 5 isn't safe at all there, but that means you can only get the capacity of three drives and it is dog slow unless you tier with the SSD and that's only fast by having no RAID on it at all and only the amount of data that is tiered in the SSD is fast in any way.
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@markl said in Project: Home/SMB NAS Setup -- Need ur advice:
@scottalanmiller So again, part of my ask here was related to my other thread on how you think of reliability when building a NAS platform (at least in terms of the example given). It sounds like:
a) You focus on the quality of the underlying hardware (hence the refurbed enterprise suggestion) -- cpu, chassis, power supply, etc...
b) You seem to favor hardware raid...You recommend Fedora for the OS (which I'd love to understand compared against Ubuntu or other distros).
So let's say I do that... the QNAP I was looking at supported 8 bays... originally I thought I'd just pay the diff to get some extra bays so that I had expansion room. I was thinking of starting with 4 x 6TB drives running RAID 10...
Does that input trigger any other thoughts?
@bj @david
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@markl your point about RAID 10 is spot on. At this size, even with consumer drives, you would be pretty safe on RAID 6, but if you grow you are heading into a danger zone. It's home use, so an extended outage due to a rebuild might not be horrible. RAID 6 tends to be popular for backups. If you have high end drives like WD RE, doing RAID 6 would be fine, but you pay a premium for those drives (they are enterprise with a low URE rate.) But if you use cost effective consumer drives like WD Red or WD Red Pro then RAID 6 is edgy at the larger scales and your RAID 10 lets you safely scale much larger and have better performance.
So at eight large drives, RAID 10 is pretty nice. But you would still be okay with RAID 6. Really, even 8x 8TB drives I might feel confident with RAID 6. That's a 48TB URE risk domain which is large, but not crazy.
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@scottalanmiller okay, that's awesome. So curious about your thoughts on "backups"... let's say you got 15TB of data you want to do backups on. Are you building a separate RAID array for backups? How does it's use change your thinking on build specs and setup? Do you use different RAID options?
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@markl said in Project: Home/SMB NAS Setup -- Need ur advice:
@scottalanmiller okay, that's awesome. So curious about your thoughts on "backups"... let's say you got 15TB of data you want to do backups on. Are you building a separate RAID array for backups?
That would depend, if it is backups from somewhere else, which seems to be your description, then I'd keep it all on a single array. Splitting up your array will significantly diminish your performance and options at this size. It'll be much less flexible. This way you have one strong RAID. That your backups and unrelated home data are on the same array doesn't create any additional risk.
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Now if you need to backup the primary data that resides on this device, that would need to go to a completely different device.
