Low powered NAS


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yeah Synology is great... if you like paying 1000$ and not getting the features a 20$ raid card can get you online BBU RAID 6 etc :wacko: ... I hear you can install flappy birds on them though so that makes up for it :rolleyes:

 

Seriously I don't care what anyone says paying for prebuilt is insane with ebay chock full of enterprise raid cards. If you want low power you can go for a pico psu and atom board which would be completely fanless I doubt youd get 8 hdds running off one of those though youd need a second power brick for the hdds.

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yeah Synology is great... if you like paying 1000$ and not getting the features a 20$ raid card can get you online BBU RAID 6 etc :wacko: ... I hear you can install flappy birds on them though so that makes up for it :rolleyes:

 

Seriously I don't care what anyone says paying for prebuilt is insane with ebay chock full of enterprise raid cards. If you want low power you can go for a pico psu and atom board which would be completely fanless I doubt youd get 8 hdds running off one of those though youd need a second power brick for the hdds.

 

You've obviously never used a Synology extensively before, your comment speaks for its self. Anyone here who has used them will recognize this.

So OP, take his advice with a grain of salt.

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You've obviously never used a Synology extensively before, your comment speaks for its self. Anyone here who has used them will recognize this.

So OP, take his advice with a grain of salt.

Hopefully this isn't a derailment of the topic...

 

What does a Synology really bring to the table? I looked at their product range pretty extensively, but I really couldn't stomach the prices. I could, and have, purchased full servers that are far more capable and powerful (of course a full server wouldn't be as low wattage as some Synology options, but current generation rack servers stay under 100W generally). I'm sure you could build or buy stuff like a mITX box or the HP MicroServer and get better features on a hardware level.

 

I haven't used a Synology, as I mentioned, but what are the solid benefits that you see in the software (DSM) that they are adding? Why do you feel it adds so much value to justify the added costs?

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There are a couple of interesting options:-

 

1) Go for prebuilt.  I don't understand why you have had so much trouble.  I have a single bay Qnap NAS which has been on 24-7 for the last 6 years (bar a few hours).  Never had a problem with it.

 

2) Go for a prebuilt server machine.  I have the N54L which is most recent G7 HP Microserver and it is not the quietest thing on the planet, but in a cupboard you can't hear it.  I have a LSI RAID card in it (used as a HBA) and 10 drives (4x3TB 3.5" in the standard slots, 4x1TB 2.5" using a backplane fixed in the 5.25" bay, 64GB and 96GB SSDs fitted in the middle area).  I also installed a network adapter so I have a WAN facing NIC and a LAN facing NIC. The box runs ESXi and a number of virtual machines including a FreeNAS VM, a Nexentastor Community Edition VM, pfSense VM (my router) and an Ubuntu VM for playing with.  Even though it is as Athlon Neo (Atom class processor) based machine, it doesn't break a sweat.

 

3) Build your own. I am desperate to do this myself but don't have the funds right now (and the Microserver works so well) - you could look at a case such as U-Nas NSC-800 and quiet fans, an Atom S1200 family processor (not your average Atom - a server class Atom), a Haswell mini-ITX motherboard, 32GB RAM, an LSI RAID card, an SSD,  1U PSU, etc.  Would be so much fun to do and would look cool too.

 

The sensible middle is the HP Microserver route - I have looked around and there isn't anything in a decent package quite like it.

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I run a n40L - it uses about 50-55watts, this is with a killawatt meter on it over a long period of time..  Uses almost nothing.  I have 4 disks in mine currently all HDD, not SSD.  Very quite too - sits next to me on the floor in my computer room, and other than the lights you would not know its on.

 

But I have to question this "several TB i guess"  How about you rip a movie or 2, and Your CDs with how you plan on doing it and then with some simple math will have a rough ballpark.

 

There is no reason to go think you need 4x4TB drives if what your going to fits on 1x2TB, etc.

 

DVDs are pretty low quality source and will produce very small files.  Did you mean BluRay?  I recently ripped all 3 seasons of Titus from DVD, 54 episodes = 12GB.. Take a lot of DVD's to use TBs of storage unless your ripping them wrong ;)

 

As to raspberry pi, have to fire mine up and connect a usb disk..  But your talking about just pulling the files off a share, you don't really need all that much power or bandwidth to play DVD quality rips.  Now if you were going to do 1080p rips off your blurays and need full 5.1 Audio and your stickler for quality you will never notice then ok ;)  But I am pretty sure it could do the job of serving up some files - when I thought my popcorn hour had died I fired it up with xbmc on the pi and was playing files fine - but it was pulling them from my storage no pushing it out off a usb disk..  Let me fire it up and do a test of speed.

 

But if your looking for something you can use for a NAS plus a lot more then yeah a microserver n40l, n54l would be a good choice - I am not hearing all that great of stuff about the new gen8 and the price is a bit steep compared to the slightly older models.

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Not really a NAS, but I still have an Acer H340 mini-server machine from yesteryear that I use as such.  4 front-loading removable SATA bays, an Atom CPU and 2GB of RAM.  It originally came with Windows Home Server, but I've been running 7 x64 on it.  It barely registers at 45W on my UPS, which includes my modem and router.  The only noise coming out of it are my hard drives grinding away.  I don't think I could've put together a much better system back then for the price.  Even though it goes back to 2008 or so, it has no problem with my recently purchased 4TB drives.

 

The only drawback is that I had to find a PCI-express 1x video card, as the unit itself is headless.  But, I only need the card to be in it when I actually need to see the display and for some unknown reason I can't RDP into it.

 

Just found a review for installing FreeNAS on it:  http://www.happybison.com/reviews/installing-freenas-on-acer-aspire-easystore-h340-6/

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I run a n40L - it uses about 50-55watts, this is with a killawatt meter on it over a long period of time..  Uses almost nothing.  I have 4 disks in mine currently all HDD, not SSD.  Very quite too - sits next to me on the floor in my computer room, and other than the lights you would not know its on.

 

But I have to question this "several TB i guess"  How about you rip a movie or 2, and Your CDs with how you plan on doing it and then with some simple math will have a rough ballpark.

 

There is no reason to go think you need 4x4TB drives if what your going to fits on 1x2TB, etc.

 

DVDs are pretty low quality source and will produce very small files.  Did you mean BluRay?  I recently ripped all 3 seasons of Titus from DVD, 54 episodes = 12GB.. Take a lot of DVD's to use TBs of storage unless your ripping them wrong ;)

 

As to raspberry pi, have to fire mine up and connect a usb disk..  But your talking about just pulling the files off a share, you don't really need all that much power or bandwidth to play DVD quality rips.  Now if you were going to do 1080p rips off your blurays and need full 5.1 Audio and your stickler for quality you will never notice then ok ;)  But I am pretty sure it could do the job of serving up some files - when I thought my popcorn hour had died I fired it up with xbmc on the pi and was playing files fine - but it was pulling them from my storage no pushing it out off a usb disk..  Let me fire it up and do a test of speed.

 

But if your looking for something you can use for a NAS plus a lot more then yeah a microserver n40l, n54l would be a good choice - I am not hearing all that great of stuff about the new gen8 and the price is a bit steep compared to the slightly older models.

Thanks for that additional information. That is about what I expected it to use when I have 1U and 2U rack servers doing 100W on Xeon processors. Very much in line with something like Synology.

 

Are you virtualizing your NAS on the N40L?

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Hopefully this isn't a derailment of the topic...

 

What does a Synology really bring to the table?

 

I'm not arguing that they bring more to the table, but they can do just as much as a standard NAS, with simplicity and hardly any setup/maintenance. The main point of my response was to address the outright unhelpful and bad information from the reply that TPreston posted of

I hear you can install flappy birds on them though so that makes up for it
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I use FreeNAS and configured the drives to power down after 30 minutes of idle time.  You also need to increase the S.M.A.R.T. interval.

 

Get an old tower, with a cheap CPU/Mobo, and good quiet CPU/Case fans. 

 

Do what I do and store your videos on the NAS, but copy them over to your primary HDTV player when you want to watch it.  I use XBMC and will probably never try anything else :)

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Yeah my "nas" currently is just windows 7 running drivepool from stablebit..  Works great and gives me extra flexibility with the VM if want to run other stuff on it, etc..  I also run my router on the same n40l as vm, pfsense, and a ubuntu server vm that I use pretty much every day for my shell access.  Plus lots of other play/test vms that I fire up as needed.  I have 16GB of ram in mine and added 3 nics for a total of 4.

 

The extra nics allow me to run 2 segments on my lan and wan connection and gives vmkern its own interface vs having to share it with lan, etc.  It is a very low budget box that gives you lots of flexibility, small, quiet and low power.  Running esxi 5.5 on the host.  But sure if want you could just run whatever OS you wanted on the hardware itself for just "nas" use.

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On the HP you could have

 

4*4Tb for storage

 

and add this for even more space

 

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/icy-dock-mb996sp-6sb-6-sata-hot-swap-525-bay-backplane-raid-cage

Don't tempt me haggis! haha.

 

Yeah the synologies are great, have a few friends with them, a breeze to set up, literally plug and go, simple remote login over the web, external and internal media servers and some other cool bits, they great if you want soemthing simple and no hastle...but thats what you pay for, their (very good) software, and a prebuilt machine that will just work and is probable quieter and lower power than a microserver,

I was soo soo close to buying one (DS414j) I think...the 4 bay home version.

 

But yeh at the price of the NAS + drives it just wasn't worth it (I also have the advantage of getting a free Server 2012 licence from work...so 1 less cost with a microserver for me to worry about).

 

My N40L now has all my media and docs, I work away a lot so runs Plex to stream it to me (synolgies have this as well) but I have the added features of it running a teamspeak and minecraft server for all my mates. but this did involve installing an OS, figuring out RAID, configuring firewalls and routers to let me login remotly...its a lot more work...but satisfying when it's working...

 

The one thing I would say and I thing budman and the other microservers owners would probably agree, put some money aside for a RAM upgarde, only comes with 2GB ECC which is a bit low when running S2012 (probs be OK for a linux distro or free nas software, but more RAM will never hurt even if you just go up to 4GB (max is 8GB without a BIOS hack then it maxes at 16GB...on that note has anyone here done that?)

 

Also if your in the UK I got mine from here.

http://www.serversplus.com/servers/tower_servers/hp_tower_servers/704941-421

Still doing the cash back and on the better model...kinda tempted to sell my N40L and upgrade...  :shifty:

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thanks guys for the input, getting lots of ideas right now.

 

Amazon.es has the N54L for 185?, diskless (well, it comes with the standard 250GB disk), so it's cheaper then buying from UK or even from my own country; also i prefer a server based solution so i can not only use it for NAS (file sharing) but stuff it with VM's; currently i have a server/game station loaded with RAM and disks, so a small server could be useful to use (with iSCSI) so i can offload from that server/game station the server part.

 

any more ideas / suggestions?

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yeah you dont need to mod the bios to accept 16gb ram

but some types of ram are a bit funny and wont work

search google there are loads of pages that give you the exact model numbers that work :)

Someone mentioned about being quiet

I had the Microserver sitting beside me last night and i could not hear it even when streaming mkv from plex

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Hello,

crappy software in QNAP that makes everything slow, not to mention crappy implementation of SMB ACL, that just doesn't work properly.

 

Also QNAP support is terrible: i asked them about this issue in December 2013, still no answer...

The web interface is kinda AJAX heavy, Ill give you that much.

The ACL implementation they use is WEIRD!!! I mean, one of the strangest ways to work in the world. Once you get a hang of it, it makes "sense" but I understand what you mean by crappy implementation. Thats the only "but" I would say but ( ;) ) besides that...I cant really think of anything else.

 

I am not hearing all that great of stuff about the new gen8 and the price is a bit steep compared to the slightly older models.

I hate you :laugh: (To be clear, I actually hate myself for choosing Intel and not listening to BudMan)

Do you believe they are going to pick up the microserver and in some time, bring me a new one? :laugh: it is insane what this server is going thru to get it changed...

BTW, I would love to read reviews from you guys and your microservers :)

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Do the extra SATA ports magically appear on the mobo, or do your have to buy an expensive RAID card ;)

I dont have raid in mine as the data i have there is no need for redundancy

But you could just buy a PCIe Sata Controller, or am i wrong?

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Do the extra SATA ports magically appear on the mobo, or do your have to buy an expensive RAID card ;)

 

Yes, for that server you can buy a cheap LSI card, for example.

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Yes, for that server you can buy a cheap LSI card, for example.

 

Or one of the many rebadges, full list here.  I have the Dell PERC H310 in my box now, bought after I bricked my IBM ServeRAID M1015 and sold my IBM ServeRAID M5014 because despite having amazing RAID performance, it didn't support JBOD and I just wanted a HBA.  You ideally want a card where the ports point backwards rather than upwards because they are easier to install in the Microserver. 

 

You could use a SATA controller card also but it is difficult to find the same number of ports for the money.

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So we are talking about putting disks in and we don't even have a clue to how much space he actually needs.  For all we know its going to be 1x2TB disk and he is good for the next 2 years.  And we are talking how to add more than the 5 sata ports the box already has?  And don't forget the esata so 6 plus the USB can be leveraged for space.

 

And to be honest all this RAID talk is just how to waste money in this sort of setup.  He clearly stated he wants to "rip" his library..  So he has original copy - does he really need to spend money to keep the library online on disk failure when he can just play the movie he is in the mood with off a disk if need be?

 

I personally see no point in spending money for parity for something like a media library..  This is not an enterprise - if a disk fails, then replace it and put the files that were on that disk back on from where you got them.  With good monitoring of your disks, normal upgrade path because your library grows and you change out smaller disks for larger disks its quite possible you would never see a  catastrophic failure and loss of data on the disk.

 

Just my 2 cents is all..  I just don't see the point of spending money and limiting storage to be honest on creating parity for your media library..  What does it matter if it goes offline for a few days?  Your not a production movie house where you have to stream your movies to paying customers, etc.

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Hello,

You know its funny that I post that I never had a problem with the QNAP at work and that same day all hell breaks loose :laugh:

Once you make a choice, tell us about it OP. As you can see, there are a lot of different opinions :)

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Yeah very interested as well to understand how much space you need..  So please rip some examples and let us know the size and what you did and how many video's and songs will be in this library and we can get going.  

 

Its pointless to come up with something that can store or expand to X amount of space, if your only needing Y and either have no plans to ever get to X amount of space or it will be years out..  If years away then can always upgrade/replace hardware as you go - why spend money in HDD space sitting there empty?  Here is one thing I can tell you for FACT, the cost of storage goes down every year, monthly really.  Other than massive floods in Thailand that took out some HDD makers required factories the prices of HDD would of continued to go down..  We are just getting back to the point where they are dropping again and getting back to the normal trend.

 

But what is fact is that cost to store 1TB will be less next year than last year.  So why spend money on putting together a 4x4TB array if you only have 1TB of data currently?  This is big flaw I see users make when trying to figure out their storage needs.  It cost so much!!  Well it cost so much because your putting together a system for 20x what you need currently.  And added to that cost is parity they somehow think they need for stuff that can be replaced without any issues, and is not even important..  Does that digital copy of Dumbo require parity?  If library goes offline so what?  You have a media copy on your shelf, you can go to the store and even buy another copy if need be.  For that matter there will prob be a better version of it next year with higher resolution and better sound and remastered, etc. etc..

 

So yeah might be a bit of pain to put the files back if you lost a disk - but is really worth the cost of disk and controller, etc..  In the OFF chance it happens?  If you put together that fancy 4x4TB raid 5 -- you do understand that if a disk fails and you put in another one its possible the rebuild fails and now its just toast anyway.

 

Raid is designed to mitigate down time on hardware failure - in the enterprise that data can not be offline, even for a few hours.  If a disk fails its better to have a bit slower access to the data than no access.  So you have degraded service while a tech pops in a new disk and it rebuilds vs having to wait while "critical" data is restored from backup..

 

In the case of a "home" media library - what does it matter if a few movies or even all of them are offline while you rerip a movie or song..  Now if your planning on putting a large amount, 10TB plus of media in your library I would suggest looking to alternative methods of not having to rerip.. Say something like unraid where you can have lots and lots of disks with only 1 disk as parity..  And even if you loose the parity and a disk or 2 only the files actually stored on the disks are lost, you don't loose the whole array.

 

Traditional raids have passed their prime and with the amount of storage and size of disks it is time to look to other solutions.  And were never meant for "home" anyway, now if your wanting to say do raid 0 for performance on your desktop with some SSDs -- that makes more sense in a home setup then creating large arrays of storage for replaceable media that is not critical to be online in the first place.

 

Thought I would throw in 2 more cents - I can really quickly get to a nickel ;)

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Budman i agree with you

 

The server i got the other day

 

I plan on eventually having 4*3Tb or 4*4tb

 

but just now i loaded my external drives i had into the server

 

so i have a 1Tb drive and 500Gb drive and the original 250Gb drive that came with it

 

i am using about 300Gb of the 500Gb and about 200Gb of the 1Tb

 

 

Once these start to get full i will purchase a 3tb or 4tb drive and load it in alongside the other 3

 

once it start to become full i will replace the 500gb drive with another 3 or 4 tb drive and so one

 

 

 

also i was looking at a ssd for os but i dont really see the point or the need for it

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