2 Bay NAS

randombar

Hi Lads,

Have a buffalo 2 bay NAS and it seems to be acting up on me at the minute, when setting up I stupidly created one large partition across the 2x2TB which I'm guess won't help me get the info off them. I'm looking around at the minute for another one and I was wondering:

Should I have created one partition per hard drive and used the NAS that way??

If the NAS goes belly up could I just take out the HD and slot it into a drive enclosure and it would work away? Or would it look to reformat??

Can NAS work on a plug an play basis?

Very vague questions I know but it might help me out.

Thanks
Gary

ED E

What you did when you set it up was create a RAID Array, specifically RAID 0 meaning that the two drives are merged into one virtual extra large drive. This gives a small performance boost, and obviously a very large storage area, but no redundancy. If one of the drives goes belly up, the whole RAID does, everything lost.

If you've corrupted the raid already there's little hope of recovery, take it to an expert if there is data that is really valuable to you, if not, read up on Raid1 before setting it up again.

randombar

Nice one for that, what do you recommend with the NAS? set up a Raid1?

Do you know if the hard drives are plug and play in this set up? I.E. If the NAS goes belly up I could plug one of the raids out and plug it into something else? The awkward thing at the moment is I've about 3TB of data that I need on the NAS, too big for a raid1 with 2 * 2TB.

Any suggestions??

ED E

With RAID1 you can quite quickly and easily "pull" a drive and replace it. But 2 x 2TB would only yield 2TB.

If you feel like reading a lot more the wiki page is pretty extensive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID


As for your 3TB of data, is compression an option? If its video a smart .264 in an MP4 container can be quite space saving. Other than that its gotta be RAID0, but as you know there's no redundancy.


It all depends on what it is you're storing, if you can afford a small outlay HP Proliant servers have been going cheap, think they have 6 or 8 bays. Drives are expensive right now, but give it a few months and we all hope they'll come down.


Or if you've got a few minutes, and its segment-able data, burn DVDs, they're pretty great as stability goes, think the rule of thumb is 10 years. Then you can RAID0 and have some redundancy, all for about €20 worth of disks.

coylemj

RAID-0 is to be avoided at all costs unless the data is backed up somewhere. You get performance but at the cost of terrible reliability. You are almost guaranteed a failure at some stage because whereas with RAID-1 both disks have to fail to lose data, with RAID-0 either disk failing is catastrophic.

If I was you I'd buy a four disk bay and use RAID-5 (D+D+D+P) which would give you 75% usable capacity e.g. 6TB usable for 4 x 2TB HDDs but as a previous poster said, better to wait until HDD prices get back to normal.

Spacedog

if you want to test your metal, try picking up a premium mini ITX board (the type used in set top machines), adding a PCI Sata controller and loading freenas up on there. you can easily build a >10 port Raid5 NAS in a nice enclosure for the cost of a 4 bay off the shelf product.

randombar

Thanks for that it looks like I should upgrade to a >= 4 port device so and hang on until I can get a cheap enough 2TB.

Couple of questions and I should be on my way:

Can I move from Raid1 to Raid5 without a reformat??

What would people recommend for a 4 port NAS? Bear in mind as always cost reliability and power consumption would be the top priorities.

The self build option?? I've tinkered with a few different things in the past so it might be a decent project, any how to's out there?

randombar

Saw a couple on amazon that might be interesting?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B005I55FN4/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001G8OTE8/

tommycahir

In terms of recommending a NAS I would have to recommend a QNAP

I have the TS212 myself and apart from 1 issues following an unexpected power drop it has been almost faultless
They have a 4 bay version also available if you are going down that route Link and if you are really flush with the cash then a 6 bay version (Link)

I have mine in RAID 1 with 2 x seagate baracuda 2TB drives running with 8 months now.

Spacedog

for home brew NAS, try doing this in a VM...
this way you know what to expect and learn how to set up sophisticated RAID configurations on several small virtual disks, you won't see the performance benefits in VM, but you'll understand the principle and see how easy this stuff really is to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geD3mf_kAaY

for off the shelf NAS I'd recommend QNAP or Synology, they have good rep.

randombar

Yikes the Qnap and Synology are a bit pricey from what I can see on amazon/ebay.

Is there a decent tutorial you could recommend hardware wise, ran through freenas on a virtual machine there, seems to be pretty straight forward thank god.

Spacedog

GaryCocs wrote: »

Yikes the Qnap and Synology are a bit pricey from what I can see on amazon/ebay.

Is there a decent tutorial you could recommend hardware wise, ran through freenas on a virtual machine there, seems to be pretty straight forward thank god.

Running on real hardware shouldn't be much different from the VM, burn your ISO to a CD, and install using a USB CD/DVD drive.

for hardware, I'd go for this, and 2GB RAM should be more than enough. processor and RAM need not be huge on a file server. I like this board because it has 5 SATA and a 4x PCI express 2 slot, so you can add more ports if necessary using a SATA controller card like this...

...if you used the 3 available e-sata ports also, you can build a 12 disk array. using 3TB disks in Raid0 would give you a maximum capacity 36TB!!!!

*drool

tommycahir

it would be interesting to see what price putting together your own system would cost compared to something like a Buffalo/QNAP/Synology.
I am guessing that they would be pretty close to similar however the advantage the home built system would have would be in regards the computing power available.

At the moment the disks would seem to be the most expensive part of any NAS home or off the shelf versions.

*EDIT : Guess the home built could be cheaper if you have a spare old desktop lying around that you can upgrade.

Spacedog

commercial NASs charge by the number ports/maximum capacity I think the solution 1 described above would be a lot cheaper than most commercial NAS boxes with >4 ports.

randombar

Spacedog wrote: »

Running on real hardware shouldn't be much different from the VM, burn your ISO to a CD, and install using a USB CD/DVD drive.

for hardware, I'd go for this, and 2GB RAM should be more than enough. processor and RAM need not be huge on a file server. I like this board because it has 5 SATA and a 4x PCI express 2 slot, so you can add more ports if necessary using a SATA controller card like this...

...if you used the 3 available e-sata ports also, you can build a 12 disk array. using 3TB disks in Raid0 would give you a maximum capacity 36TB!!!!

*drool

36TB hahaha reckon I've a bit of a way to go!!

Looks like a nice piece of kit all right, should I just work away with an old desktop or are there better/neater cases for power consumption?

Have a few sticks of memory somewhere and have the hard drives so if I got that motherboard and the mem was compatible all I'd need was a case??

Spacedog

GaryCocs wrote: »

36TB hahaha reckon I've a bit of a way to go!!

Looks like a nice piece of kit all right, should I just work away with an old desktop or are there better/neater cases for power consumption?

Have a few sticks of memory somewhere and have the hard drives so if I got that motherboard and the mem was compatible all I'd need was a case??

Looking more closely, I'd recommend at least 4GB ram, as this allows the default caching of ZFS to be enabled.

Any decent PSU should power the disks, as for the case, finding a compact one for your needs depends on the number of drives etc.

if going for a 12 disk beast, a normal PC tower case wouldn't be too bad.


some nice mini ITX cases here too...

http://www.mini-itx.com/store/nas

They even do rack mount gear, you could make plastic logo face plates, attach it to the front, go into the server storage business and become the next EMC!

(I just looked at the title of this thread again and see how much I've lost the run of myself, lol)

randombar

Hahaha ya suppose, but it's a great education for myself.

Those NAS boxes seem pricey, might take a look around or just use a old pc so? Just trying to keep the power consumption down. Probably not as easy to hot swap them from the pc too??

Spacedog

GaryCocs wrote: »

Hahaha ya suppose, but it's a great education for myself.

Those NAS boxes seem pricey, might take a look around or just use a old pc so? Just trying to keep the power consumption down. Probably not as easy to hot swap them from the pc too??

I'm no expert on Freenas, but from playing with various VM configs on it today. it looks like you need to reboot it if you swap out a v-disk. that said this might be different in a physical situation.

randombar

Just noticed there

http://www.pcworldbusiness.co.uk/buy-rent/HP+ProLiant+MicroServer+-+Turion+II+Neo+N40L+1.5+GHz/P120940P?from=category&heat=img

Another cash back offer, this would be decent enough I'd say??

Thinking about it 4 bay NAS is probably the way to go, IF I did fill the 4 days with data, I could always upgrade to 3TB down the line.

tommycahir

My friend actually got one of those microservers from dabs a few weeks back and he highly recommends it.

on a side note I just noticed that the qnap 412 is on offer from Komplett at the moment - Link

randombar

I'm guessing the QNAP would be more energy efficient but would it be worth the extra 120 euro?? Hmmm.