I just lost a five year old 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Desktop drive. I've decided to replace it with a NAS but I've never owned one before. I have done some research, I have not made a purchase but I think I've decided. I have a very open mind and I would really appreciate advice, recommendations, critiques, suggestions, and information regarding your NAS set up.
My intention is to store media files to stream via Plex and access via Kodi on a local smart TV, as well as to store some data files. Here's what I have in mind thus far -
Go buy a second hand hpe/ Dell tower server off eBay or something. Can get servers with x8 SFF SAS bays, run them in raid 5 and add 1tb disks as needed
Jaxson Brown
noise, heat, power, high cost per TB
Liam Howard
The mini with 4x12TB in ZFS RAID-Z = 36TB Lowest cost per TB.
Josiah Baker
On the other hand, performance, reliability, expandability(capacity and operationally), dual NIC and proper CPU capable of transcoding and compression
Ian Wilson
OP's build suggestion looks like it will cost just under $600. That Mini of yours starts at $999 with no drives.
Actually, the 12TB drives are more cost effective. base system = $1200 (with 32GB RAM) 4x$408=$1632 $1200+$1632=$2832 for 36GB = $78.66 per RAIDZ TB but I don't know how reliable these drives are
Hunter Miller
If you start out with a 2-bay NAS that has two 4TB drives in a RAID1 configuration, and someday you want to upgrade from the two 4TB drives to two 10TB drives, how do you do that? I don't mean, "just swap out the drives". I mean, how do I get the data from the two 4TB RAID1 drives onto the two 10TB RAID1 drives? Would all that data need to be backed up somewhere else first before swapping out the drives? Or can this be done in the NAS by removing only one 4TB drive and replacing it with one 10TB drive, copy the data to the 10TB drive, and then swapping out the 4TB drive for the other 10TB drive?
Bentley Garcia
buy a 4bay chassis and add the other 2 drives as a new mirror.
Bentley Turner
You could connect one of the original disks to a $10 dock and copy its contents to your new array in your NAS.
Noah Brooks
I think something like that is fairly straight forward in ZFS but other RAID setups might not work so well.
Landon Rodriguez
6gb RAM why? If your smart tv is too dumb for current video files, give it a $25 chinese htpc to decode videos rather than building a powerful realtime transcoding machine that costs $200+ extra and then consumes more power on top of that.
Hudson Wood
Wat? You cant grow or shrink raidz arrays at this point.
Its much easier with the most widely used RAID, Linux mdadm RAID (the thing most standalone NAS boxes and enterprise storage servers that use RAID use.)
Brandon Wilson
I was just thinking "hmm.. what about a 4-bay" as your post appeared. OK, so let's say I have a 4-bay with only two RAID1 4TB drives. Then, someday, I add two 10TB drives. You are saying I can mirror the two RAID1 4TB drives onto the two 10TB drives?
OK, then I can pull those 4TB drives out and then add 10TB drives to the empty bays. I would have a total of four 10TB drives. So my question is, if I have two 10TB drives with data on them set up as RAID1, and I add two new 10TB drives, can I change to a different RAID configuration without destroying the data or does the data need to be backed up before switching to a different RAID? I'm trying to think this thing all the way through the likely possibilities I am going to run into down the road.
William Martin
You can *but* you'll essentially have an array (RAID5/6?) over 4x4tb and one over 2x6tb.
Jason Ward
>You could connect one of the original disks to a $10 dock
Could you post a link to what you mean? I don't mean to hold you to an actual $10 price tag. I mean to learn what kind of dock you are talking about. I've no knowledge of such things and it sounds like such a dock could be a very handy thing to have.
Angel James
Get an odroid hc2 with another external HDD to mirror your drive to. Raid is not a backup, not even if you use zfs, which by the way is hilariously overpowered for what you're going for.
Owen Peterson
PS: With that being the end result anyhow it doesn't even matter much if you copy the data to the 2x6tb first and recreate the 4x4tb array or if you can live grow that 2x4tb array to a 4x4tb array with the data on it, it's only a bit more data that moves but its not that huge either way.
Christopher Adams
start with a 4TB mirror then add a 10TB mirror. you now have 14TB. decommission the 4TB mirror or keep it service until you are ready to replace those drives.
Leo Watson
BTW: ZFS and a lot of proprietary mainboard RAID crap cant currently do this migration (more drives, different RAID level) and Linux mdadm RAID can.
running a bunch of 2disk ZFS mirrors in a ZFS pool is the most flexible setup for growth; it has good performance; excellent fault tolerance/recovery; but high cost per TB. changing from multiple mirrors to a raidz will require a deep rebuild - destroys all data.
Of course this is cheap because it's directly from China so you'll have to wait for a few weeks. An alternative closer to home will be a bit more expensive.
You'll also need to connect this to a device that can mount the single RAID1 member. A laptop/PC booted with a linux live usb distro can do this. Transfer files over your network. Maybe if the NAS has USB it can do it itself.
Jackson Bailey
> 16 GB ECC RAM > 8 core processor For a single NAS that will generally stream a media file to one user and store some data...?
That thing has specs for a 16 drive cloud storage node. Probably more than that.
Dylan Nelson
Wait for Intel Gemini Lake NAS
Ethan Rodriguez
Why would you wait for that?
If you're lucky, you'll save like $1.5 / year on electricity over the "older" Atom [and probably none over an ARM capable of handling a handful of drives] that you paid anyhow as extra cost for using that new Intel.
Nicholas Reyes
Build your own NAS with whatever hardware you like and then install FreeNAS on it, you nugget.
