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beepsandboops
Jan 28, 2014

NFX posted:

It seems like the HP ProLiant N54L (previous generation) is pretty cheap, and I've been thinking about getting a NAS for a while.

So here's what I'm thinking about buying:
A HP ProLiant N54L. 2.2 GHz Amd Turion II processor, no disks, 2-4 GB memory.
8 GB ECC RAM in order to make ZFS happy.

I don't have any specific needs, but I'd like to not lose everything if a disk dies, and I think I want at least 4 TB of usable storage. It seems like 3 x 3 TB disks is at a pretty good price point, and then they can be configured for RAID-Z. Would I be more happy with two 4 TB disks in raid 1?

Is there anything I should be aware of with this setup? Will the CPU be hilariously underpowered?
HP just announced Gen9 this last week, so you might be able to get a Gen8 Microserver for cheap pretty soon.

I'm not sure if that announcement was just limited to their enterprise-level hardware, or if it applies to Microservers too, but it might be worth looking into.

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dotster
Aug 28, 2013

NFX posted:

It seems like the HP ProLiant N54L (previous generation) is pretty cheap, and I've been thinking about getting a NAS for a while.

So here's what I'm thinking about buying:
A HP ProLiant N54L. 2.2 GHz Amd Turion II processor, no disks, 2-4 GB memory.
8 GB ECC RAM in order to make ZFS happy.

I don't have any specific needs, but I'd like to not lose everything if a disk dies, and I think I want at least 4 TB of usable storage. It seems like 3 x 3 TB disks is at a pretty good price point, and then they can be configured for RAID-Z. Would I be more happy with two 4 TB disks in raid 1?

Is there anything I should be aware of with this setup? Will the CPU be hilariously underpowered?

If it is just for general storage this is probably fine. I would look at 4x 3TB drives in RAIDZ2, that will give you a bit over 5TB of usable space. If you need more performance you can run striped mirrors (RAID 10 basically), that is safer than RAIDZ/RAID5.

I would spring for 16GB of DRAM, it looks like it will support it contrary to what HP lists. I found someone in the freenas forum that is running one with 16 GB DRAM using this PN (Kingston 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 ECC Unbuffered Server Memory Model KVR1333D3E9SK2/16G).

Mr Shiny Pants
Nov 12, 2012

NFX posted:

It seems like the HP ProLiant N54L (previous generation) is pretty cheap, and I've been thinking about getting a NAS for a while.

So here's what I'm thinking about buying:
A HP ProLiant N54L. 2.2 GHz Amd Turion II processor, no disks, 2-4 GB memory.
8 GB ECC RAM in order to make ZFS happy.

I don't have any specific needs, but I'd like to not lose everything if a disk dies, and I think I want at least 4 TB of usable storage. It seems like 3 x 3 TB disks is at a pretty good price point, and then they can be configured for RAID-Z. Would I be more happy with two 4 TB disks in raid 1?

Is there anything I should be aware of with this setup? Will the CPU be hilariously underpowered?

I've got the older N40 with 16GB Ram and it runs flawlessly. I even have Win2012 VM running on it. Software is Ubuntu with ZFS and a 120GB SSD L2Arc. It saturates 1Gbit easily.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness
Yeah, the N54L is a nice little box. As for if the CPU will be underpowered, that depends on what you want to do with it. It's plenty for just running NAS4Free/FreeNAS or whatever other basic OS you want, along with your favorite torrent application. It will not, however, be enough to do much in the way of on-the-fly transcoding, if you were considering that.

NFX
Jun 2, 2008

Fun Shoe
Thanks for the answers.

DrDork posted:

Yeah, the N54L is a nice little box. As for if the CPU will be underpowered, that depends on what you want to do with it. It's plenty for just running NAS4Free/FreeNAS or whatever other basic OS you want, along with your favorite torrent application. It will not, however, be enough to do much in the way of on-the-fly transcoding, if you were considering that.
I don't believe that lack of transcoding is a dealbreaker, I certainly haven't needed it yet. I still think I'll wait and see what happens to the gen 8 servers.

Chuu
Sep 11, 2004

Grimey Drawer

beepsandboops posted:

HP just announced Gen9 this last week, so you might be able to get a Gen8 Microserver for cheap pretty soon.

I'm not sure if that announcement was just limited to their enterprise-level hardware, or if it applies to Microservers too, but it might be worth looking into.

I'd be surprised if it applies to Microservers, the G7 and G8 microserver launches didn't. The main driving factor behind the ProLiant upgrade cycle is a new Xeon socket, which doesn't really effect microservers. You might get a rebadge just to make things consistent marketing wise.

Out of curiosity I was comparing the G7 and G8, and the G7 is starting to get rare enough that the price differential is as low as $50 if you can catch a sale on the G8. It's $300 vs. $370 this instant according to google.

If you don't need the 2nd LAN port or care about the faster processor but do care about expandability or noise, the G7 might actually be the superior unit.

Chuu fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Sep 1, 2014

NFX
Jun 2, 2008

Fun Shoe
I can find the Gen7 for less than 1,500 DKK (265 USD), but the cheapest Gen8 is around 2,400 DKK (420 USD). The prices aren't directly comparable with US prices due to VAT and taxes. For reference a Synology DS415play is around 3,500 DKK (620 USD), so a gen8 is still cheaper, but the price difference between gen7 and gen8 is nearly equivalent to the cost of an extra 4 TB drive.

According to silentpcreview, the Gen8 fan speed is higher if you disable hardware RAID, but if you enable it, it's actually quieter than the gen7. Apparently it's tied to ILO's detection of disk temperature.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness
I keep seeing sales for the Seagate NAS HDD's. Anyone know how they actually stack up against WD Reds?

Dotcom Jillionaire
Jul 19, 2006

Social distortion

DrDork posted:

I keep seeing sales for the Seagate NAS HDD's. Anyone know how they actually stack up against WD Reds?

There are lots of direct comparisons out there. The conclusions I've read are that both drives are pretty much completely equal in performance, Reds had slightly better performance on multi-user systems, Seagate has better performance on single user systems, but the difference is so negligible that you should probably buy whatever is more affordable.

Dogan
Aug 2, 2006
Recently I've been on a inexplicable "personal cloud" kick and I'm trying to plan out my home network setup. So far this is what I have on the table:

Requirements:
- I want to access movies/music/pictures/documents within my home network
- Files must be centrally stored on the NAS. I don't want folder sync between all of my devices (this rules out Tonido, BTSync, and similar things)
- Ideally should use SSL when accessing documents from the WAN, from my laptop or work computer
- I'd like to be able to use Winamp at work to play directly from my home music collection
- It'd be nice if I could easily browse pictures remotely as well, ideally to the point that Picasa could access cloud-shared files.
- I'd like to avoid FTP/SFTP unless absolutely necessary

Potential solutions:
- I have a pentium-4 server with a pair of 1-TB drives and Win Server 2008.
- For all the LAN stuff I'll probably just use CIFS/Windows folder share; this should play the nicest with Win7 Libraries and such
- For access from the WAN, it looks like WebDAV is the best solution. It is fairly well-adopted, supports random access, supports SSL, and I already have the web server for it.
- I ruled out CIFS/NFS over TCP pretty quickly because it looks like that would be a nightmare to set up and maintain, also neither protocol was really designed for this scenario
- I also considered setting up a VPN server for the home network, but this seems like overkill for my scenario. Plus I would probably need another machine to act as the gateway
- Owncloud looks nice for WebDAV, but it has 2 problems: 1. It runs pretty slow on my Apache install 2. It doesn't like when files change unexpectedly. This means that changing the files from the LAN "backdoor" will break it.

So, it looks like I'll run something like IIS to serve Webdav requests, and then install either Netdrive2 or Expandrive on each client machine so I can mount the cloud share as a network drive from anywhere.


How does this sound? Are there any better solutions that I haven't considered?

phongn
Oct 21, 2006

If you really want to learn a lot (and have real DNS), you could play with OpenAFS. A lot of the big science community uses it, but it's, uh, complex.

Novo
May 13, 2003

Stercorem pro cerebro habes
Soiled Meat

phongn posted:

If you really want to learn a lot (and have real DNS), you could play with OpenAFS. A lot of the big science community uses it, but it's, uh, complex.

If you ever catch yourself thinking "Gee, I really should set up a Kerberos + LDAP + OpenAFS infrastructure at home for personal use" make sure you at least keep enough machines working so you can watch youtube while you're kicking yourself for being a retard.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
I'd setup a freakin' Hadoop HDFS cluster before I think about trying to do Andrew FS or GlusterFS at home. This is also probably because I know Hadoop already, but I never had a good experience in the past trying to setup the other distributed filesystems. Also, HDFS is useful for a lot of analytics / metadata extraction I'd like to run on the data I've got (8TB+ of random crap on the Internet basically), but replication factors of 3+ are total overkill for anything you do at home aside from literally running an online business.

GokieKS
Dec 15, 2012

Mostly Harmless.

Novo posted:

If you ever catch yourself thinking "Gee, I really should set up a Kerberos + LDAP + OpenAFS infrastructure at home for personal use" make sure you at least keep enough machines working so you can watch youtube while you're kicking yourself for being a retard.

That's a silly and dumb idea for most people even without OpenAFS being thrown into the equation.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

necrobobsledder posted:

I'd setup a freakin' Hadoop HDFS cluster before I think about trying to do Andrew FS or GlusterFS at home. This is also probably because I know Hadoop already, but I never had a good experience in the past trying to setup the other distributed filesystems. Also, HDFS is useful for a lot of analytics / metadata extraction I'd like to run on the data I've got (8TB+ of random crap on the Internet basically), but replication factors of 3+ are total overkill for anything you do at home aside from literally running an online business.

Gluster is actually stupidly easy to get running. Lustre's a bitch, but Gluster is easy.

alo
May 1, 2005


While the word "kerberos" is on the page, has anyone had any luck getting nfs4 working with kerberos and active directory (Solaris nfs server, mixed clients, mostly linux)?

Mr Crucial
Oct 28, 2005
What's new pussycat?
I have had 4x 3TB Seagates for a while now (ST3000DM001-1CH1 models). When I first got them I tried to put them into a single parity pool with Storage Spaces, but after a few days a fault came up with the pool where two disks were reported as unavailable, and the array broke. I checked the disks for SMART errors and there was nothing wrong with any of them, so I put it down to Storage spaces being poo poo and ended up just using the disks independently with FlexRAID doing parity.

A few days ago I installed Solaris and put the same 4 disks into a Raid-Z1 pool. Again it worked fine for a few days until pretty much the same thing happened - 2 disks became unavailable and the array broke. So I switched back to Windows and tried my luck with the built in software Raid-5. Guess what happens a few days later? 2 disks unavailable, array broken. On every occasion it appears to be a different pair of disks that fail the array, there's no consistency to it.

The strange thing is that the final attempt with Windows Raid-5 was with completely different hardware to the Storage Spaces and ZFS experiments. There are still no obvious SMART errors or anything.

Can anyone come up with a plausible explanation as to why these disks just don't seem to like living in any sort of array? Is there anything I can do to fix this? I don't really fancy going back to FlexRaid but thus far it's been the only way I've been able to get Raid4/5 like behaviour to work at all.

This is with an i3-2125, 8 GB of RAM, Intel DH67CF motherboard.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
Sounds more like FlexRAID is tolerant to intermittent failures as opposed to ZFS or Storage Spaces, which will drop a disk from the array as soon it disappears from the system. Possibilities are that the chipset on your mainboard is hosed (did that P67 SATA port issue ever show up on other x67 chipsets?).

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Yeah, the issue was present on both the H67 and the P67: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4143/the-source-of-intels-cougar-point-sata-bug

If those are plugged into ports 2+ on the controller, I'd either hit up Intel to see if they can verify whether or not your board is a later chipset revision without the flaw (the B3 stepping) and pursue a RMA that way, or pop an add-in controller in and see if the problem goes away.

Otherwise... any other commonalities? SATA cables, power supply?

Mr Crucial
Oct 28, 2005
What's new pussycat?
I actually had problems with Windows RAID-5 on a separate mainboard, I can't remember the exact model but it was a dual-core Atom board so I doubt there was any commonality in terms of chipset SATA channels or anything.

It could be power supply I suppose, and I will have re-used the same SATA cables. I'll look into getting some replacements and see if that makes any difference. Thanks for the suggestions.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
Whenever I'll upgrade my desktop, I intend to reuse most of the old parts to make a NAS. Ideally, this is just a new mainboard, since the old one isn't ITX, and a new case. But then I got thinking, the old CPU is a Core i7-2600. In regards to minimizing idle power draw, would it make sense to get a low TDP CPU instead, or are idle draws almost equivalent?

yomisei
Mar 18, 2011
Depending on your need for ECC (e.g. for ZFS or other important applications), processing power and electric cost it might be a good choice to go for a small Celeron or Pentium brand CPU and some ECC memory. If you don't need ECC or power is cheap, a non-ECC-mainboard will surely do with the 2600, with a bonus of good processing power.

The cost of a whole set of ECC compatible gear (CPU+RAM+MB) is usually a lot higher than you can save on the bill later on.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
Yeah, ZFS was the plan. I guess I have to scrap the plan and go with new hardware. What do you guys think about the Intel Avoton platform for a ZFS NAS?

Krailor
Nov 2, 2001
I'm only pretending to care
Taco Defender

Combat Pretzel posted:

Yeah, ZFS was the plan. I guess I have to scrap the plan and go with new hardware. What do you guys think about the Intel Avoton platform for a ZFS NAS?

One issue I've seen reported is that ZFS doesn't like it if your zpools are split between intel/3rd party SATA controllers. So long as you keep each zpool confined to SATA ports on the same controller I don't think you'll run into any issues.

Thermopyle
Jul 1, 2003

...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell

Krailor posted:

One issue I've seen reported is that ZFS doesn't like it if your zpools are split between intel/3rd party SATA controllers. So long as you keep each zpool confined to SATA ports on the same controller I don't think you'll run into any issues.

You mean in general or on Avoton?

If you mean in general, I've certainly never seen this to be the case.

Krailor
Nov 2, 2001
I'm only pretending to care
Taco Defender

Thermopyle posted:

You mean in general or on Avoton?

If you mean in general, I've certainly never seen this to be the case.

It might just be limited to the marvel controllers used on the Asrock avoton boards.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=32647.0

http://forums.tweaktown.com/asrock/56191-c2750d4i-marvel-9230-sata-port-problems.html

Some people have reported that they start crapping out during high disk I/O

spog
Aug 7, 2004

It's your own bloody fault.
On the off-chance that anyone cares, I have found that my Synology box will process thumbnail generation far faster than using my PC to do it.

PC - about 2,500 per day, with the processor pegged and usuable during they day and sleeping at night (despite an active process running)

NAS - about 7,000 per day with maybe a couple of hours background transferring from PC and no processor usage.

so, in summary, the photo uploader sucks major balls, but the NAS is better than expected.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
Here's a philosophical question: How does MS expect their Storage Spaces to go anywhere, if they have poo poo all documentation, nor a roadmap, which I'd presume would be important given how barebones it is. Did anyone in enterprise actually adopt it?

IuniusBrutus
Jul 24, 2010

Hey I was looking at throwing together a Plex box, until I realized I use Plex...never. That said, this tower was recommended and I still need some sort of NAS solution for backups for my two PCs and web dickery. Am I dumb to stuff this with two 3TB HDDs and a lightweight Linux build? I don't want to do something lovely or struggle to get it working, but I wouldn't mind it being a little bit of a project I could learn something from.

xylo
Feb 21, 2007
<img src="https://forumimages.somethingawful.com/images/newbie.gif" border=0>

Combat Pretzel posted:

Here's a philosophical question: How does MS expect their Storage Spaces to go anywhere, if they have poo poo all documentation, nor a roadmap, which I'd presume would be important given how barebones it is. Did anyone in enterprise actually adopt it?
It's not uncommon for companies to not detail out everything they are planning for compete reasons. Personal opinion is that it's only suitable atm for simple soho solution as the service it's replacing is drive extender.

I built a new NAS about 6(?) months ago and played with using as a possible solution, but after a lot of playing I found for me it was not ready for what I wanted to build. If it wasn't good enough for me then I doubt any enterprise would adopt it either.

edit: I lied, it was 10 months ago. Just checked and I built it in November '13.

xylo fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Sep 11, 2014

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
The Icy Dock enclosures, are they worth it? Or is it cheap poo poo? --edit: Or Icy Box ones (from RaidSonic)?

xylo posted:

It's not uncommon for companies to not detail out everything they are planning for compete reasons. Personal opinion is that it's only suitable atm for simple soho solution as the service it's replacing is drive extender.
I guess it's a bit annoying that you get things like ReFS, which is supposedly super-awesome, but there's jack poo poo of detail documentation as to why exactly. Not that I expect them to divulge the on-disk data layouts, but some theory beyond "woohoo B+ trees" would be nice. And as far roadmaps, this alludes a little to the poor performance of parity spaces and the inability to use ReFS' self-healing on it.

Combat Pretzel fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Sep 11, 2014

xylo
Feb 21, 2007
<img src="https://forumimages.somethingawful.com/images/newbie.gif" border=0>

Combat Pretzel posted:

The Icy Dock enclosures, are they worth it? Or is it cheap poo poo? --edit: Or Icy Box ones (from RaidSonic)?

I guess it's a bit annoying that you get things like ReFS, which is supposedly super-awesome, but there's jack poo poo of detail documentation as to why exactly. Not that I expect them to divulge the on-disk data layouts, but some theory beyond "woohoo B+ trees" would be nice. And as far roadmaps, this alludes a little to the poor performance of parity spaces and the inability to use ReFS' self-healing on it.
v1 man. :) I can't remember the exacts but I think you can use ReFS okay with SS as long as you disable integrity streams (SS has it's accounting so the extra layer on the filesystem isn't needed)? I could be wrong.. it's been a while since I looked.

I should do a write up of what I found to be the best working NAS setup for what I wanted. Basically after all the options (NSTF/ReFS/Spaces/SoftRaid/etc), what I found works best was getting a good hardware raid controller, using ReFS with integrity streams off, creating vhdx of drives and then using those as iSCSI target exports to machines.

I found that right now with ReFS, integrity streams impact performance way to much (I suspect there is some locking contention work that needs to be fixed up somewhat). I used ReFS so I wouldn't have to worry about waiting for chkdsk on a 13TB array if something went sideways. It's worked very well so far.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
So yeah, I'm likely going with a Xeon E3-1220V3 for my NAS. Doesn't sit too well with me that it'll be as powerful as my desktop, but considering the total price difference to the Atom platforms isn't large enough to justify the loss in computing power. I guess it'll be able to last a very long time.

Here's for something else... When using ZFS iSCSI devices exported in FreeNAS in Windows, does no activity let FreeNAS spin them down? Or does Windows do tomfoolery that keeps FreeNAS thinking they need to continue spinning? The case for iSCSI devices: Running a Steam library on the NAS with the least issues, and storing and compiling VS projects.

phongn
Oct 21, 2006

Combat Pretzel posted:

So yeah, I'm likely going with a Xeon E3-1220V3 for my NAS. Doesn't sit too well with me that it'll be as powerful as my desktop, but considering the total price difference to the Atom platforms isn't large enough to justify the loss in computing power. I guess it'll be able to last a very long time.
I have an E3-1260L in my NAS. You gain a lot of flexibility if you want to do CPU-intensive things and when idle they don't use much power.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
I got a compromise between an Atom and Xeon and might have gotten a better deal than either. My NAS runs on a i3-4130 and is only missing VT-d compared to an E3 Xeon. There's a lower TDP version of that available to save a few more watts, too.

I don't run iSCSI LUNs from my FreeNAS box and I'm not even sure if my drives could ever spin down much given I use them so often and thus can't test to confirm but if you use the Windows iSCSI initiator it should understand that it's a remote LUN and confirm the connection on occasion but not necessarily issue block transfers that would force a spin-up. Intuitively speaking, not every iSCSI command should cause a spin-up if the firmware is sane.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

necrobobsledder posted:

I got a compromise between an Atom and Xeon and might have gotten a better deal than either. My NAS runs on a i3-4130 and is only missing VT-d compared to an E3 Xeon. There's a lower TDP version of that available to save a few more watts, too.
Pretty much this. If you don't have need of the VT-d (VMWare, etc) baked into the Xeon, the lower-end i3 series is more than powerful enough to handle NAS duties along with a reasonable amount of add-on stuff, like transcoding for Plex or whatnot.

Piquai Souban
Mar 21, 2007

Manque du respect: toujours.
Triple bas cinq: toujours.
Looking to architect a home NAS, mostly for media and my photography archives - I am starting to work as a pro photographer. Looking for something good and off-the-shelf with a lot of app support, and the Synology products seem up my alley. Is the native transcoding on the 214play/415play important? Assuming the 213air wireless functionality will be adequately replicated by plugging them into my Airport Extremes.

Any models in particular stick out for that use case?

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
I got myself a decent EU variant of a Kill-a-Watt style inline power meter, and seeing how much my desktop's actually idling at was a bad surprise. So I can't wait for the NAS parts to arrive. Right after boot, it pulls ~140W, but I still don't know what happens on long idle (I'll see when I get from work), but if the Haswell Xeons on a mini-ITX board and no graphics card can idle at 30W as claimed everywhere, lowering my desktop runtime from 24 hours to 8 hours but keeping the NAS running all day (both assuming all idle), it'd lower my power usage to 54% of before. :psyduck:

thebigcow
Jan 3, 2001

Bully!
Does that 140 number include monitors?

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dorkanoid
Dec 21, 2004

Combat Pretzel posted:

I got myself a decent EU variant of a Kill-a-Watt style inline power meter

I've been looking for one of those - which one did you get?

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