Rolling my own NAS, SATA or SAS, and what OS?

[OaksLabs]

I was gifted with an HP ProLiant DL360 (G5), which is a quaint little 1U server that takes 2.5" drives. I am thinking about using this server as a NAS to share VMs in my XenServer pool, and I'm stuck. First things first, it only sees 4/6 drive bays in the RAID manager (not a big issue to me, I'm willing to put up with it, it was free hardware). I'm looking to build a RAID 5 array with the 4 drive bays that are working.

I will be looking into getting the other 2 drive bays working, but in the mean time I am shopping for HDDs. I use WD RE3 3.5" drives in my main virtualization server, and I have no performance complaints. I mainly want to get as much storage space as possible. I'm also on a budget (as a twenty-something college student) and I'm tempted to use HSGC 1TB 2.5" HDDs. (http://www.amazon.com/HGST-Travelst...=1-12&keywords=2.5+sata+hard+drive+enterprise)

My thought was using FreeNAS (now NAS4Free ?), and I was wondering if anyone had experience with this OS and performance on SATA drives.

 

[Porthos]

Might suggest these drives instead for your purpose..

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Hard-Driv..._feature_keywords_three_browse-bin:4990425011

 

[OaksLabs]

Might suggest these drives instead for your purpose..

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Hard-Drive-8-bay-RAID/dp/B00EHBES1U/ref=sr_1_16?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1440288285&sr=1-16&keywords=wd+black&refinements=p_n_feature_keywords_three_browse-bin:4990425011

I saw these drives shortly after I posted this thread. Have you used them before? They look good, but I'm curious as to how well they hold up in production.

 

[Markverhyden]

I've been running a FreeNAS server for several years. The latest permutation has 18tb in 8 drives, but what ever I had one hand (cheap ones). FreeNAS 9.3 and it been pretty reliable. Currently I mainly use it for my OS X TM backups as well as manual file copies.

 

[Porthos]

Have you used them before? They look good, but I'm curious as to how well they hold up in production.

No have not, But I would want them over those HGST "Travelstar" re brands. I have replaced several of those HGST drives in laptops after failure.

 

[CLC]

I use the WD Red in all my new nas builds, they work great. I've only used the 4TB and 2TB though.

 

[layoric]

FreeNas here as well. Running over 6 months no issues (once you set it up right and work through permission issues). Very fast. Have 4 3TB drives. Plenty for me. 16GB memory, memory should be high for FreeNas.

 

[CLC]

Never really was a fan of FreeNas, but to be honest I didn't really give it fair shake.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Played with FreeNAS a few years ago a few times....yeah pretty cool distro.
Does its own RAID...RAID Z, part of its ZFS file system. Probably want to consider that over RAID 5.

 

[OaksLabs]

Does its own RAID...RAID Z, part of its ZFS file system. Probably want to consider that over RAID 5.

Do you think performance would drop using the software RAID vs the hardware RAID?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Without knowing what hardware RAID controller is in the Proliant...hard to tell.
Using FreeNAS's built in RAID, you have better monitoring of drives, status, control of them using the built in native tools.
Similar to having VMWare installed on a Proliant or PowerEdge...you don't have tools within the host OS to monitor..have to do it in the BIOS or using the iLO/iDrac.

When replacing a drive, most hardware RAID controllers will perform the rebuild better. But during normal 24x7 daily use...won't really notice anything. Note that RAID 5 has slower writing, really only faster for reading. RAID 10 has better of both.

All that said 'n done...personally I'd go with the native RAID of FreeNAS. It's not a database server with heavy crunching all the time....and you gain the constant monitoring of it within the FreeNAS OS/GUI.

 

[Markverhyden]

FreeNAS has long put forward that real hardware RAID should never be used with the ZFS file system. So it's OK to use regular SATA ports or the software based RAID (BHA) cards. The catch with the software based RAID cards, that I found, is they do not all properly present the drives to the underlying BIOS and, thus, to the OS. I installed a Highpoint Rocket RAID card, HBA based, and could not see the drives. So after plenty of digging around that, for some of those cards, you need to create a small FAT32 partition, 20mb, then it will be recognized. What I get for not RTFM. LOL!!!

RAID vs. Host Bus Adapters (HBAs)
ZFS wants direct control of the underlying storage that it is putting your data on. Nothing will make ZFS more unstable than something manipulating bits underneath ZFS. Therefore, connecting your drives to an HBA or directly to the ports on the motherboard is preferable to using a RAID controller; fortunately, HBAs are cheaper than RAID controllers to boot! If you must use a RAID controller, disable all write caching on it and disable all consistency checks. If the RAID controller has a passthrough or JBOD mode, use it. RAID controllers will complicate disk replacement and improperly configuring them can jeopardize the integrity of your volume (Using the write cache on a RAID controller is an almost sure-fire way to cause data loss with ZFS, to the tune of losing the entire pool).

From - http://www.freenas.org/whats-new/20...design-part-i-purpose-and-best-practices.html

 

[OaksLabs]

Thanks guys! I'll definitely turn off the RAID card (and maybe that will fix the issues with the two drive slots not being seen....).

 

[leomag]

Spend the time on freenas as it is well worth it.
Use the software raid as it works well and you can report on it.
But, spend the time and read the manuals, get you sharing right and all will be great.

 

[luckygobaker]

Not sure if it has been mentioned or answered already, but I personally just run a Ubuntu OS, and share my two separate RAID's as their own shared folders, and then not run a GUI on my server, and it handles everything with ease. I also use it for my teamspeak server and minecraft server with no performance issues. It has a FX 8150 and a cheap mobo for the core. As far as drives go, I'd say Western Digital for sure, probably reds. Anyone have an objections? I can't see why FreeNAS is needed, but I also don't know the needs..

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/H...rminal) - Uncomplicated, Simple and Brief Way!

 

[Eagle21]

... I personally just run a Ubuntu OS ... Anyone have an objections? I can't see why FreeNAS is needed, but I also don't know the needs..

No objections from me, Ubuntu should work fine. FreeNAS is not needed.

When looking at building a storage server or NAS, there is a common misunderstanding that what is needed is a “NAS operating system.”

A NAS OS is good for non-technical computer users - it lets them set up a file server with a minimum understanding of computing. For more experienced computer users a general purpose operating system (such as Ubuntu, Fedora, FreeBSD or even Windows) is much better.

This is a good recent article which compares the differences between a NAS OS and a general OS, for file serving.
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/07/the-jurassic-park-effect/

 

[HCHTech]

This is a good recent article

Really good writing. And, as one of the folks who has, as the author says [ lack of deep technical knowledge to build the systems ], I get his point completely. I'm not going to stop selling or recommending NAS devices where I think it is appropriate, but this give me a more complete understanding of what goes with that decision. Great read!

 

[OaksLabs]

No objections from me, Ubuntu should work fine. FreeNAS is not needed.

I agree with you that file sharing can be done in a very easy fashion with Ubuntu (I run a Ubuntu FTP server and I share out one of the FTP folders on my network). I also use windows OSes for file sharing too.

My issue is performance. I plan on running VM's off this network share (too a point....). I'm building a server cluster, and this is going to be the central storage in case of an equipment failure, it will fail-over to the secondary server and the VM will continue to run with minimal downtime. However, my primary application of the cluster will be real-time migration though

While Ubuntu would work well for file sharing, FreeNAS (or a dedicated NAS OS) is better suited to high demand applications (in my opinion).

An example: Server #1 is running 6 VMs, each with a 30GB HDD. Server #1 has a RAID failure, and I need to reboot it (just as an example, I know RAID is hot-swap). I have the ability to move the VM's to server #2 in real time (yes, no interruption in operation) with my shared storage. However, I have 180GB of data to move (and I don't want to wait all day!). The performance gain from a dedicated NAS OS (with a lighter footprint) will be important.