My NAS built around AsRock B85M-ITX (AR8171)

  • Hey people!


    Since I struggled a bit getting my setup to a running condition, I though I'd share what I did in case other people face the same issues. Most of these parts are leftovers from builds I did for a company. I had some pretty good deals price-wise because of that but it limited my choice somewhat. If you have solid advice as to why not use certain parts it is appreciated! The goal is a solid box that'll last a long time.


    Hardware


    Case: Fractal Design 304
    The case comes with enough stock fans to clear out the heat your disks, psu and cpu generate. Two fans in front (with dustfilter) and one big one at the back. The psu sucks air from the bottom of the case (with dustfilter) and pushes its heat out the right side. I like the build quality, it feels solid. Cable management is a b*tch though but not impossible. It can hold 6 3.5" drives or 6 2.5" drives or any combination. There is a switch at the back to control all fans (they're not connected to the motherboard in that case) with three settings.


    PSU: Corsair CX430
    Decent PSU from what I gathered online and with some headroom in case upgrades are desired later on.


    Motherboard: AsRock B85M-ITX (Qualcomm Atheros AR8171 LAN chipset)
    Somewhat a mistake, I should have gone for a board with more SATA headers. This one has only 4 SATA III connectors so with my setup it won't allow for additional disks in the future unless I go for a decent PCIE addon card. The LAN chip on this board is not supported out of the box, you'll need the backports kernel. In my case that meant installing OMV using another PC, more on that below.


    CPU: i5-4460 (Cooler Master Hyper212 tower cooler, cpu bracket needs modding to fit motherboard because of some badly placed IC's (boo AsRock) and it's a tight fit in the case!)
    Mainly chosen because I want enough capacity for streaming with Plex. The guideline is a 2000 Passmark score to decode 1080p/10Mbps content, so this cpu (6720 passmark) will be able to do a stream and then some.


    Memory: 8 Gb DDR3


    Storage: 4 x 3TB WD red
    In Raid0 striped this is my main storage. No redundancy, I know, but my old NAS boxes are backup servers. I'm thinking something like OMVnas -> (all files) -> NAS1 -> (critical files only) -> NAS2
    I haven't decided if I'd go for real time syncing or a nightly backup. I figure the nightly backup gives you a temporary protection against wrongfully deleted files. Any advice appreciated!


    OS: OMV on 1 x 320Gb 2.5" WD on internal USB header on PCIe SATA controller
    The original plan was to install on a USB stick, but since this is advised against (too many read/writes will wreck the device) I looked for an alternative solution. I chose to use the free USB2.0 header on the motherboard to connect a 2.5" 320Gb drive and mount it in the case. That proved problematic because the drive would get different UID's after longer idle periods. I installed an Asus u3s6 PCIe SATA controller to give me some extra sata ports. Worked out of the box. The disk is way too big but I couldn't find anything smaller (first world problems).


    OMV can't recognise the LAN chipset, so I installed OMV on my target disk using an old laptop where OMV did detect the network adapter. I hooked up my disk to one of the USB ports and installing went smooth (just make sure you install it on the right disk, ideally disconnect other drives). Once OMV is installed you can enable the omv-extras plugin in the web gui. Then you can install the backports kernel which adds support for the AR8171 on my motherboard. I then installed it in my NAS and ran omv-firstaid as root. You'll have a menu option to detect ethernet adapters and voila, a running OMV.


    I wish to thank the dev team as this is a great piece of software. I've been experimenting with available NAS solutions for a while now but OMV immediately felt like a match! :thumbup:


    If you have any comments, tips/tricks or questions about my build: don't hesitate!


    Happy holidays!
    J.

  • I did try that using the latest debian netinst, however it didn't detect my ethernet adapter either for some reason. That's why I ended up using the laptop as an intermediate installation device.

  • Good write-up and a clever idea to install the system. I would do it the same way if OMV cannot recognize specific hardware without the backports. If that installation runs without hassles on your new hardware so just enjoy it.
    I would check the logs oftenly during the first time for possible errors.


    And for your backups: How often will the content of your data partition change? If you plan to store videos or music on it the content won't change very often, so I would go for a nightly rsync job. With realtime sync the systems always have to be up and running, with a nightly job you can let them sleep the whole day and wake them up when rsync starts.

    Homebox: Bitfenix Prodigy Case, ASUS E45M1-I DELUXE ITX, 8GB RAM, 5x 4TB HGST Raid-5 Data, 1x 320GB 2,5" WD Bootdrive via eSATA from the backside
    Companybox 1: Standard Midi-Tower, Intel S3420 MoBo, Xeon 3450 CPU, 16GB RAM, 5x 2TB Seagate Data, 1x 80GB Samsung Bootdrive - testing for iSCSI to ESXi-Hosts
    Companybox 2: 19" Rackservercase 4HE, Intel S975XBX2 MoBo, C2D@2200MHz, 8GB RAM, HP P212 Raidcontroller, 4x 1TB WD Raid-0 Data, 80GB Samsung Bootdrive, Intel 1000Pro DualPort (Bonded in a VLAN) - Temp-NFS-storage for ESXi-Hosts

  • Hi !


    I had the same issue with this motherboard and also solved it with installing the system on another computer and activate the backports kernel. After that i assembled my SSD into the new NAS hardware.


    Works fine.


    greets Karl

  • Thanks for the comments people!


    The content on my NAS isn't changing frequently. I guess it's what most home users use it for: pictures, home videos, movies and a bit of documents. I'll go with nightly backups for now.


    I had some problems with the USB connected disk (see OMV on USB drive: ext4-fs delayed block allocation failed). I *think* my motherboard puts USB ports to sleep after a certain while of inactivity and that causes a host of problems. So instead of messing with a lot of stuff I just bought an Asus u3s6 PICe SATA controller. Worked out of the box (most likely because of the backports?) and things have been running smooth since. I have access to my drive's SMART data too now which wasn't possible over USB.

  • Not that I'm trying to persuade your backup setup any which way, but I figured I'd share mine in case it helped confirm you want to stay with where you're at or alter things a bit.


    I have two servers at home. One is OMV, the other is an all-but-stock Ubuntu Server on 14.04.1. My main server (OMV) runs 2x3TB WD Red in a RAID mirror. I prefer having the mirror because I also host ownCloud in an Ubuntu Server virtual machine on OMV itself (and have the data dir NFS'd to my RAID - works beautifully and it's nice having an internet-facing external resource "separate" in a VM on my NAS). As a result I quite like having the RAID on my main server.


    My backup server however is just running a single 1TB drive. This of course cannot house all of my data, but it can house the most important stuff with ease. Between regular system backups (my systems, wife's laptop, etc), Pictures, ownCloud data and Documents, we're looking at just around 400 GB. At 3 AM I have a cron job that sends a WOL (wakeonlan) packet to the backup server, thereby waking it up. It pauses for 5 minutes in case the backup server does a disk check. After 5 minutes, it rsyncs all of the directories I have specified. Afterwards, it'll remotely shut it down over SSH (I altered the Ubuntu Server sudoers file to allow users to 'sudo shutdown -h now' without a password).


    So, main server runs RAID with some bigger storage. Backup server is kicked on only at one specific time a night, then shuts down (saves me a few nickels on electricity, etc).


    Six days a week, the script is doing rsync -a. On Sunday's it does rsync -a --delete, where it deletes items on the backup server that don't exist on the OMV server, thereby making a "refreshed" mirror of the data. Then of course I have an external HDD that I use with usbbackup and store it in my desk at work, bringing it home once every 2 weeks or so.


    If I had to do it over again, I'd probably still opt for this setup. The server that will be running the most and get the most use is, in my opinion, the one that can benefit from something like a RAID'd mirror the most. My backup server sporting the 1TB drive is simply more of an insurance policy in case my main rig gets fried somehow.


    If you're not that interested in having RAID, you could always just keep separate disks and rsync them every 12/24 hours or so. I prefer having RAID given I have some web stuff that hits the VM on my OMV server, but everybody's needs are different.

  • Thanks for the detailed explanation!


    The setup I had before my OMV rig was the following:


    1) Branded NAS with 5 x 2TB in RAID5
    2) Branded NAS with 1 x 1TB


    The big nas would house pretty much everything: documents, pictures, home video's. It ran Plex and I used it as a testserver for messing around with websites (not exposed to the web). I would be able to sign in to the admin interface remotely though, but not other services were running. Every night, around midnight a few rsync backup processes would backup everything critical (pictures, home videos, documents) to the smaller nas. That nas has no other purpose but be a failsafe (it's stored in a hidden place too in case people decide steal my equipment. Paranoid.)


    The critical data doesn't change much tough and all other data (a huge chunk, *cough*plex*cough*) is pretty static too. It would be nice however to have some form of backup and since that big branded NAS wasn't all that hardware spec wise I decided to build my own OMV nas to take over its function.


    What I'm left with now is:


    OMVnas > BIGnas > SMALLnas


    Maybe I should go for real time syncing from OMVnas to BIGnas, followed by a nightly critical file backup to SMALLnas?


    When I was deciding if and what RAID I would pick for the OMVnas I read that RAID5 is to be avoided on arrays with a low number of disks that are big in space. Apparently the chance of a failed rebuild in case of a bad disk is pretty big and it can take a very long time. Other RAID configurations take a huge part of the available space (I have about 6Tb of data at the moment). I went with RAID0 for the speedboost, but I doubt I'll notice it in my home-use-scenario (aside from during the migration).


    Maybe JBOD would have been better in order to not lose the complete array when a disk fails? Or would you consider the backup scenario I described above sufficient in my situation?

  • Yeah, RAID can be a bummer when it comes to dollars vs space, but like anything else you just have to weigh the pros and cons of it all. I'd be pretty "okay" having just one server at home if you also lump in an off-site USB backup via an external hard drive or something like that. My personal goal is to have my data in 3 locations. Two at home, one off-site (hence external HDD I keep in my drawer at work).


    I'm okay with the cost of additional drives for the redundancy on my main box. I mean, it holds all of our backups and hosts an ownCloud VM that we utilize rather heavily. So for me personally, I prefer, and likely always will, have some form of redundant drives on my main server.


    Once you get down to the secondary boxes I care far less. My backup server runs for all but 10 minutes a day, so the hard drive in that backup server doesn't see much action. Likewise, given it's light use, RAID in that system is pretty meaningless to me.


    So, that's my take on it. The box that sees the most action is the one that I like to keep most of my drives in. Given my storage preferences along with my ownCloud VM, RAID is a worthwhile feature to me. Everything else beyond that can run on single drives.


    Now in a perfect world if I had a ton of money... I'd have a RAID 6 with ~12TB of data on OMV. My backup server would have an equal amount of hard drive space so I could rsync *everything* over. Then I'd have an equally sized external hard drive for the USB backup. But uh, yeah we're hitting like 4 figures with that idea. Until ye olde mortgage is off the radar I don't think I could convince my wife of that without getting smacked. :P

  • Thought I'd do an update since this is somewhat relevant to how you pick your raid: two of my four my 3TB WD reds have been having read errors (pending). The first drive started giving errors a few days after I set up my system, the second drive started today. I read online (only after I bought them of course) that the 3TB versions have been having issues since november 2014. RMA'ing them is no problem and the returned drives seem to be better.
    I'll have these two replaced asap. I'm worried that I'll have to replace the other 2 some time soon too tough. The shop I bought them from did a shitty job at packaging them (putting them at the bottom of a big box and filling that with crumpled paper won't win any awards).


    However, I'm running a RAID0 striped setup. Since no critical data seems to be affected (yet), swapping out drives with a RAID5 for example would have been less of a hassle than what I'll have to do now: loose my entire array, set everything up again and start copying a ton of data from my backup box.


    I guess that it might be a good idea to buy another disk (my small case has a full house then) and set up a RAID5 or 6 in case the other disks decide to kick the bucket.

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