Choosing hardware for my future NAS

1st Official Post

    Hi community!


    I'm analysing my first NAS for my home.


    Since years I have a Raspberry Pi B with Nextcloud to sync files, but I know that now a days it was really obsolete system, it's really slow system...


    I have spent some time to analyzing some options to upgrade my system. I have thought adquire a comercial NAS and also build my handmade with pices. But I'm worried about privacy of my data and discontinued support.


    I have some experience in Debian and I'm plannig to use OMV as OS for my future NAS.


    Even so, I have some doubts about which hardware is more suitable for me.


    The main usage for my future NAS will be save data as photos, videos, documents... Sync files from mobile phones through NextCloud (or some other better app) to my NAS. And also saving backups. I'm not really interested to build virtual machines or transcode video.


    The specs that I would like to have my new hardware are the following:

    - Low energy.

    - Silent.

    - Capacity to plug up to four hard discs SATA.

    - Capacity to make RAID 1.

    - Possibility to sleep the system and Wake of Lan.

    - The number of users that will use the system will be three (only one of them will be use it more often).


    I don't have old hardware that I could build my custom NAS.


    For everything mentioned above, I have three options in my mind:


    - A Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB + a DAS USB (RAID by software).

    - Buying hardware by components (motherboard, CPU, etc).

    - Buying a second hand comercial NAS and installing OMV as OS.


    I would like something realistic and balanced for hardware and price.


    What would you recommend to me?

  • votdev

    Approved the thread.

    Option 1. Will not work. USB DAS + any kind of RAID is a recipe for heart ache.

    Option 1:

    Argon EON Pi NAS (Raspberry Pi 4)
    Build Your Own Network Attached Storage (BYO-NAS) for Raspberry Pi 4 Takes advantage of the natural heat conductivity and dissipation of the aluminum Augmented…
    argon40.com

    Option 2:

    https://www.amazon.de/CWWK-Pocket-NAS-Computer-Expandable-2-Display/dp/B0DZ5GF8J4

    or

    External Content www.youtube.com
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    It's in German, I'm sorry.

    • Official Post
    Thread
    Why I chose an N100 over a Raspberry PI5
    I have a server at a relative's house, it is an old i2500k whose motherboard has started to have problems, so I have to replace the hardware. This server serves as a remote backup to my server, plus provides a media center and other services in that home. So I looked for alternatives for these basic needs:

    - Connect a minimum of 4 existing hard drives on the original server through SATA ports.
    - Preferably, although not essential, reuse the minitx box and power supply in which the original server…
    chente

    If you could do without low energy and make being silent a non-issue by locating the NAS somewhere it can't be heard (like in a closet) then you can do very well for very little money by buying a used Chenbro NR12000 on ebay for about $150US or less depending on RAM amount. Just add disks. It will be somewhere between difficult and impossible to do better at that price point.

    --
    Google is your friend and Bob's your uncle!


    A backup strategy is worthless unless you have a verified to work by testing restore strategy.


    OMV AMD64 7.x on headless Chenbro NR12000 1U Intel Xeon CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz 32GB ECC RAM.

    OMV AMD64 8.x on headless Tyan Thunder SX GT86C-B5630 1U Server with Intel Xeon Silver 4110 CPU @ 2.10GHz & 32GB DDR4 ECC RAM.

    Like 2
    Quote from stivex

    - Buying a second hand comercial NAS and installing OMV as OS.


    That's usually my choice. But sometimes I also buy a brand new 3rd-Party NAS.

    So far I have used QNAP and TerraMaster.

    All of them work very well and are easy to install.

    (You simply need to boot into the BIOS and change the boot order)


    Make sure they have a video port and at least 3 USB ports.

    You will need one for the keyboard, one for the installation media and one for the stick holding the system.

    (of course you could also try an USB hub)


    I started with QNAP decades ago (running their FW). That's the reason I have several of them.

    The Nas from TerraMaster is great. I really like that one. That's my workhorse...

    TerraMaster T6-423

    Qnap TS-853A

    Qnap TS-451+

    Qnap TS-259 Pro+

    Like 1
    • Official Post

    I'm with gderf on this one. -> Server grade hardware for something between $150 to $250 can't be beat. It's worth giving some thought to it. You'd have purpose built hardware that's intended to be a server with hardened high end power supplies, ECC ram, cases that are well designed for ventilation, solidly made motherboards,, well, there's nothing not to like.

    If you compare prices to what it would take to get an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5, with the bits and pieces needed to get it started (a kit?), along with either a SATA hat or a drive dock to get some drives connected, you're at $200 and up. Then, what would you have? While it will be power efficient (not to be taken lightly in Europe) it's still toy hardware.

    If noise is an issue as it might be with server grade hardware, put it in a closet or another place that's out of the way. That's what I did. A Chenbro (about 2" thick) holds 12 drives and can be mounted on a closet wall where it doesn't take up much space and it won't be heard.

    If the server must be out in living spaces, there's the used pro-workstation route. Recently I bought a used -> Dell Percision T5820.
    It has a Xeon (CPU passmark at 12K), quad channel high bandwidth memory that supports ECC, an NVME boot drive, a 950Watt power supply and even a medium to high end Video card that supports 4K. Since it's a workstation, it was designed to be reasonably quiet. With 4 tool-less drive bays behind a pop open front grill, this box could easily be a server. (Move the AMD WX 7100 video card to a client, and get a really cheap Video card in case of the need for a console connection.)

    There are a lot of possibilities that would leave you with superior hardware, that's upgradable well into the foreseeable future.

    I personally prefer to build from scratch at home, since I'm not running something that is mission critical. At the office it's a different story.


    My current build is based on an Asrock B450M motherboard, AMD 5600G CPU, 64GB of non-ECC RAM, 2 SSDs and 2 HDDs connected to the motherboard and 6 HDDs connected to a PCIE SATA card, and an intel based NIC as I wasn't sure how reliable the onboard realtek NIC would be. As it turned out the realtek was ok, so I use that for general LAN access, and use the Intel to provide acces to VM's. Last year I added an Asrock Intel A380 card to use fro GPU video transcode. The whole thing is in a Fractal Design Node 804 case.


    The system draws about 80w - 90w of power when idling, and peaks at about 120w - 130w when I have a bunch of videos transcoding and other stuff is happening. I can sit in the same room as it and barely hear it. I never did a measure on the sound level, but I'd suspect it is about 35dB. At our current electricity prices this cost me about $25 CAD a month to run.

    Asrock B450M, AMD 5600G, 64GB RAM, 6 x 4TB RAID 5 array, 2 x 10TB RAID 1 array, 100GB SSD for OS, 1TB SSD for docker and VMs, 1TB external SSD for fsarchiver OS and docker data daily backups

    Edited 2 times, last by BernH ().

    Like 1

    I have two qnap nas devices. One to hold the data, one for backups (switched off and only on when doing backups). I have ordered a BeeLink ME Mini. That's an Intel N150 based 6 nvme nas device with 12 Gb ram and 64 gig EMC in it. My nvme disks will arrive today, and hopefully the BeeLink will arrive in 1.5 weeks. It will run OMV and will replace my main nas. First thing I will do is remove the wifi6 card as I will not use it for my nas.

    Beelink ME mini OMV 8, OMV-Backup, OMV-Writecache, OMV-Kernel, OVM-LVM2, OMV-MD, OMV-Nut, OMV-Tftp, OMV-TGT, Zabbly kernel 6.17.x

    OMV 8 in Hyper-V for testing, OMV-Backup, OMV-Writecache, OMV-Kernel, OVM-LVM2, OMV-MD, OMV-Nut, OMV-Tftp, OMV-TGT, Zabbly kernel 6.17.x

    Like 1

    Thank you for your suggestions and recommendations until now!


    I'm seeing that exist more options that I was in my mind.

    Quote from Krisbee

    Option 1. Will not work. USB DAS + any kind of RAID is a recipe for heart ache.

    Knowing that a DAS could make problems I'm going to discard this idea.


    Quote from wiz101

    I have two qnap nas devices. One to hold the data, one for backups (switched off and only on when doing backups). I have ordered a BeeLink ME Mini. That's an Intel N150 based 6 nvme nas device with 12 Gb ram and 64 gig EMC in it. My nvme disks will arrive today, and hopefully the BeeLink will arrive in 1.5 weeks. It will run OMV and will replace my main nas. First thing I will do is remove the wifi6 card as I will not use it for my nas.

    I can't deny that are sweet and atractive. Positive things: price, they are tiny and they could consume low energy. By the oder hand they use M.2 NVMe to save data. Perhaps more expensive than a HDD. The price of a NVMe I could buy a HDD with more capacity. I have never used NVMe yet, but I think that they energy consumation could be less than a traditional HDD. Could I be confident using NVMe for my data? I have the perception (from internet articles) that NVMe are less secure and less life than a HDD.


    Quote from gderf

    If you could do without low energy and make being silent a non-issue by locating the NAS somewhere it can't be heard (like in a closet) then you can do very well for very little money by buying a used Chenbro NR12000 on ebay for about $150US or less depending on RAM amount. Just add disks. It will be somewhere between difficult and impossible to do better at that price point.

    Interesting, the price and the possibility to expand, but in a flat I don't know where I could find a place to install it, if I had a garage or a storage, I could do it. The noise and power consumition could be another problem. And find spare parts perhaps could be difficult...

    Quote from chente
    Thread
    Why I chose an N100 over a Raspberry PI5
    I have a server at a relative's house, it is an old i2500k whose motherboard has started to have problems, so I have to replace the hardware. This server serves as a remote backup to my server, plus provides a media center and other services in that home. So I looked for alternatives for these basic needs:

    - Connect a minimum of 4 existing hard drives on the original server through SATA ports.
    - Preferably, although not essential, reuse the minitx box and power supply in which the original server…
    chente

    chente  crashtest Perhaps could be a toy but my actual Raspberry Pi 1 B has been working (years) since I bought it. Although it consumes less than other options I see their limitations and their few flexibility to change components or connecting hard drives.


    BernH I'm looking for something less power consumption.


    wiz101  Quacksalber Could you recommend some model that you have tested?


    To sum it, with you suggestions now I have discarted Rapberry Pi and a DAS.


    Now, the idea that is gaining the most strength is building a something with components. Perhaps a ASUS Prime N100I-D D4 motherboard and a Jonsbo N2 case (https://www.jonsbo.com/en/products/N2White.html). Also I think that I will need a SATA adapter, because motherbord (if I'm not wrong) only has one SATA connector. On chente post said that he used an Siba PCIe x1 to 4 SATA Adapter, but the Jonsbo admits more than four HDD. Do you know someone suitable and tested with ASUS Prime N100I-D D4 motherboard?

    Quote from stivex

    Interesting, the price and the possibility to expand, but in a flat I don't know where I could find a place to install it, if I had a garage or a storage, I could do it. The noise and power consumition could be another problem. And find spare parts perhaps could be difficult...

    My Chenbro NR12000 is hanging on the back of the door of my safe, but you could use a closet door to the same effect.


    Finding spare parts for things like this are going to be limited to the used market like eBay. Generally speaking, the price point on units like this is such that if you can't find parts cheaply you just replace the whole unit with another used cheap one.

    --
    Google is your friend and Bob's your uncle!


    A backup strategy is worthless unless you have a verified to work by testing restore strategy.


    OMV AMD64 7.x on headless Chenbro NR12000 1U Intel Xeon CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz 32GB ECC RAM.

    OMV AMD64 8.x on headless Tyan Thunder SX GT86C-B5630 1U Server with Intel Xeon Silver 4110 CPU @ 2.10GHz & 32GB DDR4 ECC RAM.

    Your storage requirements will dictate what options are available to you.


    How much storage do you require? What kind of redundancy?


    You say plugging in up to 4 drives, but what is the reasoning? Are you wanting a RAID, or are you saying that thinking of capacity?


    If it's just for capacity, the DAS option is still doable, just don't try to do a RAID over a USB connection. Alternately, there are some very large drives available in up to the 20+TB range so 2 drives with an rsync backup can give you redundancy without the unstable RAID over USB issue.


    ...and if the external drives are esata connected you can still do an OMV MD RAID if required.


    If you want to keep it to a USB connection an external RAID enclosure would also work, but OMV will not be able to monitor for a single drive failure as the enclosure is presented to the system as a single drive/filesystem, and the RAID management is done in the external enclosure. You would have to rely on alarms from the enclosure if a drive fails. This could easily work with your Raspberry Pi option or an N100 with limited connectivity.


    I have one of these (see below) with 5 x 10TB drives in it configured to run as a RAID 5. It ran as 24/7 storage attached to a NUC running OMV for several years. Now it is my Backup array where data from all my live arrays get copied to. Once again, something similar would work fine with your RPi option, as it isn't too far off the NUC setup I had with it. Orico make several different enclosures like this (ie. 4 bay, 5 bay, front load, top load, HDD, SSD, etc.), so just pick one you like as long as it has RAID capability.


    ORICO - USB Storage Adapters, Chargers, Hubs, and More

    Asrock B450M, AMD 5600G, 64GB RAM, 6 x 4TB RAID 5 array, 2 x 10TB RAID 1 array, 100GB SSD for OS, 1TB SSD for docker and VMs, 1TB external SSD for fsarchiver OS and docker data daily backups

    Edited 4 times, last by BernH ().

    • Official Post

    As gderf has said, parts for the Chenbro would be an E-bay proposition. "But" the same situation would apply to most affordable servers or consumer NAS boxes after 2 years or so. The difference is the quality of build of a server which is likely to last at least 20 years (potentially far more) from it's date of manufacture.

    When you're talking about R-PI's, there are no "parts". The PS's are the same. They're both throw away items which means you really should get two each of them for troubleshooting and backup purposes. The same applies to their SD-cards. (Maybe a primary R-PI server and use the second R-PI for backup.)

    On the noise issue, the Chenbro has tiny fans which make a LOT of noise if they're spinning fast. After startup, they do idle down to slow speed. Most home users would be hard pressed to work a Xeon hard enough, in a NAS role, to spin those fans up to high speed. (Something like that would take virtualizing Desktop OS's or other high work loads.) In any case, unless they're designed for SOHO operation, servers are not designed to be quiet and, in Europe, the cost of power is a real consideration.

    • Official Post
    Quote from stivex

    Do you know someone suitable and tested with ASUS Prime N100I-D D4 motherboard?

    If you read that entire post, you'll see that what I really recommend is an adapter with an ASM1166 chip. In the second post in that thread, you can see an update from March of this year where I replaced the original adapter with another of that type (with an ASM1166 chip) with 6 SATA ports connected to the MiniPCIe port, specifically this one: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B0BVM…yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title It's been working since then without any problems.


    The MiniPCIe to SATA adapter houses three 12TB Seagate Ironwolf hard drives in RaidZ1 for general storage and a 4TB WD Red hard drive that I use for downloads and some local backups. At the moment, there are two free SATA ports on that adapter.


    On the PCIe port, I installed a PCIe to NVME adapter and a 1TB NVME drive for Docker and KVM.


    The motherboard's only available SATA port houses a 120GB SSD running the OMV operating system.

    Quote from stivex

    wiz101 Quacksalber Could you recommend some model that you have tested?

    I am starting out with 4 Lexar NM790 nvme drives. This is due to the fact in idle these take less power than most other nvme drives, and max writes is 1.5 PB per disk. Also 5 years guarantee from Lexar. In one of my laptops I have a Lexar n620 drive, and in my low power proxmox server there's also a Lexar N620 1 TB drive.


    You are right in getting a bigger spinning disk for the amount a nvme costs, but less noise and less power was one of my incentives to move to NVME instead of spinning disks. Also the speed gain was an incentive, my qnap does not saturate the network, while I expect my new setup to easily do that. I already have bought the 4 lexars, so once the Beelink arrives I am good to go. It will run with raid-5 for redundancy, so slightly less than 6 Tb useable space should be enough for what I want, and if it turns out it is not enough I can always add some more disks.


    As for reliability, I am not too worried about that, after all that's why it is setup in raid, and also I make backups of the data, so if a drive fails, that should not immediately turn into data loss.

    Beelink ME mini OMV 8, OMV-Backup, OMV-Writecache, OMV-Kernel, OVM-LVM2, OMV-MD, OMV-Nut, OMV-Tftp, OMV-TGT, Zabbly kernel 6.17.x

    OMV 8 in Hyper-V for testing, OMV-Backup, OMV-Writecache, OMV-Kernel, OVM-LVM2, OMV-MD, OMV-Nut, OMV-Tftp, OMV-TGT, Zabbly kernel 6.17.x

    Quote from wiz101

    I am starting out with 4 Lexar NM790 nvme drives. This is due to the fact in idle these take less power than most other nvme drives, and max writes is 1.5 PB per disk. Also 5 years guarantee from Lexar. In one of my laptops I have a Lexar n620 drive, and in my low power proxmox server there's also a Lexar N620 1 TB drive.


    You are right in getting a bigger spinning disk for the amount a nvme costs, but less noise and less power was one of my incentives to move to NVME instead of spinning disks. Also the speed gain was an incentive, my qnap does not saturate the network, while I expect my new setup to easily do that. I already have bought the 4 lexars, so once the Beelink arrives I am good to go. It will run with raid-5 for redundancy, so slightly less than 6 Tb useable space should be enough for what I want, and if it turns out it is not enough I can always add some more disks.


    As for reliability, I am not too worried about that, after all that's why it is setup in raid, and also I make backups of the data, so if a drive fails, that should not immediately turn into data loss.

    Just a heads up, some people are having problems with the BEELINK ME Mini.


    See: RAID5 Array Built in OMV 7.4.17, on Beelink ME Mini, Corrupted Very Quickly after I Built It


    Using Beelink ME Mini with 6 NVME drives, only 4 are useable in TrueNAS Scale
    Hello, I wanted to build a small travel-friendly system using the new Beelink ME mini. As my drives, I got five Seagate FireCuda 530R (meant for the storage…
    forums.truenas.com

    Also, I should add that if you want to go the N100 route as Chente did, It doesn't have to be the exact same Asus board he used. Asrock makes N100 boards in both the ITX and Micro-ATX form factors. The boards have 2 built in SATA ports instead of the 1 on the Asus board, and the M-ATX board has 2 pcie slots (1@ x1, 1@ x16 size running in x2 mode) so to get an extra x1 slot which increases the ability add an extra NIC or SATA card if required.


    Likewise, with these systems, externally connected storage is still possible for expansion.


    If I was building one of these i would probably lean toward the micro-atx form factor for the extra pcie slot and the fact that there are a lot more options for cases that take ATX style boards with internal HDD bays than there are ITX cases

    Asrock B450M, AMD 5600G, 64GB RAM, 6 x 4TB RAID 5 array, 2 x 10TB RAID 1 array, 100GB SSD for OS, 1TB SSD for docker and VMs, 1TB external SSD for fsarchiver OS and docker data daily backups

    Also just read this about the future release of OMV8


    Supported platforms of openmediavault 8 · Issue #1996 · openmediavault/openmediavault
    openmediavault is based on various external software components. One of the most essential components is Salt, which is used to create configuration files and…
    github.com


    ...so make sure whatever you choose is amd64 (i.e. the n100) or arm64 based like the RPi 5, RPi 4b. (support for i386, armel, and armhf will be discontinued due to the salt project changing according to the github post)

    Asrock B450M, AMD 5600G, 64GB RAM, 6 x 4TB RAID 5 array, 2 x 10TB RAID 1 array, 100GB SSD for OS, 1TB SSD for docker and VMs, 1TB external SSD for fsarchiver OS and docker data daily backups

    Edited once, last by BernH ().

    Quote from stivex

    Could you recommend some model that you have tested?

    What worked best for me was my NAS from TerraMaster (T6-423).

    The Qnap TS-853A also works well. You need to install fanncontrol yourself.


    The other NAS from Qnap that I have / had work(ed) well, but I had to investigate some small issues (e.g. adding special params to the bool command line).

    TerraMaster T6-423

    Qnap TS-853A

    Qnap TS-451+

    Qnap TS-259 Pro+

    Krisbee thanks for the link, I was not aware of that, but I hope and think this could be solved. Hope my Beelink will arive in 1.5 weeks so I can give it a go.

    Beelink ME mini OMV 8, OMV-Backup, OMV-Writecache, OMV-Kernel, OVM-LVM2, OMV-MD, OMV-Nut, OMV-Tftp, OMV-TGT, Zabbly kernel 6.17.x

    OMV 8 in Hyper-V for testing, OMV-Backup, OMV-Writecache, OMV-Kernel, OVM-LVM2, OMV-MD, OMV-Nut, OMV-Tftp, OMV-TGT, Zabbly kernel 6.17.x

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