FluxData NAS

[Fluxmaven]

Figured I'd post the info on my budget NAS in case anyone was interested. 

 

Case: Fractal Define 7 black/white - picked up BNIB on FB marketplace for $100. It was  a nice day so I took the Miata and it barely fit in the passenger seat

Motherboard: Strix-Z270H - had this in the spare parts bin

Cooler: Thermalright True Spirit 140 POWER - also in the spare parts bin

CPU: i7 6700 - was free from a recycled PC

RAM: 4x4GB 2133- also a recycle pull

SSD: Toshiba 256GB NVMe - also a recycle pull

PSU: EVGA 750 G6 that was bundled with a 3070 I "won" a Newegg shuffle for. Sold a 2080S for the same price as the bundle so the PSU was "free"

HDD: 8x HGST Ultrastar 7200RPM 4TB drives - $216.24 on ebay (offered $25 per drive and it was accepted)

HBA: LSI 9240-8i with the breakout cables - $45.25 on ebay

NIC: 2.5G PCIe adapter - $11.29 on ebay

OS: TrueNAS - Free go check it out 

TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era

WWW.TRUENAS.COM

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TrueNAS is the World’s #1 Open Source Storage. Based on OpenZFS, it is trusted by millions and deployed worldwide.

 

Total out of pocket for project: $372.78

Ideally I'd have used a different platform that supported ECC memory, but using all the stuff I had laying around kept the build really affordable. 

 

[Cerberus]

not bad! I was able to grab a MD1000 filled with 4tb drives for $300 ($20 a drive)

 

what kind of internet connection?

[Fluxmaven]

Actually I forgot the Define 7 only comes with 4 HDD trays and I added 4 more which is why half are black and half are white. 

 

Paid $21.18 total for 2x kits the Type B drive trays.

 

So really my total was $393.96 not bad for 20TB of fast usable space with some redundancy. 

 

We have Gigabit fiber to the house and all the PCs are connected via 2.5G switches which uplink to a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro 

[ENTERPRISE]

Nice setup! I have my TureNas Scale rig in my signature. I wouldn't go back really, it is a great platform with massive expandability! Are you using Core or Scale ? If you are running Core, I would highly recommend Scale. It is as simple as an in place upgrade. If you have any jails (For running apps)though, those will be lost.

[Fluxmaven]

5 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Are you using Core or Scale?

This build is running Core which is fine considering I don't want to use this for anything but storage.

 

My current Plex server is running Windows since it was doing double duty as my test bench as it was the only air cooled PC I owned

 

Now that I have a separate test bench, it doesn't need to pull double duty so I'm considering reimaging it. Was originally thinking ESXi and run a couple VMs since that's what I'm more familiar with, but that build would be a better candidate for Scale. 

[The Pook]

you made me feel better about not using ECC, I'm redoing my NAS too  

 

I was going to raw dog FreeNAS Scale or unRAID but I'm probably going to slap on Proxmox and virtualize. 

[Fluxmaven]

I think people really overblow the must have ECC thing considering most people using this at home are likely just filling it up with "Linux ISOs"... If I were super concerned about the data, I wouldn't be using old parts bin consumer hardware with used HDDs. 

 

Most of the stuff that will live on here is backed up elsewhere or can be reacquired if something were to go terribly wrong.  

[bonami2]

This build look great!!! Meanwhile am lazy and i went with a beelink box with a ryzen 5650u 6 core and 64gb ddr4 sodimm.  

This Nas look better than my main build am jealous  Cable management = 10\10

[Fluxmaven]

Cable management on my main build goes by the out of sight out of mind philosophy. Takes 3 hands to get the back panel shut 

 

On this one I wanted it tidy for ease of access if I need to swap drives.  

[ENTERPRISE]

17 hours ago, Fluxmaven said:

This build is running Core which is fine considering I don't want to use this for anything but storage.

 

My current Plex server is running Windows since it was doing double duty as my test bench as it was the only air cooled PC I owned

 

Now that I have a separate test bench, it doesn't need to pull double duty so I'm considering reimaging it. Was originally thinking ESXi and run a couple VMs since that's what I'm more familiar with, but that build would be a better candidate for Scale. 

For sure. If you are strictly storage, scale is perfect. My use case was different as my NAS serves as my data storage, Plex and multiple VM's. That is where scale shines as well as the plethora of apps that expands its uses. 

[The Pook]

are you using your NVME for network storage or just an OS disk? 

 

I'm getting "awful" (~400MB/s) network transfers between NVME drives and my Google-Fu is letting me down 

[Fluxmaven]

The NVMe is just for the OS, all the NAS storage is spinning rust. 

 

Copying data to the NAS from PCs with 2.5G NIC is around 285MB/s. From 1G NIC its around 113MB/s. I'd be curious what these spinny boiz would do over 10 gig to remove the network bottleneck. I doubt writes would get much faster though. 

[The Pook]

 

that's about what I've been getting in unRAID, TrueNAS is only a bit better at ~400MB/s. 

 

 

[ENTERPRISE]

I would have to measure my output but I never bothered as I know the bottleneck in the NAS for my RAW data storage would always be the HDD's. I supplement them with cache drives on the SSD side and of course the ZFS Caching. Thats why TrueNas shines when you have lots of RAM, the ZFS Caching can be a real help. 

 

My NAS runs over 10Gb but that's not because I know I will be able to come close to saturating it, but I know 1Gb could potentially hold me back. That and my overall network is 10Gb and I like to have all devices on one standard...but that's just personal preference.

[Fluxmaven]

NAS update time. In the 2 years since this was posted, I had one drive start to go bad. Replaced it with another cheapo used ebay special and it resilvered and has been running fine. I also swapped the RAM for a 2x16gb kit somewhere along the way.

 

I only worked till noon today because I needed to go to the DMV. Was in and out in just a few minutes for once so I spent some time this afternoon throwing another NAS together. 

 

I actually bought the motherboard about a year ago and briefly played around with it with just the SSDs. Got busy and it all just sat around .

 

At the heart of it is a  CWWK ITX board with a Celeron J6413.

32GB of RAM

Optane P1600X boot drive

Cooler Master V1100 SFX PSU that I reviewed a while back. 

Silverstone M.2 to 5x SATA adapter + the 6x built in SATA ports.

ICY DOCK Tough Armor 5.25 bay drive adapters.

Currently has a pool with 4x Intel DC 1.6TB SSDs in striped mirrors. Plan on getting two more 1.6tb SSDs and testing if it's worth doing 3x striped mirrors or 2x raidz1 vdevs. 

The spinning rust is a separate pool with 3x 10TB in Raidz1. This is just setup to replicate the FluxData NAS.

It's all housed in a Rackchoice 2u chassis. 

 

 

Not as tidy as the OG, but clearly zero provisions for cable management in this case.

 

 

Had to pimp it out a little bit. Swapped the crappy stock fans for some Gelid Silent 8 PWM and stuck a couple white LED strips in the case. 

 

Installed TrueNAS Scale. Created a LAGG with two of the 3x 2.5GB NICs. 

 

Tossing stuff at it from two different PC's simultaneously I am seeing just shy of 5Gb on the LAGG. 

 

 

The idea is to just have a SSD pool to work off of when I'm doing things between multiple machines. When I'm done with whatever, it gets moved over to the original NAS. 

 

I recently picked up a USW-Aggregation switch. So I'll eventually put more stuff in the rack with 10Gb NICs and then in a year or two I'll probably build a faster NAS