Asking for advice on building an inexpensive NAS

Question

NAS

Hey!
There is a task: to make a NAS for daily rsync backups of two (or at least one of them) 6-terabyte ReadyNAS. Backup NAS should be large in volume (at least 10TB), easy to maintain and cost less than ready-made solutions. It will not be used for any other purposes.

How would you solve such a problem?

Namely, which case would you choose, RAID controller (can I use Intel RAID or is it better to have separate ones?), disks? Would you install FreeNAS or would you do something easier? How would you monitor the status of the RAID array?

I have never dealt with anything like this, and I will be very glad to any information and advice.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Case , in it a motherboard with 7-10 SATA ports. Liquid Cooling . I have such a motherboard, for example.
7x3.5 hard drives and 2x2.5 or 8x3.5 and 1x2.5 fit into the case (if you use case adapters 5.25->3.5). And so it turns out 10 TB in RAID1 and 1 separate disk.
In general, climb around the market - here you can pick up almost any case. I met monsters there and on 10 hdd.
I would not advise buying ready-made solutions - it will break, you are tormented to look for where and how to fix it.
It also makes no sense to use hardware RAID controllers - you will not have a high disk load (it will rest on the channel, and you will not actively write or read locally there). Besides - it is difficult to recover the scattered RAID.
It is better to install Debian (well, or ubuntu) and use mdadm. Then, using LVM, collect all the arrays into one volume.

Answer 2

Hmm, well, the comrade writes nonsense above. Everyone has their own opinion, I have a different one than my friend above.
And so:
1) body:
not enough money? take any case with the required number of disks;
money is normal - take, for example, supermicro , if 8 hard drives are not enough - put either a mobile-rack (+3 disks) or a special basket (up to 5 disks, expensive) into the 5.25 compartment;
well, or normal enclosures for 16 disks , but this is quite expensive =)
2) the number of disks: storing backups on RAID-1 is certainly reliable, but stupid, so RAID-5 (the easiest option), RAID-6 (the most expensive), ZFS (FreeNAS is natively supported - that means our choice), allocate a separate hard / flash drive for the system (for FreeNAS, this will have to be done in any case, AFAIK)
Which discs - your choice (because felt-tip pens ...). If backups are VALUABLE, then WD Green (and their classmates in terms of price) - I don’t advise, but I don’t categorically dissuade either.
3) controller: controller in any case, because 6 on-board ports are obviously not enough for you (5 2TB disks are 9 TB with a penny, but you need at least one more for spare). In this connection, there are two options:
cheap: poor SATA controllers (4-port PCI, Sil3114; 2-port PCI-E Sil3132; 4-port Marvell - figs you will find on sale), of the advantages - only the price;
normal: any modern controller, especially if there is a SAS Expander Backplane in the case. The battery and memory on them - in your task - are not really needed, so there are plenty to choose from the younger models. And FriNAS also has this line in features: automatic system notifications about LSI RAID controller events (requires email service to be configured) ;)
Advantages: one connection point, you can make a normal RAID-5 with hotspare (if necessary, of course), you can connect much more than 8 hard drives in normal cases (using expander'a)
Also, you can take a motherboard on which there is already a controller (for example , like this one ), but this is an option.
>> Would you install FreeNAS or do something simpler
? Nothing can be easier than FreeNAS, the rest is only done by hand, but hands and “easy to maintain” are clearly not friendly.
Well, the last option - contact professionals, for example 3nity.ru, they will select a quality solution. Not cheap, of course, but not expensive either =)

Answer 3

About everything I will not write because it is somehow obvious.
But about the controller, I can say that it is optimal to take Smart Array p410 with a battery and 512MB of on-board memory. This controller, in my opinion, is maximally spared from various problems inherent in RAID solutions in principle.
I think the only significant drawback is that from Linux you will have to cut either RHEL or CentOS, of course, at your own risk. In terms of software support and configuration. Or a simple solution with Windows Server 2012, but it's expensive.
Sil*** controllers are generally not worth looking at. They are buggy.