NAS recommendations? Cheapskate, obviously.

[David]

Any recommendations for a NAS box?

HP (with cash back) have been recommended in the past.

I think I need at least 4 bays (to use my stock of 3TB HDDs) but I don't
want to spend more than £200 (IIRC the HP boxen came closer to £100 when
the cash back was on offer).

I'm looking at this as an alternative to using one of my Windows PCs as a
file server.

The tower systems have the capacity but it would probably be more
effective to have the main file storage in a dedicated box with a
specialist file system.


Cheers



Dave R

--
AMD FX-6300 in GA-990X-Gaming SLI-CF running Windows 7 Pro x64

[Mark]

On 14 Dec 2019 13:12:05 GMT, David <wib...@btinternet.com> wrote:

>Any recommendations for a NAS box?
>
>HP (with cash back) have been recommended in the past.
>
>I think I need at least 4 bays (to use my stock of 3TB HDDs) but I don't
>want to spend more than £200 (IIRC the HP boxen came closer to £100 when
>the cash back was on offer).
>
>I'm looking at this as an alternative to using one of my Windows PCs as a
>file server.
>
>The tower systems have the capacity but it would probably be more
>effective to have the main file storage in a dedicated box with a
>specialist file system.

I use a Zyxel NAS & an homemade NAS FWIW. They're both fine (i.e. do
the job).

--
Little Britain leaves. Great Britain stays.

[RobH]

On 14/12/2019 13:12, David wrote:
> Any recommendations for a NAS box?
>
> HP (with cash back) have been recommended in the past.
>
> I think I need at least 4 bays (to use my stock of 3TB HDDs) but I don't
> want to spend more than £200 (IIRC the HP boxen came closer to £100 when
> the cash back was on offer).
>
> I'm looking at this as an alternative to using one of my Windows PCs as a
> file server.
>
> The tower systems have the capacity but it would probably be more
> effective to have the main file storage in a dedicated box with a
> specialist file system.
>
>
> Cheers
>
>
>
> Dave R
>

I use FreeNAS with x4 2tb drives, and hasn't skipped a beat in the last
4 years.

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

On 14 Dec 2019 13:12:05 GMT, David <wib...@btinternet.com> wrote:

>Any recommendations for a NAS box?
>
>HP (with cash back) have been recommended in the past.

They're still good if you can get them at a decent price, which I've not
tracked for ages.

>I think I need at least 4 bays (to use my stock of 3TB HDDs) but I don't
>want to spend more than £200 (IIRC the HP boxen came closer to £100 when
>the cash back was on offer).
>
>I'm looking at this as an alternative to using one of my Windows PCs as a
>file server.
>
>The tower systems have the capacity but it would probably be more
>effective to have the main file storage in a dedicated box with a
>specialist file system.

Can you free up a Windows tower system for this? Wang FreeNAS on it and
you're good to go.

If you'd like something with a bit more capacity...
https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/dell-poweredge-r510-ii-12-lff-configure-to-order

£121.20Inc. VAT
1 x Dell R510-II (2U) 12x LFF Hot-Swap, 2x SFF Non Hot-Swap SAS -
Hot-Swap PSU
1 x Intel Xeon L5520 - 4-Core 2.26Ghz (8MB Cache, 5.86GTs, 60W)
1 x Dell PowerEdge R510 - Heatsink
1 x Dell PowerEdge R510, R515 Dual Fan
4 x 4GB - DDR3 1600MHz (PC3-12800R, 1RX4, ECC REG)
1 x Dell H200 (ZM) - R510 12x LFF Kit
2 x Dell PowerEdge 'Gold' Hot-Swap PSU 750W

Annoyingly disk caddies for it are £12 each at the moment, they're
usually about £4.

The choice of RAID card (here an H200) is important if you're using
FreeNAS or any ZFS system in general - it needs to be a card you can use
as a simple disk attachment device, no enforced RAID. "IT mode" is the
phrase to google for, for a card. The H200 can do this.

The R510 can be surprisingly quiet with a bit of judicious tuning. I
have one in my cellar. I have a few spare caddies, too... ping me if you
go this route :)

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"I'll never forget my first wife - drove me to drink. I'm
eternally grateful." - W. C. Fields

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

On Sat, 14 Dec 2019 17:21:43 +0000, Jaimie Vandenbergh
<jai...@sometimes.sessile.org> wrote:

>The choice of RAID card (here an H200) is important if you're using
>FreeNAS or any ZFS system in general - it needs to be a card you can use
>as a simple disk attachment device, no enforced RAID. "IT mode" is the
>phrase to google for, for a card. The H200 can do this.

There is, shall we say, a certain amount of fannying about required...
here's a clear guide:
https://techmattr.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/updated-sas-hba-crossflashing-or-flashing-to-it-mode-dell-perc-h200-and-h310/

I bought my first card off ebay pre-flashed to IT mode. Tada! Did the
next two myself, worked fine.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"How to Stop the System for Recovery Purposes"
- chapter heading, Sun Microsystems System Administration Guide

[RJH]

Yeahbut - and if I'm reading this correctly* - they consume a fair
amount of electricity - 400w/hr maybe? Compare that to a budget NAS with
a couple of discs, maybe 25W/hr. £500/yr running costs versus £35?

* which I'm probably not, but I can't make much sense of the energy info -
<https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/PowerEdge_R510_750W_Energy_Star_Data_Sheet.pdf>

--
Cheers, Rob

[Theo]

RJH <patch...@gmx.com> wrote:
> > 1 x Dell R510-II (2U) 12x LFF Hot-Swap, 2x SFF Non Hot-Swap SAS -
> > Hot-Swap PSU
> > 1 x Intel Xeon L5520 - 4-Core 2.26Ghz (8MB Cache, 5.86GTs, 60W)
>

> Yeahbut - and if I'm reading this correctly* - they consume a fair
> amount of electricity - 400w/hr maybe? Compare that to a budget NAS with
> a couple of discs, maybe 25W/hr. £500/yr running costs versus £35?
>
> * which I'm probably not, but I can't make much sense of the energy info -
> <https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/PowerEdge_R510_750W_Energy_Star_Data_Sheet.pdf>

Power when fully loaded isn't the same as idle power, which is what you're
going to burn when a NAS isn't in use - most of the time for a home user.
However the ~100W idle power isn't great. I had an Xeon 5150 (previous gen)
in a dedicated server and it would take 330W doing not very much.

I'd probably want to go Haswell or newer for the power consumption - a
variety of Haswell Xeon (E3-12xx v3) servers were cleared out on cashback
deals a few years ago. Eg a Lenovo TS140 has idle power of about 25W in
base configuration.

Bargainhardware don't have any stock, but for some examples:
https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/tower-blade-servers/filter/cpu-series-1/intel-xeon-e3-v3/default/remove

Theo

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

Mine is an 8 HDD variant chassis with 8 disks in and is currently
burning 89W. The disks will be about 40W of that I guess.

It's the downside of wanting room for expansion.

I have a second one that I've trained to power on, accept a backup from
the primary, and power off again twice a week.

My old Microservers (N36L and N54L) would run about 52W with six 3.5"
disks in, which scales comparably. Those had under quarter the CPU and
half the RAM too.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds
language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because
I no verbs." - Quoted by Peter Ellis, afp

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

On Sun, 15 Dec 2019 01:34:14 +0000, Jaimie Vandenbergh
<jai...@sometimes.sessile.org> wrote:

>On Sat, 14 Dec 2019 20:00:44 +0000, RJH <patch...@gmx.com> wrote:
>
>>On 14/12/2019 17:21, Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:
>>> On 14 Dec 2019 13:12:05 GMT, David <wib...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Any recommendations for a NAS box?
>>>

>>> If you'd like something with a bit more capacity...
>>> https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/dell-poweredge-r510-ii-12-lff-configure-to-order
>>>
>>> £121.20Inc. VAT
>>

>>Yeahbut - and if I'm reading this correctly* - they consume a fair
>>amount of electricity - 400w/hr maybe? Compare that to a budget NAS with
>>a couple of discs, maybe 25W/hr. £500/yr running costs versus £35?
>
>Mine is an 8 HDD variant chassis with 8 disks in and is currently
>burning 89W. The disks will be about 40W of that I guess.

I found some stats in its BMC power page (there's a little ARM chip
inside that manages the computer and lets you mess with it remotely,
provides VNC and power control etc) - it says last week's average power
use was 86W so that's pretty consistent. It's currently doing a few
dozen gig of downloading from archive.org bringing the power usage up a
bit.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
'Bother' to your simplistic linear numbering systems
-- Nigel Hewitt, describing ukrs dive #100

[Andy Burns]

RJH wrote:

> I can't make much sense of the energy info

No you got the right idea, no way I'd run a rack-sized server at home,
they don't care enough about noise and heat, too power hungry.

But [pet peeve] power isn't measured in W/h (watts per hour) it's just
watts, energy is watt.hours and that's what you're charged for.

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

On Sun, 15 Dec 2019 08:15:38 +0000, Andy Burns <use...@andyburns.uk>
wrote:

>RJH wrote:
>
>> I can't make much sense of the energy info
>
>No you got the right idea, no way I'd run a rack-sized server at home,
>they don't care enough about noise and heat, too power hungry.

Wattage and noise mentioned above, specifically because they're not
particularly scary.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted" -- Bertrand Russell

[RobH]

On 14/12/2019 17:26, Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Dec 2019 17:21:43 +0000, Jaimie Vandenbergh
> <jai...@sometimes.sessile.org> wrote:
>
>> The choice of RAID card (here an H200) is important if you're using
>> FreeNAS or any ZFS system in general - it needs to be a card you can use
>> as a simple disk attachment device, no enforced RAID. "IT mode" is the
>> phrase to google for, for a card. The H200 can do this.
>
> There is, shall we say, a certain amount of fannying about required...
> here's a clear guide:
> https://techmattr.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/updated-sas-hba-crossflashing-or-flashing-to-it-mode-dell-perc-h200-and-h310/
>
> I bought my first card off ebay pre-flashed to IT mode. Tada! Did the
> next two myself, worked fine.
>
> Cheers - Jaimie
>

I bought my card off ebay and flashed it myself using precise clear
instruction from the FreeNAS
It was this one:
LSI Mega 9240-8i SAS SATA LSI00200 8-port Server RAID Controller Card
IBM M1015
to use with the ZFS file system.
I also stuck a 60cms fan underneath it to keep it cool when running.

That was about 4 years ago now.

[JoeJoe]

On 14/12/2019 13:12, David wrote:

> Any recommendations for a NAS box?
>
> HP (with cash back) have been recommended in the past.
>
> I think I need at least 4 bays (to use my stock of 3TB HDDs) but I don't
> want to spend more than £200 (IIRC the HP boxen came closer to £100 when
> the cash back was on offer).
>
> I'm looking at this as an alternative to using one of my Windows PCs as a
> file server.
>
> The tower systems have the capacity but it would probably be more
> effective to have the main file storage in a dedicated box with a
> specialist file system.
>
>
> Cheers
>
>
>
> Dave R
>

May be worth looking at a good condition 2nd hand Proliant N40L or Gen8?

I had the N40L and then upgraded to the Gen8 (for no real reason - the
N40L was just as good). They are used as a file server and a media
server, and are brilliant in terms of build quality, power consumption,
etc. Each has 3 HDDs and a small SSD for the OS inside. A nice feature
is that it has a USB socket inside, so you can try different OS's by
simply inserting a disk-on-key with it installed to try them, and simply
remove it and return to normal.

I installed Win7 Pro on them. i use Remote Desktop Connection to control
them after that - never had to take them out of the cupboard after the
initial setup.

[David]

Thanks - that is food for thought.

I started out looking for a processor, board, memory combo to upgrade one
of my old Tower cases but they kept coming in at multiple £100s which made
the purpose built NAS systems more attractive than they first appeared.

I need to inventory my old systems but how far back can you go and still
have a processor which can run a modern NAS OS?

Power consumption is also likely to be an issue with reusing really old
kit, I assume.

My oldest newish system is a Core 2 Quad which must be over 10 years old.
My never quite made to to being an HTPC is currently acting as the file
server and running W7 Pro 64 bit, i5 2500k, although it WILL go into the
AV stack soon(ish).

I assume that both are over powered for just acting as a simple file
server.

Come to that I have a small HP laptop with a severely broken case which
has been put to one side. Is it feasible/possible to transplant a laptop
motherboard into a tower case? I suppose I could whittle a template from
wood to fit ATX profile then fasten the MoBo to this. However this seems
to be a time-expensive way compared to buying the minimal new processor
kit.

[David]

On Mon, 16 Dec 2019 12:52:51 +0000, David wrote:

<snip>> I started out looking for a processor, board, memory combo to

upgrade
> one of my old Tower cases but they kept coming in at multiple £100s
> which made the purpose built NAS systems more attractive than they first
> appeared.

<snip>

Just for reference:
<https://quietpc.co.uk/sys-bundle-ryzen-uatx>

There must be much cheaper bundles out there, though.

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

On 16 Dec 2019 12:52:51 GMT, David <wib...@btinternet.com> wrote:

>I need to inventory my old systems but how far back can you go and still
>have a processor which can run a modern NAS OS?

For FreeNAS with ZFS you'll want something with 8gig RAM (more if you're
going to more than 4 disks). CPU barely matters, the HP N36L has a 2
core 1.3GHz AMD if I remember right. Still happily filled a 1gigE pipe
with four disks.

>Power consumption is also likely to be an issue with reusing really old
>kit, I assume.

Yup. Anything Pentium4 class should go in the recycling. Slow *and*
thirsty.

>My oldest newish system is a Core 2 Quad which must be over 10 years old.

That would do fine.

>My never quite made to to being an HTPC is currently acting as the file
>server and running W7 Pro 64 bit, i5 2500k, although it WILL go into the
>AV stack soon(ish).
>
>I assume that both are over powered for just acting as a simple file
>server.

The i5 certainly is, but it'll also be very happy there.

With FreeNAS you can lift the OS drive and data drives from one PC to
another without any problems, it doesn't care about hardware paths to
each drive (as long as you've got enough drive connectors in the new
host and set the OS drive as the first booter). So you could build it in
the Core2 for a play, then if it all works out transfer all the data
into and any time later do an upgrade by drive transplant if you want
to.

>Come to that I have a small HP laptop with a severely broken case which
>has been put to one side. Is it feasible/possible to transplant a laptop
>motherboard into a tower case?

Nope - they're proprietary connectors for everything internal,
power/video particularly. And you don't want to start hanging
USB2-mounted drives off it! That way lies madness (and data corruption).

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"Wow! Virtual memory! Now I can have a REALLY big RAM disk!"

[RobH]

On 16/12/2019 12:59, David wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Dec 2019 12:52:51 +0000, David wrote:
>
> <snip>> I started out looking for a processor, board, memory combo to
> upgrade
>> one of my old Tower cases but they kept coming in at multiple £100s
>> which made the purpose built NAS systems more attractive than they first
>> appeared.
> <snip>
>
> Just for reference:
> <https://quietpc.co.uk/sys-bundle-ryzen-uatx>
>
> There must be much cheaper bundles out there, though.
>
> Cheers
>
>
>
> Dave R
>
>

For my FreeNAS server I have a Supermicro X95CM-F motherboard with 16Gb
of ECC ram and a Xeon E3-1240v2 cpu.

If you go for FreeNAS and want more help, then there is a FreeNAS
support forum, which I have used from time to time.

[Raj Kundra]

I had same plan, never got around doing it. Gen8 unit is sitting here on
shelf.