Building a new NAS - advice needed

JamesBong

Dabbler
Joined
Aug 26, 2021
Messages
16
Hi All.

I currently have my storage split amongst 2 NAS (1x6 2Tb and 1x5 3Tb drives) using an old Netgear NAS (ReadyNas Pro) and an HP NL54 server. Both are currently setup in RAID 5 and are used for media/file/backup.

I'm currently looking to move to a single unit with more hard drive capacity. I've been looking around for different options including building a NAS from scratch using a Fractal case or buying a used server (possible a supermicro one) in the range of 500€. One of the options I'm evaluating is to buy a used supermicro server and bumped with one with the following specs:

Supermicro Server cse-826
2x 6c Xeon e5-2620 v2 2,1ghz
32gb
4 xlff asr5405z

My plan is to buy a server along with 2 8Tb drives, move some of the files there and then add the drives from the 1st NAS and then do the same for the 2nd one. I would like your advice on the following:

1. Does this plan make sense? Would this supermicro server be a good fit for a home NAS?
2. Will I be able to add drives to the NAS using raid 0 to move the files to the new server and then change to Raid 5 when all the files are copied?

Thanks for your advice.
 

QonoS

Explorer
Joined
Apr 1, 2021
Messages
87
Hardware is good in my eyes, RAM is hopefully ECC. ;)

And for your plan to move data ? Sounds pretty risky but I think you know that.
 

NugentS

MVP
Joined
Apr 16, 2020
Messages
2,945
The RAID card is a big mistake unless its got an IT mode and I haven't heard of one. You need to either use onboard SATA or an HBA, preferably from LSI, or using an LSI chipset (just avoid the MegaRAID I think). The HBA needs to be in IT mode.

Depending on what you are planning on doing with this - you may be a little over provisioned on CPU's and a little light on GHz on those CPU. But that's not to say it won't work. I would prefer 2 * Intel Xeon E5-2667 V1 (staying with 6 cores) - and they aren't expensive.
 

Arwen

MVP
Joined
May 17, 2014
Messages
3,600
@JamesBong - I agree with @QonoS, hardware looks okay. And also @NugentS has a good point about the RAID cards. ZFS does it's own RAID, so using a hardware RAID card is contra-indicated. And can actually cause data reliability issues.

You should read up on TrueNAS and ZFS before jumping in. If you make poor choices in the design of your disk pool, your performance or reliability can suffer. Sometimes you don't know those decisions were poor / bad, until you start loosing data. Or worse, loose all your data.

Also, ZFS re-creates some terminology. For example, old style RAID-5s are similar to ZFS RAID-Z1, but their are noticeable differences. So when designing a new TrueNAS it's quite helpful to use the proper terminology so we can know what someone plans to do. That way, we can make better suggestions. Their is a resource about ZFS terminology. (Resources have a link at the top of the Forum page.) Here is a direct link to the


TrueNAS can't imported just random disks. Nor random RAID sets from non FreeBSD or ZFS computers.

Some clarification from @NugentS reference to IT:
IT = Integrated Target, a way for a RAID card to give up a drive for normal access
IR = Integrated RAID, LSI's way of saying that a card has light weight RAID functions, RAID-0, RAID-1, etc.. but not RAID-5 or -6.
 

JamesBong

Dabbler
Joined
Aug 26, 2021
Messages
16
The RAID card is a big mistake unless its got an IT mode and I haven't heard of one. You need to either use onboard SATA or an HBA, preferably from LSI, or using an LSI chipset (just avoid the MegaRAID I think). The HBA needs to be in IT mode.

Depending on what you are planning on doing with this - you may be a little over provisioned on CPU's and a little light on GHz on those CPU. But that's not to say it won't work. I would prefer 2 * Intel Xeon E5-2667 V1 (staying with 6 cores) - and they aren't expensive.

It will be mostly used as a file server and media server (no more than two streams in parallel every now and then).
 

Etorix

Wizard
Joined
Dec 30, 2020
Messages
2,112
2. Will I be able to add drives to the NAS using raid 0 to move the files to the new server and then change to Raid 5 when all the files are copied?
As pointed out by @Arwen, there are no "raid 0" or "raid 5" in ZFS. And you cannot change pool geometry after the fact, you need to get it right from the outset.
RaidZ would be fine for your light file server case. Z1 is not advised, especially if you plan to move to larger drives at some point. Z2 is a safe option.

With an extra 3 TB drive, you could make two 6-wide raidz2 vdevs from your old drives (67% space efficiency). The issue is moving the old data into the new pool.
 
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