Replace my drobo! Noob!

[expediter]

Hello, I am John, and new to server equipment and some of the software, but I am very comfortable around computers in General.
Whoops, Before introductions, I posted this in the hardware section.
I am from Connecticut and work in the sound booth and library at a church.

We currently have a 4 disk Drobo that is usb2.0, and getting pretty old as it is about 10 years. We have new drives in it, but I am getting worried that it is going to fail me. So, I am motivated to move on. Yes I could just get another Drobo, but I would much rather have a safer backup solution.
We have archives of Video and audio, some documents, but mostly video. Used space on the storage is about 6.5 TB out of 10TB and as we are looking at bumping up the quality of the video, and are now multi-track recording the audio, drive space is being used or expected to be used quicker.
It seems that for about the same money as a drobo or synology encloser with new drives, a Freenas server could be installed with much better reliability. We would be using encription, de-duplication, the copy feature, and I would feel vastly more comfortable with having dual drive protection. Z2?

Looking on Amazon at some white label drives Thanks to CookieslikeWhoa, I found that I could get some 4TB drives for $99. Going with 2 disk reliability, I would need 8 drives about, so $800 for my drives, +SH a server could be populated cheaper than normal. (with double the drives, I wonder if I could chance this?)
As the existing drive is USB2.0,(8-15MB-sec.) anything faster will be amazing but we don't need at present a 10G NIC.

So, my education into the server world begins.

 

[gpsguy]

Welcome to the forums!

Read the horror stories regarding encryption, before you commit to do it. Steer away from de-duplication. It requires ~5GB of RAM per 1TB of storage.

encription, de-duplication

 

[wblock]

Looking on Amazon at some white label drives

If your data is valuable, use quality drives, not relabeled random drives that are cheap for a reason. If your data is not valuable, why bother saving it?

 

[expediter]

wblock, Point taken on the quality drives.

Which would be the better option at first?
1: Go with single drive redundancy with fewer but larger drives (6-8TB), and expect to make a second array (don't ask me how) in the future,
OR,
2: go ahead with many of the smaller (4TB) drives with double drive redundancy?

Is this simply a upfront cost issue or is this a reliability issue?

 

[gpsguy]

I would opt for striped mirrors. While you lose 50% of the storage due to redundancy, you can grow the pool over time (as your budget allows) by adding another pair of disks to the volume.

 

[danb35]

Looking on Amazon at some white label drives Thanks to CookieslikeWhoa,

You no doubt saw my post in that thread--in the 18 months since I bought 6 x 6 TB "white label" drives, five of them have failed. I don't think I'll be buying them any more.

 

[wblock]

WD 8TB drives are still $150 at Best Buy, for now. Those are WD Red drives, although some might not have the red label. And the warranty is not the same as a standard Red, and they must be removed from the enclosures. (Yes, must, because the USB 3 interface board powers down the drive after a few minutes of inactivity.)

 

[expediter]

Ok, I have a budget of roughly $2000 for the build, as I said, that's about what we could do it for. Now I have to live up to my word. We'll see.

I am planning on using the following hardware based on the above posts and some others I have read. The Price comes to about $2200 before tax and shipping

Xeon E5-2609 V3 1.9GHz 6-Core Processor, from the bay
Noctua - NH-D9DX i4 3U 46.4 CFM CPU Cooler
Supermicro - MBD-X10SRL-F-O ATX LGA2011-3 Narrow Motherboard
2x Samsung M386A4G40DM0-CPB - 32GB (1 x 32GB) Registered DDR4-2133 Memory for 64GB Ram "this is the cheapest price per GB I could find"
2x SanDisk - SSD PLUS 120GB 2.5" for read/write cache They are cheap but better than nothing???
6x -WD 8TB Drives mentioned above by wblock Thank you for the tip, 48TB striped I guess, I will read up more on this, I like the option to pair up as needed.
SeaSonic - G 550W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply
And a Thermaltake case that currently has a 450w psu, but I am planning to replace it.

The wattage that is calculated for this system is about 200w including all the disks I went with the larger PSU because of price and future usage.

Any thoughts?

 

[Adrian]

You probably need neither of the caches. After you have the machine in use you can gauge if L2ARC would be beneficial. The hit rate on mine is less than 1%.
You might want to use one as your boot drive. Faster and more reliable than a USB stick

 

[expediter]

What types of files and sizes do you run? I am going to have .mp3's , .WAV, .WMV, .MP4, .FLAC, etc audio and video files of 20MB to 4GB files that will be accessed. Mostly it will be sitting, but when I do.... Some of the future files may be 1080P video and could be quite large as they might be 3 hrs long.

I have to believe that file types and sizes have some play in what the hardware requirements are. I just don't know what.

 

[wblock]

48TB striped I guess

Well, with redundancy, somewhere between 2/3 and half the raw capacity.

 

[gpsguy]

Assuming your church is a 501(c)(3) you can probably give the vendor a tax exempt form and avoid paying taxes on the purchases.

before tax

 

[gpsguy]

Ignore my earlier comment, I read neither as either.

You probably need neither of the caches.