BUILD Small business NAS build

[lazyaznricicle]

Hey everyone, I got hired by a lady to file her papers and to build a NAS for her where she is going to store supposedly tons of files and her collection of music and movies.( I might build her a seperate NAS for the entertainment) Her house is quite a mess with papers and boxes of papers everywhere, literally everywhere (Shower, sink, bathtub, walkway, stares, kitchen cabinets, attic, car as well, anywhere you can think of). She just wants to scan everything and put it on a large storage where she can access it from multiple computers around the house. She also wants me to build about 5 computers that will be on her network and accessing all the files but that's easy. Shell have about 4 people at her house doing the paper work for her as well. Anyways back to the main topic, so for the NAS, since she owns quite a bit of property and is starting to do everything from home I was thinking of this set up.

Case: Fractal Design R4
CPU: Intel Xeon Processor E3-1231V3B
CPU cooler: Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard: Supermicro X10SL7-F
RAM: Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3/DDR3L-1600MT/s (PC3-12800) DR x8 ECC UDIMM Server Memory CT2KIT102472BD160B/CT2CP102472BD160B
NIC: Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X540-T1 (may or may not actually need this but its nice to have a 10GbE)
PSU: SeaSonic G Series 550-Watt
OS Drive: Not sure for this, at first i was thinking of thumb drive, but then i thought i should use a dedicated drive such as an ssd or something? any suggestions here would be great.
Storage Drives: WD Red WD40EFRX 4TB x4 or the 2TB ones x6, both in raidz2
HBA: IBM Serveraid M1015 SAS/SATA Controller 46M0831 ( I threw this into the build but i don't think ill actually need it for this set up)

I'm pretty sure all these components are compatible with each other but its always nice to get a second look over things. Any suggestions or things to upgrade for better would be great. This would be my 3rd nas build and I might even get this build for my own home NAS.

 

[Ericloewe]

Motherboard: Supermicro X10SL7-F
Storage Drives: WD Red WD40EFRX 4TB x4 or the 2TB ones x6, both in raidz2
HBA: IBM Serveraid M1015 SAS/SATA Controller 46M0831 ( I threw this into the build but i don't think ill actually need it for this set up)

The X10SL7-F already has an LSI SAS controller. Unless you're planning on using more than 14 drives, drop the HBA.

As for the boot device, it your choice:

• USB flash drives are cheap (and thus easy to mirror) but can be unreliable
• SATA DOMs are expensive, but should be more reliable than USB flash drives.
• Small SSDs are cheaper than DOMs, but larger and need cabling. Creative cable routing is naturally possible.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Unless you plan for the future, the MB and the PSU are overkill for only 4 or 6 drives, let alone the M1015 :)

You might want to use a cheaper MB and/or a lower wattage PSU.

For the boot device you can use SATA DOM, SSD or USB sticks. I recommend to use 2 of them in a mirror (see the manual to know how to mirror the boot drive) ;)

 

[marbus90]

The mobo already has an LSI SAS controller onboard, altough it would not be needed for that low a disk count. So the M1015 is not needed at all.

If you really want it small, either just buy a FreeNAS mini from ixsystems or do with this build:
Fractal Node 304
Seasonic G-360
ASRock MT-C224 (the ASRock page is a little off about the dimension, it'll fit)
Intel Pentium G3240 or 3258 with Boxed cooler (for pure file storage it's good enough - altough I would never say no to a Xeon ;) )
1x the Crucial DIMM Kit you linked for a start

The NIC would be optional, can be added later. disk wise I'd rather go with a 6disk raidz2 since that's easier to upgrade to bigger HDDs without wasting too much on redundancy. For OS drives 2x Sandisk 8-16GB USB-Sticks are fine, two SSDs are less easier to integrate into such small builds.

microATX tower:
Fractal Arc Mini or Define Mini
Supermicro X10SLL-F/X10SLL+-F/X10SLM-F/X10SLM+-F
other components as above.

 

[diedrichg]

Since the documents are really only for archive referencing you won't need to scan at 300 dpi and 150 dpi will be more than sufficient.

 

[lazyaznricicle]

Oh i did i forget to mention she wanted to expand to much more drives than i originally stated :p. The current amount of drives were just for this summer but when she has finished a new building she is working on she told me to install more. (Up to her, she gave me a $3000 limit( that's so much )) But what she has told me so far doesn't seem to require that much so selected the currents parts are to be upgrade able for her and still be very under her limit and i wouldn't have to upgrade anything else other than the hard drives for her in the future. I originally was thinking of using the Asus H97I-PLUS Mini ITX LGA1150 Motherboard with a Corsair Carbide Series 200RIntel Core i3-4370 3.8GHz in a Fractal Design Node 304 or with a Corsair Carbide Series 200R. But since she said 3k limit I decided to splurge for her a bit :p. You can check the full original build at pcpartpicker.

CPU: Intel Core i3-4370 3.8GHz Dual-Core Processor
Motherboard : Asus H97I-PLUS Mini ITX LGA1150 Motherboard
RAM: Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
Case: Fractal Design Node 304 Mini ITX Tower Case
PSU: SeaSonic 350W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply

As soon as she told me the $3000 limit, i immediately threw in that xeon processor, i might as well put in a E5 2600 if she really wanted to.
Those SATA DOMS looking pretty promising especially in a mirror ;), thanks for that.

 

[SweetAndLow]

What are her current storage needs? And how much does it grow in 1 year? I would start with 8x4tb in z2. And probably a e3-1231v3

 

[lazyaznricicle]

Current i would assume the original build i had thought of with the I3, asus h97 would suffice for her needs. She has a bout 150-200 units of tenants at the moment if i recall and she expects to expand to about 400 after her new apartment complex/center/large area of land thing goes through. So i would assume she is going to need quite a bit of storage space.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Documents are small in size so I don't expect there to be more that 1TB of data?

 

[Bidule0hm]

Well, since you have no budget limit (well, sort of :P) the first list (minus the M1015) is perfect ;)

 

[lazyaznricicle]

Possibly but this is say about 50 years worth of documents/plans/designs/etc( she is terrible with anything tech related, i was surprised in this day and age and how much wealth/assets she as accumulated that she barely knew how to use the new iPhone 6 ). I should also mention if i didn't before that she does real estate with an estimation of about 2.5m a year but much of this wealth is probably due to her husband who recently passed away and then she has just picked up from where he has left off. So far we have done about 100gb since last month and barely dented her house (we also have another 2 offices of paper or something? I'm not sure, i haven't seen these offices yet). I'm glad I don't have to do the busy paper work( we have 5 other people doing all of that. I get the fun job of setting up her office and main desktop with cat6. The office is going to hold the 5 computers that i stated earlier, there is also going to be a conference room with 2 more computers( one is going to be used for call/video chat with clients etc).

 

[Ericloewe]

I'd definitely start with larger disks if the storage requirements are going to grow. Since the budget allows, simplify the upgrade path.

Xeon E5 is probably overkill, since this sounds more like an archival server. 32GB of RAM ought to be enough for the foreseeable future.

10GbE is also overkill and, if needed, can be trivially added later. Maybe prices for 10GbE will be more reasonable in a few months (Ha!).

 

[lazyaznricicle]

You should have seen the look on my face after hearing about her budget. I was rather flabbergasted because the most expensive NAS I have built is the one i currently have at home which is 500$ + 800$ on 16tbs drives which consist of a multitude of movies/shows with about 50k songs and a abundance of photos/work/projects that I store on the NAS.

 

[lazyaznricicle]

I was planning on using the rest of the about 900$ to spend on WD 4tb Nas drives anyway and changing the current 2tb drives to 4tb as well. But hmm might as well remove the NIC and put that into extra drives as well.

 

[DataKeeper]

I'd consider a small rack to house a rack mount hot-swap chassis, UPS, patch panels, etc. Do it up properly so it's easy to maintain, upgrade, expand.

That 10GbE card you can skip for this setup and stick to 1000MbE. With the Cat6 its available in the future but for small files like she is working with and only a 1/2 dozen staff 10GbE is pointless.

 

[Starpulkka]

I dont see a UPS on your setup, is it already on house. If not UPS i a must. Also i feel a raidz3 for documents is not overdone, or does you or someone monitor that freenas box dayly? But before taking raidz3 on use a test might be a good idea versus raidz2.

 

[lazyaznricicle]

As the UPS i was going to get the CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD 1500VA 900W UPS. I may consider a small rack but the area that she wants the server in isn't the most suitable location for a rack mounted server so I settled with the fractal case. Ill try to work around and see if it would fit in her house.

 

[danb35]

It's not really a FreeNAS-related issue, but has anyone come up with a good strategy for indexing thousands of pages of scanned paper? The scanning itself is easy enough, as is the storage, but presumably the reason she wants all this paper scanned, rather than just thrown out, is so she can find particular documents on demand. That, IMO, is going to be a bigger issue than picking the server hardware.

On the issue of the hardware, you've chosen a motherboard that will handle an effectively-unlimited number of hard drives. You're also talking about the storage requirements growing with no apparent upper bound. With that, I'd suggest a chassis that gives you lots of drive bays and a SAS expander like this one. Heck, if you want to buy new, you could buy this one instead and still come in within budget. Either way, that gives you 24 drive bays you can use. You'll still have enough controller capacity to run an external JBOD shelf too.

 

[Starpulkka]

Scanned paper? What digital format is that? XML? epub?
I know woman she currently use "not free" portable document format with OCR and it picks those tiny 2mm height text from paper, and text can be searched by name. Of corse search funktion is lilbit slow as it takes 6s to get first hit from fewhundred documents.
Or are you thinkin just by searching document filename? I do use some filefinder program that has 90 description plugins, but its a slow if plugins are used with zfs.
I heard that google has some good systems and software for information search documents and from metadata.

Edit: If original poster client has a firm, i think that there are some law obligations about digital records and paper records and how those papers are catalogued and kept safe.
Here in europe for small business companies we have tight laws for that, if its in digitalpaper it has to be stored as encrypted. etc. Eu webpage is what encryption options are currently supported inside of eu. (witch is intresting if you have listen security now about encryption, and have looked snowden files. )