Enclosure or Nas build advice and direction please...

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Steveyg777

New Member
Nov 20, 2023
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I have a synology ds920+ in and have replaced several drives and have a collection of 8tb Seagate compute (yes i know some are smr, hourly i can still use them?) and Toshiba n300 drives and an ironwolf. I wanted to create storage that i can put together a collection of retro files on (all kinds of consoles and especially a full collection of amiga games). I've probably got 6x8tb drives at least and other drives lying around to use. I was wondering about getting a large enclosure (possibly 8 bays) and controlling then as raid via a pi to keep costs down but don't know if it will be powerful enough to cope? I'd like to put them to use and organise the remainder of my digital files that aren't on my synology nas.

I want to make a new nas of sorts with the drives to hold the retro stuff, i may use it to backup my syno and other devices to as well (already got a dedicated drive for syno backup by-the-way).

So i need advice for the following:

1. Drive setup - I don't know whether to go with a jbod or raid of some kind, i read raid5 is deprecated but not keen on sacrificing lots of drives to on like raid6 or 10 and read that raid6 is even slower than 5.

2. Enclosure - I'm not sure what enclosure to buy bit don't want to be buying something as expensive as a qnap or syno etc (although I've got my eye on these https://amzn.eu/d/3QV0i96, https://amzn.eu/d/5eObj, https://amzn.eu/d/dMP49SK
and I've even seen a 10bay - possibly orico). Or should i go with something else, I'm obviously very keen to get it while Black Friday is still on and I’ve got an egift card to go towards one if it’s bought from Amazon.

3. Software - not sure what software to use to achieve the nas side of things (i was thinking about omv cos truenas looked more difficult but not sure now) - I'd prefer to keep the amount of geeking about on Linux to the minimum if possible but not sure if that's possible and may be persuaded if it's not too difficult.

4. Filesystem - and then also not sure what filesystem to use. My syno uses shr1 with btrfs but i read omv isn't able to use the advanced features of btrfs, is this still true? What's the best software and filesystem combo? Zfs? Ext4? something else?

5. Raspberry pi - should i use a pi to handle raid? Is it too much geeking with Linux to setup quickly and maintenance freely (with regards to changing failing disks, maintenance, etc)? I saw a little touch screen you can but for the pi to make it a more self contained system or isn't that really needed?

I could really do with some pointers cos i feel there is so much choice out there and don't know what, of the above aspects of a new nas, will work together well or cause compatibility issues with one another, etc ...

Can anyone steer me through the mine field please?
 
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slidermike

Active Member
May 7, 2023
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Hi Steve.
Welcome to the forums.
I do not want this to sound negative but here goes.
Like just about everyone else you sound like you want your cake and to eat it too.
What I mean is you want a lot but you want it on a low budget.
That is nearly impossible so you have to choose.
Do I want this 2nd "nas" and if so am I more willing to pay for the convenience of "out of box/ready to go" - (think Synology) or am I willing to invest my time in learning linux or some other OS.

I noticed you asked a good but "loaded" question - which file format is best? Thats like asking in a mechanics forum which oil is best. There is no right answer across the board. Each has a better use case than the other and you will always get different answers from different users. Most users will provide their answer based on their experiences and most of us have not actually utilized all of the formats in all cases to make that truly informed response.

Aside from the above about deciding what you want to invest more of, your time or your money, the next best piece of advice I can offer is (as long as you are not some deadline) why not take this opportunity to learn about some of them yourself. Try the one you are most curious about, then load OMV and see how it goes. If and when you do not like it try something else. Or segment the drives into smaller pools.. 1 pool of 2-3 drives in a zfs, 1 of 2-3 btrfs etc.. load OMV and play with it from there.


As long as there is no rush, try the inexpensive route first. Use whatever you have on hand first & use OMV (free) software.
If something in there is not up to snuff, upgrade that part of the chain.

Part of the fun is the journey.
You thought through the process and did some research based on your post.
Do not be afraid to try something and find out "oh shoot, that didn't work" :)

All of that rambling aside, please do not take away that I am saying asking questions is bad.. What I am trying to encourage is while you make new online friends and interact with the community do not sit there worried that you have to do everything right the first time with that lovely hardware you have in front of you on the bench.
Post updates in here on your progress and lessons learned. You might be surprised at how many people enjoy reading (and learning) from reading someone else' build adventure.
 
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Tech Junky

Active Member
Oct 26, 2023
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PI likely will choke when calculating parity for R5 but, if you relegate the setup to be your backup destination for the primary it might not matter much. The reason for this is the mention of the SMR drives which would kill your performance on the primary setup due to having to reshingle the data when replacing bits/bytes.

I was running a NAS function on my DIY setup with R10 and it didn't hit the CPU at all and performed well for ~8 years. With Linux you can manipulate some redundancy into the configs using mdadm commands. R10 is 4+ drives in pairs but, I added a 5th to the array as a hot standby that was active in the array when looking at the command outputs.

FS is up to you but, I just used EXT4 and kept it simple.

What you could do though with a PI is offload the Raid portion to a DAS - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KY73BNQ
This one will give you the max speed of the 4 drives you put in ~400MB/s which far exceeds your network speed up to 5GE

Then you just connect it to your PI and turn it into a NAS w/o the NAS price.

The other route would be build a PC with sufficient space in the case for drives. Something like a Node 804 which holds 8 drives keeps things compact yet well ventilated. Then it just comes down to picking a MOBO / CPU and probably an HBA for additional SATA ports.
 
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nexox

Well-Known Member
May 3, 2023
677
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I don't know that I have all that much relevant advice, but it seems that you haven't mentioned how concerned you are about power consumption and noise, two factors that usually eliminate a lot of cheaper options.

RAID5 isn't deprecated in general, it's great for certain workloads (eg bulk file storage) up to about 6 drives (beyond that you likely want more redundancy,) but it isn't so good in btrfs, and the equivalent in ZFS also has some downsides.
 
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louie1961

Active Member
May 15, 2023
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My view of the world. Others may not agree. Take all of this with a grain of salt. I am not an expert. But I have built a few NAS units

1. Drive setup - I don't know whether to go with a jbod or raid of some kind Why bother with RAID? RAID is used when you need a certain level of uptime, data availability, or when you are looking for certain levels of read write performance. Since you are storing retro files I can't imagine you have a use case that needs RAID. I would probably go with a JBOD, and use either Unraid as your NAS OS or some other linux distro with snapraid laid over top. Either will give you data protection through the use of parity disks. Alternatively you could string these all together with LVM in Linux and put BTRFS on top of LVM to achieve a copy on write file system, snapshots, etc. all with out the overhead of ZFS which I would argue you don't need for this application.

2. Enclosure - If you are building your own NAS, I would just go for something like the Fractal Designs Node 304 or node 804, depending on the size of the motherboard you choose. I would not worry about hot swap bays for this use case. Save yourself some money.

3. Software OMV is fine. I have an instance of OMV that I am using as a storage destination for my Nextcloud instance. It is very light on memory and CPU requirements, and you can use EXT4, XFS, BTRFS, or ZFS (with a plug in). In my setup I have a bunch of disks in a linux software raid (mdadm) and I formatted the file system in BTRFS. It does scrubs and snapshots perfectly well on 2 CPUs (e5-2690v3) and 2 gb of RAM. Some people will tell you that BTRFS isn't ready for prime time, but it IS what Synology uses. Like what I described, just don't use BTRFS to create the raid (or JBOD) array. Use mdadm for RAID and LVM for JBOD. Both of these tools are easily controlled/manipulated from the OMV UI without the need to go through the command line.

You may also find that Unraid is a better choice for you than OMV. I suggest trying both. OMV is free, but with Unraid you can have a free trial but then it is $59 for the license.

4. Filesystem - See my answer above. OMV uses BTRFS fine, so long as you use it much in the same way that Synology does, as I have described above. OMV also works with ZFS, XFS (I think?) and EXT4 among others. I personally love BTRFS for my use case. I get snapshots, copy on write file system, data scrubs, etc. It has been flawless in OMV

5. Raspberry pi - Just no. I have a NAS build on a Pi and I love it. I use it as a backup destination. But it doesn't use RAID or a JBOD or any of that. Definitely don't even try to do RAID with a Pi, and your use case is really better off without RAID any, IMHO. Build a cheap computer or reuse an old PC that you have lying around and stick it in a Node 804 case.
 
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