Buying a suitable server for use as a NAS

[Mrjimmy1234]

I'm looking for a 2nd hand server to be used as a NAS for backups and for a media server. I've just bought an HP Proliant G6 DL380 and would be quite happy to buy something else from HP if it can suit my needs. The requirements are:

• 
  Preferably 3.5" Caddies.
  Drives must have SATA interface.
  Not particularly bothered about performance but something around a quad core xeon with HT would be great.
  RAM isn't particularly important either so 8/16GB would be fine.
  Doesn't have to have an OS or license for one.

I'm literally just looking for an empty box with enough space for a decent amount of 3.5" disks and a PCI-E slot for adding a 10G ethernet card.

Thanks in advance,
Jimmy.

 

[USAFRet]

This is for home use?
A quad xeon is absolutely not needed.

 

[Mrjimmy1234]

This is for home use?
A quad xeon is absolutely not needed.

Hi, yeah I realise it'll be overpowered but the kind of age I'm thinking of for the machine it'll be LGA1366 era and for that platform a quad core with HT you can buy off eBay for around £5, it would make no sense to buy a standard quad core or even a dual core when there's pennies between them.

 

[USAFRet]

A home NAS for that use can run on just about any hardware. Doesn't have to be a "server".

 

[Mrjimmy1234]

A home NAS for that use can run on just about any hardware. Doesn't have to be a "server".

Yes I know, but I would be hard pressed to find a standard grade PC with enough SATA ports for the amount of hard drives I'd like to get. And yes I could buy a few RAID cards but at that point i'll have paid the same price as just getting an old server.

Also I don't think I mentioned in my original post, I'd like this to go in my rack so it's all neat with my other equipment.

 

[failboat]

How many drives do you need? You may end up needing PCIE sata anyway.

Power consumption on old stuff is pretty bad. low power Xeon E3 v2 and v3 aren't too expensive on ebay.
Make sure to price your build out over a few years with power. Sometimes the old stuff is not practical.
Ram is very expensive right now.

I'm hoping this new amd line brings prices down on the ECC+10Gb NIC stuff.

https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-embedded-3000-series-launch-watch-out-xeon-d/

 

[Mrjimmy1234]

How many drives do you need? You may end up needing PCIE sata anyway.

Power consumption on old stuff is pretty bad. low power Xeon E3 v2 and v3 aren't too expensive on ebay.
Make sure to price your build out over a few years with power. Sometimes the old stuff is not practical.
Ram is very expensive right now.

I'm hoping this new amd line brings prices down on the ECC+10Gb NIC stuff.

https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-embedded-3000-series-launch-watch-out-xeon-d/

Thanks for your reply failboat, to start with I'd probably get a couple of 6TB drives and then expand when I can afford it so maybe up to 10 or 15. As you say, I may end up needing a RAID card or something similar but by getting something 2nd hand of eBay or a similar site you can sometimes get lucky and find a unit with one in or an onboard controller.

Power consumption does bother me but I don't plan on having it running 24/7, maybe just a few hours in the evening when I want to watch a film or run a backup. Something newer with better power efficiency would be nice though, depending on price of course.

I'm really hoping 10G networking equipment will begin to get more mainstream soon, I'm trying to future proof all my equipment from now onwards so I've bought a reel of Cat 6a ethernet cable which should be able to do 10G and I'll buy a few NICs along with whatever system I decide so my PC and HTPC can take advantage of the speed of the RAID, as well as between servers in the rack.

 

[bill001g]

Be very careful to do the math on all the components you intend to use. Many times it is not the network bottlenecking a NAS. If you go to the NAS sites they get huge numbers by using RAID of high end SSD and then they copy large files rather that lot of little ones. It would run very differently using so called "green" drives even in RAID configurations.

You need to look at what your actual type of files usage is. Things like streaming a movie uses almost nothing since it only needs data as fast as it is displayed. Making backups of many games involves coping massive number of files where the names of the files take up almost as much space as the contents of the file. The overhead in doing this slows the copy down a lot.

In addition the machine you are sending/receiving data to the NAS must also have a very robust disk system to not restrict you.

Slapping the 10g card in the machine is actually the simple part designing storage network. I know a number of people who make their whole career optimizing data storage systems...and they get paid huge money.

 

[failboat]

I'd go with a homebuild if you want expansion options. If you get one with an igpu you can put proxmox or another free hypervisor and run VMs off it as well. Which is nice, because it's very over specced for only NAS. I run NAS, plex, router, file server, remote access, etc off mine with proxmox. It's debian stretch so if you're comfortable using Ubuntu the command line is a lot of the same stuff. The nice part about free options is you can try them all out too.

Skylake has significantly more PCIE 3.0 lanes which gives you more options for expansion. quad 10Gb uses 8 full lanes.
You can get away with older but don't go too far back. Make sure the PCIE addin slots are all 3.0 on the board you buy.

People are moving away from RAID cards and more towards JBOD ones (basically extra sata ports) and software raid.
ZFS is very nice. It is tricky to scale up. If you start with a raid 1 mirror with two 6TB disks you can keep adding more raid 1 2x6tb into stripe for a raid 10. ZFS doesn't allow you to add more disks into an existing raid 5. You can only duplicate what you did from the start or you have to rebuild it from another backup. It has great features, one of which is using a SSD cache to speed up your random io.