NAS case vs DIY NAS

[eday_2010]

I have been looking at getting a NAS for a while, and when my budget allows for it, it will be my next project. Originally I was going to get a 4TB Western Digital My Cloud, but realized 4TB would not be enough. Then I was looking at NAS cases, but they are pretty expensive, especially when you are looking at 4-bay ones. Then I looked into building my own to see how cost effective that would be. However, I am not sure exactly what kind of hardware I need. It will not do anything but have hard drives in it with stuff on it. I am guessing the system doesn't need a lot, so an AMD based system seems like a good choice because of price.

There are a couple of 4-bay NAS enclosures that are the same price or cheaper than building one. One is from Lenovo (http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8511568&CatId=2670), which has various RAIDs as well as JBOD, so that all the drives will show up as one.

But if I am building something, would these barebone kits suffice? What else would I need? Or would it be best to stick with the Lenovo? It seems like a good unit for someone new to NASes at a really good price.

 

[RealBeast]

I recommend that you not use a motherboard controller for an NAS box RAID array -- it will fail and break your array long before anything else fails. You can use motherboard SATA connectors to build a FreeNAS system with ZFS raidz though -- it doesn't have the same weakness since it doesn't use the onboard RAID, it just uses the SATA connections.

With only 4 drives, RAID 5 would be a reasonable solution if you use RAID, and I don't think that you can easily beat the price of that Lenovo NAS box.

 

[eday_2010]

I am leaning towards that Lenovo box as well. It's a good price and far more easier than trying to build one myself. I would use RAID with it, but either RAID 0 or JBOD. I don't know much about either except there is no redundancy and the drives appear as one drive. Redundancy is not needed because everything on there would already have another copy somewhere. Does either solution let you add another disk later and have it become part of the pool? I don't think I will be able to afford the for hard drives I want at once, so if I don't have to buy them all at once, that would be great.

 

[RealBeast]

I would not use RAID 0 for storage -- if you lose one drive you lose the whole array. You may want RAID 5 for better data protection. But it is a real pain to add drives to a RAID array (very long rebuild times) even if the hardware allows it and the risk of a disk failure during rebuild that would lose all the data.

While the Lenovo *may* allow non-destructive expansion of JBOD, you really should have a backup because there is no guarantee that the current data will be intact after the disk add. I would not bet on it being intact though -- I've tried removing a single disk of a JBOD pool on a number of inexpensive NAS solutions and most of the time the whole pool became unreadable. The Lenovo may have the option to use each drive as an independent volume, which would allow expansion and be safer to use than RAID 0, as one drive failed would not break the array since there isn't an array.

I would buy all disks at once -- so I would wait to buy until the whole thing is within budget. As an alternative you can buy just a couple of drives and use them for a while, then back up all of the data before you add more drives if you have the space to do such a backup.

 

[eday_2010]

Well, all the data already exists on a few external HDDs I have in various places. The NAS would be where it all gets consolidated; everything would be copied to the NAS, but would still exist on whatever current hard drive it sits on. So if I lose what is in the NAS, it's no big deal since all that stuff already exists elsewhere. RAID 5 loses me a drive for storage, and I have my heart set on a 4-drive RAID