Need some advice in home NAS/Server build parts

[Woxter]

Hi guys,

The idea of a home server or NAS is banging on my head since last month, so I did some research and I need a bit of advice in the parts and in a couple of questions.

First the questions:

-I have 300 Mbps with Vodafone on my optic fiber, but all my switches, my PC and cables are all capable of doing 1 Gbps, so does that mean that if I'm only using my Network (Not Internet) to access to my NAS and stream 4K content from there, will the limit of the speeds be 300 Mbps or 1 Gbps? (All my setup and devices are 1 Gbps capable but Vodafone only offers 300 Mbps MAX in my country)

-I'm stuck in the software to use...FreeNAS seems suitable, but should I use Linux or Windows Server Instead? I would like a software that can block devices that are trying to access my NAS, for example I would like my PC and my Oppo UDP-203 to access the NAS but I wouldn't like a member of my family just getting their laptop and accessing my NAS server in case they think it's just an additional HDD and they end up deleting stuff or changing stuff I would like some O.S that can at leas encript the server or just ask some password everytime you access to it from a different device (for the first time only).


With that being said, here is part of my build:

-Intel Pentium G4560 perfect CPU for this, 2C/4T at 3,5 GHz with support for ECC RAM and HW Decoding H.265 4K 10 bit HDR BT.2020 files. I found one on my local store for just 54€ also supports up to 64 GB RAM.

-Case: Silverstone DS380B I fell in love with that case here is about 170€ requieres SFX PSU and Mini ATX motherboard I think (PSU I'm sure it's SFX)

-Motherboard...Well I'm stuck with that one I was expecting some advice in this one, the only requirement I have for this is an HDMI 2.0a port, USB 3.0 ports...and 1 Gbps port...if it can have more SATA ports, then better, but if the cost is going to be more than 150€ then it's not worth it. If it's a standard MiniATX motherboard then the requirements will be HDMI 2.0a port + USB 3.0 port + Ethernet 1Gbps port and at least 3 PCI Express as I may upgrade to a 10 Gbps card + RAID controller and I may add in the future a GTX 1050.
If you can list me the cheapest mobo with ECC support for running ECC Registered it would be also nice, but not really my focus. Budget for mobo should be around 80€ maximum.

-RAM: Haven't decided yet but I'm not using ECC so I will start with a 16 GB stick DDR4 2133 MHz, As I would like to have the maximum amount of RAM possible to 64 GB in a future, I would like to have 4x 16GB sitcks (I will upgrade periodically when I upgrade my storage). The price here is aprox 85-110€ per stick.

-PSU: It need's to be an SFX so I thought of the Sharkoon SFX 450W 80 Plus Bronze I've seen very good reviews and I don't think my sistem would go further than 400W with like... 64 TB and 64 GB RAM fully loaded. This is 59€ to be exact.

-CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-L9L/i whatever, it has support for LGA 1151 and is small, price about 37€, will this feet into the case???

-I was also thinking in adding this:

https://www.amazon.es/dp/B00AZ9T3OU/ref=pd_sbs_147_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=C8VJJXSRE16S4BMBSH0Z

My main use is going to be access files only. Files will be accessed from my Desktop PC, Laptop, and my Oppo UDP-203.
Type of files: Music and Movies
-Music will be DSD, FLAC, MP3,ALAC from 16 bit to 24 and from 44,1 KHz all the way up to 192 KHz
-Movies: from simple 720p, 1080p H.264 with AC3 tracks all the way up to 4K H.265 10 bit HDR BT.2020 with Atmos & DTS:X track, 4K files are up to 98 GB MAX so will this system work on that?

Are there any bottlenecks? Are the parts compatible with the case, cooler etc?

Thanks a lot, I will give a massive thank you to whoever answers as I'm struggling to figure out the whole thing.

 

[Solandri]

-I have 300 Mbps with Vodafone on my optic fiber, but all my switches, my PC and cables are all capable of doing 1 Gbps, so does that mean that if I'm only using my Network (Not Internet) to access to my NAS and stream 4K content from there, will the limit of the speeds be 300 Mbps or 1 Gbps? (All my setup and devices are 1 Gbps capable but Vodafone only offers 300 Mbps MAX in my country)

1 Gbps. Although if you're reading data off of hard drives, they can only hit 125 MB/s (1 Gbps) with sequential read/writes. With small files, speeds will be as low as 1 MB/s.

-I'm stuck in the software to use...FreeNAS seems suitable, but should I use Linux or Windows Server Instead?

If the only thing you're going to do is serve files, FreeNAS is rock solid in my experience. Just make sure to turn off deduplication (unless you need it). It's both a memory hog and kills performance. With dedup on I had to give it at least 8GB of RAM and writes were as slow as 20 MB/s. With it off, it can get by with 4GB of RAM and sequential writes are around 85 MB/s. (It's tuned for multi-user access, so you're unlikely to hit the max 125 MB/s of Gigabit from a single computer. Windows is tuned for single-user access, so while it can hit 125 MB/s, if two people are transferring files from the file server simultaneously, their combined speed will be slower than a file server tuned for multi-user access.)

How many drives do you plan to get? FreeNAS uses ZFS - a redundant filesystem. RAID 5 is typically done with 4 drives, but the performance of ZFS is slightly more optimal with 5 or 3 drives, than with 4. (Usable space is the same as RAID 5. N drives = space of N-1 drives.) That said, the performance difference is not that great. I have 4 drives (only 5 SATA sockets, and the 5th one is used by a SSD containing FreeNAS, virtual machines, and files I want to be accessible at high-speed).

I would like a software that can block devices that are trying to access my NAS, for example I would like my PC and my Oppo UDP-203 to access the NAS but I wouldn't like a member of my family just getting their laptop and accessing my NAS server in case they think it's just an additional HDD and they end up deleting stuff or changing stuff I would like some O.S that can at leas encript the server or just ask some password everytime you access to it from a different device (for the first time only).

FreeNAS lets you create users and specify which users have access to which shared drives, folders, and files. The GUI lets you use a simple inheritance-based permissions. But if you're comfortable with a Unix command line you can create much more complicated permissions. e.g. I set up each user with a public and private folder. They can read and write to both, but others can read (but not write to) the public folder. Then I used links to make everyone's public folders show up inside each user's folder. It can share via Samba, so will behave (to the client) like a Windows share in terms of logging in.

If you have enough free disk space, play with the snapshots option. If you snapshot every night at midnight and someone accidentally deletes a file, you can still retrieve it from the previous day's snapshot. So it works like a in-situ backup. (An external backup is still recommended, in case your computer catches on fire.)

-RAM: Haven't decided yet but I'm not using ECC so I will start with a 16 GB stick DDR4 2133 MHz, As I would like to have the maximum amount of RAM possible to 64 GB in a future, I would like to have 4x 16GB sitcks (I will upgrade periodically when I upgrade my storage). The price here is aprox 85-110€ per stick.

ECC RAM is highly recommended for FreeNAS. Unlike RAID which will drop a disk from the array if it detects errors, FreeNAS works at the block-level. If it detects and error, it only marks that file as bad. Actually it'll try to reconstruct the file based on the parity data and checksum. It'll do this every 35 days for all your files to protect against bit rot (a bit spontaneously flipping on the disk). It reads each file and compares to the stored checksum. If they don't match, it'll use the parity data to correct the flipped bit. But to do this it needs ECC RAM - otherwise it can mistake memory errors for bit rot and actually end up corrupting files.

And if you have dedup off, you'll be fine with just 8 GB.

Are there any bottlenecks? Are the parts compatible with the case, cooler etc?

I just got a splitting headache so I'll leave others to critique your hardware selection.

 

[Woxter]

-I have 300 Mbps with Vodafone on my optic fiber, but all my switches, my PC and cables are all capable of doing 1 Gbps, so does that mean that if I'm only using my Network (Not Internet) to access to my NAS and stream 4K content from there, will the limit of the speeds be 300 Mbps or 1 Gbps? (All my setup and devices are 1 Gbps capable but Vodafone only offers 300 Mbps MAX in my country)

1 Gbps. Although if you're reading data off of hard drives, they can only hit 125 MB/s (1 Gbps) with sequential read/writes. With small files, speeds will be as low as 1 MB/s.

-I'm stuck in the software to use...FreeNAS seems suitable, but should I use Linux or Windows Server Instead?

If the only thing you're going to do is serve files, FreeNAS is rock solid in my experience. Just make sure to turn off deduplication (unless you need it). It's both a memory hog and kills performance. With dedup on I had to give it at least 8GB of RAM and writes were as slow as 20 MB/s. With it off, it can get by with 4GB of RAM and sequential writes are around 85 MB/s. (It's tuned for multi-user access, so you're unlikely to hit the max 125 MB/s of Gigabit from a single computer. Windows is tuned for single-user access, so while it can hit 125 MB/s, if two people are transferring files from the file server simultaneously, their combined speed will be slower than a file server tuned for multi-user access.)

How many drives do you plan to get? FreeNAS uses ZFS - a redundant filesystem. RAID 5 is typically done with 4 drives, but the performance of ZFS is slightly more optimal with 5 or 3 drives, than with 4. (Usable space is the same as RAID 5. N drives = space of N-1 drives.) That said, the performance difference is not that great. I have 4 drives (only 5 SATA sockets, and the 5th one is used by a SSD containing FreeNAS, virtual machines, and files I want to be accessible at high-speed).

I would like a software that can block devices that are trying to access my NAS, for example I would like my PC and my Oppo UDP-203 to access the NAS but I wouldn't like a member of my family just getting their laptop and accessing my NAS server in case they think it's just an additional HDD and they end up deleting stuff or changing stuff I would like some O.S that can at leas encript the server or just ask some password everytime you access to it from a different device (for the first time only).

FreeNAS lets you create users and specify which users have access to which shared drives, folders, and files. The GUI lets you use a simple inheritance-based permissions. But if you're comfortable with a Unix command line you can create much more complicated permissions. e.g. I set up each user with a public and private folder. They can read and write to both, but others can read (but not write to) the public folder. Then I used links to make everyone's public folders show up inside each user's folder. It can share via Samba, so will behave (to the client) like a Windows share in terms of logging in.

If you have enough free disk space, play with the snapshots option. If you snapshot every night at midnight and someone accidentally deletes a file, you can still retrieve it from the previous day's snapshot. So it works like a in-situ backup. (An external backup is still recommended, in case your computer catches on fire.)

-RAM: Haven't decided yet but I'm not using ECC so I will start with a 16 GB stick DDR4 2133 MHz, As I would like to have the maximum amount of RAM possible to 64 GB in a future, I would like to have 4x 16GB sitcks (I will upgrade periodically when I upgrade my storage). The price here is aprox 85-110€ per stick.

ECC RAM is highly recommended for FreeNAS. Unlike RAID which will drop a disk from the array if it detects errors, FreeNAS works at the block-level. If it detects and error, it only marks that file as bad. Actually it'll try to reconstruct the file based on the parity data and checksum. It'll do this every 35 days for all your files to protect against bit rot (a bit spontaneously flipping on the disk). It reads each file and compares to the stored checksum. If they don't match, it'll use the parity data to correct the flipped bit. But to do this it needs ECC RAM - otherwise it can mistake memory errors for bit rot and actually end up corrupting files.

And if you have dedup off, you'll be fine with just 8 GB.

Are there any bottlenecks? Are the parts compatible with the case, cooler etc?

I just got a splitting headache so I'll leave others to critique your hardware selection.

Thank you so much! I already have backups of all my stuff in different external 2 and 4TB hard drives (about 15 of them) So I actually don't care if I suddenly have an error or hard drive failure because I already have an external backup. The thing with ECC RAM is that it's expensive, I found on my local store a 16GB NON-ECC stick and it's 88€, a similar stick with ECC without heatsink it's about 130€ that's the cheapest one I could find. I wouldn't mind spending like 40€ extras on an ECC stick, but the thing is that I'm stuck with the motherboard and an extra 40€ on ECC would also mean an extra 50-60€ or even more on a motherboard...that would be like at leas 100€ extras being optimistic, that's why I mentioned that. On the future I might upgrade to ECC.

Thank you so much for your help!!