Insane Compact NAS 2014 - 48TB of Network-attached Storage
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
2,123 words · ~10 min read
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we could build mundane computers with
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normal components we could stick to the
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convenient list of known compatible
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parts and we could stay safely within the boundaries of modern technology we
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could do reviews of stuff like smart baby monitors and actually okay well we
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do have on that note we do have a video coming about the mimo smart baby monitor
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so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that but that's not what we
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normally do no today we're going to be building a
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48 terabyte storage server with 64 gigs
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of RAM eight processing cores and 80 plus gold power supply and ample cooling
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all in a case that's not much bigger
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than a couple of shoe boxes welcome to
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insane compact NZ
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2014 Corsair gaming RGB keyboards
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feature Precision Cherry MX RGB key switches for 16.8 million color per key
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backlighting for virtually unlimited customization click now to learn more so
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I was first inspired to do this build when Silverstone showed me the DS 380 a
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case that they boasted featured support for an ITX motherboard eight 3 and 1/2
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in hard drives and four 2 and 1/2 in
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ssds or hard drives to which I replied
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well okay uh but what the heck Hardware are you expecting people to put in this
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thing storage geeks on a budget are going to buy 12 or 16 Port raid cards
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and put them in an ITX machine are you mad and they said no no no no no there's
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a perfect motherboard for this thing the
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ASRock rack c2750 d4i server slw workstation board
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with a passively cooled Intel avaton 27508 Core CPU support for up to 64 gigs
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of ECC DDR3 memory dual Intel i210
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network card 12 SATA ports six SATA 3 from a pair of
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Marvel controllers and six from the Intel controller two of which are SATA 3
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and the other four of which are SATA 2 a PCIe adex expansion slot that you can
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use for raid card expansion or in our case a 10 gbit Nick card and some really
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sweet server grade remote monitoring and management stuff that I've never really
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had the pleasure of playing around with before including power controls and even
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a display output preview that runs in a little Java plugin in your browser so I
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said heck yeah man now this board is cool in general but its most important
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feature for this build was actually kind of hidden in that massive spec list and
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it wasn't hard drive support but rather
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RAM support we're going to be using Freez which calls for some base memory
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about 8 gigs and then 1 gig of ECC so
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that's error correcting RAM per 1 tbyte of raw storage space so given that we're
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planning to use eight 6 TB 3 and 1/2 in drives in ZFS 2 it's about equivalent to
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raid six and that two drives within a vdev can fail out right before any data
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is lost but otherwise not necessarily that similar um well we're going to need
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a whole lot of RAM aren't we 64 gigs is
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possibly slightly Overkill but since the
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options are going to be 32 gigs in you
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know a regular 4dm motherboard or doubling it to 64 gigs in this
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particular motherboard well we're better off going a little bit Overkill rather
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than than risking losing data because we didn't have enough RAM so we've got four
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sticks of intelligent memories 16 gig
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dims that we're going to be using to keep our data nice and safe they're
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right on the approved hardware list for this motherboard so feeling pretty good
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about our chances which leads us to the storage drives we're using just about
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the badasses storage drives on the market right now seates Enterprise
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capacity drives they're designed for us large storage appliances in the most
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demanding possible environments data centers where vibration from nearby
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drives all around them needs to be compensated for and performance cannot
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go down and failure is not an option and I mean not only do these bad boys come
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prepared for a 247 or always on workload
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with full drive encryption support and a huge 1.4 million hour meantime between
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failure but compared to cate's own consumer NAS Drives their ratings are
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based on 10 times the workload or 550
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terabytes per year with a 5year warranty to back it up so I'm feeling pretty good
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about these too but obviously these drives um what we're using as a small
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business isn't necessarily going to be practical for everyone and these
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Enterprise capacity drives might not make any sense for the typical home user
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but for you guys there's the regular Nas and raid drives that are perfectly good
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options for a 1 to eight Bay storage device and cool little tidbit that I
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wasn't aware of is that Seagate sells them with a data recovery insurance plan
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now that they're calling seate plus rescue that includes shipping both ways
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a replacement drive that they send the data back to you on and no deductible or
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limit to the cost of the recovery service with about a 90% success rate so
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that's maybe something to consider I had no idea that was there until I was
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researching this build now for the rest
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of the hardware I had originally intended to install the 83 and 1/2 in
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drives for mass storage with four ssds for operating Sy system and a large SSD
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cache but further investigation revealed
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that unless your frez is going to be used for a database workload or like a
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mail server you may not benefit from an L2 Arc or SSD cache at all and even if
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you would benefit you want to keep the size relatively small like 128 gigs or
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256 gigs in most cases so I decided to
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change gears and use my 1 TB ssds for
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dedicated shares that can be assigned to individual video editors to use as
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high-speed storage for Scratch discs This Server will have up to a 20 gbit
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per second link to the rest of the network so it should be enough to keep
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everyone's storage Snappy even if they're accessing SSD storage over their
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own 10 gbit links then for power I've
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gone with a Silverstone sfx 450 W modular 80 plus gold power supply so
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this is actually the first time I've ever been thankful that a power supply has a removable 8 Pin CPU connector
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since this board doesn't require one and there's not a lot of space for cable
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management in this case so the setup
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process for FAS once you read the highly recommended by the way 60 plus page PDF
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written by cyber jock from the FAS forums is actually surprisingly
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straightforward burn a disc and put it in the system with only the drive that
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you want to use for your OS installed in my case an old 80 gig Intel x25 M gen 1
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and the whole thing pretty much does itself once you boot it up shutter down
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to install all your drives or don't the ASRock board has full support for hot
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Swap and then you pretty much boot up and you're dumped at a command prompt
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where actually things were surprisingly straightforward it might look a little
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bit intimidating if you've never really dealt with that kind of thing before but
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it's it's really not you're just going to select which Ethernet interface
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you're going to check the IP address that was assigned to the system via DHCP
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from your router and then you're going to go to some other computer on the
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network enter that IP create a password
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and that's pretty much it you can do the rest of it if you're not getting into
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the more advanced features of freas through the web interface so then lonus
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why Fraz with a ZFS file system for this build great question um initially I just
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kind of wanted to try it since I've never played around with it before and I
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heard it was great and I thought I might be able to save some money since the
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three miixed controller setup on this ASRock board will not support a large
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raid array across all the controllers and I'd need an addin Hardware raid card
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which would add expense and limit me to the onboard gigabit networking ports in
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teaming mode well after doing the necessary research I discovered that due
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to the ludicrous RAM requirements both in terms of the amount you have to buy
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and the necessity of ECC support you won't really be saving any money if you
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want a really high capacity server like ours anyway and I discovered that freas
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is surprisingly Limited in terms of how you can expand your arrays and whatnot
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but I decided to go ahead with it anyway just so that I could try it and so that
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I could Salvage my Lightning Fast networking something that will be
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important if we have multiple editors working with 4K prores footage off the
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same array at the same time where lots
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of sequential performance is going to be key so at the end of all that how did it
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perform then well here you go these numbers are for a 10 GB SSD based
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workstation to our server so while it wasn't cheap there's no doubt that when
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it comes to what we were after which was sequential performance for multiple
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users we ended up with a pretty rocking
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and compact little storage box here
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speaking of multiple users ting.com
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mobile that makes sense that's their tagline and unlike most smaller carriers
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because you might be sitting there going well I've never heard of Ting before they probably have like a like cell
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towers made of like you know pretzels and paper clips and like Co clothes
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hangers now no it's not like that they're actually running on the Sprint network but the key difference so as
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long as you have good Sprint service in your area then you'll get good Tank
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Service the key difference is that they're buying wholesale from Sprint and
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then they give you guys a very very different sort of deal so you're not
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locked into any sort of a contract you pay only for what you use their average
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monthly bill per device is only $21 and what's cool about it is you can
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kind of go oh well yeah but the way that I use my phone you know my locked in
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plan where I get a thousand text messages in this many minutes and this
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many megabytes of data it works perfectly for me every month I use
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exactly that amount well go ahead and test it because they have a savings
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calculator that lets you plug in all the numbers from your last three bills so
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how much you paid how much air time you used and all that stuff and then it just
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runs a little calculation goes Bing you would have saved this much on Ting or
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hey maybe you wouldn't have it just runs the calculation for you so they figure
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98% of Americans would save so it's probably worth it to check it out and if
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you do use our link Linus doing.com to
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get $25 off a new device or $25 in
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service credit pretty cool stuff so
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thank you for watching this video you guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a
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comment letting me know what you would have changed about the insane compact
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Nas here I'm actually genuinely very curious um you know what you guys would
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do for a NZ cuz you know there's a lot of variation and as always check the
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link in the video description you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one you can give us a monthly contribution or you
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can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so whenever you buy hard drives we get a small Kickback
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all that stuff helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't
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forget to subscribe
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