Hi all,
I'm planning a new NAS and am leaning heavily towards unRAID due primarily to its easy expandability, and (perhaps) lower hardware requirements when compared to the ZFS-based systems.
Aim 1. low cost and low volume. After that: Eventually I want >12 TB of double parity storage, primarily for movies and photos. I want it to saturate a 1 Gb/s link particularly when scrolling through photos in lightroom etc. All of my clients have small PCIe storage on board, mostly Apple laptops, so they need to store their big data on the NAS. I currently use a Mac Mini with a 1.25 TB Fusion Drive that I have outgrown and it reads at about 75 MB/s. I would like faster than that for the next machine. I'm not too fussed about VMs etc
Proposed build
CPU: Pentium J3710 - 4 Cores, 2 MB L2 etc
Mobo: Asrock J3710-ITX - 1 PCIe 2.0 x1, 1 Half-Size Mini-PCIe, 4 SATA3, 6 USB 3.0
Memory: 4GB DDR3 - 1600 Mhz
SATA Controller:
SATA-6Gbps-RAID-Controller-Card~PEXSAT34RH'>Startech 4? Port PCIe? SATA III ?Card
Cache: 2 x Kingston SSDNow UV400 128 GB in a software RAID 1
Parity Drives: 2 x Western Digital Red 4TB 3.5" 5400RPM
Storage Drive(s): 2 x Western Digital Red 4TB 3.5" 5400RPM. for 8 TB initially. N.B. My plan is to just add drives as I need more storage. I suppose with this build I can have up to six HDDs: 2 parity, 4 storage (16 TB), and the 2 cache drives.
Case: Fractal Design Node 304 Mini ITX Tower Case - 6 x 3.5" HDD bays, double sided tape for SSDs
PSU: Corsair 430W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply
Questions
1) Is double parity desirable for a system with only four storage drives? Will I be achieving anything other than adding complexity and (perhaps) increasing rebuild times? I mean redundancy is important too me, as other than building a second box I don't know how I'm going to backup 16 TB! That's a separate discussion however.
2) Is the Startech SATA controller suitable. I;ve been reading about flashing LSI cards to IT mode and that sounds far too complicated for what I'm trying to achieve? Does anybody know if the Startech card will play ncie with unRAID? I have read the manual and it doesn't mention either SMART or IT mode so I'm none the wiser...
3) Will I be able to saturate a 1 Gb/s network? What sort of speeds could I be expecting from server --> client?
4) Are 7200 rpm drives worth it on 1Gb/s network and with a SSD cache? If so I can save a lot of money with 5400 rpm drives? What about 7200 rpm drives for the parity drives? Any benefits to be had?
5) Is that CPU, ram and board ok? Quad core @ 2.6 GHz sounds like enough to me, same for 4 GB RAM. The CPU supports 2 x SATA 3, the board has a second controller for a further 2 x SATA 3 and the Star tech card supports a further 4 ports (and up to seven drives apparently )
Thanks heaps everyone
Oh, one more quick question, can the storage array use btrfs in unRAID? And are there any benefits to this other than it being "cool"
Cheers,
Tom
