I decided to just buy an off the shelf NAS (ASUSTOR AS5110T) for unRAID. The reasons for this were simple:

1) 10 internal bays

2) low power draw

3) 2 e-sata ports

4) USB 3.0

5) Compact dimensions

6) low fan noise

I know it's more expensive than building one yourself, but you can just call me lazy! But not lazy enough to put up with the conventional RAID approach by the ASUSTOR software. In case of multiple drive failure i still wanted to be able to remove individual disks and access their data. Even more important was that only one drive is spinning up during read instead of the complete array.

 

Before embarking on this adventure I contacted ASUS to enquire if it is possible to install a different os on their NAS and got this encouraging reply:

 

"Thanks for your interesting inquiry!!!

Yes it is possible to boot up from an USB Drive or stick.

You can connect a HDMI monitor and change the booting device to USB Drive or stick, then the system will boot up from your booting devices.

And in the future if you want to change back and use our ADM software, then you can change back to boot up from the internal USB DOM.

Regards,

Shawn Shu"

 

With this out of the way I ordered the thing and low and behold - unRAID  works perfectly with only one cosmetic caveat: I still have to figure out how to control the dot-matrix front panel and leds. Parity sync speed starts out at 200mb/s (3 8tb Seagate SMR drives  and 1 8tb Seagate SMR parity) and at the 50% mark is about 150mb/s. Read access over SMB is at 110mb/s (single gigabit lan - have yet to try link aggregation). I attached some pics to illustrate sync-speed. The e-sata quattro bay docking station works great (which implies that the e-sata ports of the asustor are port multiplier capable) and I love the plug-in "unassigned devices" to access some old ntfs-drives. So far everything is fine.... i will keep you posted....

Super interesting idea!

 

Do you know if the CPU is user replaceable? My understanding is that it's a celeron, would be cool to update this to an i7, run some VM's and Plex.

I have no performance problems with the J1900 coming with the 5110T (par2 repairs etc.). It is a 4 core 2.4Ghz cpu: http://ark.intel.com/products/78867/Intel-Celeron-Processor-J1900-2M-Cache-up-to-2_42-GHz.  I do not think the processor is user replaceable, but there are other models which have the same chassis but feature a core i3 or i5... but i found the 5110T to be my price performance sweetspot (it was the cheapest 10bay nas with more than adequate processor power for my needs)....

That’s a very cool unraid server!

 

I believe the CPU is soldered on the board, so not user replaceable.

 

Be interested to know how the parity check speeds holds up as you add more disks, I believe that those CPUs have a single gen 2 PCIe 4x interface, although even if used by the 10 drives should provide ~160MB/s for each, which is not bad.

 

Very interesting, so I assume you have the drives setup in JBOD and not any hardware RAID? I wonder if all Asustor NAS's can support UnRaid?

unRAID controls all disks. In BIOS they are set to AHCI mode. I believe that all new Asustor NAS can boot unRAID, but as I only tried the 5110 I can only be certain about that particular model.

This is a very interesting approach and I would think of great interest to quite a few people. I'm in Singapore, and unfortunately we can't get lots of the hardware mentioned in the forums, at least not at a comparable price and without substantial shipping costs. However, NAS's like the Asustor are available, so this is a viable option.

 

I'm trying to rebuild my unRAID server, but while it's been fun at times, it's also been enormously frustrating (now my Supermicro C2-SEE refuses to POST...) so I'm trying to find a pre-built solution. Unfortunately it seems the AVS-10/4 is rarely available (and no response to email enquiries) so the Asustor looks like a practical alternative. I realise the Asustor is not in the same league, but the pre-built angle is enormously attractive. I was mainly interested in the AVS-10/4 because there didn't appear to be any alternative, so the fact that the Asustor CPU is much less powerful is not such a big issue.

 

 

I was mainly interested in the AVS-10/4 because there didn't appear to be any alternative, so the fact that the Asustor CPU is much less powerful is not such a big issue.

 

It always depends what you want to run on the unraid server. For my needs (Fileserver, Sabnzbd - including par2 repairs, Sonarr and Plex) the cpu of the asustor is more than powerful enough. As you can see from the screenshots in the first post, parity sync is working at very high speeds (at low cpu utilization), also par2 repair speeds (multicore version) are very fast. I upgraded the memory of the unit to 8gb (cost me $40), which is also sufficient for my needs. Another plus is the compact dimensions of the unit and the low fan noise. Things might look different if you want to install Win10 in a VM and do high-end gaming.....

It always depends what you want to run on the unraid server. For my needs (Fileserver, Sabnzbd - including par2 repairs, Sonarr and Plex) the cpu of the asustor is more than powerful enough. As you can see from the screenshots in the first post, parity sync is working at very high speeds (at low cpu utilization), also par2 repair speeds (multicore version) are very fast. I upgraded the memory of the unit to 8gb (cost me $40), which is also sufficient for my needs. Another plus is the compact dimensions of the unit and the low fan noise. Things might look different if you want to install Win10 in a VM and do high-end gaming.....

 

Taking a look at the CPU, it seems that it's possible at least to run a VM, although without hardware passthrough? (Has VT-x, though not VT-d.)

I wonder could this be done with the faster QNAP machines, like the TVS-663?  They have a quad-core AMD chip in them which is quite quick.  Considering you can run Debian on those, I suppose UnRAID would work OK too.

Cool! I did the same with an old Qnap 5 Bay that got broken. Recovered the data from it and built & moved everything to an unraid server. After Qnap got fixed, I use it as an unraid backup.

On the internal USB I installed pfsense just to play with

I wonder could this be done with the faster QNAP machines, like the TVS-663?  They have a quad-core AMD chip in them which is quite quick.  Considering you can run Debian on those, I suppose UnRAID would work OK too.

 

It seems that the TVS-663 allows booting from USB for firmware recovery and it has video output, so it looks promising.

 

Cool! I did the same with an old Qnap 5 Bay that got broken. Recovered the data from it and built & moved everything to an unraid server. After Qnap got fixed, I use it as an unraid backup.

On the internal USB I installed pfsense just to play with

 

But are you running unRAID on the fixed Qnap? Videodr0me is running unRAID on his/her Asustor.

Yes I do that. Plug the licenced  USB into it, select it from BIOS and you are good to go.

Yes I do that. Plug the licenced  USB into it, select it from BIOS and you are good to go.

 

That's great! What's the Qnap model number?

My model is TS-558. Intel Atom and 1G RAM

 

Is there anyway to make it boot from usb by default ? 

I don't get any HDMI output at booting and cannot enter the boot menu to select the  boot device..