Low Budget Nas under ~550 CAD Drive-less (Rough idea/looking for suggestions)

[NasOnABudget]

Currently, I have a ~15tb JBOD array of unbacked up data with no redundancy. Id like to change that.

 

What I am thinking, is Il use 4 of the old drives combined with 2 shucked My Book 8tb drives (ive just now ordered) to both increase my storage,  and add some redundancy with at least one drive of parity data, using the remaining hard drive to backup essential data (full system images).

 

To that end, while I'm also looking at other options, I thought it best to also price out an unraid option as my budget isn't very stretchy. (Another close option was just getting more drives in what would still be a jbod arrangement allowing me to get 1 full data backup (though it would be local and cumbersome)

 

Here is what I am thinking currently, for a nice cheap, yet small and reasonable nas

 

Secondary hypothetical 

Third

This nas wouldn't really have expandability (and for now I plan to pair it with a basic key), but it would be more of a stop gap until I could get a system with at least one real full backup.

 

It's not based off of recommendations from the resources here, but as many of them seemed to be rather old, I figured a lot of that information was no longer relevant.

 

Would love thoughts/recommendations and even anecdotes.

 

Edited April 15, 2018 by NasOnABudget
small fix/addition

[Squid]

Assuming that the secondary choice has enough sata ports, I'd go with that as the first includes a Marvel controller which is a crap shoot as to if it'll work consistently or not.

[NasOnABudget]

On 2018-04-11 at 1:39 PM, Squid said:

Assuming that the secondary choice has enough sata ports, I'd go with that as the first includes a Marvel controller which is a crap shoot as to if it'll work consistently or not.

Ive now added a third option for better drive support as Ive read the Node 804 has drive screw hole placement that doesnt work with the placement on newer large drives.

 

I have to admit Im a bit disappointed with the lack of comments or suggestions. I have no idea whether this is reasonable,  good, or has glaring incompatibility issues. Its giving me a bit of analysis paralysis. Is this good? Will this work without a fuss? I kinda wish there was maybe a discord or chat where you could just ask all the small questions that might not warrant their own thread or even an updated FAQ. Every turn there are questions I cant find definitive answers to and I havent yet found a section for complete beginners on the forum if there is one.

Edited April 15, 2018 by NasOnABudget

[Squid]

8 hours ago, NasOnABudget said:

Every turn there are questions I cant find definitive answers to and I havent yet found a section for complete beginners on the forum if there is one.

Because there are a million different motherboards.  Generally, (especially for pure NAS duties), you will run into zero problems with any given cpu / motherboard combo.

[NasOnABudget]

29 minutes ago, Squid said:

Because there are a million different motherboards.  Generally, (especially for pure NAS duties), you will run into zero problems with any given cpu / motherboard combo.

Not necessarily motherboard specific. For that Ive just tried to search for users who use similar or the same motherboards as Im looking at (lan adapter/cpu etc). I actually found confirmation that a board I was looking at worked fine for unraid in the form of an amazon review.

 

Things that are quite hard to be sure on for me: How does unraid dual parity work? Ive seen a post saying its P + Q but im honestly not sure what it means here. Basically I just want a confirmation that any 2 drives could fail in that event but either Im confused, the wikipedia is inaccurate or its more like you only get dual redundancy for parity drives.

 

Then there's usb keys. Ive looked on the list of approved drives and card readers and Ive yet to find one thats not eol. That was sort of solved by looking up more modern builds and just picking one someone else has used though so I suppose its not a problem, but I must say the card reader option did look appealing.

 

More related to hardware though, I dont really have an idea of how much power/ram etc is needed. Is the 4gb I have picked out there enough to mess around with? I see some users with a whole lot, and some with less than that. I guess actually in hindsight I could have really put that in the post, along with more specifically what I plan to do with it, but Im not even 100% sure about that ha.

 

 

Essentially, if my current listed out build can max out gigabit/have no lag and maybe even run a *docker* itll be fine.

 

I guess its possible with even more research trying to piece it together by finding a relevant post here and there Il find more information. I just was hoping itd be more plainly laid out/unified/centralized/official/quick.

Edited April 15, 2018 by NasOnABudget

[Squid]

9 minutes ago, NasOnABudget said:

confirmation that any 2 drives could fail in that event

confirmed.  But, your chosen CPU (G4560) more than likely doesn't have the balls to do the required calculations without bottlenecking the system

 

14 minutes ago, NasOnABudget said:

Then there's usb keys

.  I wouldn't do dual parity on less than an i5 

 

Memory guidelines

 

NAS Only duties: 4GB

NAS + Docker Apps: 8GB

VMs: 16GB+

14 minutes ago, NasOnABudget said:

Then there's usb keys

Perfect case in point.  How are you ever supposed to keep up with the literally billions of different sticks out there.  They're so cheap anyways that if it doesn't have a unique GUID (never actually seen one that doesn't) then its not a big deal.

 

My opinion on sticks is to buy a decent 16/32Gig stick (but you're only ever going to use max 2Gig on it) from a decent manufacturer who's name you can pronounce (Kingston anyone) that is USB2, not USB3.  Speed is completely irrelevant on the stick, so stick with the most tried and true sticks which means USB2

[JorgeB]

1 hour ago, Squid said:

confirmed.  But, your chosen CPU (G4560) more than likely doesn't have the balls to do the required calculations without bottlenecking the system

Parity2 does require a better CPU, but a G4560 is more than enough, any Sandy bridge dual core or newer works for medium size arrays, for very larger arrays with 24 or more disks a better CPU would be recommended like the G4560, nothing above that is required even for a 30 disk array, a 30 SSD array would be another matter.

[pwm]

7 hours ago, NasOnABudget said:

Basically I just want a confirmation that any 2 drives could fail

 

Yes, any two drives in the array - data or parity - may fail and you can recover.

 

If a third drive fails then it suddenly starts to matter - with a classical RAID you would then lose all data because it stripes the data over all drives. With unRAID, you will only lose the data on the broken data disks. So if one parity and two data disks fails, then you lose the content of two data disks. If two parity and one data disk fails, it's one data disk's worth of data you will lose.

 

The important thing here is that the parity operates at the block level - so it helps to recover from physically failing disks. It can't replace backup - an accidentally overwritten file or accidentally formatted disk can't be recovered from parity.

 

7 hours ago, NasOnABudget said:

Is the 4gb I have picked out there enough to mess around with?

 

It's enough for a NAS. It's only if you want to run additional applications on the machine that you would need more RAM. But if you want to make it into a high-end multimedia server, then it wouldn't be enough to add more RAM - you would have to throw in a bigger processor etc. So in the end, you must decide if you will be fine with building a NAS, or if you want to add more bells and whistles to the system at a later time.

[NasOnABudget]

2 hours ago, pwm said:

The important thing here is that the parity operates at the block level - so it helps to recover from physically failing disks.

 

So then I take it the wiki doesnt match the current version?

Quote

It can't replace backup - an accidentally overwritten file or accidentally formatted disk can't be recovered from parity.

 

Oh I know, but backup is expensive. I plan to, but itll have to be later. For now Il have to settle with a recycle bin and a backup of only more important stuff 

Quote

It's enough for a NAS. It's only if you want to run additional applications on the machine that you would need more RAM. But if you want to make it into a high-end multimedia server, then it wouldn't be enough to add more RAM - you would have to throw in a bigger processor etc. So in the end, you must decide if you will be fine with building a NAS, or if you want to add more bells and whistles to the system at a later time.

Is this enough to just play with other apps (testing things out) or should I just start with 8 off the bat then. I dont think il end up using it as anything else, but plans change.

 

* I mean really 4gb more is just 30 bucks more so 

Edited April 15, 2018 by NasOnABudget

[JonathanM]

3 hours ago, NasOnABudget said:

6 hours ago, pwm said:

The important thing here is that the parity operates at the block level - so it helps to recover from physically failing disks.

 

So then I take it the wiki doesnt match the current version?

Can you expand on what you mean by that? Unraid parity has always operated the same way, the independent 2nd parity disk with a different formula has been added fairly recently, but the principle is the same as the first disk. Parity disks have no file system, and no coherent data on their own.

[NasOnABudget]

2 hours ago, jonathanm said:

Can you expand on what you mean by that? Unraid parity has always operated the same way, the independent 2nd parity disk with a different formula has been added fairly recently, but the principle is the same as the first disk. Parity disks have no file system, and no coherent data on their own.

I get that. The difference Im talking about is  with the wiki is where it seems to saying that the parity data on 1 disk is practically the same use wise as the parity data of the other one which means well basically here the answer for the third picture according to the wiki would be that the data is lost from what Im getting, but that isnt the case now

 

 

[pwm]

26 minutes ago, NasOnABudget said:

I get that. The difference Im talking about is  with the wiki is where it seems to saying that the parity data on 1 disk is practically the same use wise as the parity data of the other one which means well basically here the answer for the third picture according to the wiki would be that the data is lost from what Im getting, but that isnt the case now

 

 

The part that is wrong with the Wiki is the claim that unRAID only supports a single parity drive - it now supports two. But look at the bold text in my quote, and you can see that the Wiki is very clear on the protection you get from dual-parity:

 

Quote

unRAID does not have dual parity at present, but ‘P + Q redundancy’ is part of the future roadmap.(Dead Link)

In a P + Q redundancy system (as in a RAID-6 system), there would be two redundancy disks: ‘P’, which is the ordinary XOR parity, and ‘Q’, which is a Reed-Solomon code. This would allow unRAID to recover from any 2 disk errors, with minimal impact on performance.

 

Edit: You really don't need to understand the actual math involved in additional parity drives. You need to read quite a bit of math to understand how Reed-Solomon works. It's enough to know that there are two different formulas for computing the information for the two parity drives - a little bit simplified you could see it as if one parity drive has a vertical checksum while the other drive has a horizontal checksum to make the two checksums independent of each other.

Edited April 16, 2018 by pwm