Recently in DIY: NAS Category

About a year ago, I published a series of blogs about building a DIY NAS (Network Attached Storage) which has been a pretty popular series of articles judging by the traffic it sees. Looking at my Google Analytics many of the search queries that drive traffic to my blogs seem to be from people who want to do something similar. Since my original articles are over a year old, I thought it would be a good subject for an additional article to write about building a NAS at the beginning of 2013.

So far, I couldn't be happier with my NAS. I use it primarily for the backups of all of our PCs. Additionally, I upgraded my computer at the end of 2012 and the NAS came in pretty handy there in holding backups and offloading nearly 2 terabytes worth media storage onto the NAS.

If a friend were building a NAS today, I would suggest very much that he go the same route that I went; to start with FreeNAS and then to either use spare PC parts lying around the house or to build a new PC using inexpensive, low-power parts and as many hard drives as he could afford. Assuming my friend didn't have a cache of spare PC parts like I seem to perpetually have, here's a summary of new parts that I'd suggest:

Motherboard & CPU

Motherboard wound up being the most difficult decision that I made last time, and this time was no different. The ideal motherboard is a unique creature something inexpensive, low-power, with gigabit Ethernet and as many SATA ports as possible. In my research, I found the ASUS C60M1-I AMD Fusion APU C-60 which features: a mini-ITX form factor, an integrated AMD dual core 1.0GHz processor, on board gigabit Ethernet and a whopping 6 SATA ports for a really reasonable price of $79.99.

Even if you have a ton of spare PC parts lying around, this may wind up being a better deal in the long run. The power-sipping features of the mini-ITX form factor mean your daily operational costs for running the NAS are going to be cheaper. In my original research, I determined that the amount of power the mini-ITX motherboard would save me over a traditional motherboard amounted to about $75.00 a year, which means combined the motherboard & CPU would nearly pay for itself in the first 12 months.

Running Total: $79.99

RAM

The hardware recommendations page for FreeNAS says that the best way to get the most out of your FreeNAS box is to give it as much RAM as you can. The motherboard I picked can support up to 8GB of RAM, so I went ahead and priced out the maximum amount of memory that the motherboard would support. A two piece set of the G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB DDR3 1066 F3-8500CL7D-8GBRL would wind up costing $51.95.

Update: It was pointed out to me in a Tweet that this motherboard will actually support up to 16 GB of RAM. For an additional $70 you can bring the system RAM up to 16GB. Seems like a very worthy upgrade to me. Thanks, @plgelinas!

Running Total: $131.94

Case

In my original build, the case is something I splurged on buying, a nice Lian-Li micro-ATX case. The case looks great in my office and I'm pretty happy with it. But this time around, I wanted to try and build an inexpensive NAS to show how much prices have fallen in the past year. Since I only bought four drives last year, I reduced the number of bays in my search criteria. The COOLER MASTER Elite 120 matches the criteria (mini-ITX, at least 4 drive bays, inexpensive) very well at $49.99. This case doesn't come with a power supply, so I tacked on an additional $33.86 for a 250W mini-ITX power supply.

Running Total: $215.79

Storage

FreeNAS Drive

In a typical FreeNAS installation, the OS & FreeNAS is installed and configured on a separate drive than the actual storage drives for the NAS. The suggested drive for attaching FreeNAS is actually a USB drive. In my build, I wound up buying a USB header that I plugged right into the motherboard and then zip tied the thumb drive inside the case somewhere inconspicuous. I recently bought another USB storage device for holding my music library in the car and at it's size it's entirely unnecessary to install this in the case. It can plug right into one of the USB ports on the back of the computer without getting in the way. The SanDisk Cruzer Fit - 8GB is more than adequately sized to hold what's needed for FreeNAS and it only costs $7.99.

Running Total: $223.78

NAS Drives

Here's the meat and potatoes of any NAS build. If I recall correctly, my drives accounted for around 66% of the cost of my entire build last time around. This time, that percentage went up, because I didn't splurge in some of the areas I splurged in for the last build. To reduce the impact of bad drives in particular batches, I wound up picking two of two different 3TB model drives:

Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001	Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB WD30EZRX
$129.99	$139.99

Update: robvdl brings up a good point about the Western Digital drives in his comment below. I was previously unaware and researched a bit and have discovered this is an issue with WD Green and WD Black drives. However, I've been using two WD Green 2.0 TB drives in my FreeNAS box and haven't had any issues so far in the year that I've been using it. The Western Digital Red 3.0 TB - WD30EFRX carries a heftier price tag of $156.86 (an additional $26.87 per drive). Based off of my research, I would recommend finding a different drive than the WD Green or WD Black drives despite the fact I've been using them now for over a year without any issues.

Altogether, these four drives account for an additional $539.96. Each drive is in the ballpark of the prices that I spent last year, but comes with the added 1TB of additional space on each drive, for a total of 4 additional TBs. That's a pretty significant boost in storage compared to the NAS I built at the beginning of 2012.

Final Price: $763.74

Conclusion

In 2012, I paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $850-$900 for my FreeNAS machine. It wound up containing a total of 8TB of storage space. By juggling around the prices a little bit this year I was able to price out a fairly equivalent machine with an additional 50% of usable storage space for the NAS. Dropping this machine down to an 8TB FreeNAS would've brought the price down between $20-$30 per drive down to a very reasonable price range of $650 to $685. Because of FreeNAS and falling hardware prices, it's getting quite affordable to build a very functional NAS for your home storage needs.

Catchup

About a year ago, I started wishing that I had some sort of reliable and redundant backup for the computers in the house. So much so, that I spent almost all of my 2012 computer budget on completing the project. Instead of replacing one of our aging computers, I went ahead and built a NAS. I wrote a series of articles documenting much of my process. Because the amount of time this project has been in flight a summary was in order. For those of you interested in the nitty-gritty details here's a detailing of each of the articles in this series:

• Building a NAS: Choosing Hardware
• Building a NAS: Assembly & Configuration
• Backing up Windows Machines to FreeNAS: Part One
• Backing up Windows Machines to FreeNAS: Part Two
• Backing up Windows Machines to FreeNAS: Part Three

Hardware

Originally, I had started out by being very interested in the fantastic products that Drobo has been selling. Over the years I have been following what they have brought to market and have always had an eye on their products. Unfortunately for me, I felt that they were a little on the expensive side and outside of what I could justify spending.

Fortunately for me, open source alternatives exist. A friend of mine wound up introducing me to FreeNAS, which offered me many of the features that Drobo offered and a number more. I wound up building a machine using a dual core 1.66GHz mini-ITX motherboard, 8 gigabytes of RAM, four different 2.0 TB drives for storage, a flash drive to house FreeNAS and tucked all of that into a nice little case from Lian-Li .

The Great Hard Drive Shortage of 2011

One of the things that really set me back in this build was that I wound up paying a premium for the hard drives. This is due to the hard drive shortage of 2011. I had bought a 2 TB drive almost a year prior for cheaper than I wound up getting any of the drives for my FreeNAS box. In total, hard drives wound up accounting for 61% of the total hardware cost.

Power Consumption

Typically, I would expect most FreeNAS users to be building their NAS boxes out of recycled hardware and spare parts. Because I've been on a laptop-buying spree the past few years, I did not have the cache of spare parts I would have needed to build the NAS. Because I had to buy new parts, I tried to pick a low-power motherboard and power supply. I did this primarily for one reason: to save electricity. Ideally, the power I save would eventually pay for my hardware. A friend of mine owns a Kill-a-Watt and he recently built a fascinating arcade cabinet out of recycled computer parts which he also uses as a NAS.

We hooked both his NAS and my FreeNAS machine up to the Kill-A-Watt ran some file read/write operations to each NAS and tried to make sure that all four drives were active. Over a two or three hour time span, my friend's NAS was using around 99.2 watts and my FreeNAS was using around 41.2 watts. Based on my latest electrical bill that works out to a savings of nearly $75.00 a year by going with the low power motherboard. In comparison with the Drobo S the FreeNAS box uses 27% less power (41.2 watts vs 56 watts) with all four drives in action.

Software

Ultimately, I wound up obtaining two different types of software for this project. Firstly, the software which managed the NAS, FreeNAS and secondly Genie Timeline Pro for backing up the machines in my house. Of the two, Genie Timeline Pro was the easiest to set up and use, but I would hope and expect that to be the case. FreeNAS was more difficult to configure and get set up, but none of the difficulties I had were related to the product itself; my obstacles were a result of my general unfamiliarity with the Linux universe. I have not had to touch the FreeNAS configuration since I finished it back in the spring.

I have been running Genie Timeline Professional on my primary desktop since the beginning of March and this weekend,I went through and installed the software on my laptop and on my wife's desktop. In addition to that, I created a "home" folder on the FreeNAS box for each user to store files on. Right now, there's a little over three terabytes of free space still available. I have been both lucky and smart and have not had to recover anything from my backup. But now that I have made that claim I am pretty certain that a data disaster is in my immediate future.

Total Cost

I wound up splurging on an expensive case, and the shortage caused my four hard drives' price to be inflated. In the end, I wound up spending just under $1000 total. This includes all of the hardware, which included nearly five hundred dollars worth of hard drives, three licenses of Genie Timeline Pro, and then three upgrade licenses to Genie Timeline Pro 2012 which came out recently.

In comparison, the comparable Drobo devices range between $400 and $850 dollars, which is between $100 and $550 dollars more than I spent on the hardware that is running my NAS. On top of that, my machine has gigabit Ethernet and room for at least two more hard drives, you have to move all the way up into Drobo's enterprise product offerings to find one with a gigabit option with as many drives. If you bought the least expensive Drobo device available, spent the same amount on hard drives and the Genie Timeline Pro licenses you would wind up with a fancy 4 drive redundant mass storage USB device that would have cost around $100 more than I wound up spending and that device would not have any room for additional drives down the road. Plus that Drobo device would wind up costing around 35% more in electricity costs.

Conclusion

Because of FreeNAS being Open Source I was able to save a ton of money in this build. This savings enabled me to build a storage device that beats the pants off the devices I compared it to. If you are interested in building a device out of spare parts, I suggest strongly that you take power consumption into consideration and try to include that into your pricing calculations. Now that an entire year has passed, hopefully low-power parts have decreased in price and incorporated additional capacity. I would encourage everyone to consider FreeNAS for their own attached storage needs.

Previously, I blogged about planning to build my own Network attached Storage (NAS) for the storage of critical backups and a place to house media. This week all of my three boxes came in from Newegg and by the end of the weekend, I had a functional NAS.

Assembly

It had been years since I had last built any kind of PC, so there was a very minor amount of rust to shake off. The assembly went particularly well. The extra money that I spent on the Lian Li PC-Q25B was well worth the investment, I was especially happy with the drive cage in the case. The case came with two 120mm fans which installed nicely on the two fan headers from the ASUS E35M1-I Fusion motherboard I selected.

Naturally, things never go quite as you planned. I had dangerously assumed that because the motherboard had 6 SATA ports that it would come with a dearth of SATA cables. Instead, it only came with two cables and because one end of the cables had a 90 degree bend, the bent end would either block one of the SATA ports on the motherboard or one of the power plugs on the drive cage's backplane. This was remedied pretty easily, but it required a trip to the local computer store the next day.

There was one issue with the front case fan. Something was scraping on the fan, causing it to make a pretty annoying rubbing noise on each turn of the fan. It was simple to pull the fan out and find the issue. There was a piece of screen in a plastic frame in front of the fan. That piece was a little bit deformed and pushing in on the hub of the fan and causing the noise. It was a simple task to remove that plastic piece and put the fan back in.

I had an additional issue with getting the motherboard to detect all four of the drives we put in. After a bit of swapping of cables we determined either that one of the cheap SATA cables we bought the previous day at the computer store was either defective or had not been firmly attached.

FreeNAS Configuration

Before I could button up the case, first we needed to install FreeNAS on the USB flash drive. Using a guide on the FreeNAS website and some 3rd party utilities, I had a bootable FreeNAS USB drive. Beginning the installation meant installing the USB drive inside the case and powering on the computer.

When booting up FreeNAS for the first time, there are a few configuration options that you need to make via the Console Menu like network and DNS settings. Once the network interface is configured, the web interface on the FreeNAS machine is functioning and the remainder of the configuration can be done from a browser on the local network.

Firstly, we created a Volume, added all four disks to it and picked ZFS as the file system. Moving along, we selected the RAID option. Because we had selected ZFS and because I began the array with four drives, I decided to select RAID Z2 (roughly equivalent of RAID 6). Picking this option made the array fault tolerant enough to survive losing two drives at any one point. On the volume, we wound up creating two ZFS datasets; "Homes" and "Backups." The Homes dataset would be used to house a folder for each of the individual users; the Backups dataset would be used for the backups of our PCs. For these items, we chose ZFS datasets because of the snapshot features available. After that, we created some users and home directories for the users. Because of the ever-nifty Samba server, those home drives were available from our Windows machines as well as the Backup share we created previously.

Hopefully, as time progresses I will be getting my teeth into FreeNAS doing some blog-worthy and possibly even noteworthy things with the NAS.

Wrap Up

All in all, the assembly and configuration of the FreeNAS server was exceptionally uncomplicated. The available FreeNAS documentation walked me through anything that I had questions on or that were not clear from the interface. I have a feeling that we only started to scratch the surface of what FreeNAS is capable of. Hopefully,the flooded hard drive factories are not damaged too badly and they can start pumping out some very inexpensive 2 terabyte hard drives. When that happens, I'll be adding two more drives to the NAS.

The alternative NAS-in-a-box products are all very tempting choices and I would expect that more options will hit the market over the next couple years. Because of the availability of great (and free) software like FreeNAS building a PC today is clearly the best option. Had I been more motivated by cost, it would have been incredibly easy to build the same box using a cheap PC. Overall, I am very pleased and would recommend this to anyone thinking about adding some network attached storage to their home network.

Introduction

Since starting the project up to wire my house with Ethernet, I have been thinking of interesting ways to put my network to use. For awhile now, we have been using a Western Digital Media player and an external USB hard drive to watch video content on the television. With products like Google TV I have been thinking there would be a value to having attached network storage. My hope is that sometime in 2012, I will have a device plugged into my TV that can stream video over my network both locally and from the Internet.

Most of my thinking was spurred on by a recent sale that Drobo had on one of their low-end models. I have been an admirer of the Drobo hardware for quite some time, but I have always found it to be cost-prohibitive; I had never thought I'd get the use to justify the price. In doing some research of the products out there, I felt I had about two choices: to either build a computer or to buy an enclosure with the functionality I need built into it.

The features that I was after were for the device to be network capable supporting Gigabit, to support at least 4 or more hard drives, to support redundancy via RAID, to have a smallish footprint and to be simple enough that I can manage it without having to hire an IT consulting firm.

Because of my requirements,I started off by researching quite a few enclosures, both USB and NAS-type devices. What I found, was that with the enclosures that had the features I was looking for you wound up paying a premium both for the smaller form factor and for the ease of use. Ultimately, a combination of this cost premium and my discovery of FreeNAS convinced me to go the do-it-yourself route.

Hardware

Because I decided to build the NAS from the ground up, I had the luxury to pick the parts I wanted and that suited my needs nearly perfectly. After researching hard drive prices (over half of the cost) I budgeted around $750-$800 in total and visited the website of my favorite vendor, Newegg. I probably could have saved a few dollars going with different vendors for different components, but I value getting all my parts from a company that I have enjoyed working with over the years.

Case

One of the most important requirements was to consolidate all of this equipment down into the smallest reasonable footprint possible. This caused me to invest a little bit of effort and value into the case. I spent more time shopping for the case than I did for any other component. I needed a case that would hold at least 6 different drives and a Mini-ITX motherboard. I wound up choosing the Lian Li PC-Q25B. The case has room for 7 different drives internally and features a hot swap-able drive cage all in small-ish footprint of 14.41" x 7.83" x 11.02".

Motherboard, CPU and RAM

For the motherboard I wanted something low power with an integrated CPU, Gigabit Ethernet and support for numerous (six or more) SATA drives. I wound up picking the ASUS E35M1-I Fusion, a mini-ITX board with an air cooled dual core 1.66GHz AMD CPU built on the board. The motherboard supports up to 8GB of RAM, so I chose two sticks of Crucial 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800).

Storage

The most important and most expensive part of the build is the hard drives. To start off, I decided that I would begin with four drives and then add two more down the road in the future. Because of hard drives' declining reliability, I wound up buying drives from two different manufacturer; the Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARX and the HITACHI Deskstar 5K3000. Because hard drives often share problems across an entire batch there is a good chance that when buying two identical drives from the same vendor that both drives came from the same batch. By buying from two different manufacturers I help reduce the fact that half of the drives may in a short time span.

In addition to the disk drives, I purchased a small 8GB USB Flash Drive and a USB cable that plugs directly to the motherboard's USB header to mount inside the case. The purpose of the flash drive is to host the OS and the software to manage the NAS.

Software

The software to power the NAS was my biggest area of concern. I've tinkered with hardware RAID in the past using a 3Ware controller card. Once upon a time in a gaming rig, I had created a RAID 0 array across two disks for the fastest performance. My needs now are a little bit different I need something cheaper and that is not hardware-specific, so there are fewer points of hardware failure. Researching how to configure and support the RAID software choices made me lean towards buying one of the all-in-one enclosures. However the discovery of FreeNAS enabled me to go the PC route instead.

Directly from FreeNAS' webpage:

FreeNAS™ is an Open Source Storage Platform based on FreeBSD and supports sharing across; Windows, Apple, and UNIX-like systems. FreeNAS™ 8 includes ZFS, which supports high storage capacities and integrates file systems and volume management into a single piece of software.

From what I have been able to research so far, I am going to be able to place FreeNAS directly on a bootable USB device, and be able to configure/use it remotely via a web-interface running on NAS itself. I have read over their user documentation and I think that FreeNAS is something that a novice like myself can tackle.

Next Steps

Right now, my parts are coming in three different packages making the trek from Memphis, TN to my house. I have been eagerly tracking the packages throughout the beginning of the week. Hopefully over the next week or so I will have time to wrap up my other ongoing projects and begin to tackle this new project.