Home NAS

I've officially exceeded 500 titles on my HTPC and recently had a scare in which one of the drives in the LVM array started exhibiting errors. I decided it was time to separate the disk from the front-end and put some redundancy in-place. I checked out some of the turn-key solutions like Synology and QNAP. It seemed steep to spend $650 for an enclosure with no drives so I set out to build my own.

The Hardware

The first thing I wanted to do was verify that my assumption of a price premium to turn-key solutions was correct. I hit newegg.com and put together a list of hardware based on some recommended FreeNAS builds:

Qty.	Image	Product Description	Unit Price	Savings	Total Price
1		CHENBRO SR30169T2-250 0.8mm SGCC, Hi-PS Pedestal Compact Server Chassis for SOHO & SMB Office Model #:SR30169T2-250 Item #:N82E16811123173 Return Policy:Standard Return Policy In Stock	$149.99	-$10.00 Instant	$139.99
1		ASUS P8H61-I R2.0 LGA 1155 Intel H61 HDMI USB 3.0 Mini ITX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS (I ended up with a different MOBO, read below) Model #:P8H61-I R2.0 Item #:N82E16813131878 Return Policy:Standard Return Policy In Stock	$85.99		$85.99
1		Intel Celeron G540 Sandy Bridge 2.5GHz LGA 1155 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics BX80623G540 Model #:BX80623G540 Item #:N82E16819116408 Return Policy:CPU Replacement Only Return Policy In Stock	$49.99		$49.99
1		Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Desktop Memory Model BLS2KIT4G3D1339DS1S00 Model #:BLS2KIT4G3D1339DS1S0 Item #:N82E16820148543 Return Policy:Memory Standard Return Policy In Stock	$59.99		$59.99
1		OCZ Nocti Series NOC-MSATA-30G mSATA 30GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) Model #:NOC-MSATA-30G Item #:N82E16820227746 Return Policy:Limited Replacement Only Return Policy Out Of Stock ETA: 10/14/2013 12:00:00 AM	$59.99	-$12.00 Instant	$47.99
Subtotal:					$383.95

Not too bad, the whole shebang for about $385 and I get an SSD for the OS. I realized at this point that I have a perfectly good Lian-li PC92 case in the basement with 4 external drive bays, and 7 internals. That sounded pretty good allowing me a grand total of 11 drives. Since I now had a larger case, I was able to use a larger motherboard with more SATA ports. The Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H fit the bill nicely. The other part I wanted purely for cosmetic value and simplicity of maintenance was a few drive docks. I decided on the IcyDock 3 in 2 which brings me up to 13 possible drive bays (the motherboard only supports 9 though). The Chenbro case included a power supply so I needed to spend $50 for a good power supply to reuse my case. This raised the price of the system to $427 but gave me the docks.

1 of: Corsair Builder Series CX 500 Watt ATX/EPS  80 PLUS (CX500) [Personal Computers] Condition: New Sold by: Amazon.com LLC $49.99

ICY DOCK MB153SP-B 3 in 2 SATA 6Gbps Hot-Swap HDD Backplane Module Cage Rack by Icy Dock $66.12 In Stock.Offered by JM PRIME 24 Used & New from $64.26

Once all of the part arrived, the assembly went well. Everything connected and fit like it should. I had to do some digging to find the right length and head-angle of sata cables to get everything in place. I lo-o-ove the look of the ICYDOCK and it made identifying drives far simpler. I brought over 4 drives from the HTPC including a WD 640GB, 2 Hitachi 2TB's that I stripped out of an external enclosure and a WD 1TB 2.5". I added 2 WD Red 3TB model WD30EFRX-68A for data and the 30GB SSD mSATA for the OS.

Software

This is where the real research comes in. There are a lot of different ways to do network attached storage. After a few nights of reading on my iPad, I shortlisted the following:

Option	Pro	Con
FreeNAS	ZFS is bullet proof Deduplication Snapshots	Overkill for media There will be no duplication since it's video. Drives must be planned and can be somewhat inflexible
UnRAID	Easy to add different size drives If one drive fails, the others are still accessible Great web interface	Closed source Slow development cycle Licensing cost (negligible amount)
Ubuntu + SnapRAID + mhddfs	Anything that Ubuntu can do, this solution can do (NFS, AFP, Samba, BitTorrent, bash scripts, etc) Easy to add different size drives If one drive fails, the others are still accessible	With flexibility comes complexity, makes it easier to do the wrong thing and lose my data

I was back on forth on this for a few weeks before I finally settled on the Ubuntu option. I installed Ubuntu 12.04LTS which was really fast on the SSD then added the SnapRAID and mhddfs package per these guides:

• Install SnapRAID - SnapRAID allows user-controlled parity snapshots to be created as long as there is 1 extra drive that is as large as the largest drive in the system. Make sure to follow the Scheduling SnapRAID section at the end, the script is fantastic.


• SnapRAID on Ubuntu 12.04


• mhddfs (unfortunately the original guide is no longer available) - This package allows dynamic assembly of multiple drives/mount points into a single "view". It automatically distributes data to each of the participating drives while leaving each of them in an independant state in-case of data loss.


• Using smartctl to get SMART status information on your hard drives - Want to get an email when your drive is going south? This is where to go.


• NFS on Ubuntu 12.04 - NFS 4 is a great protocol (Unless you're using the built-in Win7 client) and is my go-to for sharing data on my network

The system works wonderfully. I was able to easily move the drives out of my existing HTPC and recreate the SnapRAID environment without having to copy any data into a new place. I simply copied the existing UUID's from the old HTPC to the /etc/fstab on the new NAS.