[ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

[Alex Carver]

My current backup is a USB hard drive on another machine.  That drive is
filling fast and the number of devices needing backup is actually
increasing over time plus the need to occasionally share files across
machines is showing up which means a NAS is making more sense.  Also
since I want to have the IP security cameras recording at all times, it
makes far more sense to drop that onto a dedicated device (and dedicated
network VLAN) with plenty of storage space for a few days or a week of
non-stop recording from multiple cameras (at least ten cameras).

Don't care about media streaming though, Plex would be a completely
different machine build dedicated to that purpose, not a NAS.  A DVR
machine is another project on the list but that's not going to be
related to the NAS in any way (not even for storage).  This NAS is
solely dedicated to total system images (Time Machine for the Macs,
Mondo/dd for the *nix, Windows Backup for the Windows machine, etc.)
hence the need for space, the cameras (more space), and shared files
without resorting to sneaker-net or just firing up local shares on the
individual machines (which I do now but it sometimes decides not to
work).  Across the machines there's probably about 2-3 TB of OS/programs
to archive and another 4-6 TB of user data (I was planning to start with
a 4 x 4TB or 6 x 4TB array).

On 2018-12-01 09:43, DJ-Pfulio via Ale wrote:
> 65W Pentium G3258 CPU with 4G of RAM.  MB and CPU was $99 total at
> purchase 5+ yrs ago.  It can transcode one 1080p stream to 720p via plex
> server.  It has over 24TB currently connected.
> 
> But I don't use it as an OS backup server. That goes to another machine
> with a 2TB USB3 HDD.  I backup about 20 systems with rdiff-backup. It is
> mix of VMs and physical. Generally I have 60-180 days of versioned
> backups.  I don't backup media files via rdiff-backup and I don't backup
> everything, just enough to recreate the system in 30-45minutes if
> something happens.
> 
> Happy to share my backup techniques. Come to ALE-NW almost any Sunday.
> 
> 
> On 12/1/18 11:52 AM, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
>> Lots of votes for DIY NAS.
>>
>> Assuming that I choose that route, I'd be aiming for relatively low cost
>> (not including the cost of the drives, that's a sunk cost no matter the
>> array).  To this end I don't need a machine that can transcode video,
>> run fifteen application servers, VMs, or much of anything else.  I just
>> need a box that can handle SMB/CIFS/NFS for file storage from remote
>> machines (mix of *x, Windows, Mac), can run rdiff-backup over ssh (some
>> of my smaller machines back up using rdiff-backup for simplicity), can
>> send me an email if something is wrong, has two or more Gigabit ports so
>> I can divide network streams (one coming from cameras on a VLAN, the
>> other coming from the other machines), and the ability to support plenty
>> of drives without much extra hardware (at least four plus an OS drive
>> without needing a SATA card, more SATA ports is better though).
>>
>> I wanted to avoid hyperexpensive motherboards.  I did some searching
>> after all the input on this thread came in and most of the build guides
>> for DIY NAS boxes max out the system so much so that you can run Plex,
>> Xen, an email server, an IoT server, cloud synchronization and like
>> fifteen other things, none of which I want.  I just want a giant file
>> bucket.  I want to send big files/backups to the machine and, in a
>> reasonable amount of time, have those files stored to disk and done.  At
>> the same time, that much horsepower is also using a lot of electricity
>> so minimizing that load would be great if I don't actually need it.
>> That simplifies cooling as well as I'd be able to use passive cooling or
>> slow fans.
>>
>> The build guides were using things like $600-$1000 motherboards from
>> Supermicro and such that had 10 GbE ports, one had SFP slots for fiber,
>> another used a Core i7 processor and 128 GB of RAM, one even had a
>> Radeon graphics card in it.  Half of them used over 100 Watts idle with
>> a significant chunk going to the motherboard rather than the drives.
>> Surely a simple file server does not need nearly that much horsepower to
>> take data from an Ethernet port and shove it through a SATA port to a
>> disk.  The most taxing application for this thing would be continuously
>> recording multiple camera streams using H.264 (around 100-200 kBps on
>> average) or MJPEG (500-600 kBps) to disk over one of its ports.
>>
>> So for those of you that did DIY, how much horsepower did you seek out
>> for the system and how little can I get away with for the most basic
>> file serving application without drastically harming performance? 
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