Network storage from a hard drive. An Overview of Key Points When Building a NAS

Question assemble a NAS yourself or buy a ready-made one invariably causes holivar in narrow circles. Here is a recent article by Kirill Kochetkov Choosing a network drive has already generated three pages of discussion. What is characteristic - fully dedicated to the holivar. Cyril IMHO due to the widest practice knows the topic of purchased NAS better than anyone else in Runet. But he does not consider it useful to discuss the subject matter. I'll have to try :)

IMHO the question in the title has a very simple and non-emotional answer: It depends on your needs and resources. And what gives him emotions is an attempt not only to issue a universal answer, but to impose this answer on everyone and everyone.

So let's ask ourselves first question - why do you need a NAS? And it turns out that the vast majority of NAS is not needed at all. Yes, they can use it - if, for example, a brother, son, etc. set up and donate. But they will not buy themselves a new one (and will tune it) even if the old one disappears. Most people's movie-watching needs are met by a TV, a regular computer, and at its most advanced, streaming services, iTunes and Play. By backup, if they do - USB disk and cloud services. So let's leave aside those who do not need the discussed piece of iron in any form.

And in the remainder we have a much smaller minority that can tell why exactly they needed a NAS. This list deserves a separate post (which I will write next), but now it is more useful to think about this list on your own. Most likely, the list will be without exotics, like everyone else. Download torrents, watch movies and listen to music through a media player, smart TV or HTPC. Backup home computers and mobile devices. Store home photos. Then both purchased and self-assembled NAS will suit you. If the exotic is available (bright examples are virtualization, the use of specific software that is not included in the delivery of ready-made NAS) - then this is a strong argument in the direction of self-assembly. Not so that it is completely impossible on ready-made NAS. But if you need virtualization (at home!), then there is no problem for you to assemble and configure the NAS yourself. In the same way, seemingly ordinary needs, but in a big way (not a couple of terabytes, but ten or twenty, video transcoding to different devices and so on) raise the requirements for a ready-made NAS from simple home devices to advanced, and even corporate ones. They go up with the price.

But, suppose that you have no exotics. Then comes into play resource question. if you easier to pay than to delve into software and hardware - we choose a ready-made NAS, there are enough of them. Moreover, it is not so much to pay extra - the price of one hard drive is rude for the case of home configurations without exotics. If a assemble and set up yourself - for fun, then we carefully review the Wishlist, try to estimate the margin for growth, select the software, then, according to its requirements, the hardware. In that order, not vice versa. Whatever software and config you choose, gods don't burn pots. If you are able to choose hardware for an office computer and put an axis there, and also know how to google and understand what you read, then you have the necessary skill to create your own NAS. In addition to skill, you will need time. At least a day or two. Maximum, if it turns into a hobby - as much as you like. If the temporary resource is critical, we again return to the purchased option.

PS As you can see, there is no place for a holivar in the choice itself. It exists in psychological moments, which we will not discuss here. With one exception. Almost always at the start there is a substitution of concepts. And instead of comparing apples to apples, and pineapples to pineapples, there is a comparison of apples to pineapples.

Just a few years ago for iron self-assembly NAS meant x86 platform, and basic prebuilt meant ARM. Of course, ARM eats less, heats up less and is much weaker in performance. But in recent years, it has become possible to assemble on ARM. For example, under New Year I bought on Avito for 2500 + 300 + 300 + 200 = 3300 rubles + power supply + case + SD card, I found a box for the HDD in the USB storage box, left over from buying an external drive at a price less than the internal one of the same model. I put an old one and a half terabyte disk in the box, which became unnecessary in a media player with a NAS. Set up nas4free (with zfs!) including robot for automatic download new episodes of series and for transferring photos and other things back and forth through hot folders, i.e. in a way understandable to the housewife. And he took his relatives to another city. Uptime approaches 5 months.

In the same way, a ready-made NAS is now not necessarily on a weak processor - if for some reason your workload is above average, the choice is quite wide. So the question of how much energy is consumed or whether there is enough performance is not a decisive one in the choice. Unless the case is exotic, both options can provide the requirements.

By software 99.99% of finished NAS are Linux based builds. And in self-assembly, you can choose at least Win, from Windows 7 Embedded standard, cleaned from all rubbish to Win Server 2016 Tech Preview, at least * nix in all its diversity, from Linux to FreeBSD and Solaris. But is there a comparative advantage? IMHO almost certainly not. Because if the software functionality of a purchased NAS is not enough for your case, you rather have unusual requirements.

PPS UPD about a question that you will probably ask - which version has more functionality?
IMHO - the same, both practically and theoretically.

Practically: you do not need all the functionality, but only the one you use. And everything except exotic in all options is.

Theoretically: on sufficiently powerful hardware, both ready-made and self-assembled NAS support a hypervisor. Accordingly, you can put Xpenology in a virtual machine on a self-assembly. (This is legal, since it is a compilation of code published under the GNU license. Synology does not claim otherwise, by the way.) And to have all the functionality that is in DCM and is missing in the host system. In the same way - on the contrary, we put anything on the finished NAS into the virtual machine - and go ahead. So the question is only in hardware, read - about money. this approach does not solve, of course, the issue with some cloud services from NAS manufacturers. But if (!) you need them - it is unlikely that there is something unique among them so that there is no replacement. Those. again about money. And small ones.

Canon PowerShot A200

Digital photography burst into my life in 2002 with the birth of my daughter. You can’t remember everything, and with time something is forgotten, and therefore I wanted to capture as many moments as possible of the beginning of her life. So it was assumed that I would take a lot of photos and often, which then film photography did not allow (the cost of film + the cost of printing = expensive). And on August 21, 2002, a Creative PC-CAM digital device was purchased that combines a battery-powered webcam and the ability to take 1MP digital photographs no more than 8 pieces (it no longer fit in internal memory device and work with memory cards, she did not know how). Very quickly realizing all the charm of such a photo and the inferiority of the built-in small memory, after a couple of months, the young dad strained himself financially and bought a real Canon PowerShot A200 digital camera that could also record video!

From that moment on, the Samsung Hi8 camcorder immediately died morally in pursuit of the film camera. The quality of the photos of the new camera was so amazing, and this Canon line is so versatile (multiple optical zoom, stabilization from "shaky" hands, a large number of photos from a single charge), that in subsequent years only the model changed: A400, A430, SX100 IS (optical stabilization!) and SX200 IS. The latter was also bought on August 21 (coincidence), but already in 2009 and is still in use. In addition, in March 2012, a Sony NEX-C3K Kit camera was purchased with two interchangeable lenses in the kit 18-55mm/F3.5-5.6, and the volume of photos and videos (already in FullHD quality) has grown significantly. The Sony NEX camera is even better because through a cheap Chinese adapter I connected the Helios 44-M lens to it from my father's professional Zenith camera in the USSR (wow, how many weddings were filmed on it!).

What am I for. For about 17 years, we have accumulated more than 20 thousand photographs and many, many hours of video. For me, this is a real treasure, which I didn’t want to lose at all. All this goodness was unloaded from the memory of cameras and carefully stored first on the hard drive of the PC, then, due to a virus problem in Windows, it moved to one external drive, and then to a more capacious HDD western digital(WD) 1TB My Book. Plus, digitized films (!) from my father and from my Samsung Hi8 video camera began to take up some decent volume.

Photos in old photo albums could disappear only if there was a fire, but you will notice this unpleasant event immediately, or if you are lucky, then call the firemen in advance and manage to save everything. The peculiarity of the digital is that all your accumulated photo and video archive disappears instantly, without the preliminary smell of smoke, how to say “at the snap of your fingers”. In recent years, this has happened to two of my friends with external USB-HDDs.

As an option for storage external HDD, the market offers us NAS devices - network storage devices. But this is not their only function, these devices have a fairly wide functionality: they can work as stand-alone torrent downloaders, and then they can broadcast the downloaded video, for example, to a TV, they can work as media players directly on TV by connecting via HDMI, as servers of your web site, etc. Everything is limited only by your desires and the software repository for a particular NAS. Drives in the NAS can be combined into arrays from RAID0 to RAID10, depending on the number of slots in the NAS model. RAID allows you to freely manipulate the shared disk space (for example, combine two different HDDs into one shared drive using RAID0) and making file storage more secure (for example, using RAID5). You can read more about the options for using different levels of RAID on the Internet. And another difference from conventional PCs and a big plus of NAS is energy efficiency and silence. Because NAS is not supposed to be used for games, they usually put a cold processor and a large slow fan to cool the HDD. The big minus of NAS is the cost, sometimes reaching up to 40 thousand rubles or more for some models, and this is without taking into account the cost of drives, which can take another fifteen thousand (for example, 4 HDDs of 1 TB each in April 2019 prices) . Agree, not everyone family budget can pull the whole thing.

Fortunately, there is another alternative and very budget option. I also took advantage of them. It's certainly not ideal, nothing is perfect. Of the benefits - the cost is from 0 rubles, you can assemble a NAS for your home from an old PC and unnecessary HDDs. And from the minuses - you must be "with hands" or at least not be afraid to tinker a little with pieces of iron and software. I went down this path and here is my story.

For starters, a decommissioned 10-year-old “office” PC with a 300W PSU, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, an Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5400 processor and all this “happiness” was found on a Gigabyte GA-G41MT-ES2L motherboard (2009) having “ on board" for connecting hard drives, not only 4 SATA connectors, but also a couple of old IDE. I was very happy with the last one, because. I had a couple of old IDE drives that had just been lying around unneeded for years, on which I was going to start my NAS experiments. Another thing that pleased, on the motherboard, in addition to naturally PCI slots, there was one modern PCI Express x1, which was very useful to me later. Of the minuses of this motherboard - there is no way to boot the operating system from the built-in card reader, even after updating the BIOS to latest version. It's a pity, I have an unnecessary pair of 4GB SD cards that would be suitable for this project, but alas. But it is possible to boot the OS from a USB flash drive. Okay, let's see how this can be used in the future. There is also a 1Gb network port on board the motherboard, which is just great, because. network copying speed will be very fast. The center of my home LAN is the Zyxel Giga II Internet Center, whose ports also operate at 1Gbps.

Let's continue. So the second question after system block, there was such: and what OS to use for NAS? There are many options on the Internet, both paid and absolutely free: FreeNAS, EasyNAS, Rockstor, OpenMediaVault and the like, I advise you to read the article (opens in a new window) "The best NAS distributions". After I watched Youtube for a few more days, and then independently checked and tested all these OSes on my virtual computer in VirtualBox, the decision came to stop at OpenMediaVault (in short OMV). Why? Yes, because OMV fully supports the Russian language, is free and based on the Linux (Debian) OS, which means stability and reliability that Windows OS never dreamed of. What is remarkable about solutions on Linux OS is that they are free, there is no threat of infection with OS viruses, which means there is no need to buy an antivirus, system requirements to Linux in times below than Windows, which means that the OS will feel great even on those PCs on which Windows simply refuses to start. In addition, devices running Linux do not require much attention to maintenance (for example, all SmartTVs, routers and Cell Phones work on one or another build of Linux. In general, whatever one may say, Linux in this case is my option. In general, I decided on the OS.

I probably will not describe the installation of OpenMediaVault here. Everything is quite simple, there are no problems, and similar descriptions full on the Internet, for example, I will give a link to the article (opens in a new window) “Openmedia vault, or How to make a NAS yourself? ". Read yourself. I'll just write what works for me now:

Torrent downloader with a web interface. Very comfortably.

MThe miniDLNA media server allows you to watch movies on your TV. Specified several folders where my films are located, as well as the folder where the torrent downloadsrocker.

Notifications enabled for email. Now at work (yes, anywhere!) I immediately know about all the incidents if they happen.

S.M.A.R.T hard drive monitor enabled. If a disk suddenly becomes “bad”, I will receive a notification about this by e-mail, for example, on my smartphone and I will be able to save information from it to another disk in time, before the disk is completely broken.

Rsync is enabled, with which backup copy hard drive with family photos and videos is archived on a remote server at work.

Imade a shared folder for all users on my home network. Now there are no problems with documents, when you finish editing the text on a stationary PC, you can open it on a laptop that is on the balcony or on a tablet.

Enabled Clave antivirus for scheduled scans shared folder. The fact is that there is one Windows PC on the home network, and even though it has an antivirus, it’s Windows, and we understand that the antivirus in this case is notalways saves. So in fact, an antivirus in Linux is needed in case files in a shared folder become infected from a Wiondows computer. In Linux itself, there are no viruses just as a class.

OMV has a plugin that needs to be installed if the OS is running on a USB flash drive. To be honest, my hands itched so much that I hurried and did not deal with this plugin, and therefore did not install the OS on a USB flash drive, and in order not to take boot disk valuable SATA port on the mother, I decided to put OMV on an IDE disk. And what? The speed is not so important here, the peculiarity of Linux is that it works in the PC's memory and does not terrorize the write-read HDD computer like Windows. In general, the OS takes up about 2.5 GB of space and is located on a 80 GB hard drive, and after finishing all the OMV settings, I made a backup on the second IDE screw, in case the first IDE drive fails. That's how it turned out byudzhetninko and I think it's reliable.

Temporarily, for experiments, friends threw a pair of 3.5" HDD 500GB each. I included them in RAID0 and the output was one disk with a capacity of 1TB. Until they take it back, it will work like this. Used for the operation of the torrent and the shared folder of users. We also bought a pair of 2.5" Seagate Barracuda 1TB. That's how all 4 SATA ports on the motherboard became occupied. The photo on the right shows, from top to bottom: 2 IDEs with an OMV system, then there are a pair of SATA 500Gb that are “linked” in RAID0, and at the very bottom two are 1TB 2`5 inch laptop screws. By the way, the pictures below are all clickable, click on them to enlarge.

Because disks turned out to be what is called "vnaboy" and the summer is ahead, I decided to make additional cooling for them. I bought an Aerocool Motion 12 fan at the CSN for 270 rubles. and installed it inside opposite the rack with the HDD in a regular place. It works quietly, 1200 revolutions in total, but it blows wonderfully due to the increased number of blades, there are 9 of them.

I wonder what to do when I need to add at least one more hard drive? Now there is no free SATA port on the motherboard, and there is also no place in the PC case in the regular HDD attachment points.

Wandering around the Internet, one day I found in Chinese store interesting solution. A rack for six 2`5 HDDs on a retractable chassis is inserted into the PC case in place of the DVD drive, with a lock against accidental disconnection of disks, with indication HDD work and forced cooling of the insides. Of course, I didn’t need to go directly to 6 HDDs, and even inside a limited space they would be too dense, and this is a heat removal problem, the disks heat up, especially around the clock. But in general, I liked the idea. I began to look for a solution for 4 HDDs and I had to somehow solve the problem of the lack of free SATA ports. And to paraphrase the proverb about Rome in a modern way: in China - everything is there. I found an SSU SA3014 PCI-E board that adds 4 SATA 3.0 ports for about 1350 rubles on Alishka.

But to be honest, I got lucky at that moment and bought it elsewhere: the new online store Bringly.ru, a joint project of Yandex and Sberbank, had just opened. There were discounts, and even for the first purchase they gave out points with which you can pay for the goods like money. In general, together with everything, with delivery, this fee cost me 565 rubles. It turned out very budget, in the style of my project. Then, having reviewed a bunch of options for HDD racks in a 5`25 bay, I came to the conclusion that the most normal company is Oimaster. A bunch of positive reviews, and judging by the photo of the device, everything is quite high quality and reliable, although a little expensive.
But after all, he must carefully take care of my disks so that the data stored on them does not disappear anywhere, for example, due to poor-quality soldering of some kind of circuit inside the rack or elementary overheating. The minimum price for it is around 1898 rubles. For a couple of months I was looking for cheaper options, I was waiting, maybe where there will be discounts? There were no discounts on the last sale even on Aliexpress, so I had to buy what is called at full price. It's good that I use the Letyshops cashback service (click on the banner at the top of this page), and part of the money paid is always returned to me, so we can assume that the goods are always cheaper. When everything came, I installed everything in the case. Everything works perfectly!

OMV has a built-in statistics system. A record is kept of how heavy the load on the processor is, how much RAM is used, and how much is left free, you can see the dynamics of filling hard drives, and so on. Let me remind you that my system has Intel processor Pentium Dual-Core E5400 which turned out to be more than enough power, the average load does not exceed 8-10%. Random access memory 2GB is also more than 0.6GB is occupied by the system, the rest is allocated for data buffering.

In conclusion. I can say that the NAS turned out to be cheap, in fact, from the mandatory expenses - this is 270 rubles. for an additional fan for mandatory cooling of the HDD array. So do not rush to throw out old PCs - they can still serve you for a long time, but in a different role. If there old HDD- then also no costs. All my other expenses for an additional fee and a rack for 4 disks were, in general, not necessary. The possibilities of OMV are enough not only for home use, but also for the office, and for large corporate network- since all this is based on the Linux (Debian) OS with regular system updates. And my NAS pleases with seven new films, instant availability of the entire mass at once home video and photos, and finally confident peace of mind for the safety of all the data accumulated over the years.

The FreeNAS operating system will run on any personal computer. If you don’t have an extra system unit with the ability to install multiple hard drives, then assemble a new one following our recommendations.

We chose the Prodigy chassis from BitFenix ​​as the basis for the NAS system. It has six bays for installing 3.5-inch hard drives. compact motherboard ASRock E350M1 with integrated dual core central processing unit provides sufficient performance and provides four SATA connectors for connection of rigid disks.

To use six drives, you will need to install a controller board with two SATA ports. With motherboard compatible two RAM modules Kingston HyperX 4 GB each. We chose the quiet and energy-efficient 300W be quiet Pure Power L8 model as the power supply, and we recommend quiet hard drives such as, for example, WD Red (2TB).

2. Assembly of components

If you strictly follow the instructions in the user manual for the BitFenix ​​Prodigy case, then there should be no problems when assembling the computer. It should be noted that it is best to install the power supply with the vent down, and the hard drives are inserted into the case with the sled connectors forward.

3. Connection

First connect to system board connectors for the power and reset buttons, as well as LED indicators, since access to them will subsequently be significantly difficult. It is recommended to connect hard drives from the side of the case where the power and reset buttons are located.

4. Installing FreeNAS on a flash drive

Unzip to PC with operating system Windows image FreeNAS as well free program Win32 Disk Imager. To do this, use the 7-Zip archiver, which can work with the XZ format.

Insert a flash drive with a capacity of at least 2 GB and launch Win32 Disk Imager. Open the FreeNAS image file by clicking on the folder icon and selecting the drive letter for the Device. Clicking on "Write" will start the process of writing the image to the USB flash drive. Remove the drive from your computer and insert it into the USB port of the NAS you have assembled.

5. First boot NAS

Connect the keyboard as well as the monitor to the NAS you have assembled and connect it with a LAN cable to the router. Turn on the NAS and immediately press the Del button several times to enter UEFI settings.

In the "Advanced / Super IO Configuration" item, change the value of "Serial Port" to "Disabled" - in otherwise FreeNAS won't start. After that, in the "Boot / Boot Option" item, select the flash drive, save the settings and reboot the NAS.

After the reboot, you will see a text menu and an IP address where you can access the FreeNAS web interface.

6. Basic parameters

Open the web interface in a browser on your computer. In the "System / Settings" item, you can change the language to Russian. In the "Time Zone" section, select necessary settings. After clicking on "Save" and pressing the F5 key, the Russian-language interface will load.

7. Disk setup

Using the "Storage/Manage ZFS Volumes" button, you can perform disk space allocation. First, enter "Volume Name", then click on the "+" sign next to " Available discs". After that, in the "Volume Layout" section, you will see the connected disks. Drag the round silver button up and to the right, as a result, all the disks should be located next to each other. For maximum fault tolerance, select "RaidZ2" from the menu.

8. Create a user account

In the folder tree, click Account/Users/Add User. In the "Username" and "Full Name" section, enter "Guest", click next to "Home Directory" on "Browse" and select the volume created in the previous step.

Activate the "Disable password login" option and confirm your choice by clicking on "OK". Click on the "Storage" icon at the top and on the previously created volume, then at the bottom on the key icon with the "Change Permissions" disk. In the dialog box, select Guest next to Owner (User) and Owner (Group) and click Edit.

9. CIFS setup

Then create a new share with any name in the “Shares / Windows (CIFS)” item and specify the previously created volume as the path. Activate "Allow Guest Access" and "Guest Access Only".

Then click the Services button at the top and the wrench icon behind CIFS. Select the "Anonymous" option in the "Authentication Model" line, enter the NetBIOS name and workgroup name of your PC.

As a guest account, select "Guest" and activate the option "Allow blank password" and "Include home directories". In the "Home Directories" item, select the volume you created earlier.

Finally, enable CIFS using the Services button at the top. Now the network share will be displayed in Windows Explorer at the address "\\\".

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