Has anyone built their own NAS?

[GJOB]

I'm looking at a way to share files on a network of 8 computers - For day to day work we use Google Apps for Work but the CAD guys have some really large files that we want to distribute on our LAN.

Ideally I'd like the largest throughput possible so I am interested to see if anyone else has built theor own mega system?

Cheers.

 

[steaky360]

I've not built my own NAS but I do have a Synology NAS which seems to work fine for filesharing between PC's (although I'm looking to build my own when this one gets full). Might be worth considering if you've not got the experience of building yourself? Its essentially just a 'specialised PC' though with lots of HDDs

 

[GJOB]

I believe that "throughput" and "IOPS" are the most important measures though how to specify parts that can maximise those measures seems to be a mystery, it's almost like you have to build it first and then measure rather than being able to specify the constituent parts first....

 

[ricbai]

At home, I've got a quite old (~5 year) 4 bay Drobo DAS which is connected to USB to a Raspberry Pi which is then acting as a NAS (basically, I had previously formatted the Drobo as Linux but Windows machines can't access it directly, so the Pi offers Windows SAMBA shares of the Linux mounted contents to the network).

If I was "doing it properly", I'd either buy a prebuilt NAS system (such as the Synology one or a Drobo NAS) or get a nice large case with hardware RAID cards and populate it with drives and mount it over the network. I know people doing this with old Macs (on a predominately Mac network), others using old PCs etc (if I had the money and need, I'll also get a rack of Backblack Storage Pods and use them: but I'm not a millionaire). Do you know which sort of quantity of storage you'll need, how reliable do you need it (if a drive fails, can you afford for the NAS to be unavailable/degraded for hours/days - my Drobo takes about 3-4 days to "rebuild" on a drive failure), and what sort of throughput do you need (all 8 users accessing multi-Gb+ files at the same time, or just dropping in/updating files a couple of times a day), and do you want anything "advanced" like file versioning/backups etc?

 

[GJOB]

Looking at 4 drives for now @ 4TB - something like WD Red. I've looked at the prebuilt but I'm concerned that if I don't get the throughput to match our needs (we won't know until we try using it I guess).

I've asked the question elsewhere but there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer - I would be looking for something that could handle all 8 users accessing multi GB files at the same time even if that was the worst case.

The plan was to back up the NAS in the cloud.

So really I'm trying to use the NAS as a file server as I don't need all the bells and whistles and we use Google Apps for Work now.

 

[ricbai]

>> The plan was to back up the NAS in the cloud. <<

I would say, scrap that plan. I've had Backblaze for 3 months now and it's only managed to back up 2.3Tb (still got another 1.8Tb to go). And that's just on my "local" machine with "important" files. My Pi-NAS (which do run the WD Red drives - good warranty on them [even though I've never had to RTM a Red, only Greens - which fail within 3 years in a NAS]) has 7.5Tb on it, my "data drive" has another 1Tb - and then I can look at backing up everything else (like old laptop drive which still has some files on it). For "local backups" of my data drive (and vital Windows files), I've just brought a 3.5" external drive bay for my PCS machine and chuck in a 2Tb WD Green every week (with another two due to go on "rotation" once I've got "Reflect" configured). If they are multi-GB binary files, it's going to be "tricky" for any online backup system to keep in sync as they'll probably have to resync the whole file after a small change. If the files were smaller, I might have suggested "cheating" and use something like Dropbox for Business which allows the Dropbox account to be shared on multiple machines and keeps revisions - but after changes, you've got to wait for the file to resync before others can edit the same version.

If you can't afford downtime/loss of data, you'll ideally need two systems: a "live" and a "backup". But it all depends what you are protecting against - if you are protecting against drive failure, then keeping both in sync all the time will work nicely and is easy to do - user "error" then you'll need to keep revisions - and if it's the "classic" "building goes up in fire" situation, then you need off site backups. I know someone who carries in a spare drive to his workplace every week and connects it to his machine - it's configured as part of a RAID1 set so once it's connected the drives try and "sync up". That's one way of doing it. Others have gone to setting up microwave links between two locations for backups...

8 users accessing the same NAS shouldn't be too much of an issue (especially if they are only pulling on file at a time each - they should be stored in a single chunk on the NAS which was save seeking) - obviously performance will take a small hit though - you may get network bottlenecks though (especially if you are just on 100Mb network). https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/performance gives some performance metrics for Synology based on 4 PCS accessing a single 8Gb file fo r3 minutes.