Any good prebuilt NAS or hardware for DIY NAS on FreeBSD?

Str4nd3r666

Str4nd3r666

Any recommendations of good prebuilt NAS or hardware for DIY NAS that is supported by FreeBSD? Does FreeBSD support Raid 1 to 10? Thanks in advance.
 
Didn't we have a thread about enclosures for this within the last 4 months? There was a lot of good information in it, different suggestions on enclosures, power supplies and storage devices.
If you don't want to completely roll your own, a lot of people have mentioned:

XigmaNAS – XigmaNAS

xigmanas.com xigmanas.com
 
It's interesting no one mentioned HP Microservers yet, here or in the older thread. I use them for approx. 15 years now, and they never failed.

My "current" box is a Gen8 with a low power version of a Xeon CPU and 16 GB of RAM.
2x 256 GB SSD ZFS mirror for the system as well as jails and bhyve VMs.
2x 14 TB HDD ZFS mirror for data.

They come with ECC RAM, iLO for remote management, so despite the form factor, it's real server hardware.

Many years ago, I bought different ready-to-use NAS solutions, but I found that for the same money, I am way more flexible with a simple FreeBSD box. I know how my server works because I built it and I have set up every single service myself.

NAS appliances can be really nice if you don't want to do everything yourself, but this is the FreeBSD forum, so roll your own and feel good about it even 5 years later :) Your NAS manufacturer probably won't provide updates for your box in 5 years. I simply freebsd-update my Microserver from.. I don't know.. 2018?
 
Schluppenkalle said:
It's interesting no one mentioned HP Microservers yet, here or in the older thread. I use them for approx. 15 years now, and they never failed.

My "current" box is a Gen8 with a low power version of a Xeon CPU and 16 GB of RAM.
2x 256 GB SSD ZFS mirror for the system as well as jails and bhyve VMs.
2x 14 TB HDD ZFS mirror for data.

They come with ECC RAM, iLO for remote management, so despite the form factor, it's real server hardware.

Many years ago, I bought different ready-to-use NAS solutions, but I found that for the same money, I am way more flexible with a simple FreeBSD box. I know how my server works because I built it and I have set up every single service myself.

NAS appliances can be really nice if you don't want to do everything yourself, but this is the FreeBSD forum, so roll your own and feel good about it even 5 years later :) Your NAS manufacturer probably won't provide updates for your box in 5 years. I simply freebsd-update my Microserver from.. I don't know.. 2018?
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Wow! I didn't know these existed. I've been looking for a small NAS case that could take a bluray drive (I use it for M-DISC backups and makemkv ripping). Are these silent?
 
Relatively speaking, yes. The two HDDs can be heard quite well, but that depends on the model. Other than that, it's ok. Should be silent enough for a living room with SSDs only. When you turn it on or reboot, the POST will crank up the fans to full speed. Sounds like a starting jet for 5 seconds
:)
 
I wrote several posts about the topic NAS with FreeBSD in several threads about the same topic, like
I built me my NAS completely myself, My advice was, You need to look primarily for three things:, It all depends on what you need

Summarized:
  • Don't bother much about the hardware. The most important part is the storage drives anyway. That's what any NAS is all about. Those are always by far the most expensive part(s) of any NAS. You better pick more than one (see next point) new, high quality storage capacity drive. Apart from a not too slow network card the rest of the hardware doesn't matter. Can be slowest used old junk as long as it works, and as long as it provides enough SATA ports. 8GB RAM are enough, more than 16 are overkill (You may evaluate if chosing error correcting RAM.) A NAS has nothing else to do than to operate the drives and the filesystem. So, don't look on CPU or GPU specs. Better look at the PSU! You better try to keep the energy consumption as low as possible: few CPU cores at low frequency, PSU with best efficiency not being too oversized (110...120%), most primitive GPU (just for the case you need a terminal (text only) when things need to be done directly at the machine). Reduce the rest to the max, since that thing is going to run 24/7 and for a NAS you don't need any of that junk anyway.
  • Do a ZFS raid. You don't need to do take the effort to create an own NAS when you don't have any redundancy against hardware failures. IMO mirror is best for two drives, and I prefer a 4 drives raidz2 or an at least 5 drives raidz3 (depends on your situation.)
  • FreeBSD already provides anything needed for an NAS in it's most basic installation (except maybe Samba, if also Windows machines shall have access to it.)
  • If using FreeBSD on a NAS, use ZFS. If using ZFS, use its raid capability. If using ZFS' raid capability, don't use any other raid system. Not needed, and causes more trouble than it helps.
 
msplsh said:
Easily explainable by their high retail cost 😅 If it's running FreeBSD, what's the storage controller driver?
Click to expand...
Definitely, and I wouldn't buy a new one.

Concerning the storage controller of the Gen8, it's an HPE Dynamic Smart Array B120i, but I use the raw SATA disks only and let ZFS do its mirror magic. As Maturin said above: "If using ZFS' raid capability don't use any other raid system."

When I bought my first Microserver, it was on sale because HP changed to the new series at that time. It was the N54L and would cost ~150€, IIRC. At that time, compared to even the cheapest purpose-built NAS options, this was awesome. 4 SATA II bays and the freedom to build your own at this price tag was unbeatable.

I found my current Gen8 on eBay for just under 400€ with Xeon E3-1220L V2 and 16GB RAM a few years ago. Still doing its daily job without issues, and I keep the N54L for backup purposes, just in case. It should be good enough for the job, just noticeably slower with all the jails (I could live without some of them).

As a pure NAS without additional workloads, even this 15+ year old box could be an option. The CPU (AMD Turion II Neo N54L) is a 64-bit architecture, so FreeBSD 15 should be no problem.
 
Just my thoughts, but what users want with NAS would be, non-stop availability (several seconds to re-spin up spinning rusts may be OK, but some would NOT want short hicups, though).

Usually, most likely to stop working would be spinning rusts (HDD). So hot swapping of HDDs without interrupting operations would be wanted.

This should need hardware supports with drivers. But this kind of chassis are hard to find (including sufficient informations). And this is why I'm using Synology NAS (unfortunately, not FreeBSD based) with hot-swap drive bays.

Ideally, all components except chassis (including backplane) are redundant and hot-swappable, including CPUs, memories, PSU, controller boards like on mainframes. And faulted drives can be auto-ejected with warnings to replace (as far as I know, even mainframes doesn't doing so).
But it should cause too expensive hardwares and overkill for personal uses.
 
T-Aoki said:
But it should cause too expensive hardwares and overkill for personal uses.
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I didn't gave it a real thought, but by feeling of guts I would say, this could also be doable somehow FreeBSD based - first thought come to my mind was using eSATA ports instead of common ones were mandatory... AFAIK you don't need to shut down the machine for replacing a volume in a ZFS pool. You need it for the replacement of not hot-swappable hardware. (correct me, if I'm mistaken.)

However,
I think hot-swappable modules(drives) are reasonable when you
1. must provide 100% 24/365 accessability
2. have so many modules(drives) there is at least one worn one out every couple of months
so, very large "cloud"-machines on many user usage for professional purposes.
This, I guess, was asked very specifically, if any at all here. :cool:

My 9 HDD ("spinning rust" = "💩") NAS wasn't built with all new drives, now runs since Juni 18 16:57:54 2022 and by now I had not a single drive to replace yet.

About "hicups" I cannot complain.
Since I'm connected via power LAN to it the network connection ain't not really fast, 🐌, but it's enough to watch movies smoothly without any lag at all directly from it mounted as NFS, which is what I specified as sufficient for my usage.
After all, as I put in general terms in other posts about this topic as it is in general always the case:
One needs to specify what one wants, for what's it needed.
As long there is no specification there only can be experiences and ideas about what others have/did.
And quickly we may not talking a simple NAS anymore, but a real server. (Mine is also running my tiny SVN repo - is it still a pure NAS, or already a "real" server then? 😁:cool:)
When this thing has real work to do, then of course we'are talking CPU, RAM etc.

But IMO it's pretty sufficient for being just a reliable large personal storage being pretty safe against hardware failures, for storing all the larger amounts of stuff you don't neither need to keep in your home permanently, nor want to trash it up with such things, like movies, music, pictures, ISO images, PDFs, audiobooks, ebooks, any old files or projects you are not working on anymore but want to keep - archive... I don't store those in my /home. My /home currently has 14 GB of which .thunderbird is 11 GB.
Everything not needed to be backupped regulary is outsourced to other storages, e.g. my NAS. I don't stress my BU routines unneeded with things not changing but doing a redundancy BU only every couple of months on.
And doing BU to such a "primitive" thing I think it's not only pretty usable, but in any case even better than any of those external USB single drive thingys. At least with 5 drives in a raidz3 pool I feel my data is pretty safe against hardware failure, especially since I had not a single drive failed in years yet.
And it cost me less than 300€. :cool:

But again: It's all what somebody exactly needs, wants, and can afford - specification.
 
Maturin said:
You need it for the replacement of not hot-swappable hardware. (correct me, if I'm mistaken.)
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You're correct.
And even though ZFS supports hot-swapping as software layer, without hot-swappable hardware (drive tray and so on), need shutdown and powering off, open chassis, use screw driver to remove worned out HDD and install new one physically.
And HDDs often dies when something are needed to be saved in hurry.
(Murphy's law?)
 
T-Aoki said:
You're correct.
And even though ZFS supports hot-swapping as software layer, without hot-swappable hardware (drive tray and so on), need shutdown and powering off, open chassis, use screw driver to remove worned out HDD and install new one physically.
And HDDs often dies when something are needed to be saved in hurry.
(Murphy's law?)
Click to expand...
From my old days I remember hot swapping drives for fun - no problem.
But once one drive failed in production it took the one next to it with it and cache battery was all of sudden bust.
 
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