Ask Slashdot: DIY NAS For a Variety of Legacy Drives?

An anonymous reader writes "I have at least 10 assorted hard drives ranging from 100 GB to 3 TB, including external drives, IDE desktop drives, laptop drives, etc. What's the best way to setup a home NAS to utilize all this 'excess' space? And could it be set up with redundancy built-in so a single drive failure would cause no data loss? I don't need anything fancy. Visibility to networked Windows PCs is great; ability to streak to Roku / iPad / Toshiba etc would be great but not necessary. What's the best way to accomplish this goal?"

Not worth it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those older drives are probably failures just waiting to happen. With the cost of the hard drive space continually dropping, just use new drives. It's not worth screwing around with old ones for anything other than salvaging old data off them, even though the urge to do so is strong in the more frugal among us.

FreeNAS or Unraid.

[detritus.]

Look at FreeNAS or Unraid. Unraid has a 3-drive limit IIRC for the free version, but supports an unlimited amount of drives for the non-free version.

Re:Not worth it.

[ZeroSumHappiness]

I agree to an extent. Take anything SAS or SATA that's 1TB or greater and re-think the project with just those. Sell or recycle the rest of the drives. Depending on your needs the remainder should be RAID-1, 5 or 6'd (using software RAID if speed isn't an issue) and then put on an OpenFiler or FreeNAS box. Anything non-replaceable should then be backed up to a respectable backup provider in addition to your home-grown solution.

We need more information though -- what are your actual drive sizes and what do you want to put on this NAS?

Re:You can , but probably without RAID

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds awesome. Should have a MTBF of about 20 minutes

Do you care about your electricity bill?

[jimicus]

Do you care about your electricity bill at all? If you do, it'll probably be cheaper over the course of 6-12 months to buy a simple NAS box or a cheap atom board and plug in a couple of 2TB hard drives.

Don't Build.... Buy a Drobo

[InitZero]

1. Throw away everything that isn't a standard-sized SATA drive.
2. Buy a Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/products/professionals/drobo-fs/index.php).
3. Put the five (or eight) largest drives in the Drobo.
4. Throw away the rest of the drives.
5. When you get a drive that is larger than the smallest drive in your Drobo, pull the smaller drive out and insert the larger drive.
6. Find peace in the universe.

When I was young and foolish, I tried to keep every drive spinning, even long after its time had passed. I had *nix boxes stuffed with drives and SCSI-attached arrays. I learned a lot about drive management and system administration but, mostly, I learned that there is a value to my time and my time isn't best utilized playing disk administrator.

Drobo doesn't pay me a dime and I am still more excited about Drobo than any technology product since TiVo.

Cheers,
Matt

Re:the 2 main choices:

[epine]

In all, what's not to love?

ZFS does nothing to protect integrity in memory, and especially in the dedup case, your data sits in memory a long time.

I wouldn't run dedup on a non-ECC mainboard. Had an experimental ZFS that suffered a failed memory stick (this array not run in dedup mode after a performance test following the initial build). The next scrub found inconsistencies on disk. Even after copying all the data to a new location on the same storage tank and deleting the old location, there were internal consistency errors. This didn't surprise me, but illustrates that memory-induced corruption will often kill the entire array. Keep plenty of offline backups.

Now if you just happen to have a fresh Opteron 3250 lying around on a mainboard populated with the right type of memory, with full server chip validation and background memory scrubbing, fill your boots with those old 30MB IDE drives.

I'm running my test array on three 500GB drives. Two are enterprise grade and the third was a Seagate warranty replacement (consumer grade refurb). I could have run with the consumer drive as an idle hot spare, but decided to run a three-way mirror, which keeps your hot spare silvered at all times. Note that the consumer drive limits my peak write bandwidth, as the enterprise drives have higher read/write performance. The reads seem to be distributed so that the hot silvered consumer drive works out to a net performance gain.

My scrub on 50GB of data takes just under 15m. Concurrent read traffic is not greatly impacted at home network levels.