NAS posting

The QNAP line of NAS products is a great way to get an off the shelf network attached storage system that you can buy easily and just pack it with with disks to have your data stored in a RAID array the next day. They have tons of software to help you get into the workflow of having a centralized chunk of storage. You can access it from multiple machines or operating systems and have the little piece of mind that RAID configurations offer. As well they deliver great archive and recovery software with QuDedup, which is a great way to open your HBS3 files when you archived datasets onto hard disks for offsite or long term storage. I really enjoyed having a place to dump stuff when I needed to manage disk space. It still runs my Unifi Controller I just had a lot higher hopes for my TS-451+ in almost every way.

It’s very capable of playing back your digitized 4K library of video across the network using PLEX with a gigabit network. It could even plug directly into a TV, the thing is that’s not really a useful feature for me. With all 4 bays filled with spinning metal disks the response time on the GUI was slow and transfers, limited at 1GB, were sometimes long and painful. The NAS was capable though of running controller software for my network appliances and I was able to play around with small Ubuntu VMs and containers without worry. I was able to dip my toes into NAS ownership but a lot of these experiences were slightly frustrating, which was depending on how unreasonable I was being in my demands. I didn’t find a great use for an SQL database or Node-Red.

I wanted to move to a solution with ECC and a Xeon processor and every time I shopped for a QNAP that fit the bill I could only ever see it as a wish list item. After a while of shopping around and basically seeing that I was priced out of that market, I spoke with a consultant and decided to try ZFS on my own, with a little help. QuTS offers QNAP users of upper tier products the peace of mind that ZFS and error correcting memory have to offer. If you are unfamiliar with ZFS there are tons of videos on YouTube that extol the virtues of a copy on write filesystem. ZFS is an efficient and resilient file system that offers lots of configuration. It’s a new way of looking at software RAID.

Not just a new way of looking at software RAID. It’s a very good argument for never doing hardware RAID again. You need some hardware to run a file server you should at least run one like the data is actually crucial.

I had headed my consultants advice and began looking at hardware for building a TrueNAS ZFS file server that ticked all of my boxes. I couldn’t find the form factor of the small QNAP I wanted for a reasonable price or of sufficient build quality so I just opted for a larger R7 case. Once I made that small compromise I was able to build something for around $700 CDN off of eBay and local parts sellers that was somewhat comparable to a +$3000 QNAP. The only issue was leaving behind the comfort of the GUI that QNAPs work hard to provide. Though that wasn’t that big of a deal for me.

TrueNAS comes in two flavours CORE and Scale. Both are very functional for network attached storage but Scale is geared towards home users. Scale has a wealth of plugins and features as well as easy to use virtualization. CORE is built like an appliance and has somewhat more locked down security and is great for an off the shelf NAS option. The options for configuration are so vast and testing iterations is so easy that you can actually easily do your own testing for your own use case and optimize how storage is managed with block tuning, compression and deduplication.

Adding 10GBe networking to your NAS build is truly a game changer with how disk performance stacks up when spinning them in an array. It’s costly but for $600 you can enjoy the full bandwidth of SSD storage across the network. It can really change your workflow and how you approach storage in general. Not to mention all the data is protected with ECC and should be more resistant to bit rot. It makes the $700 purchase of my old QNAP kind of hurt. Take a look on eBay for Supermicro components and see if you can find anything you would want to make into a NAS.