Silent NAS/Home server build - suggestions?

[delroth]

Hoy people,

I need a new NAS / home server / 802.11ac access point at home, so I've been working on a nice build that does everything I want. Key points:

• Needs a fairly powerful CPU to handle full disk encryption (Intel has the advantage with AES instructions)
• As silent as possible
• Lots of RAM for deduplication / cache
• Obviously, disks, disks, disks
• I'm buying everything locally in Switzerland, so availability is sometimes not great

My current WIP list of components is the following:

• Case: Lian Li Q25B
• Motherboard: H87I-PLUS
• CPU: i3-4130T
• RAM: 16GB DDR3-1600
• CPU cooler: Scythe Big Shuriken 2
• PSU: Seasonic Platinum 520 Fanless (a bit overkill, but I'd like to have some margin + fanless + good efficiency, and the choice was limited)
• Disks: 4x WD Red 2TB (+ a WD 3TB that I already have, + a 256GB SSD I already have)

I'm still looking for a PCIe 802.11ac card that works as access point on Linux, unfortunately.

Any suggestions / problems with this build? I've never ever done silent/small/low power builds, so I might be missing some obvious things.

[shuffle2]

Case: fine, whatever. You might investigate if you can get away with disabling one or both of the fans.
Mobo: fine, whatever.
CPU: below
RAM: really cheap nowadays, get at least 16GB
Cooler: below
PSU: good
Disks: below

I would save money on all parts possible and focus on getting as many SSDs as your budget allows. They are silent, WAY more dependable, emit much less heat, and much faster.
I think you will hit the NAS transfer rate (1Gb/s?) limit much before you hit any other (cpu/disk/..). I also doubt that a non-stock cpu cooler will help in any way. The stock ones on my last couple intel cpus have been basically silent, and perform fine even with i7-4770 under full load. I doubt a NAS machine will ever see > 10% load with modern CPUs, even with full disk encryption (well, at least with bitlocker, idk what you're going to use).

Don't see why you'd want wifi...as mentioned above the overall throughput of the NAS will easily have the network interface as the limiting factor.

[delroth]

Re: SSDs, it's still too expensive/GB at the moment, especially if you include a bit of redundancy (at least RAID5-grade). I'm looking at 8-10TB with all my disks (not buying everything yet) - and yes, I do need this kind of storage (I often do some processing on very large datasets).

I'm planning to use software RAID (via ZFS), so hardware RAID matters very little.

Agree with the concerns regarding network bandwidth. I'll be using 1Gbps Ethernet when I'm close to it, but unfortunately my housing is not wired with RJ45 so I have to use 802.11 most of the time. 802.11ac should be around 800Mbps, which I consider "enough" for most uses.

Re: CPU power, I expect writing at ~100MB/s with AES encryption is going to be more expensive than you expect. According to what I see on the internet, this i3-4130t should manage around ~400MB/s at peak. ZFS also has some non-null overhead, and I might consider some encryption/dedup. If you add the load of some random server apps running on it, I think it's not too extravagant. Also, it's a very low TDP CPU for how it performs.

[NaturalViolence]

What exactly are you planning on storing on here? 10TB seems a bit excessive to me but then again we still don't really know much about your plans for this thing.

How small do you want this thing to be?

Like shuffle said SSDs are basically required to make a NAS truly silent. But I guess if you really need 10TB then that's not a practical option.

Do you really need that much cpu power? According to tomshardware even Intel silvermont/bay trail-D would meet your needs:



You can get a fanless board for that and design a system that uses well under 100w at load before factoring in HDDs.

delroth Wrote:PSU: Seasonic Platinum 520 Fanless (a bit overkill, but I'd like to have some margin + fanless + good efficiency, and the choice was limited)

Most reputable PSUs turn off the fan automatically when the load drops below 40/50%. You might not need to spend big bucks on a high end fanless model if you plan carefully. Or you could wire up an external power brick with a pico-psu. Those go up to 150-250 watts if I recall.

[delroth]

(03-29-2014, 03:08 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: What exactly are you planning on storing on here? 10TB seems a bit excessive to me but then again we still don't really know much about your plans for this thing.

Tons of things, going from music to uncompressed video to games to massive (~25GB compressed) log files. Oh, and backups.

(03-29-2014, 03:08 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: How small do you want this thing to be?

As small as it can be with 6-7 not-too-expensive disks in there.

(03-29-2014, 03:08 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Like shuffle said SSDs are basically required to make a NAS truly silent. But I guess if you really need 10TB then that's not a practical option.

It's not.

(03-29-2014, 03:08 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Do you really need that much cpu power? According to tomshardware even Intel silvermont/bay trail-D would meet your needs:



You can get a fanless board for that and design a system that uses well under 100w at load before factoring in HDDs.

I do. Encryption is expensive, ZFS too (especially when using advanced features), and I might consider compression as well. I've had feedback from people with Bay Trail solutions saying that they got rid of FDE because it became the bottleneck quicker than IO on their system.

(03-29-2014, 03:08 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Most reputable PSUs turn off the fan automatically when the load drops below 40/50%. You might not need to spend big bucks on a high end fanless model if you plan carefully. Or you could wire up an external power brick with a pico-psu. Those go up to 150-250 watts if I recall.

Any suggestion of good PSU that does that? I'd like to have high efficiency too, since this is going to run 24h/24. I don't think pico-psus are an option with the power requirements of this thing (at least around 300W).

[shuffle2]

fwiw I do have systems that use all combinations of hw raid/bitlocker/ntfs compression. Even with mirroring + FDE + compression the load is minimal. Maybe you should use a better implementation of FDE/compression?

[delroth]

Maybe you should consider using a filesystem that integrity-checks everything written on disk and supports object-level replication

I've looked at Avoton stuff a bit (Atom server, basically), unfortunately it looks good but out of my price range (500CHF for a MB+CPU combo). Has AES-NI and ECC support though, which would have been cool but I'll have to do without it.

[NaturalViolence]

delroth Wrote:I do. Encryption is expensive, ZFS too (especially when using advanced features), and I might consider compression as well. I've had feedback from people with Bay Trail solutions saying that they got rid of FDE because it became the bottleneck quicker than IO on their system.

Well you said 100 MB/s so I was basing it off of that.

delroth Wrote:massive (~25GB compressed) log files

Jesus christ! Wtf are you logging?

By the way do you have any kind of set budget for this project?

delroth Wrote:Any suggestion of good PSU that does that? I'd like to have high efficiency too, since this is going to run 24h/24. I don't think pico-psus are an option with the power requirements of this thing (at least around 300W).

It helps when I know what's availible in your area or what retailer you're going to be using.

There are lots of options availible depending on what you want. Some examples:
Seasonic 450 watt modular gold certified with smart fan control and 5 year warranty: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151124

Similar option with plantinum rating from FSP (can't garuantee the fan shuts off on this one): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817104167

[delroth]

(03-29-2014, 05:45 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Jesus christ! Wtf are you logging?

Executation traces mostly.

(03-29-2014, 05:45 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: By the way do you have any kind of set budget for this project?

<$1500.

(03-29-2014, 05:45 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: It helps when I know what's availible in your area or what retailer you're going to be using.

There are lots of options availible depending on what you want. Some examples:
Seasonic 450 watt modular gold certified with smart fan control and 5 year warranty: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151124

Similar option with plantinum rating from FSP (can't garuantee the fan shuts off on this one): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817104167

I'll investigate a bit more with local availability (toppreise.ch is a good website to check what I can buy :p).

[Qaazavaca Qaanic]

For your information, Bitlocker is absolutely a NSA-enabled product. I would recommend using Truecrypt, which is likely but not definitely backdoor-free. I'm not sure about the speed, but I do not trust Bitlocker at all.