[Novalug] NAS Questions

Nick Danger nick@hackermonkey.com
Thu May 22 19:53:13 EDT 2014


1. Depends. If you use hardware raid, then you can just use a slice of
the disk for the OS. Or if you have lots of slots, you can use 1 disk
for OS and raid the rest. If its a software raid, or you have no "extra"
slot for an OS disk, then you can use USB, or another media like an SD
card. If you open many other NAS boxes that have all the disks dedicated
for storage, you'll find some other media that holds the OS. I used to
have a very cool little USB flash disk that went onto the headers of a
motherboard, not into a usb slot.

2. SSD's are not used for the OS. Its a waste of the SSDs capabilities.
I suppose if I was building my own and someone gave me a smallish SSD I
could but I wouldn't buy/build one that way if I was paying for parts.
Some NASs use SSD for cache or other purposes, I think raid2z can use
SSD to speed up writes before raiding, making things work faster.

3. Sure. anything you can boot or write to will work. Somewhere I have a
IDE to SDcard adapter. I was going to use it to hold a small linux
distro on a firewall so I didn't have tons of noise from the hard drive.
I never did follow through with that plan...

4. No idea. You would need to write onto something.I know there were
some Linux distros that would boot from CD and then store user data on a
usb disk, you could do something like that, but that sounds way over
complicated.

5. No. You'll pay extra for no reason. Either buy a pre built nas
(Synology, WD, whomever) or build one. Don't buy a prebuilt and reload
it. That way be dragons.

6. My own "NAS" currently is just a Linux box with an old 80GB disk as
the OS and a software raid of 2x3TB hard drives. It works great. I had
built a FreeNAS and was looking at other solutions and I realized I just
didn't have the needs for something complicated. All I needed/wanted was
a common storage server, and only really needed NFS.  Whatever you
decide to go with, dont overcomplicate it. Oh, I did add a USB disk
hanging off it which RSYNCs my important stuff every night. The USB
disks were super cheap at Costco and I couldn't resist.


Nick

On 05/22/2014 05:02 PM, Charles R. Head wrote:
> *Guys,*
> 
> I'm thinking about adding an NAS to my home network.  I'm specifically
> considering buying a four bay commercial NAS and running the HDDs as a
> RAID 5.  I like the idea of having quick access to the HDDs for
> installation & replacement through a door on the front of the NAS.  I'd
> appreciate help with the following questions:
> 
>  1. If I use all four HDDs in a RAID array, where does the OS for the
>     NAS reside?  I've seen discussions of building your own NAS and
>     booting it from a thumb drive plugged into the NAS's USB port.  I
>     don't much like that approach. 
>  2. Do any NASs come with the equivalent of an SSD (i.e., a 5th drive)
>     on the NAS motherboard?
>  3. Are there other options for location of the NAS OS, such as on a
>     bootable optical disk? 
>  4. Where would the NAS configuration files be located if the NAS OS was
>     on an optical disk (read only)?
>  5. All the commercial NASs appear to come with their own NAS OS
>     preinstalled.  Is there any reason to replace such a vendor supplied
>     OS with FreeNAS?
>  6. Is there anything else I should be considering?
> 
> Thank you.  I'll appreciate any help/advice you can give me.
> 
> *Charlie Head*
> 
> 
> 
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