Reply With QuoteNo personal experience but these look like they could be an alternative?
http://www.u-nas.com/xcart/product.php?productid=17617
I'm looking for recommendations for NAS PC cases so naturally I came to a watch forum. ;-)
I'm looking for cases suitable for 5-bay and 8-bay NASs. My requirements are:
. Compact case size. (Naturally an 8-bay case will be rather less compact than a 5-bay).
. External hot-swap access to drives (so it needs a SATA backplane).
. mATX or Mini-ITX motherboard compatible.
. Drives will be standard 3.5" spinning rust, SATA.
. Tower form factor, not rackmount.
. Ideally a well soundproofed design.
This will probably be running Freenas.
An example of the sort of case I'm looking for is a Silverstone CS380B but if there are any recommendations from personal experience I'd be very grateful.
Last edited by markrlondon; 27th December 2017 at 17:36.
No personal experience but these look like they could be an alternative?
http://www.u-nas.com/xcart/product.php?productid=17617
^^^ Thanks for that, one to consider.
I've always found Synology pretty decent, might be worth a look.
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Found an interesting article, might be of use ?
https://blog.brianmoses.net/2016/02/...6-edition.html
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The famous HP N54L is also worth considering. It can be found used and sometimes new. I picked mine up for under $200 new in a clearance.
Four bays but you can use the full size DVD bay for a fifth drive if you like, and you can then additionally install FreeNAS on the motherboard USB socket on a thumb drive. Note that HP deliberately knobbled this hardware to ensure it didn't cut into their "serious" server sales, by limiting the drive bays to non hot-swap and the SATA speed to 1.5gbps.
But wait! You can easily un-knobble it by installing a different firmware. Then everything becomes hot-swap and the SATA is unrestricted. The server takes a remote management card if you want, and accepts ECC RAM (a must for ZFS-based systems such as Free NAS). It is dead quiet, and the AMD CPU used sips power.
I originally installed FreeNAS on mine (and the other competing one) to try them out, but settled on Ubuntu in the end. Ubuntu now supports ZFS out of the box, and is frankly just better updated, maintained and flexible than FreeNAS. But you have to know (or google) a few ZFS commands, so might not suit the GUI-dependent.
It's been running non-stop for years and is utterly reliable. As it is an actual server, rather than a RAID box, you can configure it how you like. It comes with an onboard single Gb NIC but I added an Intel Quad Gb NIC to mine and run these into a Cisco switch with link-aggregation. Transfer speeds from any single device on my network reach full Gb saturation regardless of how many devices are accessing the server.
For a size reference, here it is, in my AV cupboard:
Paul
And you called me a geek.Originally Posted by Tokyo Tokei
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The Synology cases are indeed excellent (as are Thecus and Qnap cases in my experience) but in this scenario I just want the empty case and not the hardware and software within. I'm looking for greater flexibility than can be provided by a proprietary solution.
Synology's NASs are excellent proprietary NASs but have one drawback (for my use case and for many of my clients' use cases) and that is that their encryption capabilities are unreasonably hobbled (I can go into it if anyone is interested). Thecus and, more recently, Qnap have a much better encryption experience although Thecus depends on a physical USB stick containing the encryption key being inserted at boot time whereas Qnap allows mounting of encrypted volumes to be done remotely (and I think it allows individual encryption of shares too).
Back when I was considering a NAS for myself, I was tempted by open source NAS software such as Freenas and various others but, at the time (a few years ago now), none of them were capable of providing the full set of features that I required, which included straightforward encryption support. In the end, at the time, Thecus seemed to be the only proprietary provider of NAS systems at the size scale I needed that also had a competent encryption capability. Since then, Qnap's encryption capabilities have improved (Synology has not improved in this respect) and open source NAS software has radically improved.
If I was speccing a new proprietary NAS now for someone who needed encryption then it would probably be Qnap. If encryption was not a must-have then Synology would be my choice of proprietary NAS.
But, for greatest flexibility, it seems to me that open source NAS software running on commodity hardware has now matured to a point where it is a plausible solution for many more people than in the past.
However, despite this, I think proprietary products still have the advantage in base hardware costs (e.g. case, motherboard, memory, CPU, etc.) compared to decently-specced commodity hardware. This is, of course, because the hardware specs of proprietary NAS devices are often pared to the bone compared to what you might want to spec for an open source NAS for yourself or for clients.
This is a very informative article! Thank you very much indeed.
Last edited by markrlondon; 29th December 2017 at 17:34.
Interesting comments, thanks. As I understand it, the downside of this case for NAS use is that it doesn't have built in externally-accessible hot-swappable bays. You can un-knobble the motherboard to support hot-swapping but you're stuck either with fiddling with cables or installing hot-swap caddies in the drive bays. (And I think it only has one externally accessible drive bay, is that right?). If I was willing to put up with internal fiddling when upgrading or replacing disks, I could easily enough use one of the all-too-many many decent cases I have lying around in my home but I really want the convenience of externally-accessible hot-swap bays, as you get with proprietary NASs.
I think it would be an ideal firewall case and motherboard, although perhaps not quite if it was required to support a VPN endpoint.
An interesting, but entirely sensible, choice. I think there's a trade off between convenience and flexibility. For greatest convenience one can choose a proprietary NAS. For a good mix of convenience and flexibility one can choose open source NAS software running on commodity hardware. Or for greatest flexibility one can choose a suitable general purpose OS running on commodity hardware. The level of convenience in the last option there depends on what suits you and, for you, it clearly does what you need.
For my use case (and for the use cases of many of my clients), I feel that maintainability is important. This need is answered by proprietary NASs such as Thecus, Qnap, Synology, Netgear and so on, and also nowadays by open source NAS software running on commodity hardware. However, once you start to roll your own on top of a 'bare' OS then I think maintainability (including by third parties) becomes potentially much harder.
Horses for courses, of course. :-)
Yes indeed, hence my interest in ATX/ITX cases that have externally-accessible hot-swap bays. That way I can configure the hardware exactly as I like.
Very nice indeed! You point out a key issue that many people overlook and that is that the network configuration/hardware must be able to support the NAS properly. Having a very cool NAS that is hampered by a slow network means that the benefits will fail to be realised.
Of course, getting clients to pay for the upgrades necessary for their vision of how they want things is easier said than done. ;-)
I have recently had my head turned by the idea of 10GbE over Cat7 copper but the adapter costs are still too high for my liking.
Last edited by markrlondon; 28th December 2017 at 12:53.
Re N54L
It does in fact have 4 hot-swappable bays. Access is from the front. Unlock the door and the 4 drives are facing you, and can be popped in and out individually as necessary. It is a very nicely designed professional unit and I can see why, prior to HP intentionally ruining the firmware, it posed a threat to their more expensive offerings. I sleep about 2m away from that AV cupboard and cannot hear a thing.it doesn't have built in externally-accessible hot-swappable bays.
I originally built it to act as a bit-rot proof archive for my digital photos and ripped music, both of which were beginning to show bit-rot symptoms and ZFS is ideal for this. I'm fine with unix command line stuff having obtained my first unix-based server at home around 1985, but for anyone who had a more normal childhood, a Synology NAS, online backup service or some other commercially supported NAS build is likely less worry. If you need protection from bit-rot, be careful about the memory choices (use ECC) and yes, 10Gb looks appealing right up until you price the adapters and switches...
Ah, thank you. Useful to know.
I’ve got one these microservers and never really made much use of it, I had whs installed on it initially and then windows 7 but ended up getting a nas which i do use.
Might revisit the microserver to see what I can do with it.
Cool. Firewall (if you need it), BitTorrent client, personal cloud server?
pfSense if you are going to use it as a firewall :)
https://www.pfsense.org
Or Opnsense.
Whilst I greatly respect the achievements of pfSense, I dislike the way it is going in terms of being tied to Netgate's hardware. Opnsense seems to retain the mindset that originally attracted me to pfSense.
Do you use an online off-site backup service or something more bespoke? I like to be in control of my data so retain a set of mirror drives in my secret underground lair.
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