Budget Storage Server 2021! | 80TB NAS

what's going on guys my name is matt and for a while i very badly needed a new data storage solution see up until this point i've done what a lot of content creators do which is fill up my internal drives then either delete files or move them to an assortment of external drives this works okay but it makes it hard to track down certain files and there's no redundancy which isn't great going for something like an off-the-shelf nas can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars before you even begin to factor in the cost of drives hopping on a youtube you'll find people who claim to have built a high drive count system for only a few thousand dollars and then they proceed to pull out ten thousand dollars worth of drives provided to them from a manufacturer this is fine and all but i wanted to see what i could put together for much cheaper so say hello to my new 80 terabyte storage server that i put together all in for right around 1500 bucks it's got an 8 thread xeon cpu 16 gigs of ram 80 terabytes of raw capacity ssd cache and more now just a disclaimer i'm a huge server noob so don't take this as a guide and actually there is a bit of a glaring issue with the hardware selection in the system which i'll talk about later in the video so the idea for this server all started when i saw a craft computing video on a 1u 12 drive server that cost under 150 bucks this seemed like what i was looking for and i kept coming back to this video until i decided to track one of these down and purchase it going onto ebay i found a number of these chenbro nr12000 servers with various configurations after some deliberation i landed on purchasing this one for 120 with free shipping this server had pretty much everything i needed besides ram and drives i ordered this one in a week or so later a box landed on my doorstep opening it up i found the surprisingly compact system suspended in a bunch of close elf foam this made me super happy to see that it was so well packed pulling out of the box the only other thing i found was a power cable and pulling it out of the foam i was ready to open it up for the first time loosening this thumb screw right here allows the huge top panel to slide forward then be pulled off inside you can see around 40 percent of the space is taken up by the server components and then the whole other section contains mounting spots and cables for up to twelve three and a half inch drives in terms of core specs the cpu this came with is the intel xeon e3 1230 v2 this is a four core eight thread cpu running on the ivy bridge architecture the e3 1230v2 has a base and boost clock of 3.3 and 3.7 gigahertz respectively this is a bit overkill for my current use case but i may be able to take advantage of it in the future for stuff like virtual machines this cpu is being cooled by an all copper passive heatsink this little guy is surprisingly heavy for how small it is with no fans on the heatsink itself it means it gets all of its airflow from the 40 millimeter fans placed towards the middle of the case there's also this thin plastic shroud that ensures three of the fans blow directly onto the heatsink and ram the motherboard this system uses is on the lga 1155 platform and is made by a company called tie-in it has four ram slots a bunch of pcie slots which aren't that important because of the system's 1u form factor but would be good in a more standard thickness case the i o on this board is 4 usb 2 ports dual gigabit ethernet ports an ipmi port vga serial and a uid led button this isn't great for a normal system but for a server this selection of ports is fine the real feature of this board that makes it perfect for this use case is the 14 yes 14 built-in sata ports this allows all 12 of the main drives to plug directly into the motherboard leaving two more open for extra cash drives or even redundant os drives depending on the configuration you go with powering the system is a 400 watt 80 plus gold rated flex atx power supply this unit is purpose built for a server like this with tons of sata power connectors one downside of this server is that it doesn't have redundant psus but that's fine for me now there are 13 total sata power and data cables pre-run to each of the 12 drive slots and one to a two and a half inch slot for an os drive what's really nice is they're all labeled which is amazing for troubleshooting and finding a problem drive within the array this labeling can 100 percent be done in any system but having it pre-done saves a ton of time and for a noob like me it's extremely helpful in keeping a project like this from being overwhelming all these parts are in the 1u enclosure which is pretty compact considering how much hardware can fit in it with the server picked out and received i could start figuring out and ordering other parts for a system like this you ideally want ecc memory but unfortunately this doesn't support registered ecc memory because of this i hopped onto ebay looking for a ram kit that would fit my needs and budget what i ended up getting was four four gigabyte sticks of crucial unbuffered ddr3 ram running at 1066 megahertz these four sticks cost a total of around 43 dollars which is an okay deal for unbuffered ecc ram 16 gigabytes is an adequate amount especially for the configuration i ended up with and luckily they installed and worked flawlessly in this system with ram picked out all that was left to do is purchase drives i did a bunch of thinking and planning to get drives and was waiting for good deals on higher capacity drives but with the looming possibility of a drive shortage due to chia mining i eventually decided to pull the trigger on 10 8 terabyte external seagate drives see normally you would buy standalone drives but believe it or not it's cheaper to buy the external versions and take the drives out of them this practice is known as shucking and is very common within the data hoarding community again i originally wanted to get something like 12 or 14 terabyte drives but i couldn't find a good enough deal so again purchase 10 8 terabyte drives at an average of 125 each this totals to 1250 dollars spent on mechanical drives for the array i also purchased a 500 gigabyte sata ssd to be used as a cache drive this is the crucial mx500 which is a good quality sata drive and i'll be explaining more details about using it as a cache drive later in the video with all the drives in hand i could begin shucking opening up the packaging on one of these drives i found the drive itself some paperwork a usb cable and a power cable i started by taking each of the drives out of their packaging and plugging them in to ensure they powered on and reported normal functionality once this was done i could begin opening them up one thing to note is that taking the drives out of the casings does void the warranty but these drives are much cheaper than their standalone counterparts so you have to decide for yourself if the cost saving is worth it or not to get into these enclosures you need to start by wedging something super thin like a razor blade into the seam like this then you can wedge something slightly bigger into place and begin to pry up to release the clips it's very difficult and may be impossible for a normal consumer to open these without breaking any of the clips and i definitely left most of these with numerous broken ones with the top popped off i could then do a little prying to get the drive out then i could pull off these rubber shock mounts and unscrew these metal pegs with that done i could unpeel this metal foil flip it over remove this screw then remove this board this little board is just a saturday usb adapter and i may save these to use in the future with one drive done i then had to repeat the process nine more times and here's a little time lapse of me doing it [Music] so with all the drives out i was ready to mount them now when chucking external drives you never really know what you're gonna get most of the larger capacity seagate external drives use ironwolf nas or even exos drives which are super high quality and one of the reasons i originally wanted to go for the larger capacity ones inside of these eight terabyte external drives were 10 seagate barracuda compute ones these are model number st8000dm004 and i got these for about 30 less per drive compared to buying these standalone drives meaning i saved around 300 buying them as external ones this is when i came to a very important realization these are actually smr drives smr or shingle magnetic recording is an inferior and outdated design which is very unideal for certain use cases but with them all shucked i had to proceed with the build and in the end it worked out fine for my use case which i'll explain in a minute to mount these i needed a few things that didn't come with the case i needed these little rubber gaskets that i got off of amazon and some 632nd bolts that i got from my local hardware store the gasket slips over the bolt then one is secured into each of the four bottom mounting holes on the drive i installed four into each meaning 40 bolts and 40 gaskets total the first one was brought to mount number one this added data and power was plugged in it was lowered down and then slid back to secure all four gaskets into place with the first one done all i had to do was install the other nine drives one at a time into mounts two through ten with that completed the last component i had to install was the cash drive which is in mount 11 and currently not secured but i will probably mount it with some double-sided tape in the future with that done i need to decide what kind of os and file system i'd be using with this i originally debated between trunas core with a zfs raid z2 file system but because of the way zfs stripes data across the array my research shows that smr drives would not be good to use in that kind of setup this made the choice to use unraid much easier now unraid is paid software but it's ridiculously easy to set up and gives a good alternative to raid or zfs which are the more common options for a file server like this see instead of data striped across the array of drives each file is only stored on one drive and you set up parity drives for data protection this means accessing files only requires one drive to spin up making for a quieter more power efficient and less drive stress intensive setup while this does all sound great it comes with the caveat of having much less performance when compared to a raid 6 or zfs raid z2 setup with normal write speeds of around 30 megabytes per second it can be painfully slow to transfer files with that being said that's where the cache drive comes in when transferring files to the server they first go to the cache drive at a faster rate then at a later time say in the middle of the night you can use a mover script to transfer them automatically to the array for me this is great because it means a ton of archival storage that should be reliable and low maintenance but the slow speed means doing stuff like editing directly off the array isn't possible which again is fine with me setting up unraid is very simple and i actually followed a guide by juan m tech who did a great job of explaining the basics of how to set it up i'll go over the process briefly in this video but we'll link the tutorial in the description unraid actually is installed on a usb drive and then the os is loaded into ram anytime the system boots up all you really need is a usb drive that has a few gigabytes of capacity i actually ended up using this 64 gigabyte drive because it's the most compact one i own and may eventually clone it to a smaller capacity one it's important that it's physically compact because it will be permanently sticking out of the back of the server and the lower profile the better so to set the usb up i just downloaded the unraid usb flash creator opened it up named the server then installed it to the flash drive and this whole process took like two minutes i then plugged it into the server and booted into the bios the only monitor i have with vga is this dying one so please excuse the poor picture quality i set the boot priority to the usb drive then save changes and exited it booted to this window then automatically loaded in the unraid os it did an initial setup then provided an ip address to access the server remotely from any web browser connected to the same network i then went into my browser and typed in the ip address that was provided and was brought to this page the unrate version i need will be ninety dollars but i just started out with the trial to make sure i liked it i then proceeded to assign the first two drives as parity drives the other eight as part of the array and the ssds cache i then had to build the array and configure the parity drives which for 8 terabyte parity drives took around 16 hours this isn't ideal but it's pretty normal for the size of this drive then i formatted the drives in the array then set up a root password created a share folder that i will access over the network creating myself a user account that can read and write to the share and finally map the network share to my file explorer once that was done i had access to the full array once parody drives were taken into account along with the overstatement of size by drive manufacturers i was left with around 58 terabytes of capacity this amount of storage should last me a minimum of two years and likely at least three getting back to the drives used smr drives have their major downside in rewrite performance from my understanding so if you're constantly adding and deleting files to the server it's definitely not ideal but anything i put on the server will more than likely never be deleted which means this problem shouldn't affect me again if you're doing a project like this try and avoid smr drives and go for cmr instead all in all for around fifteen hundred dollars in hardware this 80 terabyte storage server is pretty sweet in my opinion but i'm very interested to hear your thoughts on it in the comments below i'm a server noob like i said before so if there's another way you think i should configure this or certain plugins or features i should enable let me know all the parts and resources mentioned in the video will be linked in the description if you guys have any questions i'll try and answer as many as i can so yeah guys i think this wraps this video up i hope you guys enjoyed it if you did make sure to give this video a thumbs up and consider subscribing and as always this is matt from tech by map signing out

Channel: Tech By Matt

Views: 1,161,970

Keywords: storage server, storage server build, diy storage server, nr12000, chenbro, server, nas, diy nas, 8tb, seatage, western digital, techbymatt, tech by matt, homelab, network attached storage, 2021, budget storage server, budget nas, cloud computing, amazon web services, storage, hard drive, hdd, ssd, unraid, zfs, raid, truenas, truenas core, best, ultimate, cheap nas, cheap storage server

Id: EIYUb2uptzM

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021