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DIY lowend USB3 NAS
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DIY lowend USB3 NAS

vishvish Member

Does anyone have any experience building a low cost nas using usb3? I’ve got an itch to build a massive one with like 15 drives and run mdadm raid6.

The reason I’m thinking usb3 is that I would want to use something low power and embedded like a NUC instead of a full motherboard.

Let me know what you guys think. How viable is it?

Comments

  • deankdeank Member, Troll
    edited May 2018

    usbdrives-lives-matter

    stoptheusbslavery

  • vishvish Member
    edited May 2018

    @deank said:
    usbdrives-lives-matter

    stoptheusbslavery

    Is the end nigh?

  • In my experience, USB (any of them, 3 included) tend to not be very "stable" over long periods of time and in my use cases of trying to get rsync running on them for large number of files/inodes it was a royal pain in the ...

    If you have small(er) number or large(r) files they tend to do better.

    Anyway despite many motherboards, different USB3 chipsets (and drivers) and different USB3 drives it was always somewhat fragile and unreliable for backups (even fsck's would be painful) that I just completely gave up on using them for anything substantial.

    If other's have better stories, it'll be gratifying to know that it's my fault.

    This was for a single drive.

    Now where you're going with mdadm/multiple drives on top of this... makes me want to (politely) smirk.

    Thanked by 1vish
  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    Here's my recent build:

    https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-xu4
    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0757YTWS7
    https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822179009R (x4)

    I setup the drives in RAID5 giving me 10.9TB of usable space. I installed vsftpd and samba on the eMMC card (running Ubuntu) and disabled the GUI. The write speeds top out at 110MB/s both locally and remote so it looks like the drives are the bottleneck. I've had it running for 7 days so far without any issues, although the CPU fan does spin up randomly for some reason. Today I added some velcro to hold the XU4 and USB cable in place. I powered it off to take some pictures of it.

    Here's a pic with the drive bays accessible:
    Here's a side view of it:

    Thanked by 3vish NanoG6 nullnothere
  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep
    edited May 2018

    Oh, and I forgot to mention that at full load it uses about 28 watts of power. My Synology uses 13.4 watts at full load with a single-core 800MHz CPU and 1 2TB hard drive so another 15 watts for an octa-core 2GHz CPU and 4x 4TB drives isn't that bad. :)

  • vishvish Member

    @KuJoe said:
    Oh, and I forgot to mention that at full load it uses about 28 watts of power. My Synology uses 13.4 watts at full load with a single-core 800MHz CPU and 1 2TB hard drive so another 15 watts for an octa-core 2GHz CPU and 4x 4TB drives isn't that bad. :)

    Perfect! Thanks for sharing. I think I’ll take the plunge and give it a try myself. I have an old ecs liva I’m going to use. It has 2gb ram and 30gb emmc which should be enough to run Debian. I’ve read that you can have as many as 127 usb devices so I’m going to see how it handles like 10 drives or so.

    Most nas boxes I see are 4 bay and the price goes really high for the 8bay. Haven’t seen anything bigger really. Looking at eBay I can buy 3tb hard drives for about $45 which is the cheapest per TB cost ($15).

  • vishvish Member

    Picture for reference

  • @KuJoe said:
    Here's my recent build:

    https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-xu4
    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0757YTWS7
    https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822179009R (x4)

    I setup the drives in RAID5 giving me 10.9TB of usable space. I installed vsftpd and samba on the eMMC card (running Ubuntu) and disabled the GUI. The write speeds top out at 110MB/s both locally and remote so it looks like the drives are the bottleneck. I've had it running for 7 days so far without any issues, although the CPU fan does spin up randomly for some reason. Today I added some velcro to hold the XU4 and USB cable in place. I powered it off to take some pictures of it.

    Here's a pic with the drive bays accessible:
    Here's a side view of it:

    The drives run very hot in those (I had one) and also if you start trying to do a lot of random read/writes it slows to a crawl (or at least it did when I tried it)

  • williewillie Member

    Using the Mediasonic SATA to USB enclosure is one thing, but my impression is that OP wanted to use a bunch of separate USB3 external drives and implement the NAS completely in software. That sounds much flakier and I think I'd go with the Mediasonic box or something like it.

  • A good idea is to first write to a folder on an ssd or an internal hdd and sync/write later to the USB in one go at specific intervals, using an internal program on the machine.

  • edited May 2018

    I'm on the similar track as @KuJoe, but infinitely more more hacky. I have a couple of the below linked boards on the way from China. Like @KuJoe, my plan is to connect to USB3 on my ODROID-XU4. I will use an existing power supply from my Dell Poweredge 2950 controlled (power on/off) by I/O on the ODROID-XU4 to supply the drives. Not sure how I plan to mount drives yet, but simple acrylic similar to the below linked enclosure. Knowing how hacky this will be, it's probably going to be cardbox box with slots cut out.

    https://www.aliexpress.com/item/USB-3-0-to-Dual-SATA-Adapter-Card-for-2-5-or-3-5inch-HDD-SSD/32763774540.html

    https://www.aliexpress.com/item/NEW-ARRIVALS-Transparent-hard-disk-extension-rack-3-5inch-Desktop-Computer-external-hard-drives-HDD-hard/32841319470.html

    Edit: Just remembered I have a picopsu at home collecting dust. I could use that to power the drives too to make it less components.

    Edit #2 : I wish I could take credit for the idea for this hackjob NAS, but I first saw it on Reddit.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7w68tx/100_diy_8_bay_uaspusb3_gbe_nas/

    Thanked by 2vimalware vish
  • I have this little encosure working on my nas, working with 4 * 2TB drives:

    Works pretty well and it does the raid on it's own.
    I picked one up on sth like craigslist for cheap ($35).

  • @KuJoe - thanks for sharing this. Looks very neat.

    I'm very curious to know how it performs over time and especially when used as a backup target for a relatively large (inode/files) rsync. Also, since you do have eSATA why not use that instead (bandwidth wise comparable to USB3 I suppose).

    Also, how quiet is it?

    At a price point of $50-100, I'm very tempted to instead use a "conventional" low end desktop type of cabinet with a low powered CPU (like an older generation Pentium) which is still way more powerful (with lots of bells and whistles etc.) and gives me the full flexibility of 4-6 drives. It may not be as power efficient as these kinds of setups but I think it's still in the sub 50W ball park. I can of course hide it away somewhere to get rid of the ugliness and possible fan/ambient noise.

    I'm eager to know @vish and @rajprakash's experiences with these kinds of setups.

  • lemonlemon Member
    edited May 2018

    @willie said:
    Using the Mediasonic SATA to USB enclosure is one thing, but my impression is that OP wanted to use a bunch of separate USB3 external drives and implement the NAS completely in software. That sounds much flakier and I think I'd go with the Mediasonic box or something like it.

    can't complain

    Model Family: Western Digital Elements / My Passport (USB, AF)

    9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 089 089 000 Old_age Always - 8639

    getting round about 300-400mbit/s, the drive is attached to my R7000

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    nullnothere said: Also, since you do have eSATA why not use that instead (bandwidth wise comparable to USB3 I suppose).

    eSATA isn't an option on the XU4. :(

    nullnothere said: Also, how quiet is it?

    It's silent except when the fan ramps up. I don't know why it does, but I'll be moving it to a closet soon so I'll never hear it again. :)

    Thanked by 1nullnothere
  • KuJoe said: It's silent except when the fan ramps up. I don't know why it does, but I'll be moving it to a closet soon so I'll never hear it again. :)

    I replaced the fan with the big blue heatsink from HardKernel, silent and doesn't get very hot for normal operations.

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    @rajprakash said:

    KuJoe said: It's silent except when the fan ramps up. I don't know why it does, but I'll be moving it to a closet soon so I'll never hear it again. :)

    I replaced the fan with the big blue heatsink from HardKernel, silent and doesn't get very hot for normal operations.

    They sell a XU4Q which is identical to the XU4 except they swap the fan with a heatsink. Same price and temps are roughly the same from what I've read. https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-xu4q

  • lemonlemon Member

    @KuJoe said:

    @rajprakash said:

    KuJoe said: It's silent except when the fan ramps up. I don't know why it does, but I'll be moving it to a closet soon so I'll never hear it again. :)

    I replaced the fan with the big blue heatsink from HardKernel, silent and doesn't get very hot for normal operations.

    They sell a XU4Q which is identical to the XU4 except they swap the fan with a heatsink. Same price and temps are roughly the same from what I've read. https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-xu4q

    Well, you'll get less power out of it, but therefore it's silent.

    https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-xu4/hardware/benchmark_xu4_xu4q

  • vishvish Member

    @willie said:
    Using the Mediasonic SATA to USB enclosure is one thing, but my impression is that OP wanted to use a bunch of separate USB3 external drives and implement the NAS completely in software. That sounds much flakier and I think I'd go with the Mediasonic box or something like it.

    The box is definitely the way to go if you’re not budget constrained. Much more clean solution and probably more stable as well.

    With that said, I found these $30 hard drive racks: http://www.microcenter.com/product/290245/HDDRACK5_5-Bay_Hard_Drive_Rack

    I’m going to get a few of those and use a spare power supply I have lying around. I’ve ordered some 3TB hard drives from eBay along with SATA to usb3 adapters from here: https://ebay.com/itm/USB-3-0-to-ESATA-External-SATA-5Gbps-Convertor-Adapter-for-2-5-3-5inch-HDD/222659427566

    I’m going to pair that with some 7port usb3 hubs I have and see if I assemble a mdadm raid6 array using the liva.

    I’ll post more as I get the parts. Thank you guys for sharing your experiences!

  • teamaccteamacc Member
    edited May 2018

    Be aware that most arm boards are 32 bit (i know the xu4 is), and hence cannot create partitions over 16TB. (at least on ext4)

    Lost a ton of linux isos that way myself.

    Thanked by 1vish
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