Tag: linux

I searched a long time for the right NAS, because it should need some things that important for me :

1. Terminal SSH
2. DNLA
3. 4 HDDs with 4TB
4. apache
5. very fast connection
6. encryption

And I choosed the ds415+ for 513€ because it seems the best solution for me.Because its have a very fast XOR(for RAID5) and AES(for encryption) performance, is based on Linux Kernel and seems one of the best NAS Systems on the market.After some days I got it and here it is:

Hardware

• INTEL Atom C2538(4×2.4GHz)
• 2 GB DDR31600 CL11
• 4GB internal store

Overview

RAM

Then I upgraded the RAM with a “Kingston 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Non-ECC CL11 SODIMM” for 70€, that is not really necessary but I need a big cache for my database.This is the ram usage just with some apps running:

Hard disk

I created a RAID5 with 4 WD40EFRX.One of them cost about 170€ that’s not cheap but for 4TB at this good quality it is okay.I chose the RAID5 over RAID10 because so i get the size of 3 disks and not only 2, the performance is more than the network can handle.

Here we see that volume1 has a size about 10.8T that’s very much space.

SNAS> df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0                  2.3G    727.5M      1.5G  32% /
/tmp                      3.9G    236.0K      3.9G   0% /tmp
/run                      3.9G      1.7M      3.9G   0% /run
/dev/shm                  3.9G         0      3.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/md2                 10.8T      1.2T      9.6T  11% /volume1

Here we get a little Benchmark about the Hard disk, we see reading is more than enough, and the most of the time i read from the disk.

SNAS> hdparm -Tt /dev/md2

/dev/md2:
 Timing cached reads:   2962 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1481.56 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 1018 MB in  3.01 seconds = 338.72 MB/sec

For more Information about Benchmarks see Benchmark Your System.

This is the Writing, we could see the network is the bottle neck, I use only one LAN Port because my main board cant handle more.here I moved a file via FTP to my NAS its only writing:

Its about 75MB/s what’s a good value is for a RAID5.

Webserver

I have the problem that every connect to my homepage lets my HDDs spin up, so I tried to mount a USB into the File system to host my Page and MySQL on it.

At first we need a USB stick and change the File system, make 2 Partitions.One of them for the database one for the Web page, I choose 1/3 to 2/3 of the Stick size.And its better if the USB supports USB 3.0, now we connect to our NAS via SSH and look what’s the name of our Stick:

df -h
/dev/sdq1                 7.4G    144.8M      6.8G   2% /volumeUSB1/usbshare1-1
/dev/sdq2                21.6G    171.9M     20.3G   1% /volumeUSB1/usbshare1-2

Before we make some changes shut down your word press, phpmyadmin and database !

Okay now we copy our web and mysql folder to our USB stick.Importand is to only move the mysql database and not the postgress because the postgress is needed in the start-up and your NAS would crash.

cp -r -p ./web/ /volumeUSB1/usbshare1-2/web
cp -r -p ./@database/mysql /volumeUSB1/usbshare1-1/@database/mysql

Now we make a copy about our Directory’s, if it crash we could move it back.

mv web web_BACKUP
mv @database/mysql @database/mysql_BACKUP

Okay now we need a folder to mount our new files from the stick.

mkdir web
mkdir @database/mysql

Now we could mount the Stick, its important to mount it after every reboot.

mount -o bind /volumeUSB1/usbshare1-2/web/ /volume1/web
mount -o bind /volumeUSB1/usbshare1-1/@database/mysql /volume1/@database/mysql

Now we could turn on our web services.If you use phpmyadmin and MariaDB it could be useful to take a look at phpMyAdmin and Mysql Cache tuning.

Noise

If you have it in a room where you work its no problem, if its completely silent you can hear it a little bit.I turned it on silent mode.

Power

The Power usage is between 12W and 40W.

Conclusion

All together its a very good NAS and I would buy it again.But if you look at a cheap solution for backup and web space look at Silent PC for 260€ it also need less power.