Building Orion
A file server that houses my photos
I take my media storage and it’s accompanying workflow quite seriously. I’m always on the lookout for tools and storage techniques that will make my media management easier in the long run.
For a few years, my storage has been reliant on a Western Digital My Book Raid attached via USB3 to my Mac. This raid drive was backing up daily to another WD drive, an 8TB My Book single drive.
But in October of 2020 my raid drive finally bit the bullet. I booted it up one morning only to be greeted by the red error LED, indicating that something was wrong with it.
Had I not backed this raid drive, I would have lost every photo I ever took since starting out with photography. That’s around 56000 photos for the past 5 years.
Before we move forward, let me elaborate on some tech jargon:
Direct Attached Storage, or DAS, is a hard drive or SSD you plug directly to your computer via USB or Thunderbolt. These drives can be a single drive or an array of drives in whatever RAID combination suits the user.
A Network Attached Storage, or NAS, is, as the name implies, storage attached via your computer network — youconnect to the NAS via WiFi or ethernet.
NAS boxes are a little more flexible since they are computers in of themselves, meaning it can run tasks, like cloud backups, on its own without needing to be attached to your primary computer.
I planned to put up another storage to replace my failed drive, but this time I wanted take advantage of the flexibility of NAS boxes. I wasn’t sure if I wanted an off the shelf product from brands like Synology or Terra Master, or build the server myself from pc components.
Unfortunately, moving and settling back in Tacloban took the forefront of my priorities — my NAS project fell to the wayside for a few months. I was running all my photos from the backup 8TB drive and nothing else during these months.
Yes, I could have uploaded my backup drive to a cloud service like Backblaze, but it would have taken ages given I was running on an old 2MBit connection here in Tacloban.
In February, I restarted this project since minor improvements were being made to the house. I took this opportunity to wire CAT6 all around and put up a network shelf. Luckily, fiber was also finally attached to our home, increasing my internet bandwidth to around 200Mbit.
The Build
This was a budget NAS build. I was aiming to hit a Php30K ceiling or lower including drives just so I could justify not getting a Synology. Most 4–5 bay Synology starts at around Php20K excluding the cost of drives.
I found old PC components from a hackintosh build I had abandoned: a Gigabyte H61M mATX board and an 8GB Team Elite ram.
I needed a CPU, a CPU cooler, a case, a power supply, and NAS drives to round this build up.
CPU
Running a search through TipidPC yielded a Core i3 2120 for Php500 + Php200 shipping from Manila to Tacloban. Php700 for a 2 core 4 thread processor is not bad.
PSU
I’ve always gone for modular PSU for computers I’ve built in the past; they were just easier to work and cable manage with.
Unfortunately, our local PC supplier in Tacloban do not stock such specialty components. Entry level modular PSU also were twice the cost of non-modular units. This would blow my budget, so I resorted to a 550W Gigabyte 80+ bronze non-modular PSU.
Case
There are several NAS specific pc cases out there, but most look like crap. On the other end of the spectrum are tower pc cases. I was surprised to see that most pc cases today no longer have a multitude of 3.5" drive bays. A nod to how nVME storage has taken a foothold on pc storage.
This server would be sitting in my home office/studio, so it at least had to look half decent, and not have multiple rgb lights spitting out from every crevice of the computer
Fractal Design’s Define R5 with it’s multiple 3.5" drive bays would have been the perfect case, but I couldn’t find it in marketplaces or even in online retailers.
In the end I settled for a very bland non-windowed Fractal Design Core 3500 with 4 3.5" bays. Bland is good for this build instead of flashy gaming pc cases.
Drives
My Lightroom catalog housed 4.3TB of raw images. But upon auditing it, I saw I could trim it down to 2TB by removing similar photos or rejects. So I did.
2TB was my baseline then. I wanted a little headroom so I wouldn’t run out of space for a few years, and doing a little math with the number of shoots I was doing on average, I’ll probably eat around a terabyte of storage per year.
I went with 4 x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf. With a 1 disk parity, I should have 12TB of available storage when this build is completed.
Back in March, online retailers were running out of stock for Ironwolf drives. I managed to grab hold of 2 drives but had to wait for restocks.
The remaining 2 drives I needed were finally available around mid-April.
Cooler
I admit I cheaped out on this component. It’s just some cheapo generic cooler I bought for P400 pesos at the local pc supplier (thanks Joebz)
Boot
TrueNAS, formerly FreeNAS, is what I installed on this box. TrueNAS is a full-fledged operating system that is catered to running storage servers from simple DIY boxes like mine, all the way enterprise applications.
Installation was fairly straight forward and quick. I used a spare SSD lying around as my boot drive.
Reliability
TrueNAS and the underlying file system, ZFS, is very reliable according to storage experts; I’ll their word for it.
As of writing Orion has been running for more than a month now with zero hiccups on the operation part. There were several instances where power was cutoff from the main line, but that’s beyond my control. I did hook Orion up to a cheap UPS for surge and battery backups.
Workflow
Ok the fun part. My new photo storage workflow involves ingesting images on the Mac and directly storing those to Orion via the network.
I then pick out my selects, flag, and star-rate them:
1 star for Ok photos 2 star for social media-possible photos 3 star for Off the charts photos 4 star for print worthy photos
Photos that arent flagged will be considered rejects and will be deleted a week after ingestion
My mac has a terabyte SSD attached to it. This SSD houses smart previews of the raw files that are then housed within Orion. So, technically, even if Orion isn’t online, I could still do photo processing on my photos.
I could also take my mac and this SSD with me if I wanted to say work at a cafe. Well I could if Covid had not come to rain on us all.
My local network is only gigabit, but so far I’ve not noticed any performance issues. I’m sure I’ll saturate this bandwidth when I start storing videos in Orion and retrieving those on the fly.
Further, Orion is backed up every midnight to Backblaze B2. This runs automatically without me doing anything. I just occasionally check logs
Further Improvements
I’m still planning on a few upgrades to my storage workflow.
For one, I need to upgrade my network to 10 gigabit just to prepare myself for the increased load once I start doing a lot more video projects.
I’m also eyeing on getting a secondary storage server so I could back up Orion locally instead of just relying on cloud backups. I might call this server Gemini, as Gemini, the constellation, sits just beside Orion in the night sky. Perfect for how these two servers will sit in my home office/studio.
