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Building a NAS

jro.io

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Re: Building a NAS

#41

Post by ValentineC »

linsomniac wrote: post #34

Oddly, I recently went the other direction. In the past I've built some storage servers similar to this, and 6 months ago I took 6x 2TB laptop drives in a 6 drive "mobile rack" that fits in one 5.24 bay in my desktop (IcyDock MB996SP-6SB). Loving it! Now, my storage needs are fairly modest in comparison to the author. I'm running with RAID-Z2 and at 44% capacity. I have this unit in my work workstation, at an externa…

> I took 6x 2TB laptop drives in a 6 drive "mobile rack" that fits in one 5.24 bay in my desktop (IcyDock MB996SP-6SB)

Thanks, I didn't realise these exist.

I've been wanting to create a DIY version of Synology's "slim" model line [1] for a while, but haven't been able to find an off-the-shelf enclosure that would fit my needs. Putting six drives in a 5.25" bay is a fantastic idea.

[1] https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS416slim

Re: Building a NAS

#42

Post by seltzered_ »

ValentineC wrote: post #41
linsomniac wrote: post #34

Oddly, I recently went the other direction. In the past I've built some storage servers similar to this, and 6 months ago I took 6x 2TB laptop drives in a 6 drive "mobile rack" that fits in one 5.24 bay in my desktop (IcyDock MB996SP-6SB). Loving it! Now, my storage needs are fairly modest in comparison to the author. I'm running with RAID-Z2 and at 44% capacity. I have this unit in my work workstation, at an externa…

> I took 6x 2TB laptop drives in a 6 drive "mobile rack" that fits in one 5.24 bay in my desktop (IcyDock MB996SP-6SB) Thanks, I didn't realise these exist. I've been wanting to create a DIY version of Synology's "slim" model line [1] for a while, but haven't been able to find an off-the-shelf enclosure that would fit my needs. Putting six drives in a 5.25" bay is a fantastic idea. [1] https://www.synology.com/en-glo…

Not quite as slim, but I recently put a super micro d-1520 motherboard in an old intel ss4200 case that's relatively compact (could theoretically put it in a 30l backpack) and it holds 4 desktop hard drives: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/another-x10sdv-...

Re: Building a NAS

#43

Post by secabeen »

vmarsy wrote: post #13
melp wrote: post #2

I originally posted this on reddit, but I'm happy to see it reposted elsewhere. Let me know if anyone has any questions.

That's a huge setup :) One questions I have regarding NAS is backups of the NAS itself. If I have a very simple NAS with 2 drives in Raid 1 (let's call it Drive A and B), and I want to make a physical backup of my NAS in a different location. How easy is it ? What is the best practice. Ideally you could just have a big rsync method that takes care of it, or rclone as described in the article, but what if you want to…

If you're using ZFS, the right thing to do is to attach drives C and D temporarily, create a second zpool on them, them use zfs send/receive to replicate snapshots from the primary drives to the backups. You can then export the zpool and move it to a different location.

Refreshing the backups is either done by putting the backups online at the remote location and syncing the deltas between the last snapshot and the current over the net, or by bringing the drives back to the primary, and sending the deltas.

The sanoid/syncoid toolset will help immensely with handing the necessary zfs snapshot and send/receive commands: https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid

Re: Building a NAS

#44

Post by secabeen »

jonathankoren wrote: post #37
mjevans wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is actually the cheapest way over time. If you're able to tag stuff you know you want to keep and it's a smaller set you could look in to something like Backblaze B2 (previously a featured story on HN); the storage costs are relatively moderate, but restoration from it will cost you. I haven't yet heard of any solution along the lines of "Rent a (large) NAS for a month" for those times that you're upgrading your…

You still have to put the second NAS somewhere, preferably offsite to avoid the house-burns-down fail case. Personally, I don't even know where I put this second NAS, since it would need power and bandwidth, unless you really wanted to sneakernet a NAS, which would work, but seems really weird. My home nas is small enough where I can reliably backup to some USB external drives and store in a drawer offsite. According…

I have a good friend on the other side of the hill in town. We cross-backup our NAS systems to each other.

Re: Building a NAS

#45

Post by seltzered_ »

jonathankoren wrote: post #12
melp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do a lot of high resolution photography and videography work. I've got about ~15 years of raw images and video files that I could probably go through and delete, but I'd rather keep them around so I can pretend that maybe some day, someone will be interested in looking at them. I look at it as a modern version of the boxes full of pictures and slides my parents and grandparents kept in their basement for decades an…

What's your backup strategy? My experience with the FreeNAS people was "build a second nas", but that always struck me as stupid for a home setup.

Its hackish (needs setting up bhyve/ubuntu vnc, don't bother with the plugin), but crashplan central can be used with freenas.

Re: Building a NAS

#46

Post by jimmcslim »

vbezhenar wrote: post #32

I own HP Microserver Gen8. It allows to use 4 disks, it's a real server (ECC memory, hardware watchdog, KVM over network and much more), it's extremely quiet and it costs $200 with Celeron processor. Also it's quite outdated at this moment and requires using "hardware raid" (implemented in software proprietary driver) for optimal cooling, it's awesome machine and I didn't found anything better yet. I only wish HP wou…

I'm still using one of the previous generation HP N54Ls. Great pieces of kit. The Gen8 was a slight step backwards in some ways insofar as loosing the standard 5.25" bay which was handy for installing 4-6 2.5" drives. Agree that HP should definitely keep evolving this, but seems like they aren't interested. Plus they have taken an actively hobbyist-unfriendly stance with regard to access to updated drivers now requiring a support agreement.

Re: Building a NAS

#47

Post by secabeen »

melp wrote: post #2

I originally posted this on reddit, but I'm happy to see it reposted elsewhere. Let me know if anyone has any questions.

Thanks for the really detailed ZFS allocation write up. I've recently been building ZFS storage systems on Ubuntu 16.04 (one in excess of 800TB), and I've poured over the various ashift/recordsize options and spreadsheets, but your description was quite useful in cementing my understanding of why the large recordsize is useful.

Re: Building a NAS

#48

Post by jimmcslim »

ValentineC wrote: post #41
linsomniac wrote: post #34

Oddly, I recently went the other direction. In the past I've built some storage servers similar to this, and 6 months ago I took 6x 2TB laptop drives in a 6 drive "mobile rack" that fits in one 5.24 bay in my desktop (IcyDock MB996SP-6SB). Loving it! Now, my storage needs are fairly modest in comparison to the author. I'm running with RAID-Z2 and at 44% capacity. I have this unit in my work workstation, at an externa…

> I took 6x 2TB laptop drives in a 6 drive "mobile rack" that fits in one 5.24 bay in my desktop (IcyDock MB996SP-6SB) Thanks, I didn't realise these exist. I've been wanting to create a DIY version of Synology's "slim" model line [1] for a while, but haven't been able to find an off-the-shelf enclosure that would fit my needs. Putting six drives in a 5.25" bay is a fantastic idea. [1] https://www.synology.com/en-glo…

You might want to check out Silverstone's DS280 case [1], a Mini-ITX case that supports 8x2.5" hot swappable drives.

[1] http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=668&area=en

Re: Building a NAS

#49

Post by StillBored »

melp wrote: post #6
justryry wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your power consumption like on this set up?

Sits at about 250W, goes up to ~300W when it's running a scrub or something.

I generally run linux on my NAS, but power consumption is always one of my big priorities for my home NAS. I also shoot for the lowest possible idle power. I don't care if it consumes 250W when I'm using it, only that when I'm not using it it better be just a few watts. That is why i traditionally use Atom (c2000) or ARM hardware. Combined with disk spindown (custom script), turning off everything not in use (extra network ports, etc) My idle power is ~25W. I've only got 12 disks but the big power draw right now is the marvell SATA chips on my motherboard, which don't have any kind of link power saving controls (that I've found yet). I've got another motherboard using a G4400 that idles closer to 12W (total system power), but doesn't have ECC or a BMC..

Anyway, I use a little script which monitors activity against my MD device (yah software RAID, another discussion) and sends full spindown commands to the drives. I've been experimenting with a full drive powerdown, and full port power down (different machine). If I weren't using the NAS as a DHCP/DDNS/etc server I would probably put it into S3 standby and then wake it on CIFS/NFS/RPC inbound.

I'm also using cheap x540 based 10G boards, which add about ~5W a port, but I turn them off on an idle timer and fail-over to a 1G port that I can't measure the power on.

Bottom line, a home NAS device isn't a server that needs to run 24-7. Its not hard to tweak stuff to pull the idle power way down. Given a long enough timer (say 1-2 hours) you will only notice the machine resume/spin up once a day when you initially sit down at your desktop.

Re: Building a NAS

#50

Post by StillBored »

You didn't say how fast it is?

That many drives, you should be able to saturate a good part of a 10Gb link. The difference for streaming read/write loads (like copying movies..) is night and day vs 1Gbit. That is assuming you've got enough CPU to run ZFS that fast. That is part of the reasons I stick to linux MD/xfs. Every time I try to use ZFS I run out of CPU or RAM. Also, given that I want low idle power means I'm not willing to throw enough hardware at it to make ZFS run well.

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