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Building a NAS

jro.io

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Re: Building a NAS

#51

Post by StillBored »

barrkel wrote: post #22

I have a 36T NAS (26T usable raidz2), built using the Norco 4224 chassis. The backplane / drive trays that it comes with aren't 100% reliable, so I would recommend trying to get a SuperMicro chassis instead. I keep mine in the attic to keep the noise down. Mine runs fine on an old Q6600 with 4G of RAM. I'm not trying to do anything silly, like enabling dedupe, so it's not a problem. I'm running ZFS on Linux, again, n…

Are you backing up all 36T to crashplan?

I've been using crashplan on my NAS for a few years now, but I feel bad and only really backup critical stuff. (aka its just a few TB) rather than the full 50T+ on the NAS.

Re: Building a NAS

#52

Post by paulannesley »

AtticusTheGreat wrote: post #40
johnthomas00 wrote: post #35

System is probably good for 3 or 4 years, right? If your cost of funds is 6%, that works out to: 3 years: $177/month 4 years: $136/month Add $20/month for electricity: 3 years: $197/month 4 years: $156/month Could that rent respectable enough device(s) in the cloud?

Getting 60TB of usable space in the cloud is pretty expensive. Honestly I have no idea why he needs so much space, but if he does need it all, he probably didn't make out too badly. One of the main benefits of the cloud, though, is that you only pay for what you use, and he has to over-provision from the beginning, so let's consider that. So he's currently using about 10TB of 60TB of usable space. If he uses Amazon S…

> So he's currently using about 10TB of 60TB of usable space.

Other way around; he's using ~50TB of ~60TB with ~10TB free.

Re: Building a NAS

#53

Post by loeg »

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 Also it's quite outdated at this moment and requires using "hardware raid" (implemented in software proprietary driver) for optimal cooling, it's awesome machine and I didn't found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 have a previous generation N40L and highly recommend this line of products for people who can get away with 4 or fewer disks. It's well-designed and a solid product. The loudest component is the HDDs, followed by a case fan that occasionally acts up. The CPU is pretty slow at this point but I only ask it to do RAID10, not RAID5 or ZFS.

Re: Building a NAS

#54

Post by tracker1 »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #29

Eh. Cool. To much work. I just bought a FreeNAS Mini because I am lazy. But this very cool.

been thinking of DIYing a freenas mini xl.. can save about $500 by building with the same MB, but don't like the case options.. not sure what case iXSystems uses, or where they get it (probably custom)... but with the same MB and an 8-drive itx case, came out around $900, but concerned about the clock/brick issue with that CPU.

Re: Building a NAS

#55

Post by baronseng »

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…

you can always upgrade the cpu if you find the performance lagging.

Re: Building a NAS

#56

Post by linsomniac »

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…

Oddly enough, I had gotten these drives originally a couple years ago to go in a 1U Supermicro "twin" machine, with 8 drive bays split across two physical machines in a 1U chassis. Then the cheap hosting for that fell through and they just sat in a box. Came across them while cleaning the garage and put them into service.

I think these are the Toshiba drives. Seems like 2TB is still as big as you can go on laptop form factor spinning drives.

Re: Building a NAS

#57

Post by melp »

thomasjudge wrote: post #24

What's your cpu utilization like? Xeon E5-1630 seems a little overkill

Oh, it's totally overkill, but I don't have any regrets. I have a couple VMs that can sit on a lot of CPU time when they're in active use.

Re: Building a NAS

#58

Post by melp »

StillBored wrote: post #50

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…

It'll saturate a 1Gb link, obviously. I've been eyeing 10Gb configurations for a while, that will be my next upgrade. I'd really like to stick with copper so I can wire the whole house for 10Gb and have some super fast X11 nodes, but we'll see.

Re: Building a NAS

#59

Post by melp »

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.

(I meant to reply to you several hours ago, but HN wasn't letting me post comments for some reason...)

I've got rclone set up to encrypt and upload everything to ACD. There's a section at the bottom of the article that goes into some depth on this and some other backup strategies I've tried in the past (including CrashPlan, Backblaze, and Zoolz, all of which are awful). Check http://jro.io/nas#rclone . I never considered building a second NAS, it does seem pretty stupid, even for an enterprise setup. The whole idea is to get the data off-site.

As a side note, some of the so-called "FreeNAS people" can tend to blindly parrot a given general guideline without really understanding the reasoning behind it or why it might be perfectly valid in certain situations to disregard it. For instance, ask them about bhyve and I promise you'll get at least one response along the lines of "bhyve isn't officially supported in FreeNAS so you shouldn't use it under any circumstances, period."

Re: Building a NAS

#60

Post by melp »

secabeen wrote: post #47
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.

I'm glad you think so. I also found it was extremely difficult to find a thorough explanation of the types of overhead I described, so I wanted to get it all together in one place. Working through it while writing it also helped me understand it much better... it's a pretty abstract concept, especially when you factor in compression, etc.
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