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Building a NAS

jro.io

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Re: Building a NAS

#61

Post by melp »

no_protocol wrote: post #14
melp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Did you consider a low power NAS approach? Spending somewhere around $20 per month on electricity for a home server seems like a lot to me. Maybe if it was hosting a handful of VMs for various purposes, but I suppose you don't want to run a NAS as a VM?

Nope, never considered low power. I really didn't want a CPU bottleneck when I move to 10Gb network interface. Running a NAS in a VM (at least FreeNAS) is highly discouraged, so I never considered that. I do, however, run several VMs on the NAS itself, which help to justify the overkill hardware I used.

Re: Building a NAS

#63

Post by melp »

abusque wrote: post #23
opk wrote: post #17

I like the creative use of what appears to be an Ikea table for a rack.

That's actually a fairly common setup, known as a LackRack [0], although this one seems to be a different size/model, but maybe that's my eyes playing tricks on me. Edit: actually now that I look back at it I'm almost positive this is the deeper lack "coffee table". [0] https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack

Enterprise Edition, baby! It's an official variant.

By the way, if anyone is considering deploying their own LackRack, I would highly recommend reading the installation section in the OP. It's got some quirks that are worth considering before you dive in.

Re: Building a NAS

#64

Post by melp »

Bedon292 wrote: post #26
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.

I already have a FreeNAS system, but I have been thinking about upgrading a few parts, like the chassis. Right now it sits in a cheap Tower, and doesn't have enough drive slots for my liking. So this is a really interesting guide.

I'm glad to hear it! I've had a ton of fun working on it, but just know that FreeNAS is a slippery and expensive slope!

Re: Building a NAS

#65

Post by melp »

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 really don't want to go over ethernet (and I'm assuming fiber is out of the question, too), there aren't really any great methods to automate this process. If you don't want to pull drives and put your data at risk, you might be able to add a third drive to the mirror, let it replicate, then disconnect it and plug it into the second system. If you're on FreeNAS, check out this section for guidelines on how to add an extra drive to the array: http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/storage.html#replacing-drives-to...

...but really, you should figure out a way to go over ethernet. Even if it takes a really long time, it'll be soooo much easier to have everything automated. You also don't have to risk pulling drives, etc...

Re: Building a NAS

#66

Post by melp »

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?

BackBlaze B2 is probably the lowest price S3-like cloud provider and for 50TB (my current dataset size), it would be ~$250/mo: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

Granted I didn't do this math before I dropped a few stacks on hardware. I really wanted to build it, configure it, play with it, etc. It's been a really fun project for me, and I've got a bunch of other stuff I want to do with it in the next few years (10GbE, X11 nodes, set up dedupe, etc).

Re: Building a NAS

#67

Post by melp »

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…

36T to CrashPlan sits on 36GB of RAM at all times... screw that. rclone never uses more than ~2GB to manage my whole 50TB dataset.

edit: Also, I'm using a SuperMicro chassis, not a Norco. I've got a section where I go into why I went with SuperMicro.

Re: Building a NAS

#68

Post by JustSomeNobody »

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?

Could the "cloud" keep up speed-wise? Your calculations should include the added cost of gigabit internet to even come close.

Re: Building a NAS

#70

Post by melp »

x0x0 wrote: post #69
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.

Your crab photo is amazing http://jro.io/photos/wildlife/

Hah, thanks. Galapagos is an amazing spot for wildlife photography.
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