Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a NAS

jro.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 150 posts

Re: Building a NAS

#71

Post by pmiller2 »

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…

How much does it cost to build and run a system like that? What does "my pool wanders between 40 and 70% utilization" mean? I'm assuming you're not talking about free space, because you say you don't delete things.

Re: Building a NAS

#72

Post by PhantomGremlin »

Whenever I see one of these periodic postings of people using FreeNAS, and they come up on HN every few months, I'm always looking for the answer to IMO the most obvious, most basic question:

   Why FreeNAS; why not vanilla FreeBSD?
I've never seen a good, detailed answer to this. Mostly the response is along the lines of: "well, of course use FreeNAS, after all you're building a NAS!"

From what I can tell, FreeNAS offers a pretty GUI and some tuning on top of FreeBSD. Anything else?

Re: Building a NAS

#73

Post by dfinlay »

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.

Amazing setup and even better write up. It shames my tiny 2x 4tb setup.

My only suggestion would be to try out gaffer tape instead of the duct/masking tape combo. I started using it about a year ago, and haven't looked back. No residue and no dry flaking over time.

Re: Building a NAS

#74

Post by lucaspiller »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #72

Whenever I see one of these periodic postings of people using FreeNAS, and they come up on HN every few months, I'm always looking for the answer to IMO the most obvious, most basic question: Why FreeNAS; why not vanilla FreeBSD? I've never seen a good, detailed answer to this. Mostly the response is along the lines of: "well, of course use FreeNAS, after all you're building a NAS!" From what I can tell, FreeNAS offe…

I'd say that people recommend it because it's mostly just plug-and-play and works out of the box. You don't need to learn much about how RAID or ZFS works or understand every little detail about nix administration. If you follow the guide it's pretty hard to go wrong.

I however wanted to learn all the details when I set up my NAS, so went with Debian Jessie and BTRFS. I only use AFS and NFS, and I'm the only user, so don't need half the features FreeNAS provides. Graphs are pretty, but I can quickly get all the information I need via SSH.

Re: Building a NAS

#75

Post by melp »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #72

Whenever I see one of these periodic postings of people using FreeNAS, and they come up on HN every few months, I'm always looking for the answer to IMO the most obvious, most basic question: Why FreeNAS; why not vanilla FreeBSD? I've never seen a good, detailed answer to this. Mostly the response is along the lines of: "well, of course use FreeNAS, after all you're building a NAS!" From what I can tell, FreeNAS offe…

Because I've never done this before and I wanted a more manageable learning curve. I had very little *nix experience and zero bsd or zfs experience before I started this project. My next server will probably be vanilla bsd, but then again it might be freenas because it just makes the whole setup process easier.

Re: Building a NAS

#76

Post by myrandomcomment »

tracker1 wrote: post #54
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.

I am thinking of moving to their 8 bay system. The case is key. I will have a look at my case and see if I can find a brand.

Re: Building a NAS

#77

Post by fnj »

People always make such a big deal out of getting ashift "right". In actual fact, there is NEVER any valid excuse to make ashift any smaller than 12. It should default to 12. It is a scandal that it still defaults to 9. You aren't going to find a single hard drive in the world that you would ever use in ZFS, which does not have 4k sectors, papered over as fake 512 byte sectors in the interface.

Re: Building a NAS

#78

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

Wow, this is an amazingly detailed blog post. I only skimmed it, but since I'm in the process of setting up my own NAS I'll definitely have to revisit it and read slowly.

Is anyone here using FreeNAS Corral? I've been toying around with it for a few days, and its been a frustrating experience. My first sign that I should've avoided it was that trying to install 10.0.3 with UEFI just fails. With 9.10 they have a nice docs page with lots of details and info, but with Corral they just threw it all out. The web interface provides no help, and the cli just gives a brief sentence which is usually of little help. I can see the long-term potential in Corral, but right now it feels like a rushed out beta. Should I just install FreeNAS 9.10 instead, or is it worth sticking with Corral? Are there any other OSs that I should try out?

Since we're on the subject of home networks, what are people's thoughts on running FreeIPA and FreeRadius? I'm hoping to use it to setup a home VPN server, as well as provide a means of performing authN/authZ for multiple "personal cloud" applications. My goal is to reduce my reliance on cloud providers, since I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with their practices and the loss of privacy.

Re: Building a NAS

#79

Post by pmiller2 »

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…

Glacier is not a good primary backup. It's not designed for that. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921365

Re: Building a NAS

#80

Post by netzone »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #21
Teknoman117 wrote: post #7

Wow, I actually just got done building a home NAS for myself. As far as storage controllers, I managed to find myself a working SAS 9201-16i for $50 on eBay (16 port SAS card, only supports IT/HBA mode). Also got some cheap used 10 GbE cards off eBay as well for the link between my workstation and the NAS. Got a 4 port card for the NAS to turn it into a cheapo 10 GbE switch (OCe14104-U-TE with four SFP+ fiber optic t…

Wow 50TB for $60 per month... Amazon Drive sounds like an insanely great deal for me if it works the way I think it does, but the reason I haven't tried it yet is I honestly don't see them being able to keep storage space unlimited for very long, if it in fact competes in the same real-time sync'd storage space as the likes of Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc. Every such service that I've ever heard of that offer…

It's not real-time sync afaik, at least not when I used it in 2016, might have changed since though. You'd have to manually grab files you wanted to open/change and then manually update.
Post reply on HN