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Building a NAS

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Re: Building a NAS

#121

Post by cat199 »

cm2187 wrote: post #104
viraptor wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the consumer for that kind of flow? It makes sense on switches, but for a single device, it would be hard to find a reason. We can do 4kUHD way under 1Gbps. We don't get over 1Gbps internet at home. We can't write that fast to any permanent medium. Even RAM will slowly start being a problem if the DDR4 bandwidth is only 6 time higher than 10GbE.

Consumers do buy Synology & Others NAS. Right now 1Gbps is the bottleneck for accessing a NAS.

This depends on the storage configuration & use case..

It can be a bottleneck for a NAS-

That said, depending on use case, the extra expense of 10GbE still might not be worth the expense..

Re: Building a NAS

#122

Post by melp »

ValentineC wrote: post #116
melp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> rclone never uses more than ~2GB to manage my whole 50TB dataset. How do you handle file versions with rclone?

I guess that's the downside. It only syncs the latest version of every file it syncs.

Re: Building a NAS

#123

Post by cat199 »

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…

Am on a similar raid1 setup -

For me, I have 2x extra drives and a USB caddy, and rsync the array onto the caddy automatically, keepping the unused drive offsite.

This does mean that the wear on the live array is higher than the offsite ones, and I have to have 4 drives total, but since RAID1 with a traditional filesystem doesn't provide integrity protection (e.g. bit errors on 1 drive can cause silent corruption), I don't have to worry about subtle raid rebuild issues gradually propagating through the entire raid set.

The 'cheaper' version would be to only have 1 offsite drive, but that means my data on the raid array is only protected from severe failures up to the last time I ran the sync.

Longer run, I'm looking at moving up to something with integrity protection, but since my server is OpenBSD (less storage configuration options), this means RAID5 which was only recently OK'd for rebuilds, and soft-raid5 rebuilds take forever on spinny drives - Will probably wait and upgrade to 4x SSD's 1st or get a hardware raid card (my data set is fairly small).

Another thought I had was to setup a raspberry PI at a friend/relative's place and have an Rsync run nightly to it, and offer same to them... but haven't gotten around to it.

Re: Building a NAS

#124

Post by melp »

cm2187 wrote: post #82

The problem with these NAS is noise. I see on the pictures that the NAS is just next to his desk. Even if you get a quiet chassis (rack servers tend to be noisy as hell, but synology chassis are pretty quiet), having 12+ disks running next to you is very noisy too. I am looking forward the time SSD will be cheap enough to be used for mass storage.

I have this system sitting next to me in my home office which I share with my wife. Both of us work from home full time and the server is quiet enough that she doesn't complain about it.

Re: Building a NAS

#125

Post by cat199 »

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…

> You still have to put the second NAS somewhere, preferably offsite to avoid the house-burns-down fail case.

Think pretty much the only viable solution for this for home users is to have a 'peering agreement' with a trusted friend where you each colo the others machine at your home.. however this can be tricky because you're sticking all of your sensitive stuff in someone elses house and trading some level of full network acess to each other - though I suppose trading access to some kind of encrypted rsync-like dumps or similar might work without some of those risks being too high

Re: Building a NAS

#126

Post by melp »

breakingcups wrote: post #102
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.

What is the noise level like? Could you comfortably keep this in the living room without aggravating a spouse or visitors?

Just replied to a similar comment below with: "I have this system sitting next to me in my home office which I share with my wife. Both of us work from home full time and the server is quiet enough that she doesn't complain about it."

One thing to consider is that I'm in the northeast US (philly) where the ambient temperature is generally lower than other places. I've also only had this server running through the colder months (built it in fall), so it may get noisy as the house gets warmer in summer. I would definitely not want this server in my bedroom or living room, but so far, it's been okay in my office.

edit: I should also point out that, regarding the server passing the "wife test", she tends to get hyper focused on whatever task she's working on, so background noise doesn't bother her as much as it does other people. YMMV!

Re: Building a NAS

#127

Post by melp »

davemtl wrote: post #115
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.

Thank you for shamelessly copying the steps in the Bhyve video I created. :-) You'll be pleased to know that in the 9.10 nightly train, the base OS has been upgraded to FreeBSD 11 and the GUI has a UI for Bhyve, also enables VGA consoles.

Hah, I have no shame m0nkey! They're great videos.

So the 9.10 FreeNAS GUI will have bhyve management stuff in it? Or did I misunderstand that?

Re: Building a NAS

#128

Post by cat199 »

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

Wow.. awesome!

I wish I'd have known/thought about that years ago when I bought a metal rack which i subsequently ditched due to space constraints.. though at that point I was young/stupid/wanting 'cool'/enough that I probably wouldn't have cared..

Re: Building a NAS

#129

Post by theWatcher37 »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #88
lewisl9029 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you like Google Drive, their Google Apps plan will give you unlimited storage for a slightly more expensive plan. One limitation I've met with Amazon Cloud Drive is a 50GB file size limit. Both of these support rclone which is what I use for backups anyways.

50GB size limit kills it for me :(

Re: Building a NAS

#130

Post by cm2187 »

cat199 wrote: post #121
cm2187 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers do buy Synology & Others NAS. Right now 1Gbps is the bottleneck for accessing a NAS.

This depends on the storage configuration & use case.. It can be a bottleneck for a NAS- That said, depending on use case, the extra expense of 10GbE still might not be worth the expense..

There are very few disks you can stick in a NAS that won't yield 100MB/s, particularly in RAID.
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