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Building a NAS

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Re: Building a NAS

#141

Post by fatal510 »

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…

> Getting 60TB of usable space in the cloud is pretty expensive.

Amazon cloud drive is unlimited and 60$ a year.

Re: Building a NAS

#142

Post by dom0 »

glenneroo wrote: post #110
dom0 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm, what exactly is crashplan doing with all that memory?

I wonder if it's related to the memory "issue" with their client, where exceeding 1TB/1 million files, a manual edit of the .ini file to bump the JVM memory allocation is necessary. I remember reading somewhere that it has to do with CRC checksum calculation for all the files? I've had to change the setting multiple times (currently at 8GB for ~8TB/1 million files). https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Troubleshoot…

Hm, maybe give Borg a shot. For initial backups it's not exactly the fastest thing, though much better after that.

Re: Building a NAS

#143

Post by ValentineC »

hrez wrote: post #137
boredprogrammer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came across this product recently: https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1 which is seeking crowd funding at the moment. Personally I think they've made a mistake by going for 2.5" storage first with 3.5" coming later. Anyway, it sounds like it might be of interest to you?

I like the design and 2.5" choice. But if it doesn't support zfs it's no go for me. If you (abstract) are not concerned with bit rot you doing NAS wrong. Something like that running FreeNAS (w/o dedup) would be ideal for me.

> But if it doesn't support zfs it's no go for me. If you (abstract) are not concerned with bit rot you doing NAS wrong.

What are your thoughts about Btrfs?

Re: Building a NAS

#144

Post by ValentineC »

boredprogrammer wrote: post #91
ValentineC wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I came across this product recently: https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1 which is seeking crowd funding at the moment. Personally I think they've made a mistake by going for 2.5" storage first with 3.5" coming later. Anyway, it sounds like it might be of interest to you?

That looks really great if one's concerned about the FOSS nature of their storage. Thanks for the recommendation!

I'm not sure if an ARM chipset would do justice for a multi-disk NAS setup though (or if the GnuBee would support RAID5/6 — it does seem to, with LVM/mdadm). My experience with consumer ARM-based NASes was that they suffered on transfer speed. I ended up going with a 4th generation Intel Pentium chip on a mini-ITX board, which offered the best compromise between price, performance, and power consumption for my use case.

Re: Building a NAS

#145

Post by StillBored »

melp wrote: post #58
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.

BTW: I'm running 10GbaseT at my house, and every single foot of it is cheap cat5e. Its rock solid (yah I can monitor mangled packets drop rates on my switch). I've had a lot of people talk down copper 10G and tell me things like its not possible to use anything but cat6A or better. Which is a load of BS if your runs are well under the 200M that is possible with cat 6A. I think my switch actually says that that it supports runs of 45M on cat5E, which is probably still 2x the max run in my house.

Frankly, the asus XG-D2008 and a few Chinese x540 boards (~$100 for two ports)with cat5 cost less than some of the fancy home AP's and is well within the prices I paid for my first 1G hardware. Two workstations and a server should be less than $600.

Adding to this this, there is the Ubiquiti US-16-XG which also has a bunch of SFPs for under $600.

Re: Building a NAS

#146

Post by alphapapa »

melp wrote: post #136
alphapapa wrote: post #135

Incredibly comprehensive article. Thanks for sharing. First thing that jumps out at me, though: in the photos at the top, the UPS is on the floor. Get that UPS off the floor! When your house suffers minor flooding (burst pipe, overflowing toilet, leaky roof, etc), it will be sitting in it. You think it won't happen--but then it does, and if your electronics on the floor don't get damaged, you're lucky.

Good call... I'll prop it up on something soon. This is on the second floor of my house, so it's safe from flooding, but I'd hate to have spilled water kill my stuff.

> This is on the second floor of my house, so it's safe from flooding

Not if there's a toilet on the second floor. I speak from experience. :( Neighbor's upstairs toilet tank burst while she was at church. Couple hours later, it's raining inside my apartment and her whole place is ruined. I was very lucky that my computers didn't get ruined. 50-cent piece of plastic connecting the tank to the supply line caused thousands of dollars of damage.

Re: Building a NAS

#147

Post by koffiezet »

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…

CPU is never a real issue in my experience, even when using compression (lz4) on everything. I do run an 8-core machine, but it's only a Intel Avoton C2750 (ASRock C2750D4I is pretty cool motherboard board with 12 SATA ports built-in), but I do have 32Gb ECC RAM. 16 was probably enough, but I run other things on it in Docker (Plex media server etc). I installed a plain Ubuntu 16.04 with ZoL - and it has been rock-solid.

Re: Building a NAS

#148

Post by vbezhenar »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #119
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…

Why does it require using hardware raid for optimal cooling? I set up one of these recently using AHCI (disabling the hardware raid controller) with mdadm.

When you're using hardware raid, server is able to read HDD temperatures and adjusts fans accordingly. When you're using AHCI, server can't read HDD sensors and turns fans higher. I'm not sure why it's implemented this way, but you can easily check it via iLo web interface. For me it's 20% fan vs 6% fan and I can distinguish it, I can hear 20% fan at silent night, but 6% fan is really silent, so my wife can sleep well.

If you don't have those problems with noise, it doesn't matter (and I would recommend to avoid those "hardware" raids, I have much more trust with widely used open source solutions).

Re: Building a NAS

#149

Post by hrez »

ValentineC wrote: post #143
hrez wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the design and 2.5" choice. But if it doesn't support zfs it's no go for me. If you (abstract) are not concerned with bit rot you doing NAS wrong. Something like that running FreeNAS (w/o dedup) would be ideal for me.

> But if it doesn't support zfs it's no go for me. If you (abstract) are not concerned with bit rot you doing NAS wrong. What are your thoughts about Btrfs?

I trust zfs more but would use btrfs for personal storage provided backup strategy is solid :) I'd go with raid1/raid10 though.

Re: Building a NAS

#150

Post by linsomniac »

milcron wrote: post #94
boredprogrammer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came across this product recently: https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1 which is seeking crowd funding at the moment. Personally I think they've made a mistake by going for 2.5" storage first with 3.5" coming later. Anyway, it sounds like it might be of interest to you?

I agree. A 3.5" version of that is exactly what I need.

I've used the Supermicro enclosures that turn 3x 5.25 bays into 5 3.5" bays and been pretty happy with them. Something similar to the CSE-M35S. More recently (5 years ago now :-) I tried some 5 bay E-SATA enclosures so I wouldn't have to pack these Supermicro into the chassis, and the eSATA were nothing but trouble. Hopefully better these days.
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