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A modular, extensible DIY NAS

blog.georgovassilis.com

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Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#11

Post by julianwachholz »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #4

> I hear and read conflicting testimonies about ZFS which supposedly handles data corruption better and will give it a try at some point. For now, I use md5sum to create and verify checksums of my backup .tar.gz archives and parchive to create error recovery files. I’ve written about parchive before and remain to this day a dedicated fan. I’m very surprised you went through the trouble of building such an amazing NAS…

It definitely sounds overwhelming at first but once you get the gist of it it is quite easy to manage. I even somehow managed to migrate my FreeBSD pool to OpenZFS without any major hurdles.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#14

Post by theshrike79 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #7
shock wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can't easily change the size of the disks one at a time. How would you migrate from 4 x 4TB to 4 x 6TB disks by buying one disk at a time?

You replace each disk in turn, then grow the pool, right? You don't get the increased capacity until you're done, but still workable.

Workable, but not the point.

This is why I picked Synology as my nas. The Synology Hybrid Raid system let me just shove all my extra drives in the 4 bay NAS and still have parity protection.

Then I just slowly upgraded all drives to the current money/capacity optimum one or two at a time.

If I was made of money and could afford to upgrade all the drives in a pool in one go, I'd definitely go for ZFS too.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#15

Post by justoreply »

vbezhenar wrote: post #12

Please note that modern microserver called HP Microserver Gen10 plus. Also to make Gen8 almost silent, it's necessary to utilize built-in fake-raid (not very convenient with Linux).

I don't think it is true: I have an almost silent gen8 and I'm not using the built-in raid

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#16

Post by srle »

I’d urge anyone planning on building or buying a home server to try out Unraid. It’s not free or open source, but it’s only $130 iirc for the unlimited lifetime license and it Just Works^tm.

You install it on a USB stick, and the web interface has you up and running within like 2 minutes. The only hard rule is that your parity drives must be as large as or the same size as your data drives, but other than that you’re completely free to add or remove disks one, two, or ten at a time and all it takes is like 3 button clicks.

The community is large so there’s always someone to help should you run into trouble but in general the whole thing is pretty brainless. Click button, server work.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#17

Post by nine_k »

srle wrote: post #16

I’d urge anyone planning on building or buying a home server to try out Unraid. It’s not free or open source, but it’s only $130 iirc for the unlimited lifetime license and it Just Works^tm. You install it on a USB stick, and the web interface has you up and running within like 2 minutes. The only hard rule is that your parity drives must be as large as or the same size as your data drives, but other than that you’re…

The whole point of the exercise is to have a device completely under your control. Closed source need not apply for security / trust reasons.

Otherwise, e.g. Synology produces excellent devices, etc.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#18

Post by nine_k »

What is the point to run RAID6 on 4 drives, instead of RAID10? With both, half the space is usable, but with RAID10 read speed is twice as high, and resilvering is twice as fast.

RAID6 makes sense for 5-8 drives.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#19

Post by ggeorgovassilis »

justoreply wrote: post #15
vbezhenar wrote: post #12

Please note that modern microserver called HP Microserver Gen10 plus. Also to make Gen8 almost silent, it's necessary to utilize built-in fake-raid (not very convenient with Linux).

I don't think it is true: I have an almost silent gen8 and I'm not using the built-in raid

I think there is some spread of the fans (case and power supply) used in the gen8. My gen8 is ok for an office or a large room, but too loud for a study room. Unfortunately the fan has a special pinout and cannot be replaced easily with a quieter piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPn8tXP-ZjI

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#20

Post by ggeorgovassilis »

systemvoltage wrote: post #5

I don't understand why anyone would do this instead of running FreeNAS. It comes with everything you need including ZFS pools.

I have plenty of experience with Ubuntu and wanted to reuse that. Learning FreeNAS just for this one machine I am building seems like an overkill.
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