21–30 of 113 posts
The problem with extensibility here is the fact that the enclosure is limited to four drives. Growing the capacity is quite hard but probably necessary considering the RAID 6 only gives you two HDDs worth of usable storage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> 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…
The next thing I will try out is dm-integrity.
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
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.
With RAID10, if the 'wrong' two disks fail, the array will go offline.
With RAID6, any two disks can fail and the array will still be online.
EDIT: The author has also demonstrated that they've gone through various growth permutations over the years. 4 disk RAID6 under md-raid has a supported growth mechanism, allowing you to add additional disks and have it restripe data automagically for you. It's not a good idea as far as performance is concerned, but for a home use nas that is primarily intended for streaming media, it's not a major issue, and enables you to grow to your heart's content (even if it is a bad idea, as I successfully proved growing from 4 disks to 16 over a few years, before respinning as multiple 6-disk arrays)
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.
The testing is focused on ZFS but, quoting from the conclusion: If you're looking for raw, unbridled performance it's hard to argue against a properly-tuned pool of ZFS mirrors. RAID10 is the fastest per-disk conventional RAID topology in all metrics, and ZFS mirrors beat it resoundingly—sometimes by an order of magnitude—in every category tested, with the sole exception of 4KiB uncached reads.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/zfs-versus-raid-eigh...
While I'm quite new to the DIY NAS, I have been running a FreeNAS instance for about a year and finally decided to switch to Ansible-NAS[1] about 6 months ago. It has all the features I'd want and seamlessly supports ZFS as my filesystem without standing in the way (since it's all just Ansible playbooks) [1] https://davidstephens.uk/ansible-nas/
I don't understand why anyone would do this instead of running FreeNAS. It comes with everything you need including ZFS pools.
I don't understand why anyone would do this instead of running FreeNAS. It comes with everything you need including ZFS pools.
> 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…
Thanks. I haven't tried ZFS so far for historical reasons: the post describes the latest evolution of my NAS; in fact, there were several hardware versions before with the hard disks being transplanted (and later upgraded) from the previous to the next. The filesystem structures are over a decade old, having been upgraded from ext2 to ext3 and now ext4. The next thing I will try out is dm-integrity.