A modular, extensible DIY NAS • Hacker News Board

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#41

Post by oarsinsync » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:43 AM UTC

electricant wrote: post #26

nine_k wrote: post #18

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.

Actually, according to recent testing by ArsTechinca [0] performance with RAID the topic is more complicated. 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…

> it's hard to argue against a properly-tuned pool of ZFS mirrors ... ZFS mirrors beat it resoundingly

Emphasis on 'properly-tuned'. This doesn't hold as true as the OP states for the defaults (which is what the majority of home users will be using)

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#42

Post by oarsinsync » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:45 AM UTC

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.

Better range of hardware support in Linux than FreeBSD.

Also note that the FreeBSD implementation of ZFS has been replaced and ported from OpenZFS (formerly ZFSonLinux).

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#43

Post by miahi » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 9:11 AM UTC

anilakar wrote: post #36

I've relied on hardware RAID over one hardware failure, for the first and last time. We were running some services on a stack of older Dell servers with mostly identical hardware. The RAID controller and mainboard on one of them let the magic smoke out. We (a sysadmin team of three) promptly decided to move the RAID array to another unused server in the stack in order to avoid a lengthy reinstall and manual restoring…

This is the reason I now use a 3rd party RAID controller on my HP Microserver Gen 8 - I have 3 RAID cards with the same hardware and firmware, and tested that the RAID config can be imported from one to the other.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#44

Post by ragnak » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 9:35 AM UTC

nsomaru wrote: post #35

ragnak wrote: post #32

A NAS seems like a nice way to consolidate my photoalbums and have redundancy in terms of physical storage. But that whole cloud thingy is something I don't need, heck, I don't want! I would say that a good router is the way to go and I think I should replace the one my ISP has given me. Can anyone point me in the direction for a guide to a hardware router and appropriate firmware, so I can be sure to control what th…

Sounds like you’re looking for a router that supports OpenWRT

Thank you, I'll look into it.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#45

Post by m463 » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 10:29 AM UTC

anilakar wrote: post #36

I've relied on hardware RAID over one hardware failure, for the first and last time. We were running some services on a stack of older Dell servers with mostly identical hardware. The RAID controller and mainboard on one of them let the magic smoke out. We (a sysadmin team of three) promptly decided to move the RAID array to another unused server in the stack in order to avoid a lengthy reinstall and manual restoring…

I ran into the same (type of) problem years ago.

I think I had a raid card with two mirrored drives. Thing is when one drive failed, I couldn't just pull the data off because the remaining drive could only be accessed by that raid controller.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#46

Post by nix23 » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 10:59 AM UTC

Read "DIY NAS" and was thinking...sure a HP Mini and Freenas or pure FreeBSD or Xigmanas and what do i see, Ubuntu...but that's probably just because of the Bitcoin mining....with a Celeron... :)

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#47

Post by anilakar » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 11:03 AM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #38

anilakar wrote: post #36

I've relied on hardware RAID over one hardware failure, for the first and last time. We were running some services on a stack of older Dell servers with mostly identical hardware. The RAID controller and mainboard on one of them let the magic smoke out. We (a sysadmin team of three) promptly decided to move the RAID array to another unused server in the stack in order to avoid a lengthy reinstall and manual restoring…

> Moral of the story: If you are depending on certain hardware features, you need to have a cold spare available with identical hardware and firmware. If you cannot afford one, it's better to either use a software implementation, have a really good service contract with the vendor or just let a VM provider take care of your infrastructure. +1 for this. Hardware raid absolutely has its place, but if you expect to be a…

>Also, RAID is not a backup. RAID provides high(er) availability. You need to have backups still!

Absolutely true. In this case we underestimated the workload caused by the service tag and firmware version issues and the fact that the new controller wanted to check and rebuild the array, when the disks themselves should have been fine. In hindsight it might have been faster to reinstall the OS and services plus restore the backups.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#48

Post by nix23 » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 11:10 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #17

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.

>Synology produces excellent devices,

Sorry but had quite the opposite experience even with the professional lines. The only NAS i trust is a Server (at least HP mini server) and ZFS. Stuff like unraid is for Windows mindsets, i don't trust HW-Raid and i especially don't trust Closedsource Software BS for stuff like that, exceptions are Enterprise stuff like EVA's or NetApp and EMC.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#49

Post by lilSebastian » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #39

lilSebastian wrote: post #13

I'd love HP to release a Ryzen based MicroServer

Asus already has one (zen2) and Asrock is about to. I’d imagine HP is only a matter of time

Can you link to any or provide model names?

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#50

Post by Qwertious » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

What's the power use on this? I would have thought x86 is a terrible choice for a NAS, as it only does the one thing and you don't need much processing power to do it (and implicitly x86's advantage lays primarily in being 1: fast and 2: compatible with x86 binaries, not in being low-power).