51–60 of 113 posts
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).
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you link to any or provide model names?
Asus one is PN50. 4300U - 4800U Unsure about asrock. I think they maybe have pivoted to a non renoir cpu
The A500 is very nice, though in practice it needs a USB3 hub sitting next to it.
> 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…
However, do some include support for CRC? That would allow not only detecting, but also correcting bitrot. I assume that's what Raid6 does, albeit less granular than per file, and more aimed at recovering a full file than a few bits?
Can anyone point me to a FS that supports it, or to the reason it's not done?
As for ZFS, I think I'll keep avoiding it until it is mainlined. I don't really want to play that game.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Btrfs is on the kernel and just works.
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…
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).
Why? Because storing a single copy of your data on a single local RAID array doesn't protect you from disasters such as fire, theft, accidental fluid spills, small children/pets, a power surge after a lightning strike, flooding, and so on. Basically, a lot of the stuff you'd fine in your home insurance policy.
RAID doesn't guarantee data integrity either. You lost data after an unintended deletion or corruption by some computer program? RAID won't help you get your data back any more then a single disk scenario would. If the original file got overwritten and mirrored across the array, and all you had was that one copy, you won't be able to go back to that original.
A more exceptional scenario would be a drive silently failing and RAID happily mirroring corrupted data across the entire array. Unless you use a filesystem that implements checksums - like ZFS - you wouldn't notice this unless it was too late. [1]
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/112683/does-raid-1-protect-a...
I'm not advising against RAID. I think there's merit in using RAID when it comes to convenience and availability. Like, your data remaining available when you experience a sudden disk failure, and not having to spend hours or days getting everything back on line again.
I'd say that RAID and backups are complementary.
So, what about backups then? The 3-2-1 backup strategy is a good start: 3 copies, 2 local, 1 physically remote. That could be as simple as copying your drives every week to a separate HD or SSD drive, and every month to another separate drive which is safely stored outside of your home, i.e. a family member, friend, or at the bank.
You could step it up a notch and choose to rsync your data across two connected drives, while rsync a third copy to specialized cloud storage service such as Borgbackup or Wasabi. Add in scripts that perform regular checksums control and reports the results daily and you've got a pretty solid solution.
The final step is looking at your data and differentiating between the stuff you absolutely can't afford to lose (e.g. family albums) and the stuff you may afford to lose (e.g. software downloads). The goal here is to calculate the costs associated with required storage volume and bandwidth, and land on an appropriate backup solution that matches your budget and your needs.
Finally, that's just safeguarding your data in the present and short term future. Neither RAID or backups are a long term preservation strategy. Which is a whole other can of worms, including such challenges as migrating obsolete data formats (Yeah, I have WordPerfect 5 and AutoCAD files in my own personal archive), or dealing with obsolete hardware I/O (Yeah, I have a bunch of old IDE drives in a cardboard box for which I had to buy an I/O converter).
Been building DIY NAS servers for 15 years for my personal use. ZFS with initially OpenSolaris, then FreeBSD. Typically 5 to 7 drives in raidz2. I found it very strange the guy is happy with & measured 100 Mbps throughput over the network. Any 2+ drive NAS from the last 5 years should be able to saturate a 1Gbps link.
I think the OP means 100 MB/s and not 100 Mbps here