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Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

mtlynch.io

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Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#31

Post by Joel_Mckay »

627467 wrote: post #13

How do you handle backups of such amount of data?

"CephFS supports asynchronous replication of snapshots to a remote CephFS file system via cephfs-mirror tool. Snapshots are synchronized by mirroring snapshot data followed by creating a snapshot with the same name (for a given directory on the remote file system) as the snapshot being synchronized." ( https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/dev/cephfs-mirroring/ )

We found ZFS led to maintenance issues, but it was probably unrelated to the filesystem per say. i.e. culling a rack storage node is easier than fiddling with degraded raids.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#32

Post by mrslave »

nicolaslem wrote: post #5

I also run a home NAS in a Node 304. I went with a supermicro mainboard for ECC support which means I had to swap the three fans that come with the case because the mainboard only supports PWM fans. Non-PWM fans would only spin at full speed otherwise. Regarding the SLOG device, you probably don't need it for a file server, but if you do you can definitely free a drive bay for an HDD by just using double sided tape s…

I occasionally look at the PCIe-to-SATA market and find it confusing. It appears polarized into either cards from a reputable brand and very expensive, even with few SATA ports, or cards from an unknown brand and relatively affordable. What's your experience with this and what can you recommend (2-port or 4-port)? Are the cheap cards safe & reliable or are they to be avoided?

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#33

Post by linsomniac »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #24
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #15

Why is there a need to proselytize about ZFS in every thread on this topic?

Because people don't know about cephfs yet, and the silliness of degraded raid setups. i.e. trusting a zfs community edition in a production environment can be a painful lesson. ;-)

I'm sure it'd be painful, but let's throw "infrequent" onto your description of the lesson. :-)

I've run ZFS for home storage and work backups for ~15 years, across Nexenta, ZFS-fuse, FreeBSD, and OpenZFS, backing up hundreds of machines, and have never lost data on one of them.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#34

Post by jandrese »

amluto wrote: post #3

As far as I can tell, building a similar system using NVMe is vastly more complicated. If you can fit everything into M.2 slots, it’s easy. Otherwise you need barely-standardized PCIe cards, backplanes, connectors ordered off a menu of enterprise things with bizarre model numbers, and possibly “RAID” cards even though you don’t actually want hardware RAID.

22TB of NVMe drives is going to be a bit more expensive than the system in the article however.

I do wonder what the power consumption figures would be though. His system was drawing an annoyingly large amount of power and I suspect that was mostly those HDDs.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#36

Post by sascha_sl »

>If you’re new to the homelab world or have no experience building PCs, I recommend that you don’t build your own NAS.

>Before building this system, I had zero experience with ZFS, so I was excited to try it out.

Sorry, but this is amusing to me. ZFS on TrueNAS is probably fine, but you're building your production NAS, to replace the Synology device you've become "so dependent on". Don't become dependent on ZFS without knowing the implications!

I was facing this choice recently, and I agreed with the other tech savy person in the household that we should just use good old LVM + Btrfs. Not only does it run like a charm, but it also allowed us to switch the LV from single (during the data move) to RAID 1 and eventually to RAID 5/6 with zero issues. It will also be much easier to recover from than ZFS.

On another note, it's a bad market to buy NAS drives, especially from Seagate. Seagate Exos drives are at this point in time often cheaper than IronWolf, even non Pro IronWolf. They're slightly more noisy and don't come with the free data recovery, but otherwise they're a straight upgrade over the IronWolf drives.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#37

Post by Macha »

eminence32 wrote: post #9

Nice build. I recently built my second NAS (from a used R720 from ebay). The total (without disks) is pretty similar to the build documented in this article. Having a large NAS has had an interesting (though predictable) impact on all the computers around it: Pretty much every bit of data lives on the NAS (accessed either by CIFS, NFS, or iSCSI). When I had to reinstall Windows, it was mostly painless because all my…

How is performance, especially with regards to load times, if your steam library is mounted remotely?

I ask because the difference between a SSD and a hard drive can be massive in this regards, so I'd be really interested to know if the network latency is also a comparable hit.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#40

Post by Macha »

throw0101a wrote: post #21
627467 wrote: post #13

How do you handle backups of such amount of data?

A 22TB pool can perhaps be backed up to a single 26TB drive (over USB? Thunderbolt?): * https://www.techradar.com/news/larger-than-30tb-hard-drives-... Buy multiple drives and a docking station and you can rotate them: * https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/docking ZFS send/recv allows for easy snapshotting and replication, even to the cloud: * https://www.rsync.net/products/zfs.html * https://arstechnica.com/informati…

However, such a drive is getting heavily into diminishing returns territory.

e.g. a 20TB drive from Seagate is $500. A 4TB drive is $70, 8TB is $140. Getting the same spend in smaller capacity drives would give you 28TB in the 4TB drives and 24TB/32TB in the 8TB drives (for $80 under/$60 over).

Add in a second to rotate and you're spending $1000 in drives, assuming these 26TB drives replace the 20TB drives at a similar price when they trickle down to consumer hands.

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