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Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

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Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#51

Post by bobcostas55 »

farmerstan wrote: post #23

I think using 1 disk redundancy is a mistake. It’s not only physical failure you’re worried about, it’s an error upon rebuild when you lose a drive. Bit rot on your remaining drives can occur which wouldn’t be detected until rebuild time when you lose a drive, and that could cause you to lose your entire volume. Bit rot can be checked for but you can’t always be sure and with larger and larger sets of data it gets sl…

Doesn't ZFS have a mechanism for periodically checking for and correcting bit rot?

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#52

Post by loeg »

zekica wrote: post #4
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.

You can use pcie switches on pcie x4 to 4xM.2x4 drives.

The active pcie switches are a lot more expensive than the passive splitters that only work on systems with pcie bifurcation.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#53

Post by CraigJPerry »

Back around 2004 there was a technology called VRRP then OpenBSD got a similar thing called CARP - a quick google suggests these still exist but i never see mention of them in my filter bubble for some reason.

I was obsessed with making an instant failover cluster. I never managed to get it working exactly how i wanted and it relied on two old UPSs with dead batteries to operate as STONITH devices (they had well supported rs232 interfaces).

I sometimes think about investigating that idea again but maybe with raspberry pis and cheap iot plugs.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#54

Post by geek_at »

hddherman wrote: post #6

> I see people talking about snapshotting, but I haven’t found a need for it. I already have snapshots in my restic backup solution. They’re not especially convenient, but I’ve been using restic for two years, and I only recall needing to recover data from a snapshot once. The ease at which you can revert mistakes using ZFS snapshots is much better compared to restic. You can pretty much navigate to the correct snaps…

Not only that but also

> I chose raidz1. With only a handful of disks, the odds of two drives failing simultaneously is fairly low.

Which is not really the case of you bought x amount of the same disks and always use them together. I had that happen to me just a few months ago. 4 identical discs bought at the same time. Raidz1 reported one dead/dying disk so I replaced it and started resilvering, which can take days and leaves the disks at 100% utilization.

So after 12 hours or so a second one failed and the data was gone.

Lesson learned: mix up your disks

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#55

Post by loeg »

Jhsto wrote: post #41

What is the technical upside of using TrueNAS instead of samba? If you want to optimize for control, it seems a bit weird to me to settle for an "all in one" software stack.

You’re asking the equivalent of “why use Linux instead of TCP?”

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#56

Post by idoubtit »

hddherman wrote: post #6

> I see people talking about snapshotting, but I haven’t found a need for it. I already have snapshots in my restic backup solution. They’re not especially convenient, but I’ve been using restic for two years, and I only recall needing to recover data from a snapshot once. The ease at which you can revert mistakes using ZFS snapshots is much better compared to restic. You can pretty much navigate to the correct snaps…

I'm okay with claims that snapshots are much better than backups for many uses. But in this case the GP was explaining that they only used their backups once in several years, so they did not need to change their backup system.

I'm in the same boat. I configured remote backup systems on a handful of computers. I think I reached for backups only twice over the last ten years. Of course I need something, backups or snapshots, but for my use case snapshots (with a network copy) would need work to set up. And if the remote storage is worse, that would be more of a problem than the changes in the restore process.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#57

Post by loeg »

bobcostas55 wrote: post #51
farmerstan wrote: post #23

I think using 1 disk redundancy is a mistake. It’s not only physical failure you’re worried about, it’s an error upon rebuild when you lose a drive. Bit rot on your remaining drives can occur which wouldn’t be detected until rebuild time when you lose a drive, and that could cause you to lose your entire volume. Bit rot can be checked for but you can’t always be sure and with larger and larger sets of data it gets sl…

Doesn't ZFS have a mechanism for periodically checking for and correcting bit rot?

Yes.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#58

Post by kalleboo »

mrslave wrote: post #32
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?

Basically: they can be buggy. Either they work fine for you, or you hit an edge case and have trouble. They can also have worse performance as they only have one SATA controller and split it amongst the drives.

The fancier more expensive ones are typically referred to as HBAs instead of "SATA cards" https://unraid-guides.com/2020/12/07/dont-ever-use-cheap-pci...

If you're doing this at home, you can get used enterprise gear on eBay (like an LSI SAS HBA) for the same price or cheaper than brand-new consumer gear, and it will probably still be more reliable (I built a 130 TB NAS for my friend's video production business and literally everything aside from the drives and the cables was bought used on online auction, and it's been humming along fine for a while now - the only part that was bad was one stick of RAM, but the ECC errors told me that before I even got around to running my tests on the sticks)

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#59

Post by copperfoil »

throw0101a wrote: post #14

22TB of total capacity is interesting because we're now getting >26TB on single drives : * https://www.techradar.com/news/larger-than-30tb-hard-drives-... Crazy.

Yes but there’s a price/reliability/performance trade off. Also, with disks that big failures become qualitatively different. For example, when a disk fails in a mirror, the bigger the disk size the higher the chance the 2nd disk will have unreadable blocks.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#60

Post by kstenerud »

I set up my most recent NAS using a TerraMaster unit. It's basically a nifty case (9x5x5 inches) around a low power Intel board with a USB stick for a boot device (which I replaced with a mini 100gb USB SSD).

I don't know and don't care about TerraMaster's software (it might be awesome - I have no idea). I just rolled my own NixOS install with ZFS so that I could have a deterministic installation (I've heard good things about the TrueNAS OS as well, but I'm a control freak and like being able to rebuild the entire server with a single command and a config file, so I stick with NixOS).

The nice thing is that I essentially got a motherboard, CPU, PSU, and compact case for $350 (for the F2-422). All I had to do was upgrade the RAM (SO-DIMM) and add the drives.

I've long since reduced to only two drives for my NAS. At one point I was up to 7 drives before I realized my madness. It's cheap enough to get the storage I need with two mirrored drives, is quieter and uses less energy (I can keep it in the same room), and when I finally outgrow them in 5 years or so, the old drives will be re-purposed as backup via an external USB enclosure I keep around.

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