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Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

mtlynch.io

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Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#81

Post by kalleboo »

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…

> Bit rot on your remaining drives can occur which wouldn’t be detected until rebuild time

ZFS can perform periodic scrubs to detect and repair bit rot, and I'm pretty sure TrueNAS is configured to do this by default

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#82

Post by DeathArrow »

I just use pCloud mounted as a network drive and throw everything I am not currently working on on it. With 10Gbps I have at home, it works wonders.

Plus, the storage is unlimited. Plus, it is more resistant to failures and disaster than anything home made. Plus, I don't have to store and take care of another noisy box in my home.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#83

Post by kalleboo »

sascha_sl wrote: post #36

>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 witho…

Has someone yet created open source patches for LVM + Btrfs like what Synology does to pierce the layers and use the btrfs checksums as a tie-breaker to tell lvm what disk to trust to repair errors?

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#84

Post by Joel_Mckay »

magicalhippo wrote: post #48
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 know about CephFS, but performance was abysmal compared to ZFS for a home server. On a single box with 4-8 drives I didn't come close to saturating a 10G link, which ZFS managed just fine. It was also very complex to manage compare to ZFS, with many different layers to consider. I'm sure it shines in a data center, for which it has been designed. But unless something radical has changed in the last year, it's not f…

The cephfs per-machine redundancy mode is usually the preferred configuration. i.e. usually avoids cramming everything into a single point of failure, buying specialty SAS cards, and poking at live raid arrays to do maintenance.

Seen too many people's TrueNAS/FreeNAS installs glitch up over the years to trust the zfs community edition as a sane production choice. ZFS certainly has improved, but Oracle is not generally known for their goodwill toward the opensource community. ;-)

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#85

Post by red0point »

DeathArrow wrote: post #82

I just use pCloud mounted as a network drive and throw everything I am not currently working on on it. With 10Gbps I have at home, it works wonders. Plus, the storage is unlimited. Plus, it is more resistant to failures and disaster than anything home made. Plus, I don't have to store and take care of another noisy box in my home.

Where did you find the unlimited storage offering? I couldn't find it on their website.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#86

Post by kstenerud »

copperfoil wrote: post #59
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.

This is what ZFS scrubbing is for. If a drive develops unreadable sectors, ZFS will alert you.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#87

Post by aborsy »

kstenerud wrote: post #69
aborsy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you install TrueNAS on it? It’s unclear if one could install TrueNAS on a Synology, QNAP, Teramaster etc. Sometimes hardware is not supported.

I don't know, but if I could install NixOS without difficulty, it should be possible. I installed Ubuntu server on it at first and that also worked fine. No tweaking necessary at all. You just flash the standard x64 installer on a USB stick, plug it in, and install like you would on any PC (because it basically is a PC - it even has a working HDMI port). Edit: Looks like someone did a writeup for TrueNAS on a TerraMa…

It’s an attractive option, because it might be cheaper than a TrueNAS mini from iXSystems (which is also difficult to ship outside US) or a DIY NAS.

You get an affordable TrueNAS server.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#88

Post by amluto »

loeg wrote: post #52
zekica wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a large scale storage system (more NVMe devices than PCIe lanes), a switch is mandatory. Or a “RAID” card or another switch-like device.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#89

Post by aborsy »

red0point wrote: post #85
DeathArrow wrote: post #82

I just use pCloud mounted as a network drive and throw everything I am not currently working on on it. With 10Gbps I have at home, it works wonders. Plus, the storage is unlimited. Plus, it is more resistant to failures and disaster than anything home made. Plus, I don't have to store and take care of another noisy box in my home.

Where did you find the unlimited storage offering? I couldn't find it on their website.

Lifetime plan on their website.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#90

Post by Spooky23 »

planb wrote: post #22

Thanks for including energy usage in the article. I carry USB-C SSDs around the house for backups and storage of archived files. Of course this is a bit of a hassle and I played with the idea of either buying or building a NAS. My current standby consumption for all computer stuff (access points, router, switches, a dozen or so microcontrollers and various SmartHome stuff, but not TVs, running computers or gaming con…

Check out used Linux thin clients on eBay. They are in a raspberry pi price point but more performant and unusual.

Energy use is very low.

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