My conclusion from this was that the Synology is actually excellent value, and a newer one would likely have been superior on all dimensions (including time spent).
Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
91–100 of 316 posts
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#92Author here. I consider myself an intermediate homelabber and a TrueNAS beginner. I just built my first NAS server, so wrote this to capture everything I wish I'd known at the start. I hope it's helpful for anyone else thinking about building their first NAS server. Any questions or feedback about the post are more than welcome.
Just wanted to share my appreciation for not just this post but all your work in recent times! Been following your trail since your post about Google promos and the set of useful projects you've been working on since then.
Thanks so much for the kind words and for following along!
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 simil…
You have to factor in the power usage of having multiple drives spinning. Though I’d agree that smaller drives are better when you have a drive failure, as resilvering is quicker.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#94I use 2 ZFS mirrored 4TB drives mounted on a USB C dual bay device (iDsonix brand) for backing up my ZFS pools. I have a simple script that imports the backup pool and sends snapshots from my main ZFS pools to the backup pool.
My question: How do you safely store your physical backup drives/devices?
I have a fireproof box, but I don't think it was made for safely storing electronics in the event of a fire.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#95> 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 sna…
I think of a backup like a fire extinguisher. It's better to have one and never need it than to one day need it and it's not there.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#96I use 2 ZFS mirrored 4TB drives mounted on a USB C dual bay device (iDsonix brand) for backing up my ZFS pools. I have a simple script that imports the backup pool and sends snapshots from my main ZFS pools to the backup pool. My question: How do you safely store your physical backup drives/devices? I have a fireproof box, but I don't think it was made for safely storing electronics in the event of a fire.
The same solution only powered by POE and buried in a pelican case filled with dessicant sacks in your back garden
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#97Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#98> And if you’re dumb like me, and you’ve used a Synology-proprietary storage format, you can’t access your data without another Synology system I wonder what he means by this. If he's referring to SHR, then it's just standard mdraid and Synology themselves have instructions on how to mount the volume in Ubuntu https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_can_I_recover... edit: He later mentions encrypted volumes bu…
Oh, cool! I was referring to SHR. I thought it was a proprietary format and didn't realize you could access it from non-Synology systems. I've updated the post:
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#99> 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…
In my case even mixing up the disks might not help but I agree it’s still helpful.
I bought 4x Seagate Ironwolf Pro 12TB drives from different vendors, one failed after a year, then when I got the replacement another drive failed during the rebuild, and then 6 months later the replacement failed. Now another one of the original drives is also reporting reallocated sectors.
Same system has 4x WD Red drives which have been running fine with 0 reallocated sectors for almost 7 years.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#100I have to say, I'm put off by the power benchmark. I have a way older system with way more stuff (6 3.5 inch HDD, 2 2.5 inch HDD, 2.5 inch SSD, 8-port SAS controller, Intel NIC card) and it idles (all drives spun down) at ~30 watts. When I first bought the system over 10 years ago, ZFS on Linux wasn't really a thing, so I used FreeBSD. I later switched and with the switch came substantial power savings.
Oh, that's interesting. TrueNAS is available on Debian now, so I wonder if there would be a big drop in power consumption.
Lawrence Systems just ran benchmarks[0] between TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD) and TrueNAS Scale (Debian), but they didn't include power consumption, unfortunately.