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Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

mtlynch.io

131–140 of 316 posts

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#131
> While I obviously don’t want my server to corrupt my data in RAM, I’ve also been using computers for the past 30 years without ECC RAM, and I’ve never noticed data corruption.

You never noticed also exactly because you can’t know about data corruption if you don’t run with ECC memory.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#132

This article seems right up my alley, so here are some thoughts: - ZFS is pretty amazing in it's abilities, with it ushering in the age of software RAID over hardware RAID - ZFS shouldn't be limited to FreeBSD. The Linux port has come quite a long way. I'd advise you to use PPA over repo though, as many key features are missing from the version on repos. - TrueNAS is more targeted towards enterprise applications. If…

> I'd advise you to use PPA over repo though, as many key features are missing from the version on repos. I would advise using ZFS only with distros that come with it (i.e. Ubuntu, Proxmox), especially if you plan to have your / on it. I wasted too much time on CentOS with ZFS, would not do it again.

Yeah, Ubuntu has done a pretty good job with ZFS on root installation.

Zero setup, works out of box. Highly recommend ZFS and Ubuntu with ZFS!

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#133
post #49

Author 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.

Did similar recently. Some suggestions for anyone else looking to do the same: i3 runs a bit cooler than ryzen, still 8 threads. 8tb WD blues (they're SMR at 8 and up). You can find Atx boards with 8 sata ports and dual nvme slots for caching / fast pools.

I'd be really careful about SMRs in a RAID. You can end up with no end of performance issues. It's all the downsides of a single SMR drive multiplied by however many drives are in the pools.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#134
post #49

Author 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.

- "RAID is not a backup" primarily because "you could rm -rf". ZFS snapshots cover that failure mode to the same extent that synchronization with offsite does, but cheaper. ZFS snapshots obviously don't cover other failure modes like natural disasters or a break in, so RAID is still not a backup.

- for ZIL to do its work properly, you need the disks not to lie when they claim that the data has been truly saved. This can be tricky to check, so perhaps think about a UPS

- if you have two M.2 slots you could use them to mirror two partitions from two different disks for your data pool's SLOG. The same could be done to form a new mirrored ZFS pool for the OS. In my case I even prefer the performance that a single-copy SLOG gives me at the risk of losing the most recent data before it's moved from the SLOG to the pool.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#135
post #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: https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io/pull/920

It's pretty cool in that it's a mostly "COTS" implemention. LVM and MD, IIRC.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#136

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.

It's 2Tb plan, but unlimited in the sense I can grow it to whatever I need. I got 8Tb with 75% off on Black Friday.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#137
post #13

How do you handle backups of such amount of data?

I have a nightly restic backup from my main workstation to buckets on Backblaze and Wasabi. It backs up the few local folders I have on my workstation and all the files I care about on my NAS, which the workstation accesses over Samba. I've published my scripts on Github.[0]

I don't back up my Blu-Rays or DVDs, so I'm backing up [0] https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch-backup

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#138
post #113

New drives are around $16-$20/TB depending on if you catch a sale and are willing to shuck. You can pick up used SAS drives in 3-4TB capacity for around $5/TB. I'm a crazy person, so I built this to hold 11 3TB SAS drives: https://imgur.com/a/JqbBN1p https://pcpartpicker.com/list/dLhNvf I used a Supermicro MB and ECC RAM. It's not much more expensive and it's nice having IPMI. I personally think it's crazy to forego…

The catch with shucking drives from cheap NAS systems like from WD is that those drives have a strong likelihood of being SMR drives instead of CMR. Basically, they'll work fine until something goes wrong requiring, say, a RAID rebuild, and then you'll be out weeks while they rebuild begging that they don't fail in the process because the random write performance is abominable.

SMR only affects writes, so assuming you're originally fine with SMR (let's say you only write to the pool very sparingly), you can start off with SMR but then use CMR for replacements.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#139
I'm fairly happy with my 4-bay Synology NAS. When I last looked at ZFS, it seemed that piecemeal upgrades - like, upgrade a 4TB drive to 8TB, and get more available space - wouldn't work in ZFS, but it would in SHR, at least if you had more than 2 drives.

Having scheduled checks is a good idea: I have weekly short SMART tests, monthly long SMART tests, and quarterly data scrubs.

The TinyPilot device looks nifty - it's a Raspberry Pi as a remote KVM switch. I stumbled on that last night as I was banging my head against a familial tech support issue.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#140

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.

Nice, that's a cool setup! What area of the world do you live where you get 10 Gbps to the Internet? Can you reliably get 10 Gbps transfers to pCloud? I got 1 Gbps fiber in the last year, but it's more like 700-800 Mbps in practice. I consider myself lucky to even get that, as my experience before that has always been 100-200 Mbps even on a "1 Gbps" plan. I'm super jealous of people who get a full 10 Gbps Internet co…

I live in Bucharest, Romania. We can get 10Gbps FTTH since the beginning of the year.

Uploads to pCloud are about half of that while downloads can be over 1GB/s.

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