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Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

mtlynch.io

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Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#191

Post by kettleballroll »

xedarius wrote: post #116

I have pretty much this existing setup. One thing I'd add is that it's quite noisy. If you have somewhere you can put it, and your house is all cat 6'ed up then great. But if like me you have it in the same room as you, you wil notice it. And it's not the pc, the fractal case has very quite 120mm fans, it's the HDDs.

Are you me? I have almost the exact same build as discussed in the post, and I am super annoyed with how loud the disks are. I have a cronjob that puts them to sleep every night(the NAS is in my bedroom)... For some weird reason they never stop spinning otherwise.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#192

Post by UmbertoNoEco »

> Based on Backblaze’s stats, high-quality disk drives fail at 0.5-4% per year. A 4% risk per year is a 2% chance in any given week. Two simultaneous failures would happen once every 48 years, so I should be fine, right?

Either I misunderstood or there are some typos but this math seems all kind of wrong.

A 4% risk per year (assuming failure risk is independent of disk age) is less than 0.1% by week. A 2% risk per week would be a 65% risk per year!!

2 simultaneous failures at the same week for just 2 disks (again with the huge assumption of age-independent risk) would in the order of magnitude of less than 1:10^6 , so more than 20k years(31.2 k years tbc)

Of course you either change your drives every few years so the age-independent AFR still holds or you have to model the probability of failure using some exponential distribution like Poisson's. Exercise for the reader to estimate the numbers in that case.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#193

Post by AviationAtom »

aborsy wrote: post #182
gjulianm wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - TrueNAS is more targeted towards enterprise applications. If you want good utility as a home user then give Proxmox or the like a look. Then you can make it into more than just a NAS (if you're open to it). I have questions about this. I'm thinking of building my own NAS server, and I don't know which OS to use. On the one hand it looks like people recommend TrueNAS a lot, which is nice now that they have a Linux…

What you miss with raw Debian compared to TrueNAS is compatibility. TrueNAS makes sure that all pieces are compatible with one another so that when you update each piece or OS, the storage doesn’t break. The whole package is tested throughly before release. Also, TrueNAS makes setup painless: users, permissions, shares, vdevs, ZFS tuning, nice dashboard etc. With Debian, you get a lot of config files and ansible play…

There's been a movement in the industry to bring storage back onto servers. They use the fancy buzz term of "hyper convergence" now though.

I will definitely argue that TrueNAS gives stability and ease of management. Some of that can be found with Proxmox too though. I think it just really depends on which medium you prefer. Perhaps trying both is the best option?

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#195

Post by lousken »

raidz1 - depending of the type of data, for more important stuff than movies and audio I wouldn't use it

it is ok for like an offsite backup that you'll touch maybe once in years, if it blows up one day, just upload a new backup

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#196

Post by AviationAtom »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #187
AviationAtom wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also forgot to mention, your guidance on ZFS memory requirements is outdated. From what I have heard recent releases have drastically reduced the size of ARC cache necessary. One person reported it working phenomenally on a newer Raspberry Pi.

True but COW is even harder on an SD than ext4 is so I would really not use it on a pi unless it's not using SD storage :)

I do think many folks using such applications are booting from disk. IIRC, Raspberry Pi 4 supports disk booting natively.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#198

Post by mustache_kimono »

AviationAtom wrote: post #126
vetinari wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

ZFS on Root just sounds like pain to me. I opt for MD RAID on root and then ZFS my other volumes. I would also say Ubuntu is probably the better choice for Linux ZFS, as CentOS seems to be lacking good support.

Once you try it, you're never going back. Snapshots are made for things like system administration. Upgrade borked your system? Just rollback.

Want to use the last version of your firewall config? I wrote a utility you might like to try, httm[1], which allows you to restore from your snapshot-ed unique versions.

If you like ZFS, then trust me you have to have ZFS on root.

[1]: https://crates.io/crates/httm

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#199

Post by mustache_kimono »

AviationAtom wrote: post #164
aborsy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I think for me I am more concerned about trying to get the OS bootable again, if something becomes corrupted on the OS level. Even with MD RAID it came be a bit of a struggle to recover, but ZFS on Root seemed much harder to troubleshoot and repair. Perhaps I am mistaken in this belief though?

I've had to recover a ZFS on root system, whose bootloader installation I had somehow screwed up, and the process is pretty straight forward.

See: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Ubu...

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#200

Post by marius_k »

sandreas wrote: post #72

Building your own NAS Server by hand may be a nice project, but if you would like to get something up and running quickly, you should consider prebuild servers like Dell T* series or HP Microserver. It is real server hardware, supporting ECC RAM and by far less work to build, often providing (semi-)professional remote management. If you plan to build a budget NAS and enough room is not a problem, I personally would r…

what would you recommend for power efficient hdds (when idle)?

I have recently built a truenas box with 2x4TB ssd's. But I think I will want to expand it. Currently it runs at 14W idle. If I add 2hdd I expect it to increase to 40W(?). How can I optimize this?

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