Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

mtlynch.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 316 posts

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#241

Post by mrg2k8 »

mtlynch wrote: post #109
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.

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…

You can get 25 Gbps in Switzerland :)

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#243

Post by [deleted] »

lazide wrote: post #203
KennyBlanken wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to fix anything. ZFS automatically self-heals an inconsistent array (for example if one mirrored drive does not agree with the other, or if a parity drive disagrees with the data stripe.) ZFS does not suffer data loss if you "suffer a total disk failure." I have no idea where you're getting any of this from.

If the data on disk (with no redundant copies) is bad, you’ve (usually) lost data with ZFS. It isn’t ZFS’s fault, it’s the nature of the game. The poster built a (non redundant) zfs pool on top of a hardware raid6 device. The underlying hardware device had some failed drives, and when rebuilt, some of the underlying data was lost. ZFS helped by detecting it instead of letting the bad data though like would normally h…

[deleted]

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#244

Post by viraptor »

InvaderFizz wrote: post #169
KennyBlanken wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not missing anything. They're completely wrong. In RAID-Z, you can lose one drive or have one drive with 'bit rot' (corruption of either the parity or data) and ZFS will still be able to return valid data (and in the case of bit rot, self-heal. ZFS "plays out" both scenarios, checking against the separate file checksum. If trusting one drive over another yields a valid checksum, it overwrites the untrusted dri…

The situation I laid out was a degraded Z1 array with the total loss of a single disk(not recognized at all by the system), plus bitrot on at least one remaining disk during resilver. Pairity is gone, you have checksum to tell you that the read was invalid, but even multiple re-reads don't give valid checksum. How does Z1 recover the data in this case other than alerting you of which files it cannot repair so that yo…

Why do you have bitrot to begin with? That's what scheduled scrubbing is for. You could of course by very unlucky and have a drive fail and the other get corruption on the same day, but check how often you find issues with scrubbing and tell me how likely that scenario is.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#245

Post by cm2187 »

AviationAtom wrote: post #119

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…

Is there any reason not to use zfs for a NAS? I am thinking of a NAS hosting multimedia files, surely the ability to roll back must comes at a cost in term of disk space for large files.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#246

Post by InvaderFizz »

viraptor wrote: post #244
InvaderFizz wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation I laid out was a degraded Z1 array with the total loss of a single disk(not recognized at all by the system), plus bitrot on at least one remaining disk during resilver. Pairity is gone, you have checksum to tell you that the read was invalid, but even multiple re-reads don't give valid checksum. How does Z1 recover the data in this case other than alerting you of which files it cannot repair so that yo…

Why do you have bitrot to begin with? That's what scheduled scrubbing is for. You could of course by very unlucky and have a drive fail and the other get corruption on the same day, but check how often you find issues with scrubbing and tell me how likely that scenario is.

I've had hundreds of drives in hundreds of terabytes of appliances over years. URE and resilver is a common occurrence, as in every monthly scrub across 200+ drives. This isn't 200 drives in a single array, this is over 4 appliances geographically distributed.

The drives have been champs overall, they're approaching an average runtime of about 8 years. During that 8 years we've lost about 20% of the drives in various ways.

It is almost guaranteed that when a drive fails, another drive will have a URE during the resilver process. This is a non-issue as we run RAID-Z3 with multiple online hotspares.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#247

Post by GekkePrutser »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #216
GekkePrutser wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is why businesses spend so much on their RAID controllers. To make sure they're in warranty and that kind of thing doesn't happen. Incidentally its also pretty great because no business buys them second hand without warranty. So they're usually available for half nothing. I don't use raid cards right now but I do use fibre channel which is also dirt cheap second hand

3 weeks ago I had a controller failure in a manufacturing plant in Latin America. The contract with the manufacturer was to provide a replacement on site in 4 hours. Guess what, 8 hours later the technician with the replacement controller was still on the way. With TrueNAS I can move my drives to any other computer with the right interface and they will just work. I did this in the past 10 years of using TrueNAS.

I can imagine but companies want to offload responsibility.

If the manufacturer is late they can blame them, after all your IT manager paid for 4hr support so they've covered their ass.

If your TrueNAS fails at work, it's your ass on the line :P

I totally agree these special drive formats are really annoying. In this case I'd probably keep a spare on hand myself.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#248

Post by GekkePrutser »

mvanbaak wrote: post #239
GekkePrutser wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZFS on root is really amazing on FreeBSD and the advantage is that you can snapshot your boot drive.

have a look at Boot Environments. It really is amazing.

Yes I know, bectl. I use it.

I just didn't want to mention it because the discussion was mainly about Linux. But FreeBSD has a really strong toolchain for this indeed.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#249

Post by dhzhzjsbevs »

giantrobot wrote: post #235
bcook wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think @dhzhzjsbevs meant that 8TB and higher is CMR. A quick google search seems to support that.

You actually have to be careful. There's disk sizes where the manufacturer will do say 8TB CMR and essentially the same drive with different firmware as a 10TB SMR. They'll also have a 10TB CMR model. You have to pay close attention to the model numbers. It's even more of a crapshoot if you shuck drives. You have to carefully research what externals are known to have CMRs. SMRs are a fucking blight.

Yup, sorry got them mixed up. 8tb and up WD blues are all cmr. The Seagate ones are all hit and miss unless you go for Nas drives.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#250

Post by 6ak74rfy »

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…

May I use your help?

Background about my situation: I've only ever used laptops and Raspberry Pis in my life. Currently, my home server is a couple of RPis but I've outgrown them and need to upgrade.

Point being, I've never built a server from scratch or even opened one up. I am planning to go with this for now: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/bzYZcb

What you are suggesting seems a better way for me to go about it. Can you share some links from Ebay or Amazon for the kind of servers I could get? Also, will these servers contain everything I need to get up and running (with the exception of hard drives, of course)?

(I am based in the US.)

Post reply on HN