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Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

mtlynch.io

251–260 of 316 posts

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in the process of setting up a home server after buying a pair of matching 3TB Western Digital “Red” disks. I plan on installing them in a HPE ProLiant MicroServer G7 Server / HP Micro G7 N40L that I was gifted a couple of years ago. Even though it comes with a hardware RAID, I was considering setting up RAID 1 using Linux software RAID. However, according to the Linux Raid Wiki ¹, Hardware RAID 1 is better than…

> according to the Linux Raid Wiki¹, Hardware RAID 1 is better than Software RAID 1. Don't take that too much into consideration - the article was last updated in 2007 ( https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php?title=Overview&action... ) so it lacks some details (the same can be said as well for many ZFS-related infos that you might find) => nowadays doublechecking articles related to raid and ZFS is a must. In my case…

Thanks for the tips and feedback. I’ll stick with Software RAID. I wasn’t sure that the system would have enough resources to support ZFS but I think I’ll try it out before I commit large amounts of data to it.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#252

> I chose raidz1. With only a handful of disks, the odds of two drives failing simultaneously is fairly low. Only if you buy different hard drives or at least from different production batches. I had a lot of trouble on the same premise and I won't make that mistake again. Edit: He mentioned it though ( a bit later in the article) > The problem is that disks aren’t statistically independent. If one disk fails, its ne…

> I had a lot of trouble on the same premise and I won't make that mistake again. Please elaborate, I'd love to hear your story! I hear a lot of advice around raid/z-levels and it often seems backed up by shaky math that doesn't seem to be backed up by reality (like the blog posts that claim that a rebuild of an array of 8 TB drives will absolutely have hard read errors, no exceptions, and yet monthly ZFS scrubs pass…

I decided on Raid 5 and 2 drives broke within the week.

Not much to tell otherwise though. I was really annoyed with it at the time.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#253

> 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.

Precisely. My trust in a non-ECC machine is much lower. I've had slow on-disk data corruption that I've tracked down to failing memory in retail-grade hardware, and it's been in a collection of large media files being sync'ed between machines. Those corruptions tend to be un-noticed at the time, and are effectively impossible (without original sources) to resolve later on, but happily also tend to have minimal impact.

Either way, I've been using computers longer than TFA and wouldn't build a home lab box without ECC.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#254
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how Synology implemented it, but they do support Windows ACLs on btrfs volumes.

They likely use XATTRs to store the ACL (that is an option in Samba), but it's not native like it's on the TrueNAS systems with the kernel. I bet if you log into the Syno's via SSH you don't get the ACLs enforced on the shell. With the NFSv4 ACL patchseries, they would and you could benefit from the better options that the NFSv4 ACLs give you. Storing them in metadata is not the same as having them natively.

They maintain their own kernel module to handle ACLs (synoacl_vfs) and they are indeed enforced locally as well. They can be read and modified by using the `synoacltool` cli.

  $ synoacltool -get .config
  ACL version: 1 
  Archive: is_inherit,is_support_ACL 
  Owner: [semiotic(user)] 
  --------------------- 
   [0] user:semiotic:allow:rwxp-DaARWc--:fd-- (level:1)
   [1] group:users:allow:r-x---a-R-c--:fd-- (level:1)

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#255
post #245

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.

Because it's a copy on write file system The snapshots don't take up any extra space until you do any writing. The common parts between snapshots are shared between them in storage so you only pay the cost for any changes (rounded to some block size).

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#256
Cool post thanks for sharing! I wanted to throw out another option, older enterprise server hardware is surprisingly cheap on ebay. https://labgopher.com/ has a nice page to help you find good deals (I am not affiliated with them). One warning these servers are outrageously loud and power hungry.

Also, in the bay area I like the local vendor https://unixsurplus.com/

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#257

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.

It really depends on the drives you have. When I upgraded from 3TB to 4TB and 6TB models, I was very much taken aback by how much louder these drives are despite being in the same WD Red CMR product line. Some of their more recent SMR drives have really weird acoustics that always makes me think they are about to fail, but in reality thats just now they should sounds like, yikes.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#259
If I was building the same system, I'd use 8GB of RAM and use the NVME drive for an L2ARC. I'd put the root fs into the main zfs dataset. The machine will be faster (~128GB of cache), cheaper and draw less power due to less RAM.

I'm not sure if TruNas supports this kind of config, or if they enforce booting from a separate drive. But FreeBSD itself is perfectly happy to boot from ZFS.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also a Solaris thing, yeah? (beadm etc)
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