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Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

mtlynch.io

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Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#291

Did something similar but with a lot less power consumption and price: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/silent-fanless-fre...

These types of builds are a lot more interesting as you imposed some constraints in terms of noise and cost, resulting system is a lot more practical

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#292
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raidz (or preferably raidz2) is good for archival / media streaming / local backup and has good sequential read/write performance, while striped mirrors - raid10 - are better for random access read and write and are a little bit more redundant (i.e. reliable), but costs more in drives for the same usuable space. Raidz needs to read all of every drive to rebuild after a drive replacement while a striped mirror only ne…

Side note, since it's probably a niche use-case, but using NVMe's in Z1 was both pretty effective with VMs and cheap enough on usable capacity (4×1TB for ~3TB usable). I feel SSDs are in a totally different category that makes Z1 an actual option, whereas I don't trust it for spinners. Key difference being that a failed SSD can usually be read (only) whereas a failed spinner is usually as good as bricked.

I use SATA ssds in RAIDZ2, and have 6*1TB for approx 4TB usable. They're fantastic and I have yet to have an issue replacing a drive. Nor do I need to do it very often as my workloads are pretty low, it's mostly an archival box.

It's been great, right up until one of the sticks of RAM started to fail...

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#295
post #282

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…

> If you want good utility as a home user then give Proxmox or the like a look. Isn't proxmox just virtualization? didn't know it can be used as a NAS too.

IMO NAS setup is much more straightforward on truenas. It’s doable in Proxmox inside a VM or LXC, but true as exposes this all directly via a nice UI. I personally use Proxmox with a simple Debian NFS VM, but for less technical users that just want stuff to work I tend to recommend they stick with truenas.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#296
post #182

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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?

I’d try both, they tend to target different use cases. Proxmox doesn’t come with a lot of the tooling for things like SMB, LDAP, etc that Truenas ships with but you may find you don’t actually want any of these extras. In that case Proxmox would be a better choice IMO since it’s Debian based and a bit more streamlined.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, the question is, what are your real needs and what part of you is asking for MORE POWER? :-) I personally think, that the Dell T20 is more than enough for a ONLY NAS Server and even for a small homelab. You could go for something similar to this (ebay) but I had MUCH more success in looking at "garage sale" websites (I don't know, what sites to use in the US): https://www.ebay.com/itm/175291934211?hash=item28d0…

> Well, the question is, what are your real needs and what part of you is asking for MORE POWER? :-)

Ha, should have mentioned that before! I want to run a few services at home, so need more than 2 GB RAM. I'll also create a NAS/Nextcloud to store "family" data (documents, pictures etc.) but nothing "data hoarder" level. So, 4 TB would easily last us a decade or more.

Do you still think I should go for such enterprise servers? (Noise, complexity etc.) Or should I just get a used desktop/laptop?

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I was referring to more to corruption resulting in an unbootable system. If you can't boot in then how would you roll it back?

That's where backups come in. Any filesystem can get corrupted. Though for ZFS it's less likely than with something like ext4. Even though both have journalling, only ZFS has copy on write.

My problem was rather with problematic updates of zfs itself.

The update "helpfully" updated initramfs for older kernels too... and if something broke, it broke previous versions too, so they all were unbootable. Eventually I ended up with an USB stick at hand with known bootable environment :(

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#299
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 pictures inside your case give me anxiety for some weird reason. That's the cleanest* inside of a PC I've seen in my life, almost artificial looking; are you building in a clean room? *Clean in terms of dust, not cable management

I built it in my basement. Why would a newly built PC have any dust?

I'm sad you don't think much of the cable management. I think I did pretty good considering there's 11 drives, 6 fans, and I wasn't able to use custom lengths on any of the cables.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > This is in fact one of the very few places where Hardware RAID solutions can have an edge over Software solutions - if you use a hardware RAID card, the extra write copies of the data will not have to go over the PCI bus, since it is the RAID controller that will generate the extra copy. This is not a thing to bother (especially after we moved from PCI to PCI-E) for a home user. The only great thing about HW RAID…

Wow! That's all really informative. I had thought that a non-striped, mirrored disk should be usable if the H/W RAID controller failed (given that all the data is stored on the disk) but I didn’t know for sure. I didn’t think it would also be possible to recover striped disks. Thanks for the great advice on using LVM and the commands for replacing a disk. I only recently cane across a system that used the disk block…

> but I didn’t know for sure

The array metadata is just stored at the end of the disk, so this is not a problem to just attach a disk somewhere rlse

> commands for replacing a disk

Take it with a grain of salt, I just wrote them from memory. But the overall process is exactly as I said.

Glad you found that helpful.

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