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How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)

neil.computer

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Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)

#21

Post by Confiks »

watermelon0 wrote: post #18
Confiks wrote: post #7

Not a great time price-wise to be building a NAS, but I have been doing so for the last two weeks. Inside a Jonsbo N6 case, which is pretty nice with an 8x SATA backplane and drive bays (unlike the earlier Jonsbo variants). I ended up on shucking 4x the 14 TB WD Elements Desktop. They contain helium drives, the WD140EDGZ in my case, and are about a third cheaper than 4x the 12 TB WD Red Plus drives (which are air-fil…

I've been thinking about building my own NAS as well. Mind sharing how much did you pay for those hard drives, and what motherboard did you choose?

It was €329 per hard drive (through a reputable store), and I chose the ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 mATX motherboard combined with a Ryzen 5 8500G. Stock CPU cooler, replaced the Jonsbo case fans with Arctic P12 Pro PST LN. I only slightly regret the PSU (MSI MAG A650GL), which could be quieter. Not that it's very noisy, and it's a great PSU otherwise, but I should've chosen one that just shuts the fan down at low power usage.

Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)

#22

Post by bradley13 »

Just yesterday I was brainstorming with ChatGPT about this. I have an ancient QNAP plus a slightly less ancient NUC running PiHole, Wireguard and other services. Both need replaced, so why not combine them?

I don't know much about ZFS, but it sounds like I need to learn. Docker may have conquered the world, but I plan to stay with LXD for services.

The one thing I take issue with: an appliance like this runs 24/7. It should be low power and fanless. A processor like the N100 seems like the obvious choice.

Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)

#23

Post by bakugo »

tamimio wrote: post #8

Yeah no. When it comes to backups and data storage, I would rather use a proven reliable system that’s been used and tested by millions of other users, keep these hacky stuff for your hyperland set up.

> I would rather use a proven reliable system that’s been used and tested by millions of other users

You're describing ZFS.

Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)

#24

Post by bpye »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #14

Tangential, but about this: > I am creating a RAIDZ1 (RAID 5) zpool. That means 1 drive redundancy in-case of failure A friend once told me that RAID5 has a high latency cost, because every Write requires a Read to update the stripes across all drives, and while this made sense when drives were expensive, nowadays you might as well do a RAID10 instead, and trade space for latency. Is this still true with ZFS RAIDZ1?

> and while this made sense when drives were expensive

I don't have the answer to the latency question, but HDDs have shot up in $/TB over the last couple years too. They are once again kind of expensive.

Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)

#25

Post by bpye »

burner420042 wrote: post #11
Khaine wrote: post #2

Can anyone recommend a good server for a homelab to use for a storage purpose like this?

I'm sure there's better options now but the HP ProLiant MicroServers (used). They support ECC ram, 4 caddies, one extra PCIe slot, and to my knowledge you're not cpu limited for a zfs file server usecase. Keep in mind though, all you need is linux* support, iDRAC, ECC if you're a snob, and drive bays ... and that's basically any free server. In my extremely opinionated opinion I would only get used enterprise server…

I'm still running an old Gen 8 MicroServer. Modern drives can actually saturate the SATA controller, and because it only has a single PCIe slot I can't add both a 10Gb NIC and a storage controller - I went with the 10Gb NIC.

It works well enough though and has lasted me over a decade at this point. 16GB DDR3 ECC, an old 4 core/8 thread Xeon, 4x14TB drives and the Mellanox NIC.

Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)

#27

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

naturalmovement wrote: post #10

[flagged]

> Running ZFS on anything but Solaris/Illumos/FreeBSD is asinine.

> ZFS is a permanent second-class citizen on Linux

Linux is the primary target of OpenZFS [0] [1], and has been since 2020 [2]. It may not be supported by the Linux kernel developers, but it's supported by the ZFS developers, and that's all that really matters.

> I don't want to trust my data to some half-assed out-of-tree solution that may or may not break in a week.

Sure, it's an out-of-tree module, but that doesn't mean that it will randomly break all the time; it just means that you may occasionally need to wait for a new OpenZFS release before upgrading your kernel.

> FreeBSD ZFS support has matured and is outstanding.

Agreed, but Linux and FreeBSD both use the same ZFS [3], so I don't really see how the ZFS in FreeBSD can be better than the one in Linux. The tooling and install procedure is certainly better on FreeBSD, but the actual filesystem code is the same (and is probably slightly more robust on Linux since that's going to be where most of the testing occurs).

[0]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs#supported-kernels-and-distrib...

[1]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/8987

[2]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-2.0.0

[3]: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/zfs/

Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)

#28

Post by bpye »

ggm wrote: post #15
naturalmovement wrote: post #10

[flagged]

Run ZFS backed filestore on FreeBSD, have migrated it to/from Debian. At work and home, not petabyte scale but certainly multi hundred terrabyte. Over 15 years, on over 50 hosts/NAS/SAN instances, different hardware. Run ZFS on Raspberry Pi, on home builds, on Intel, on AMD, on other ARM chipsets. I think you're over-stating things. Debian is fine for this. I do think FreeBSD is a better platform for myself. The code…

I guess you can try Windows next - https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs

Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)

#30

Post by realityfactchex »

Confiks wrote: post #7

Not a great time price-wise to be building a NAS, but I have been doing so for the last two weeks. Inside a Jonsbo N6 case, which is pretty nice with an 8x SATA backplane and drive bays (unlike the earlier Jonsbo variants). I ended up on shucking 4x the 14 TB WD Elements Desktop. They contain helium drives, the WD140EDGZ in my case, and are about a third cheaper than 4x the 12 TB WD Red Plus drives (which are air-fil…

> Not a great time price-wise to be building a NAS

That under-states the matter. It is a terrible time, price-wise, to build a NAS.

I'd almost rather have no AI whatsoever and have storage 1/10 the price of pre-AI times.

(If there were a magical choice between having AI and significantly more expensive storage, and having no AI and some program to dump that investment money into getting and somehow leveraging significantly more available storage, that is.)

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