How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024) • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by cm2187 » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 9:07 AM UTC

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #41

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’m running an 8-drive ZFS RAIDZ2 pool. I’m wondering if you know — are the free space recommendations around ZFS cargo or real? Like I’m already giving up two full drives for redundancy (which saved my ass - I recently had two drives fail on me in quick succession — both SSDs from what looks like an identical batch) but then the advice is kinda saying I need to keep at least another drive worth of space free for the…

For home usage, if you have backups raidz1 is fine (just do an incremental backup at the first sign of trouble). If you don’t have backups, then you probably shouldn’t be running a NAS in the first place.

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

#112

Post by 6581 » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 9:12 AM UTC

gpt5 wrote: post #100

gpt5 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZFS will auto-degrade performance if there isn't enough headroom. In addition, if you use SSD, you also want the headroom, because otherwise you end up writing and rewriting on the same small empty space which kills SSD (unless you have enterprise SSD, which have built-in headroom).

Not sure why I'm being downvoted for being factually correct (and also, why I can't edit my above comment). ZFS will definitely degrade write performance gradually from 90% utilization, and will hit a stronger cliff at 95%+. Same with SSD, using a consumer SSD above 90%+ utilization would rapidly degrade its lifetime. The effect will be smaller for very large pools and very large files, but the effect is stil there.…

> Not sure why I'm being downvoted for being factually correct

Maybe because your statement about SSDs is incorrect. Consumer SSDs have spare blocks too, and wear leveling prevents the scenario you're describing.

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

#113

Post by igoose1 » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

anon-3988 wrote: post #77

I really, do not want to have a big server rack lying around at my house. I have a couple of SSDs that are not being used and 3 USB HDD drives. I also have a PN50 that I am not using as well. I am thinking of buying a USB bay with 5 SSD slots in it and then 3 HDD drive. My use case is very, very cold. It is mostly just readonly data with some rclone sync every week. Does anyone have a suggestion? I am pretty much rel…

10 months ago I've built a Raspberry Pi 5 mini NAS with 3 SSDs connected through RADXA Penta Hat. It runs OpenMediaVault, system is on the SDcard, other data are on the SSD ZFS pool. I have autosnapshots enabled, and I tune compression methods on specific datasets (lz4 for almost everything, zstd for file backups).

We use it for storing (backups, media files), playing (PaperMC), and watching (Jellyfin). I can only complain about the lack of hardware decoding in Raspberry Pi 5. Jellyfin loads CPU much if I enable transcoding so it's always disabled. If I knew this, I'd consider a cheaper and faster, but less popular, RADXA machine. Storage is fast enough for me, rsync and Samba speeds are usually limited by my network. PaperMC also runs without a hitch, thanks for asking!

As I didn't have high requirements for the machine, I also considered USB Bays at first but they wouldn't go well with ZFS.

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

#114

Post by barrkel » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #84

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m running an 8-drive ZFS RAIDZ2 pool. I’m wondering if you know — are the free space recommendations around ZFS cargo or real? Like I’m already giving up two full drives for redundancy (which saved my ass - I recently had two drives fail on me in quick succession — both SSDs from what looks like an identical batch) but then the advice is kinda saying I need to keep at least another drive worth of space free for the…

I don't think they are. I've already filled a ZFS pool almost to the brim with no adverse effects.

My experience has been escalating fragmentation past 90%, along with lower performance owing to the fragmentation.

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

#115

Post by igoose1 » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 9:17 AM UTC

neilpanchal wrote: post #54

jmusall wrote: post #47

This post mentions https://github.com/wyager/zfs-backup for (offsite) backups. Why would they recommend this over something more established like https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid ? Has anybody tried it?

It's pretty minimal and straightforward written in Haskell. Probably can write one from scratch with Claude now.

What's next!? Let Claude analyse clinic visits!? Oh well...

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

#116

Post by Gigachad » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 9:43 AM UTC

nuker wrote: post #93

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…

> combined with LUKS, TPM keys Does it work? Server can reboot and use TPM to unlock rootfs? What about /boot - encrypted and tamper proof? Resists evil maid attack? Rabbit hole, I know, but so fascinating if you solved it all :)

If you are worried about someone breaking in to your house and replacing the bootloader while leaving your drives in place I probably wouldn't use the TPM auto unlock even if in theory secure boot should be able to handle this.

But in reality that will never happen and the only actual attack you need to be worried about is junkies breaking in and flogging the drives on facebook marketplace. For which, this level of security is fine.

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

#117

Post by ahepp » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 9:48 AM UTC

anon-3988 wrote: post #77

I really, do not want to have a big server rack lying around at my house. I have a couple of SSDs that are not being used and 3 USB HDD drives. I also have a PN50 that I am not using as well. I am thinking of buying a USB bay with 5 SSD slots in it and then 3 HDD drive. My use case is very, very cold. It is mostly just readonly data with some rclone sync every week. Does anyone have a suggestion? I am pretty much rel…

I'd probably just buy a cheap prebuilt PC with a big case, or surplus enterprise tower. You can get cheap LSI PCI cards and do miniSAS to SATA if needed.

The biggest concern I'd have with USB is power delivery to the hard drives, but I haven't even done the napkin math so maybe it's fine. The SSDs seem like they might be a waste of money. USB hard drives have a poor reputation, but I don't have a ton of experience to say how much of that is deserved. On a practical level, I'd also be concerned about knocking the cable out.

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

#118

Post by cheschire » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 9:49 AM UTC

actionfromafar wrote: post #105

socalgal2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it a genuine birthday greeting when you bought a card? Or used an online card? I don’t really see the difference. The point is you thought of them, not the actual words

With AI you don't have to think about them.

Great business opportunity there. Make a free service that sends AI generated birthday notes to people. All the user has to provide is the other persons birthday.

People cannot be relied upon to provide accurate birthdays but nobody would suffer the social faux pas of an incorrect birthday congrats note. Nor would they send it to a spam catching email, but rather are guaranteed to send it to a regularly checked address. They know the persons birthday after all.

You can then sell high quality birthday information correlated to contact information to ad agencies.

Fuck this current internet. So dystopian.

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

#119

Post by ahepp » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 9:51 AM UTC

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 got a gen10 plus microserver and liked it so much that I got a second one.

Throw FreeBSD on it and add a couple lines to /etc/exports and rc.conf and it's a NAS right out of the box

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

#120

Post by gpt5 » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 9:53 AM UTC

6581 wrote: post #112

gpt5 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why I'm being downvoted for being factually correct (and also, why I can't edit my above comment). ZFS will definitely degrade write performance gradually from 90% utilization, and will hit a stronger cliff at 95%+. Same with SSD, using a consumer SSD above 90%+ utilization would rapidly degrade its lifetime. The effect will be smaller for very large pools and very large files, but the effect is stil there.…

> Not sure why I'm being downvoted for being factually correct Maybe because your statement about SSDs is incorrect. Consumer SSDs have spare blocks too, and wear leveling prevents the scenario you're describing.

I appreciate the reply, but my warning consumer SSD is not incorrect. Perhaps I should have clarified that While they typically have a small overprovisioning of 7%, enterprise SSDs have close to 4 times as much, exactly to allow more writes (which is very relevant if running a ZFS raid on the drive). Keeping 10-20% headroom will prolong your SSD's life significantly, and increase performance of ZFS.