Given the current "crisis", I wonder if older off-the-shelf NAS from QNAP, Synology, Asus, UGreen etc. could be re-flashed using FOSS.
A lot of them can, yes.
How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
181–190 of 265 posts
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For most people snapshots are enough backup. It is still useful to have an offsite backup, but realistically fire is rare enough that you can risk it, and that is about the only risk most people have (you can have your NAS in a location likely far from where a fire might break out to reduce the risk farther).
Fire, malware, accidental deletions, capricious RAID controller (pre-ZFS). And that’s only the stuff that happened to me. Add power surge, theft, correlation in SSD failures (eg power on counter overflow firmware bug), damaging the array while moving, etc.
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#183Earlier 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…
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.
In the Linux ISO community the math is different because none of the data is essential, however there is a lot of it.
Backing it all up even one time to an off-site location would be a 2x expense for a hobby. So 3-2-1 is hard to justify.
Instead the math can be different e.g. it's ok to lose some data but not all. Therefore you might prefer the unraid approach over zfs where losing more than parity doesn't kill the whole pool.
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 signifi…
> I'd almost rather have no AI whatsoever and have storage 1/10 the price of pre-AI times. Almost? ALMOST!?!?! If you handed me a button that would make it like LLMs had never existed I'd be slamming that button so hard Sam Altman's clothes would spin around. Return memory and storage prices to normal, undo the sloppification of ~everything, remove all these annoying "features" that are so useful they have to force t…
Hey everyone, stop progress! Wolrah has decided that November 29, 2022 is as far as things should go. Because everyone knows before that day, there were no scams, every artist lived lavishly from commissions, and software was flawless and without any extraneous features.
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI has freed most people I know from the tedious job of writing actual emails and birthday greetings - leaving then more time to e.g. wash dishes or clean the floor. Seriously, if arts and creativity is what sets humans apart from other animals, then AI has almost completely displaced our capacity to even consider doing these activities ourselves. People reach for AI when they should be composing a birthday greeting…
Is it a genuine birthday greeting if you just let AI do the job?
For 90% of birthday greetings, are they ever genuine?
Like seriously, outside of some close friends and family, are you sitting there deliberating over a message for your coworker Steve in the Slack chat or a cousin you barely talk to outside of a birthday and Christmas card?
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm doing it anyway and I've found some secondhand deals. Maybe COVID homelabbers are offloading gear? I built a 24 TB HDD NAS in a 36 bay chassis for around $1000 all-in: mb, ram, rails, chassis, rack, disks, hba, nic Awful Watts/TB but the plan is to run it and the GPU rig on solar.
36 bay? Why so many?
The 36 bay was all I could find on fb marketplace.
I fell in love with the silly idea of squeezing 10G NIC + 10G writes (to a 2x12 RAID 10 HDD array) on the thunderbolt bus of my 12 year old macbook pro.
Then I got distracted with the server mb and truenas and ZFS.
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#187Where can I have a discussion with other developers about storage?
Is here okay?
I want to have physical storage over here, and logical storage over there, and I want to control the mapping from one to the other. I want to talk about encryption, replication, latency. Make "time machine" available on this logical storage. And then I buy some new physical storage, and it joins the story. This physical storage is over at my friend's house for backup. This physical storage is slow and archival. This is a device for writing archival media, and there's a brand new media in it, go ahead and write to it. Show me the health report on all of the physical media, and show me what you've done to protect the logical storage. Graph my usage and make suggestions about when to add more physical storage.
Buying physical storage with power and wifi, and configuring it with a QR code that's on an e-ink display - seems like it should be the most obvious thing in the world, that we should all be really used to doing by now.
What am I missing?
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd almost rather have no AI whatsoever and have storage 1/10 the price of pre-AI times. Almost? ALMOST!?!?! If you handed me a button that would make it like LLMs had never existed I'd be slamming that button so hard Sam Altman's clothes would spin around. Return memory and storage prices to normal, undo the sloppification of ~everything, remove all these annoying "features" that are so useful they have to force t…
Hey everyone, stop progress! Wolrah has decided that November 29, 2022 is as far as things should go. Because everyone knows before that day, there were no scams, every artist lived lavishly from commissions, and software was flawless and without any extraneous features.
There's a difference between standing in the rain and being hit by a tsunami, even if it's both just water.
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most people snapshots are enough backup. It is still useful to have an offsite backup, but realistically fire is rare enough that you can risk it, and that is about the only risk most people have (you can have your NAS in a location likely far from where a fire might break out to reduce the risk farther).
Fire, malware, accidental deletions, capricious RAID controller (pre-ZFS). And that’s only the stuff that happened to me. Add power surge, theft, correlation in SSD failures (eg power on counter overflow firmware bug), damaging the array while moving, etc.
Malware, accidental deletion, RAID controller issues - all things ZFS with snapshots are immune to. You can decide if the other worry you or not - the risk is not zero, but it may be acceptable. Your backups are all subject to similar issues.
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#190Where can I have a discussion with other developers about storage? Is here okay? I want to have physical storage over here, and logical storage over there, and I want to control the mapping from one to the other. I want to talk about encryption, replication, latency. Make "time machine" available on this logical storage. And then I buy some new physical storage, and it joins the story. This physical storage is over a…
bcachefs is slowly working up to what you're describing - describing what you want and letting the filesystem sort it out. We're basically there for local storage, and other people have been building some nice reporting on top.
Next year (post Rust, because networking code is so much nicer in Rust) will be send/recv, and I think we should be able to make some nice improvements over the state of the art there.