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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)

#201

Post by bensyverson »

cm2187 wrote: post #111
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…

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.

The risk of z1 is that if you get a read error during resilvering, that data is permanently corrupted. The odds of this happening go way up the larger your individual drives are. This is why I chose RAIDZ2 for my NAS. I've had to resilver 2-3 times over the past 10 years, and never lost a byte of data.

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

#202

Post by philjohn »

realityfactchex wrote: post #30
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 signifi…

You're telling me.

I had a drive go bad in my 4 year old home-built NAS a few weeks ago, and it cost 2x what it originally did to buy the same capacity drive, and that was going to a grey-market importer on eBay, it was more on "reputable" sites.

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

#203

Post by j1elo »

dwedge wrote: post #177
j1elo wrote: post #173

I'd love reading some blogs about what's the best usage for actually minimal computers, any suggestions? It always gets me how the world of self-hosting is usually introduced from claiming that you can start giving a second life to a Raspberry Pi or a forgotten laptop, and suddenly the next blog you read calls "minimal" a beast machine meant for racks and semi- or professional environments. Bought a ThinkCentre M910q…

> ThinkCentre M910q I love these machines. I have 3 of them and an M720Q. Needs changed so only one of each is actually in use, but they are so low profile and quiet that I'm considering deploying the other two at home just in case I ever get the urge to play with K8s or something. The only thing I'm missing is a splitter so I can use one plug socket instead of three - not sure if something like that exists. One nice…

So it has the potential to even look and work like an actual NAS! That is so cool. Sad state of affairs that 64GB seem to be around €400 nowadays, that's actually double of what the whole machine cost. I'll wait for the AIpocalypse and come out later to buy some sticks.

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

#204

Post by cormorant »

naturalmovement wrote: post #67
ylyn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assert that ECC RAM being necessary for ZFS is just a myth but provide no justification for why that is untrue. Is it not the case that if you don't have ECC memory, ZFS could end up writing a checksum that does not match the data if you get a bitflip in just the right (wrong) spot?

> You assert that ECC RAM being necessary for ZFS is just a myth but provide no justification for why that is untrue. ZFS without ECC is no more risky than any other file system / software RAID without ECC. As no one owes you an explanation, it would take you five seconds to Google this and discover: 1. It's been disproven, with one of the original ZFS developers chiming in. 2. The original source of the rumor was a…

> five seconds to Google this and discover

...(after much longer) that it's a rabbit hole with nuance. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18481910

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

#205

Post by toast0 »

dijit wrote: post #74
Confiks wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, indeed. ECC RAM is better than non-ECC RAM, also for ZFS. The myth, popularized by a notorious thread on the TrueNAS forums [1], is specifically that ZFS requires ECC RAM, and will do worse than other filesystems without it, because scrubbing will multiply a single bitflip into a failed pool. A ZFS core developer says that that isn't the case [2]. Here's some more reasoning [3], also about many other myths. [1]…

Usually if you’re using a NAS you don’t want to lose data, ZFS is not significantly more sensitive than everything else. But everything is actually quite sensitive. We’ve accepted lack of ECC because Intel decided it would be a product line differentiator, and serious customers who didn’t want random crashes or to lose data would buy chips with ECC. It’s actually less of an issue these days because DDR5 has (by spec)…

> We’ve accepted lack of ECC because Intel decided it would be a product line differentiator, and serious customers who didn’t want random crashes or to lose data would buy chips with ECC.

AMD has been allowing ECC on lots of regular hardware for a long time.

People don't tend to buy ECC for desktop use because it costs significantly more (used server ram is/was often cheap... but it often doesn't work in desktop boards), and the performance specs are poor.

My home servers are mostly retired desktops, so they get my old desktop ram and I don't want to pay premium prices for jedec speed ecc ram on my desktops, thanks.

Since DDR5 doesn't include reporting on bit errors (afaik), it likely means much fewer single bit errors, but most experienced errors will be multi-bit. Although, I dunno what proportion of bit errors is on the ram chips and what's on the bus... there's no protection from bus errors.

If there were reporting, you could replace chips with high error rates, but without reporting you'll keep running them until they fail enough to notice.

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

#206

Post by [deleted] »

alex43578 wrote: post #184
wolrah wrote: post #168

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

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

#207

Post by regexorcist »

solarengineer wrote: post #197
regexorcist wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LVM does have snapshots.

"It is important to regularly monitor the snapshot’s storage usage. If a snapshot reaches 100% of its allocated space, it will become invalid." [1] ZFS snapshots use Copy-on-Write differently and have no such allocated space limit. Thus, we can do interesting things like snapshotting a file system after an OS is installed, and then roll back to that snapshot upon an OS upgrade failure, or even clone a new file system…

You can do those things with LVM snapshots too, that's what they are used for.

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

#208

Post by robrtsql »

fluoridation wrote: post #175
dotancohen wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

Are you being sarcastic? There's no way you believe people couldn't wash dishes or clean floors because of all the emails and birthday greetings they had to write, or that people have almost completely lost the ability to consider making art.

I believe it was rhetorical. They were trying to illustrate that we've automated tasks that people might find to be fulfilling (drawing, writing) but are still a long way off from affordably automating drudgery.

> or that people have almost completely lost the ability to consider making art

They haven't lost it, no, but there's a lot of financial incentive to stop paying people to do it.

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

#209

Post by toast0 »

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 :)

I run my cheap hosting box with a cleartext boot setup that uses ssh to automatically grab the key for the real root from my home server (or an alternate at my MILs house). Using FreeBSD, but similar concepts.

A previous hoster once gave me someone else's drives without wiping them. I don't want random customers snooping around on my data if a similar mistake happens with my disks.

For home use, I run without disk encryption. If I ever need to do data recovery, it's not going to be possible with encrypted disks and one point of a centralized NAS is to have stable long term storage.

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

#210

Post by sowbug »

fluoridation wrote: post #175
dotancohen wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

Are you being sarcastic? There's no way you believe people couldn't wash dishes or clean floors because of all the emails and birthday greetings they had to write, or that people have almost completely lost the ability to consider making art.

It's a paraphrasing of the popular 2024 Joanna Maciejewska quote: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
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