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The Cheapest NAS

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Re: The Cheapest NAS

#161

Post by ttyprintk »

kevinkeller wrote: post #146
kstrauser wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely, positively, 100% need it on anything that carries data you care about. I personally consider it a hard requirement for a NAS. I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere.

> I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere. If you have disks set up in RAID 1 or RAID 6, would you still lose data though?

Consider all the RAM along a network transmission. Maybe you’re using authenticated encryption, maybe your transfer has an internal or out of band checksum. Maybe not.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#162

Post by gerdesj »

MobileVet wrote: post #136
dudus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Synology sure provides an expensive but complete package for home office and enthusiasts. Just buy it and be done with it. It's certainly more expensive than DIY it yourself using off the shelf components and things bought out of online classifieds. But for most people that have no interest in tinkering or don't know what to do, just paying the price of a complete solution might be worth it.

Totally. If you enjoy the config and have the time, by all means. If you just want it to work, by a Synology. Mine has been running strong for several years now and has docker images for my unify controller, pi hole and Plex. Took minimal time to setup and none since that day. Love it Edit: And my encrypted cloud backup in Backblaze B2 was equally as easy to setup and costs a whopping $2 a month for every family pic,…

Redundancy and backup are not the same thing. RAID gets you redundancy but if you get pwnd, you get redundantly pwnd!

So you backup to elsewhere. Now you have two copies of your data. Cool. Now you probably can recover from a silly mistake from up to a week ago or whatever your retention period is. However, if you don't monitor your backups, you'll never notice certain snags such as ransomware. OK, that might be low risk for your home backups.

It's quite hard to get the balance right but I think that you might not be quite as protected as you think you are. Why not buy a cheap hard disk and clone all your data to it every three or six months and stash it somewhere?

I have a similar argument with a colleague of mine, to the point that I will probably buy a LTO multi head unit myself and some tapes.

RAID is not a backup, its a data integrity thing. It ensures that what you save now stays saved correctly into the future. It protects now. Backups protect the past.

Think long and hard about what might go wrong and take suitable steps. For you I think a simple, regular off line back up will work out quite well with minimal cost, for disaster recovery.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#163

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Performancewise this looks similar to https://gist.github.com/SvenKortekaas/60387b0428b1592e5c9ec0... , where the aluminum-case and baseboard were available for about 11USD for a time. (ex. shipping, OFC)

The fitting SBC was about the same price, the most expensive part was the high-efficiencý (GAN) wall-wart, and 2.5" Disk.

I know this, because I ordered this eons ago :-)

Still running somewhere, that thing. 24/7 since then, with some reboots, because updates...

Runs Armbian, if you like to, or anything else if you are willing to mess more.

Seems to be still on sale, according to https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#164

Post by gosub100 »

justin_murray wrote: post #121
edmundsauto wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add a disk shelf :). Basically supplies power and data cabling for just a rack of drives. Those get interfaced with the NUC via a host based adapter.

Can you elaborate? What’s the economic way to do this?

they make external HDD chassis that connect via USB. I don't have any experience with them so I can't comment on their reliability, but search for "ORICO 5 Bay USB to SATA Hard Drive Enclosure".

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#165

Post by benlivengood »

kevinkeller wrote: post #146
kstrauser wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely, positively, 100% need it on anything that carries data you care about. I personally consider it a hard requirement for a NAS. I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere.

> I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere. If you have disks set up in RAID 1 or RAID 6, would you still lose data though?

In raid1 all you need is a bit flip in RAM between writing to disks to cause a permanent error (one disk gets the flipped bit, the other does not).

Raid6 will repair single bit errors, assuming a bit wasn't flipped before/during the erasure code calculation when writing the data.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#166

Post by averageRoyalty »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #111
galkk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google takeout of my personal pictures from Google photos takes 600gb+ alone. And I'm not avid picture taker (that's the archive since 2000s, I did upload a lot of my old dslr photos to google photos when it was unlimited). I guess if people make more personal videos, they will use more space easily

I think we probably have different definitions of ‘not an avid picture taker’ :D

I'd say so. I take over 500GB of personal photos/videos per year, and I'm not a huge phone user.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#167

Post by freddie_mercury »

gosub100 wrote: post #164
justin_murray wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? What’s the economic way to do this?

they make external HDD chassis that connect via USB. I don't have any experience with them so I can't comment on their reliability, but search for "ORICO 5 Bay USB to SATA Hard Drive Enclosure".

FWIW, I wouldn't recommend Orico. I don't live in the US so my options are somewhat limited but I found a local retailer that carries Orico. I've had five of them in the past five years and four died within 12-18 months.

If it was just one, I'd put it down to random bad luck. But with that many failures I assume they are doing something stupid/cheap.

Usually they would simply fail to power on but sometimes individual slots seemed to die (which RAID just loooooves).

And having an entire enclosure fail and waiting days/weeks for a replacement sucks as you lose access to all your data.

I eventually bought a Jonsbo N3 off of Aliexpress and PCI SATA card (to support more than the 2-4 drives most motherboards support) and that has been working well for months.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#168

Post by averageRoyalty »

Aeolun wrote: post #156
jjav wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for personal setups. My personal files are ultimately a lot more important to me and much more irreplaceable than any files at work. I'd never run a NAS without ZFS and ECC.

I don’t think I’ve ever had ECC, and have never had any issues. What kind of problems would you expect to see?

Non shielded RAM is subject to bit flipping. Non-ECC always carries this risk in general computing, but the problem is compounded when you run a filesystem like ZFS which uses memory as a significant storage element for write cache.

If it would hugely impact your life if a bit were flipped from a 0 to 1 in your stored data - say you make videos or store your bitcoin wallet key on your NAS - you are running a risk not using ECC.

You may not have had issues or ever have issues with non-ECC. Your car may never be stolen if you leave the keys in either, but it's not a good risk proposition for most people.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#169

Post by averageRoyalty »

theshrike79 wrote: post #32
Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #3

Note that it doesn't look like it has ECC, so make sure to have backups. Fancy file systems like ZFS don't remove the need for ECC.

I've had non-ECC NAS systems for over 20 years and I've had exactly zero cases where memory corruption was an issue. It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for personal setups.

You might have been leaving fire pits to burn out for 20 years when you go to bed, but it only takes 1 errant spark for the "overkill" of wetting the ashes isn't overkill.

There are various trade offs you can make depending on your filesystem, OS tooling and hardware which can mitigate risks in different ways. However non-ECC invites a lot of risk. How often are you checksumming your backups to validate integrity? It seeks unlikely you've had 0 memory corruption over 20 years, more likely you didn't notice it or your run a filesystem with tooling that handles it.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#170

Post by firecall »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #27

My secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of businesses use them and upgrade on a regular schedule. If you care about power consumption like I do, you can Google "$model energy consumption white paper" which contains very accurate data about idle usage, for example https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy... In one case I had a…

Here in Australia there are thousands of ex-Lease Dell 7060 SFF and 7060 Micros PCs on aucation sites every week.

The Dell's coming off lease now have modern features including Intel 8th Gen CPUs with TPM and USB-C etc...

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