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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)

#161

Post by layer8 »

bartvk wrote: post #37
bradley13 wrote: post #22

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…

It also surprised me that the author said "4 Cores, Xeon Server CPU can be had for cheap". But the specs also said ECC RAM and I don't think the N100 supports that.

The N100 supports "In-band ECC" (IBECC), which uses regular non-ECC RAM at the cost of less available memory and a 10-20% performance drop. It’s unclear how well it works, and almost nobody uses it.

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

#162

Post by trollbridge »

randusername wrote: post #153
realityfactchex wrote: post #30

Earlier 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'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.

I obtained a used Dell PowerEdge and just stuffed a bunch of drives in there. It's old enough that the RAM is not overly expensive (DDR3), so it has 192GB of RAM to effectively cache the data, and then 32TB of raw storage. (Of course I regret not spending the extra money to take it to 384GB now.)

The nice thing about the array being big is that I can just RAID 1 it instead of worrying about tinkering with RAID 5, and leave a drive as a hot spare.

PCIe 2.5G NIC for the uplink, and then it can serve over SMB or iSCSI. The main use case for this thing, incidentally, is it just is a caching proxy that holds Docker images, models off of Huggingface, and so on.

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

#163

Post by denkmoon »

beagle3 wrote: post #80
denkmoon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is kind of exactly how zfs works though. The guide isn't complete, sure, but "rebuilding" the array is just replace the disk and run a single zfs command.

That’s comforting to know; that wasn’t true in the past for ext4 over lvm (is it true now?). But what is that command? And how do you know which disk has gone bad? I am sure I can get an answer from Google / Claude / ChatGPT, but a guide is incomplete without it - and the failure report should be active like a beep or flashing hardware light - I typically log into my NAS only a few times a year. A motd or other banne…

man zfs, man zpool, cron, your mta of choice (I like dma) :)

schedule a zpool scrub every month, send an email if it finds errors. zpool status will show the errored drive. zpool replace will initiate the drive replacement.

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

dotancohen wrote: post #69
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would kill (figuratively, anyway) to have no AI whatsoever. No slop machine threatening to replace my job, or turn my job into babysitting its stupidity, and hardware would be reasonably priced? That would be awesome. AI has brought me nothing but downside.

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…

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by bix6 »

randusername wrote: post #153
realityfactchex wrote: post #30

Earlier 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'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?

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

#168

Post by wolrah »

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…

> 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 them upon people, and make scammers actually have to put in a slight bit of effort, all at the "cost" of real human developers, artists, writers, etc. getting paid for their work....

If this is a hard decision for you, you are the problem.

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

#169

Post by bluGill »

sgt wrote: post #76
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…

Is it a genuine birthday greeting if you just let AI do the job?

I used to write birthday emails to my friends years ago. I quit when calendar systems started automatically promoting me when birthdays happened. Remembering someone's birthday no longer seemed like a significant effort on my part and so it wasn't worth the bother since it didn't say as much.

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

#170

Post by joshmn »

Beijinger wrote: post #127

Has anybody used unraid for his Home Server? Is it worth it? unraid.net

I'm hardly a sysadmin and I think Unraid is great. My usecase is some Docker containers and media backups. The UI gets the job done well, whereas Synology tries to dumb things down and make things pretty.

Android is to Unraid as iPhone is to Synology.

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