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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)

#211

Post by seniorThrowaway »

gpt5 wrote: post #120
6581 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Go ahead and let them try consumer SSD's. It seems to be a lesson everyone has to learn with ZFS once.

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

#212

Post by Kon5ole »

wolrah wrote: post #168
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'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…

Oh come on! I'll take a few years of expensive RAM in order for humanity to get wide access to something near as makes no difference to the Star Trek Ship computer.

Which is 100% what this has felt like to work with, all spring and summer.

So we're in a slop phase, it'll pass. The first few years of youtube gave no hints that we'd get stuff like Veritasium.

Ignore the slop and use the tools to create something you never thought you could do. That's what it's for!

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

#213

Post by ChiperSoft »

wolrah wrote: post #168
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'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…

Same, I'd smash it like it was offering me a million dollars. I cannot think of a single positive thing that has come out of the AI boom. It has been a net negative for all of society.

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

#214

Post by vardalab »

That's what I did after my 15 year old Synology DS1010+ built in USB DOM failed. Put a network booted debian on it via netboot.xyz with zfs and now i get to reuse those 15 year old 2TB still chugging along disks. Fully open source, pretty nice way to keep old hardware going. It's my tertiary backup that wakes up once a week pulls in some open weights LLM models that I hoard just in case and goes back to sleep.

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

#215

Post by vardalab »

ylyn wrote: post #60
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…

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?

Had it happen to my PBS backups running on ZFS without ECC just the other day. Turned out to be heat related, memory was fine but during long backups heat was causing bit flips.

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

#216

Post by Pwntastic »

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…

someone at work unironically said they use ai to compose "thoughtful responses" to people, and my immediate thought was that what they are doing is the literal opposite of thoughtful

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

#217

Post by mrighele »

Having built a nas recently (luckily before ram/diskpocalypse) there seems to be a huge difference between making a small nas (say 4 disks) and a big one. With a small one you are essentially building a pc, and the differentiating factor is the software. Mobo, memory, case, PSU… buy consumer (cheap) stuff and you’re ok. Above that you have to start buying very expensive business oriented stuff,disk enclosure, better psu… the costs increase more that linearly , especially if you don’t live in the US and can easily get used stuff from eBay.

And that stuff is often not just more expensive, but uglier and noisier. I ended up making my own “enclosure”

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

#218

Post by RulerOf »

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 bays and only 24T of storage?

Can't you get that in a single disk that costs less than a kilodollar?

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

#219

Post by iJohnDoe »

PeterStuer wrote: post #98

Rather than 'plain' debian you can put it on Proxmox, and enjoy the bliss of Proxmox Backup Server.

Can you explain a bit more about this. Would this help in a single server to facilitate backups? Or does this need the the NAS and the Proxmox Backup Server on a different system?

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

#220

Post by bobbob1921 »

neilpanchal wrote: post #106
Confiks wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bought Qty 10* of HC520 (12TB) SAS drives for $1000 about 3 weeks ago, avg age is about 2.5 years, still well within its rated lifetime. That's cheap indeed. Enough headroom for some failing disks too. How is the noise and power usage? I didn't look at SAS drives at all, because my impression was that they're very noisy. I can place my NAS in a closed off room, but it's not too far away and I was afraid SAS drive…

> How is the noise and power usage? I think they're same as SATA drives, just different interface. AFAIK they have the same physical dimensions and same internals.

This reply is exactly right about using enterprise drives (hdd), and ideally SAS. Note the power usage of SAS vs sata for an identical drive make/model is very small sometimes 0.5 W to 1.5 W at idle (idle power draw is what matters for spinning HDD’s as underload it doesn’t increase much and idle is what you’ll be at 98% of the time). Also enterprise SSDs are much better than consumer SSD‘s for ZFS, and be aware that when you get above the 4 TB size SSD drives frequently use more power than HDD drives (i’m mainly referring to enterprise non-consumer level drives as that’s all I run for 100s of disks across many zfs systems over past 15 yrs).

Also something people forget for home nas or figuring out cost for a nas, the power draw of the entire system times your electricity price you then have to multiply this times 2x to 4x times if your climate requires cooling air conditioning of any kind

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