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Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

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Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#281

Post by InvaderFizz »

viraptor wrote: post #264
InvaderFizz wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had hundreds of drives in hundreds of terabytes of appliances over years. URE and resilver is a common occurrence, as in every monthly scrub across 200+ drives. This isn't 200 drives in a single array, this is over 4 appliances geographically distributed. The drives have been champs overall, they're approaching an average runtime of about 8 years. During that 8 years we've lost about 20% of the drives in various…

> monthly scrub Are they used 24/7 at high iops? Why not nightly scrub?

We could do weekly. The volume of data is large enough that even sequential scrubbing when idle is about an 18 hour operation. As it is, we're happy with monthly scrubbing on the Z3 arrays. We don't bother pulling drives until they run out of reallocatable sectors, this extends the service lifetime by a year in most cases.

I intentionally provisioned one of the long term archive only appliances with 12 hot spares. This was to prevent the need for a site visit again before we lifecycle the appliance. Currently down to seven hot spares.

That replacement will probably happen later this year. Should reduce the colo cost by power requirement reduction enough that the replacement 200TB appliance pays for itself in 18 months.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#282

Post by sngz »

AviationAtom wrote: post #119

This article seems right up my alley, so here are some thoughts: - ZFS is pretty amazing in it's abilities, with it ushering in the age of software RAID over hardware RAID - ZFS shouldn't be limited to FreeBSD. The Linux port has come quite a long way. I'd advise you to use PPA over repo though, as many key features are missing from the version on repos. - TrueNAS is more targeted towards enterprise applications. If…

> If you want good utility as a home user then give Proxmox or the like a look.

Isn't proxmox just virtualization? didn't know it can be used as a NAS too.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#283

Post by sascha_sl »

kalleboo wrote: post #83
sascha_sl wrote: post #36

>If you’re new to the homelab world or have no experience building PCs, I recommend that you don’t build your own NAS. >Before building this system, I had zero experience with ZFS, so I was excited to try it out. Sorry, but this is amusing to me. ZFS on TrueNAS is probably fine, but you're building your production NAS, to replace the Synology device you've become "so dependent on". Don't become dependent on ZFS witho…

Has someone yet created open source patches for LVM + Btrfs like what Synology does to pierce the layers and use the btrfs checksums as a tie-breaker to tell lvm what disk to trust to repair errors?

I'm not sure. We use the raidintegrity option, which layers dm-integrity on top of the raid. We then run btrfs scrubs periodically to trigger reads on the device.

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/lvmraid.7.html#DATA_IN...

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#284

Post by barrkel »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #271
barrkel wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raidz (or preferably raidz2) is good for archival / media streaming / local backup and has good sequential read/write performance, while striped mirrors - raid10 - are better for random access read and write and are a little bit more redundant (i.e. reliable), but costs more in drives for the same usuable space. Raidz needs to read all of every drive to rebuild after a drive replacement while a striped mirror only ne…

> Raidz needs to read all of every drive to rebuild after a drive replacement while a striped mirror only needs to read one. However if you're regularly scrubbing zfs then you read it all regularly anyway. Not quite. Each vdev rebuild uses disks within it. A pool with multiple vdev each being raidz does not need to read all disks to rebuild a single raidz vdev. Your statement compares one vdev vs many vdevs. It just…

Sure, you can build striped raidz and 3+ way mirrors and other more exotic variants but the two most typical corners of the configuration space are plain raidz2+ for all the drives vs striped mirrors. You lose usable space not putting all your drives into a single parity array and maximizing usable space is usually why you go with parity. Mixing multiple arrays only makes sense from this perspective if you have a mix of drive sizes.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#286

Post by cm2187 »

simcop2387 wrote: post #255
cm2187 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason not to use zfs for a NAS? I am thinking of a NAS hosting multimedia files, surely the ability to roll back must comes at a cost in term of disk space for large files.

Because it's a copy on write file system The snapshots don't take up any extra space until you do any writing. The common parts between snapshots are shared between them in storage so you only pay the cost for any changes (rounded to some block size).

But if I remux a large video, won't I have two versions of that video taking space on the disk? If I do that often, that will eat the capacity very quickly.

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#287

Post by 8fingerlouie »

Oh i've been down this road before, and i ended up with a new Synology, though i keep my lab part on a separate machine and use the Synology for storage only :)

Benchmarks are nice, but you're comparing an old NAS to a brand new one with significantly more computer power, and had you compared to a new Synology, you'd probably arrive at the same findings.

Parts of you power consumption could very likely be from your choice of hard drives. The 8TB Seagate Ironwolf has an average power consumption of 8.8W [1], where a WD Red 4TB requires at most 4.8W [2]. With 4 drives, that's an additional 16W of power consumption right there.

Another thing you could try is to enable powerd and measure if it has any effect on the power consumption. In case it does, you can enable it in TrueNAS Core by adding it as a tunable via the web UI. System -> Tunables -> Add Type = rc.conf Variable = powerd_enable Value = yes

FreeBSD Wiki also has some Tuning Parameters [3]

[1]: https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/ironwolf...

[2]: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...

[3]: https://wiki.freebsd.org/TuningPowerConsumption

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#288

Post by simonjgreen »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #189
AviationAtom wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the worst point is vendor lock-in. If your controller fails, and a replacement isn't available, then you may be dead in the water. That kind of goes against the very point of RAID.

But this is why businesses spend so much on their RAID controllers. To make sure they're in warranty and that kind of thing doesn't happen. Incidentally its also pretty great because no business buys them second hand without warranty. So they're usually available for half nothing. I don't use raid cards right now but I do use fibre channel which is also dirt cheap second hand

Spending lots of money on hardware support doesn't guarantee it won't fail, or even that you will get replacements fast, it just guarantees that a contract exists saying something. As an architect we should engineer our solutions to cater for hardware failure.

I call this sort of thing a technical guarantee rather than a commercial guarantee

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#289

Post by xedarius »

kettleballroll wrote: post #191
xedarius wrote: post #116

I have pretty much this existing setup. One thing I'd add is that it's quite noisy. If you have somewhere you can put it, and your house is all cat 6'ed up then great. But if like me you have it in the same room as you, you wil notice it. And it's not the pc, the fractal case has very quite 120mm fans, it's the HDDs.

Are you me? I have almost the exact same build as discussed in the post, and I am super annoyed with how loud the disks are. I have a cronjob that puts them to sleep every night(the NAS is in my bedroom)... For some weird reason they never stop spinning otherwise.

Made me chuckle. Until SSD are within the reach of a reasonable price range we're out of luck. I have resorted to leaving my NAS off and turning it on when I need it.

For reference here's the drives I have. I don't think they're by any means the loudest and nor are they the quietest. The perception of noise can be a lot to do with surroundings, if you have wooden floor instead of carpet and a whole number of factors. For me the constant whiring is too much.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07H289S79/ref=ppx_yo_dt...

Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

#290

Post by mobilio »

6ak74rfy wrote: post #275
mobilio wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here - 32 cores/64G ram/4 3.5" bays, dual power 460w for $300. Results: - idle - 55W - full usage - 200W Not bad for 10 years old server.

(Cross-posting from another comment of mine.) I am a newbie with server builds. Can you share an Ebay or Amazon link that can be a good/cheap starting point? Also, will these servers contain everything I need to get up and running (with the exception of hard drives, of course)?

Here is it: https://www.ebay.de/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m5...

Just check how many RAM they have, how many disk slots and what is their connector (SATA/SAS).

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