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The Cheapest NAS

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Re: The Cheapest NAS

#281

Post by idatum »

stragies wrote: post #91
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…

I was under the impression, that for most (popular) chip families, like RockChip, Allwinner, Amlogic, some assorted Broadcoms, .. the Mainline linux kernel support has mostly been sorted for, and it's only the stragglers like Hisilicon, Huawei, Most Broadcom, Qualmcomm where mainline support is not on their priority list?

If the application fits, choosing one of the BSDs with the more popular chip families can work well. In other words, if the BSD crowd likes an SoC, you'll get a good, stable system running with good kernel support. In my case it's the RockChip family, specifically from PINE64.

Examples:

- PINE64 Rock64 running FreeBSD 14.1 replaced an aging RPi3. I use this for SDR applications. It's a small, low power device with PoE that I can deploy close to my outdoor antennas (e.g. 1090mhz for dump1090-fa ADS-B). It's been really solid with its eMMC, and FreeBSD has good USB support for RTL-SDR devices.

- PINE64 RockPro64 running NetBSD 10. I have a PCIe card with a 500gb SSD M.2 slot. NetBSD has ZFS support and it has been stable. This lets me take snapshots on the SSD zpool. I generate time-lapse videos using the faster cores.

You don't get 100% HW support (e.g. no camera support for RockPro64) but I don't need it. The compromise is worth it in my case because I get a stable and consistent system that I'm familiar with: BSD.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#282

Post by Dylan16807 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #249
Dylan16807 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of places the file can get corrupted on its way to your drive. The memory of the NAS itself is only one of those. If you want any certainty you need to verify it after writing, so ECC RAM is not enough. And once you do set up that verification, you don't need the ECC RAM anymore.

I am not sure this is correct - there could be an error not only in the data, but also in instructions - but flip could cause data to be written to an incorrect location of the hard disk.

Possible, but I bet the risk of writing/losing the wrong sector based on that kind of RAM bit flip is a lot less than the other sources of writing/losing the wrong sector.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#283

Post by vermaden »

Its very hard to beat Dell Wyse 3030 LT with USB attached disks.

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/silent-fanless-del...

I use that and the costs are about $20-25 for a used Dell Wyse 3030 and $60 for used 5TB 2.5 HDD from Seagate in USB 3.0 case.

Then the power bills will also be tiny as it draw about 3.8W when idle and 10.3 W with CPU and disks stressed to maximum.

The only limitation is 'only' 2GB RAM - but with ZFS ARC set to 32MB minimum and 64MB maximum RAM is not an issue.

    % grep arc /etc/sysctl.conf 
      vfs.zfs.arc.min=33554432
      vfs.zfs.arc.max=67108864
Regards.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#284

Post by metadat »

vermaden wrote: post #283

Its very hard to beat Dell Wyse 3030 LT with USB attached disks. - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/silent-fanless-del... I use that and the costs are about $20-25 for a used Dell Wyse 3030 and $60 for used 5TB 2.5 HDD from Seagate in USB 3.0 case. Then the power bills will also be tiny as it draw about 3.8W when idle and 10.3 W with CPU and disks stressed to maximum. The only limitation is 'only' 2GB RAM -…

Note: S.M.A.R.T. status info can't be read from USB attached drives. You have no idea if they're throwing errors indicating imminent doom.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#285

Post by Yodel0914 »

remram wrote: post #278
danparsonson wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is. PC explodes -> download the cloud copy. Not to be relied on by itself, but it absolutely qualifies as a backup.

Backup solutions usually need to cover more scenarios than "PC explodes". In fact solutions for that are usually called "disaster recovery" instead. A real backup solution ought to cover the case where you deleted the wrong file, and you find out the next day. Or it got corrupted somehow (PCs and disks can explode slowly) and you find out the next time you open it, a week later. If the cloud service happily replicate…

> A real backup solution ought to cover the case where you deleted the wrong file, and you find out the next day. Or it got corrupted somehow (PCs and disks can explode slowly) and you find out the next time you open it, a week later. If the cloud service happily replicated that change, it can't be used to restore anything.

a) my cloud storage has file versioning b) as I mentioned, I have a ~24hr old snapshot as well as a ~30d old snapshot

The worst practical case is that I lose a month's data, and I'm fine with that.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#286

Post by gerdesj »

MobileVet wrote: post #241
gerdesj wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good points. I didn’t actually specify it out, but my third backup is an offline SSD that I plug in every once in a while and store at my office. I only mentioned the RAID for local redundancy reasons. You are right about the data being corrupted, either maliciously or bitrot. The NAS is not accessible outside my home network, so I think I am ok there. Bitrot would require snapshots and full backups stored over time,…

No idea why you were downvoted - that's just daft.

Offline backups are quite literally the gold standard - that might get you out of jail if ransomeware hits and encrypts.

You obviously care and think about your data - good skills mate. We can always only do our best with what we have.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#287

Post by Yodel0914 »

timbit42 wrote: post #255
Yodel0914 wrote: post #201

Although not quite as cheap, I bought a mini pc (Intel N-95, 8GB, 256GB) for not a whole lot more. It has room for a 4TB SSD in a built-in enclosure, which I mirror to an external 4TB HDD nightly. Important stuff is cloud-synced and manually backed up monthly to a external HDD that lives at work. It also runs Jellyfin, minimserver, syncthing etc. One of the nice things is that it has a full sync of my cloud storage,…

Cloud storage isn't a backup any more than RAID 1 is.

Maybe I phrased it badly - I use the minipc to backup cloud storage, not the other way around.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#288

Post by 15155 »

rustcleaner wrote: post #274
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, reading through the linked https://hub.libre.computer/t/source-code-git-repository-for-... really sours my opinion of Libre Computer - shipping with UEFI so you can just use generic images is a huge advantage, but creating your default images (and firmware! which is worse, IMO) with a proprietary process is such a big red flag that it makes me question the whole thing. If the firmware is FOSS and you can build…

Too bad TALOS II is a $5K motherboard. It actually is open down to the brass firmware tacks!

Are the schematics and gerbers provided somewhere?

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#289

Post by remram »

Yodel0914 wrote: post #285
remram wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backup solutions usually need to cover more scenarios than "PC explodes". In fact solutions for that are usually called "disaster recovery" instead. A real backup solution ought to cover the case where you deleted the wrong file, and you find out the next day. Or it got corrupted somehow (PCs and disks can explode slowly) and you find out the next time you open it, a week later. If the cloud service happily replicate…

> A real backup solution ought to cover the case where you deleted the wrong file, and you find out the next day. Or it got corrupted somehow (PCs and disks can explode slowly) and you find out the next time you open it, a week later. If the cloud service happily replicated that change, it can't be used to restore anything. a) my cloud storage has file versioning b) as I mentioned, I have a ~24hr old snapshot as well…

You're probably fine then! I was replying to the post above, which might not reflect your opinion. Mainly because I've seen it multiple times throughout this comments page...

You definitely can make a good backup solution that includes cloud storage, I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#290

Post by throwaway2037 »

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…

I never heard of "nuc" before this post. I found:

    > Next Unit of Computing (NUC) is a line of small-form-factor barebone computer kits designed by Intel.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing

They look even smaller than one litre PCs.

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