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Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

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Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#31

Post by mannyv »

beala wrote: post #24
leobg wrote: post #19

I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in. The author is using a ThinkPad T430. Any experiences?

The official TrueNAS docs recommend against using USB drives [1]. My understanding is that between the USB controller, flaky connectors and cables, and usb-to-sata bridges of varying quality, there are just too many unknowns to guarantee a reliable experience. For example, I’ve heard that some usb-to-sata controllers will drop commands and not report SMART data. That said, there are of course many people on the inter…

Been using like 7 external usb drives with 40-50tb total for a few years with no issues. Not raid, just backing up drive to drive. No controller or drive issues. Mix of seagate and wd 8/12/16gb.

I hate blanket recommendations like this by docs. To me, it just sounds like some guy had a problem a few times and now it's canon. It's like saying "avoid Seagate because their 3tb drives sucked." Well they did, but now they seem to be fine.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#32

Post by numpad0 »

econ wrote: post #2

OT > Half of tech YouTube has been sponsored by companies like... It just struck me that the product reviews are a part of the social realm that is barely explored. Imagine a video website like TikTok or YouTube etc where all videos are organized under products. Priority to those who purchased the product and a category ranked by how many similar products you've purchased. The thing sort of exists currently in some h…

There's Kakaku.com[1] in Japanese Internet for all consumer electronics, Minkara for cars, bookmeter.com for books, and 5ch.net as fallback. It's surprising that there's only Goodreads on English Internet that everyone have heard of...

1: https://review.kakaku.com/review/K0001682323/ | https://review-kakaku-com.translate.goog/review/K0001682323/...

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#33

Post by dheera »

leobg wrote: post #19

I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in. The author is using a ThinkPad T430. Any experiences?

> I was about to buy a NAS.

The UNAS Pro 8 just came out and I'm thinking about getting it, switching away from my aging Synology setup ... only thing I wish it had was a UPS server as my Synology currently serves that purpose to trigger other machines to shut down ...

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#34

Post by aftbit »

I've been considering "de-enterprising" my home storage stack to save power and noise and gain something a bit more modular. Currently I'm running on an old NAS 1U machine that I bought on eBay for about $300, with a raidz2 of 12x 18TB drives. I have yet to find a good way to get nearly that much storage without going enterprise or spending an absolute fortune.

I'm always interested in these DIY NAS builds, but they also feel just an order of magnitude too small to me. How do you store ~100 TB of content with room to grow without a wide NAS? Archiving rarely used stuff out to individual pairs of disks could work, as could running some kind of cluster FS on cheap nodes (tinyminimicro, raspberry pi, framework laptop, etc) with 2 or 4x disks each off USB controllers. So far none of this seems to solve the problem that is solved quite elegantly by the 1U enterprise box... if only you don't look at the power bill.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#35

Post by dragontamer »

aftbit wrote: post #34

I've been considering "de-enterprising" my home storage stack to save power and noise and gain something a bit more modular. Currently I'm running on an old NAS 1U machine that I bought on eBay for about $300, with a raidz2 of 12x 18TB drives. I have yet to find a good way to get nearly that much storage without going enterprise or spending an absolute fortune. I'm always interested in these DIY NAS builds, but they…

I have to imagine that the best NAS build is simply a 6-core or 8-core standard AMD or Intel with a few HBA controllers and maybe 10Gbit SPF+ fiber or something.

"Old server hardware" for $300 is a bit of a variation, in that you're just buying something from 5 years ago so that its cheaper. But if you want to improve power-efficiency, buy a CPU from today rather than an old one.

--------

IIRC, the "5 year old used market" for servers is particularly good because many datacenters and companies opt for a ~5-year upgrade cycle. That means 5-year-old equipment is always being sold off at incredible rates.

Any 5-year-old server will obviously have all the features you need for a NAS (likely excellent connectivity, expandibility, BMS, physical space, etc. etc.). Just you have to put up with power-efficiency specs of 5 years ago.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#36

Post by beagle3 »

amelius wrote: post #26
tw04 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t need any performance it’s a great backup strategy. If your only way of connecting the drives to the laptop is USB I would be concerned about data integrity if it’s important data.

Why is USB so bad at data integrity. Doesn't it have error detection/correction? If so, that sounds like a huge design flaw.

Individual writes are safe, in my Experience with thousands of uSB drives in many configurations, some with 12 2tb drives hanging on multiple USB hubs at the same time.

However, there are disconnects/reconnects every now and then. If you use a standard raid over these usb drives, almost every disconnect/reconnect will trigger a rebuild — and rebuilds take many hours. If you are unlucky enough to have multiple disconnects during a rebuild, you are in trouble.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#37

Post by dragontamer »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #15
speedgoose wrote: post #4

I admire the courage to store data on refurbished Seagate hard drives. I prefer SSD storage with some backups using cloud cold storage, because I’m not the one replacing the failing hard drives.

RAID. Preferably RAID 6. Much, much better to build a system to survive failure than to prevent failure.

Don't RAID these days. Software won rather drastically, likely because CPUs are finally powerful enough to run all those calculations without much of a hassle.

Software solutions like Windows Storage Spaces, ZFS, XFS, unRAID, etc. etc are "just better" than traditional RAID.

Yes, focus on 2x parity drive solutions, such as ZFS's "raidz2", or other such "equivalent to RAID6" systems. But just focus on software solutions that more easily allow you to move hard drives around without tying them to motherboard-slots or other such hardware issues.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#38

Post by zettabomb »

mannyv wrote: post #31
beala wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The official TrueNAS docs recommend against using USB drives [1]. My understanding is that between the USB controller, flaky connectors and cables, and usb-to-sata bridges of varying quality, there are just too many unknowns to guarantee a reliable experience. For example, I’ve heard that some usb-to-sata controllers will drop commands and not report SMART data. That said, there are of course many people on the inter…

Been using like 7 external usb drives with 40-50tb total for a few years with no issues. Not raid, just backing up drive to drive. No controller or drive issues. Mix of seagate and wd 8/12/16gb. I hate blanket recommendations like this by docs. To me, it just sounds like some guy had a problem a few times and now it's canon. It's like saying "avoid Seagate because their 3tb drives sucked." Well they did, but now they…

RAID is much different. You can try it over USB, you won't have a good time. TrueNAS is primarily talking about RAID users.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#39

Post by f_devd »

dragontamer wrote: post #37
LorenPechtel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAID. Preferably RAID 6. Much, much better to build a system to survive failure than to prevent failure.

Don't RAID these days. Software won rather drastically, likely because CPUs are finally powerful enough to run all those calculations without much of a hassle. Software solutions like Windows Storage Spaces, ZFS, XFS, unRAID, etc. etc are "just better" than traditional RAID. Yes, focus on 2x parity drive solutions, such as ZFS's "raidz2", or other such "equivalent to RAID6" systems. But just focus on software solutio…

FYI XFS is not redundant, also RAID usually refers to software RAID these days.

I like btrfs for this purpose since it's extremely easy to setup over cli, but any of the other options mentioned will work.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#40

Post by toast0 »

aftbit wrote: post #34

I've been considering "de-enterprising" my home storage stack to save power and noise and gain something a bit more modular. Currently I'm running on an old NAS 1U machine that I bought on eBay for about $300, with a raidz2 of 12x 18TB drives. I have yet to find a good way to get nearly that much storage without going enterprise or spending an absolute fortune. I'm always interested in these DIY NAS builds, but they…

If you want 100TB, you need a bigger NAS than most, and that makes most of the DIY NAS not so good. 2-4 drives seems to be where DIY shines. These days motherboards often stop at 4x sata, so you'll need a HBA or USB (eww).

Personally, I just don't have that much data, 24TB mirrored for important data is probably enough, and I have my old mirror set avaialable for media like recorded tv and maybe dvds and blu-rays if I can figure out a way to play them that I like better than just putting the discs in the machine.

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