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Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459

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Re: Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459

#41

Post by hnick »

moreorless wrote: post #23
nicolaslem wrote: post #2

I was surprised that there are very few PC cases made for small NAS. So this solution of buying a consumer product and installing FreeNAS on it makes sense.

These things are great for small NAS. https://buy.hpe.com/us/en/servers/proliant-microserver/proli...

My FreeNAS has been running for years on an older ProLiant, off a USB stick, in an Ikea desk cupboard with poor ventilation (some gaps around the front door, and a 4 inch circle drilled in the back). The only failure so far was the old USB stick, once I reinstalled and put a new stick on I could see my ZFS data again.

I should probably update the software, but I already broke it once trying that, so for now it's sitting happy as a dumping ground for files.

Re: Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459

#42

Post by jlgaddis »

linsomniac wrote: post #27
humaid wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the advice. Will keep it mind when setting it up with the new drives!

Oh, my other advice is: Avoid Seagate drives. Historically, I've found Hitachi to be the most reliable, and the BackBlaze hard drive stats seem to confirm that, though they tend to have small numbers of Hitachi drives. This is because they optimize for price not reliability. I've had good luck with other brands, but I've pretty much had universally bad luck with Seagate. Last year I replaced the last of our Stagate 1…

> Oh, my other advice is: Avoid Seagate drives ... I've found Hitachi to be the most reliable ... but I've pretty much had universally bad luck with Seagate.

Don't take this personally but this advice is fairly useless.

For every person like you, who has "found Hitachi to be the most reliable" and "had universally bad luck with Seagate", there's someone else who has the exact opposite advice.

Our opinions are shaped by our own experiences, of course, and (most of the tine) it's hard to change our minds or convince us otherwise.

The (unfortunate) truth is that there's no one brand of HDDs that really is "the best" -- especially for all use cases! If there were, well, we'd all be using them by now and all of the other manufacturers would have already went out of business.

Re: Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459

#43

Post by hnick »

joshgachnang wrote: post #21
amenod wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: why? Can't you simply shut down the NAS^wmicroserver and replace the failing drive then? (assuming the downtime is not a problem, which is probably the case with most home NAS installations)

One fear I've heard from Sys Admin friends is that you'll have another drive failure when the machine tries to boot back up (and possible data loss if you're only running RAID5). As I understand it, there's a nonzero chance the drive is fine while it's still running, but will disappear or have trouble spinning back up after a reboot, so you want to rebuild your array before rebooting.

Is there any truth to the advice that this is mitigated by buying drives from different retailers and aiming for different batches and average failure time?

Re: Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459

#44

Post by ValentineC »

zepearl wrote: post #28
linsomniac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, my other advice is: Avoid Seagate drives. Historically, I've found Hitachi to be the most reliable, and the BackBlaze hard drive stats seem to confirm that, though they tend to have small numbers of Hitachi drives. This is because they optimize for price not reliability. I've had good luck with other brands, but I've pretty much had universally bad luck with Seagate. Last year I replaced the last of our Stagate 1…

I used to always buy Hitachi as well, but when I decided a few weeks ago to replace all my old 4TB HDDs with 8TB HDDs I found out that they're quite expensive (did they use to be that expensive?). Well, in any case now I bought 8 Toshiba N300 8TB (4 HDDs for a server and another 4 for a NAS, both used by a RaidZ1) and so far they worked (and they're not loud and don't vibrate like hell when the disk is spinning, unli…

Not to second-guess your purchase, but was there a reason you didn't diversify across the brands to prevent a situation where they might all fail at once?

Re: Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459

#45

Post by pfranz »

jlgaddis wrote: post #42
linsomniac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, my other advice is: Avoid Seagate drives. Historically, I've found Hitachi to be the most reliable, and the BackBlaze hard drive stats seem to confirm that, though they tend to have small numbers of Hitachi drives. This is because they optimize for price not reliability. I've had good luck with other brands, but I've pretty much had universally bad luck with Seagate. Last year I replaced the last of our Stagate 1…

> Oh, my other advice is: Avoid Seagate drives ... I've found Hitachi to be the most reliable ... but I've pretty much had universally bad luck with Seagate. Don't take this personally but this advice is fairly useless. For every person like you, who has "found Hitachi to be the most reliable" and "had universally bad luck with Seagate", there's someone else who has the exact opposite advice. Our opinions are shaped…

Also, the bummer about the Backblaze stats is that they can't tell you about new batches of drives.

Re: Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459

#46

Post by linsomniac »

jlgaddis wrote: post #42
linsomniac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, my other advice is: Avoid Seagate drives. Historically, I've found Hitachi to be the most reliable, and the BackBlaze hard drive stats seem to confirm that, though they tend to have small numbers of Hitachi drives. This is because they optimize for price not reliability. I've had good luck with other brands, but I've pretty much had universally bad luck with Seagate. Last year I replaced the last of our Stagate 1…

> Oh, my other advice is: Avoid Seagate drives ... I've found Hitachi to be the most reliable ... but I've pretty much had universally bad luck with Seagate. Don't take this personally but this advice is fairly useless. For every person like you, who has "found Hitachi to be the most reliable" and "had universally bad luck with Seagate", there's someone else who has the exact opposite advice. Our opinions are shaped…

I would generally agree with you, but it comes from a decently sized sample set (not huge, a few thousand), but also because it seems to be backed up consistently by Backblaze's stats. :-)

Re: Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459

#47

Post by linsomniac »

ValentineC wrote: post #44
zepearl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to always buy Hitachi as well, but when I decided a few weeks ago to replace all my old 4TB HDDs with 8TB HDDs I found out that they're quite expensive (did they use to be that expensive?). Well, in any case now I bought 8 Toshiba N300 8TB (4 HDDs for a server and another 4 for a NAS, both used by a RaidZ1) and so far they worked (and they're not loud and don't vibrate like hell when the disk is spinning, unli…

Not to second-guess your purchase, but was there a reason you didn't diversify across the brands to prevent a situation where they might all fail at once?

I'm reminded of those HP drives that would brick themselves after a certain number of operating hours. People had every drive in their RAID array fail at once.

Re: Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459

#48

Post by ksec »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #16
ksec wrote: post #13

Qnap actually has a new OS called Hero Edition that uses ZFS by default, coming in Q3. https://www.qnap.com/quts-hero/en/

Why not support the company that actually supports the development of ZFS instead? I don't know anything about Qnap but FreeNAS has a wealth of robust functionality. I'd be curious as to why people would prefer Qnap?

Well if they actually does anything consumer like Synology and Qnap, ASUStor or TerraMaster I would have bought one immediately. But iXysystem hasn't done it for the past 10 years.

Re: Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459

#50

Post by vetinari »

hnick wrote: post #43
joshgachnang wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One fear I've heard from Sys Admin friends is that you'll have another drive failure when the machine tries to boot back up (and possible data loss if you're only running RAID5). As I understand it, there's a nonzero chance the drive is fine while it's still running, but will disappear or have trouble spinning back up after a reboot, so you want to rebuild your array before rebooting.

Is there any truth to the advice that this is mitigated by buying drives from different retailers and aiming for different batches and average failure time?

Having different batches reduces the risk of multiple devices failing at the same time. There's a higher chance of devices from the same batch failing simultaneously (due to the same material or fault during the manufacture) than from different batches, or even better, from different vendors.
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