Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A modular, extensible DIY NAS

blog.georgovassilis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 113 posts

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#91

Post by bluGill »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #59

A quick word of caution: RAID is not a backup (as already mentioned elsewhere in the comments). Even more so in home solutions whether they are DIY or off the shelf. Why? Because storing a single copy of your data on a single local RAID array doesn't protect you from disasters such as fire, theft, accidental fluid spills, small children/pets, a power surge after a lightning strike, flooding, and so on. Basically, a l…

I run ZFS to mitigate half of what you say. I trust ZFS more than backups to keep my data correct - checksums ensure against bitrot. I also have snapshots, so unless I don't notice the file is gone for years it is there to restore easily.

What you say about protection from fire/theft is still real though. I'm looking for a good (which includes easy) solution for that.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#92

Post by nix23 »

ggeorgovassilis wrote: post #87
nix23 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>backup is too expensive, so investing into robustness and availability is the only option left. No please don't say something like that if you love your data. Raid is for the availability of your data, a Backup is the secure storage/versioning of you data, two completely different things.

My love for my data has a price tag :-) If I afford backup with this amount, I need to cut down on other expenses in my life.

Have a look at some used LTO4 tape-drives ~40$ they can store up to 1.6TB per Tape (compressed) and are the perfect thing to offline your data.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#93

Post by FerretFred »

I tried something similar after looking at what I really needed a NAS for: serving music and video to my home network, and via Wireguard VPN if needed. When I actually looked at the requirements in detail I set up a Raspberry Pi 4B with 2Gb memory, a 1Tb SSD connected via USB3/SATA and just installed Samba and MiniDLNA. Careful tweaking of the Samba config file ensured that it played nicely with all devices here, including Roku and Apple. It's simple, works well and is backed up to another, offline disk.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#94

Post by ggeorgovassilis »

nix23 wrote: post #92
ggeorgovassilis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My love for my data has a price tag :-) If I afford backup with this amount, I need to cut down on other expenses in my life.

Have a look at some used LTO4 tape-drives ~40$ they can store up to 1.6TB per Tape (compressed) and are the perfect thing to offline your data.

Thanks. I looked at the specifications; it's not clear how that would connect to the server. All SATA ports are taken and USB is too slow (estimated 72 hours) for a full backup and would require 6-8 tape changes.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#95

Post by agapon »

pabs3 wrote: post #78
anilakar wrote: post #36

I've relied on hardware RAID over one hardware failure, for the first and last time. We were running some services on a stack of older Dell servers with mostly identical hardware. The RAID controller and mainboard on one of them let the magic smoke out. We (a sysadmin team of three) promptly decided to move the RAID array to another unused server in the stack in order to avoid a lengthy reinstall and manual restoring…

IIRC the Linux kernel RAID infrastructure supports various on-disk data structures generated by various hardware RAID controllers, so probably it would be easier to recover from your situation in 2020.

I am not sure but I think that it is for various "soft RAIDs" like those that come with AHCI / SATA controllers (including integrated ones). True hardware RAID controlelr probably require more magic.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#96

Post by wvh »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #59

A quick word of caution: RAID is not a backup (as already mentioned elsewhere in the comments). Even more so in home solutions whether they are DIY or off the shelf. Why? Because storing a single copy of your data on a single local RAID array doesn't protect you from disasters such as fire, theft, accidental fluid spills, small children/pets, a power surge after a lightning strike, flooding, and so on. Basically, a l…

I think the complexity of RAID might even itself be the reason of data loss in quite a few cases. Of course in a corporate environment with whole racks full of disks it makes sense, but at home I just rather synchronise single disks. Make/buy a NAS with two disks for media files, use one as master and copy the changes from one to the other at midnight or whatever frequency makes most sense. It gives you a chance to undo stupid command line mistakes, and you don't need to have similar models of disk. Then keep an external eSATA/USB disk to backup the main disk once a week/month.

When I was younger, all these experiments with firewalls, routers, vlans, RAID and other more professional technologies were a good learning experience, but after all those years, I rather keep work at work and keep it simple at home rather than to simulate a corporate environment on a shoestring budget.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#98

Post by oarsinsync »

ggeorgovassilis wrote: post #94
nix23 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at some used LTO4 tape-drives ~40$ they can store up to 1.6TB per Tape (compressed) and are the perfect thing to offline your data.

Thanks. I looked at the specifications; it's not clear how that would connect to the server. All SATA ports are taken and USB is too slow (estimated 72 hours) for a full backup and would require 6-8 tape changes.

Good, cheap, fast. Pick two.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#99

Post by PAPPPmAc »

I built a similar little machine a couple years ago, mostly for storing my big archived files, being a borg backup target for my other machines, and subsequently mirroring said backups offsite with rclone.

I went for a Chenbro SR301 case (I don't know what's changed in the still-available SR301 Plus model) + modest commodity parts over the HP or Supermicro turnkey boxes in a similar form-factor mostly because it takes standard components (mini-ITX boards, ATX PSU, standard fans... nothing I couldn't overnight from any major vendor for cheap) for easy replacement. It was also a little cheaper.

I did btrfs "RAID10" instead of RAID. Hardware RAID is always a hassle, btrfs is in-kernel, and it has all the nice modern data integrity features (two spindle rule, I have a timer that scrubs it periodically for to verify checksums, etc.) - I've been really pleased with that except for the lack of good automated monitoring/notification tools for btrfs.

Documentation I wrote at the time, more about the backup scheme than the machine at https://pappp.net/?p=1627 I'm still using that setup, eventually I'll need to swap some discs as capacities increase, but that machine has required zero fucking around since it was set up.

Re: A modular, extensible DIY NAS

#100

Post by nix23 »

ggeorgovassilis wrote: post #94
nix23 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at some used LTO4 tape-drives ~40$ they can store up to 1.6TB per Tape (compressed) and are the perfect thing to offline your data.

Thanks. I looked at the specifications; it's not clear how that would connect to the server. All SATA ports are taken and USB is too slow (estimated 72 hours) for a full backup and would require 6-8 tape changes.

Used PCIe Fiber card or cloud-something like Tarsnap or Backblaze?

BTW: For Tape it's REALLY important to have a steady Dataflow, too slow like USB is a big NONO, you NEED something like SAS/SATA or Fibre. The tape can but should not stop and wait for new data to be written.

EDIT: Well then look at LTO5 (double cap)...LTO6 is probably still too expensive.

Post reply on HN