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Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!

My Rhythmic Crotch posted:

edit: those are apparently used 2.5" consumer laptop doodie poopy drives
Oh boy. Considering the whole build cost 4.5 grand, you could have designed a proper NAS with way way more storage space for the same dough. And less power hungry. But holy poo poo, an expensive LGA 2011 build around used laptop drives in USB wrappers. :psyduck:

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sleepy gary
Jan 11, 2006

Wow that's a really bad and stupid thing.

Krailor
Nov 2, 2001
I'm only pretending to care
Taco Defender
That's Travis as gently caress.

If there hadn't of been pictures I don't know that you could have convinced me this was real.

sleepy gary
Jan 11, 2006

I understand putting it together if you had the parts already just to get a benchmark and some photos for posterity. But to actually use that? To actually spend $4,500 on that? I can't even....

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
I shudder at the idea that he's like every other storage architect I've ever known that can barely explain wtf IOPS even are but somehow be in charge of millions of dollars of SAN equipment and have every other vendor certificate.

MrMoo
Sep 14, 2000

DNova posted:

I understand putting it together if you had the parts already just to get a benchmark and some photos for posterity. But to actually use that? To actually spend $4,500 on that? I can't even....

The best bit is only $350 on the disks, a $4,000+ table.

red19fire
May 26, 2010

Hey folks, I have a question about NAS and Time Machine, and the hardware questions thread said it would be better to ask here:

red19fire posted:

So I just got an imac (2012, Yosemite) and am making the switch from PC. While it's kind of a mix of software and hardware, I feel like the answer is staring me in the face.

I have a 2 tb NAS drive on my network (synology ds213j if it matters), which has about 750 gigs of work, media, music, etc backed up on it. The whole NAS system was set up with a Win 7 PC. I turned on Time Machine, and after it ran the first time I got an error message on the NAS that the disk was nearly full. I also have crash plan free running afterwards to back up the actual files, but this may be redundant.

From what I understand about TM, does it earmark the entirety of the free space for itself for its hourly backups and such? And could this be the culprit for why the disk reads as full, because of MAC-PC conflicts?

Would it be easier to export the NAS contents to a separate drive and reformat it for Mac? And possibly make a separate partition for time machine/crash plan backups?

Just wondering if anyone else has any ideas, I'm leaning towards reformatting and partitioning a separate time machine area.

E: :aaaaa: V Thanks!

E2: I figured it out, i had the backup set to the volume and not an external.

red19fire fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Dec 22, 2014

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.

red19fire posted:

Hey folks, I have a question about NAS and Time Machine, and the hardware questions thread said it would be better to ask here:


Just wondering if anyone else has any ideas, I'm leaning towards reformatting and partitioning a separate time machine area.

Setup a user account on your synology with a size quota, however many gb you want to dedicate to time machine. Use that account to login to time machine and time machine will think the disk is only however many gb you set as the quota. Time machine should erase old backups automatically.

fletcher
Jun 27, 2003

ken park is my favorite movie

Cybernetic Crumb
Is now a good time to be buying 6TB reds? Price drop or higher capacity drives due any time soon?

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

fletcher posted:

Is now a good time to be buying 6TB reds? Price drop or higher capacity drives due any time soon?

If we see 8TB Reds any time soon, expect that they're going to be quite expensive--HGST's 8TB drive goes for $800+, and Seagate's 8TB drive comes with a note that basically says "use this poo poo like you would tape back-up; re-write performance is going to be terrible."

Off Amazon, Red's $/GB plays out like this:
1TB - $0.67 / GB
2TB - $0.47 / GB
3TB - $0.38 / GB
4TB - $0.3875 / GB
5TB - $0.428 / GB
6TB - $0.443 / GB

So the sweet-spot is the 3TB, but if you can find a discount, or are limited by ports or have some other reason to prefer larger drives, you're not going to be paying THAT much more for it. I'd doubt that prices will sink much in the next few months, anyhow.

phosdex
Dec 16, 2005

that $4500 build.. jesus. xeon e5 and ddr4 for that.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness
You could probably literally attach a handfull of 4-5TB external drives to a random white-box and get similar performance.

mayodreams
Jul 4, 2003


Hello darkness,
my old friend
That money pit of a table server is most glorious thing I have seen in quite a while, and totally made up for my very lovely Monday I am having.

Walked
Apr 14, 2003

I've decided to build a dedicated Plex box.

I'd just go really simple and go with an HP Microserver, but I'd really like something that can transcode as well (and if I can run some VMs for a little more, that'd be nice - not a must).

Any suggestions on:
- Board (6x SATA would be really nice)
- Processor that can handle transcodes at 1080p. Ideally low(ish) wattage. Dont forsee more than one going at any given time
- Case that's quiet (I can swap fans out if needed)


edit:
Looking at:
Mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157547
Case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352047
CPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116995

Any issues at hand? Toss 8gb RAM in there and then 4-5x 4tb Reds and be good to go

Walked fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Dec 23, 2014

Daylen Drazzi
Mar 10, 2007

Why do I root for Notre Dame? Because I like pain, and disappointment, and anguish. Notre Dame Football has destroyed more dreams than the Irish Potato Famine, and that is the kind of suffering I can get behind.
I just built a NAS box and installed FreeNAS 9.3 on it. Went with an AMD quad-core processor that was $90, threw it on a Biostar ATX Mobo that was $80, then attached a water cooler system. Only have 8GB of RAM in it, and when I dumped some multi-GB files on the three WD Reds it took forever to write. Think I need to up the RAM to 16GB, see about getting a RAID controller, and adding a few more drives. I'm just using the NAS as part of a lab, so I'm not in any hurry to shell out another $500, but it is something I want to do in another 6 months.

Ninja Rope
Oct 22, 2005

Wee.
What makes you think those things would improve performance?

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.

Daylen Drazzi posted:

I just built a NAS box and installed FreeNAS 9.3 on it. Went with an AMD quad-core processor that was $90, threw it on a Biostar ATX Mobo that was $80, then attached a water cooler system. Only have 8GB of RAM in it, and when I dumped some multi-GB files on the three WD Reds it took forever to write. Think I need to up the RAM to 16GB, see about getting a RAID controller, and adding a few more drives. I'm just using the NAS as part of a lab, so I'm not in any hurry to shell out another $500, but it is something I want to do in another 6 months.

Are you using all 8gb ram? You probably arn't using 1gb ram.

Also ditch the water cooler, get a 24/7 reliable simple heatsink/fan assembly.

Daylen Drazzi
Mar 10, 2007

Why do I root for Notre Dame? Because I like pain, and disappointment, and anguish. Notre Dame Football has destroyed more dreams than the Irish Potato Famine, and that is the kind of suffering I can get behind.

Don Lapre posted:

Are you using all 8gb ram? You probably arn't using 1gb ram.

Also ditch the water cooler, get a 24/7 reliable simple heatsink/fan assembly.

Went with the water cooler for noise reduction - tried an aftermarket cooler I bought originally and then the watercooler. Didn't look back after that.

Pretty certain I was using all 8GB of RAM - system reporting was showing that RAM utilization was maxed out, which I'm told is to be expected when using ZFS. Still have room for another 8GB, but I wasn't expecting to want to install it so soon.

Not sure if buying a RAID controller would make any difference in Read/Write speeds, but I've always figured (and I may be wrong) that hardware RAID is faster than software RAID. Willing to concede that my experience with RAID controllers is limited, plus I'm not sure if it would even be useful with FreeNAS.

Mr Shiny Pants
Nov 12, 2012

Daylen Drazzi posted:

Went with the water cooler for noise reduction - tried an aftermarket cooler I bought originally and then the watercooler. Didn't look back after that.

Pretty certain I was using all 8GB of RAM - system reporting was showing that RAM utilization was maxed out, which I'm told is to be expected when using ZFS. Still have room for another 8GB, but I wasn't expecting to want to install it so soon.

Not sure if buying a RAID controller would make any difference in Read/Write speeds, but I've always figured (and I may be wrong) that hardware RAID is faster than software RAID. Willing to concede that my experience with RAID controllers is limited, plus I'm not sure if it would even be useful with FreeNAS.

You don't want to run ZFS on a RAID controller. The filesystem makes certain assumptions regarding your drives and the way it "talks" to them. A RAID controller will obfuscate the commands ZFS sends to your drive. This could lead to corruption because your RAID controller could cache writes while ZFS thinks everything is consistent and written to disk. In the event of a crash your filesystems may be corrupted.

If you do use a RAID Controller use one that works in JBOD (IT) mode and does not have any RAID configuration on it.

Edit: You use WD REDs? I had one WD Red and added it to a pair of Samsung f1s and performance was horrible, like 7 MB Sec writes on my Zpool. This prompted me to buy three seagates and now I easily get 200MB/sec transfers.

Don't know if it is related, but my experience with WD Reds was bad. YMMV ofcourse.

Mr Shiny Pants fucked around with this message at 10:29 on Dec 24, 2014

Daylen Drazzi
Mar 10, 2007

Why do I root for Notre Dame? Because I like pain, and disappointment, and anguish. Notre Dame Football has destroyed more dreams than the Irish Potato Famine, and that is the kind of suffering I can get behind.

Mr Shiny Pants posted:

You don't want to run ZFS on a RAID controller. The filesystem makes certain assumptions regarding your drives and the way it "talks" to them. A RAID controller will obfuscate the commands ZFS sends to your drive. This could lead to corruption because your RAID controller could cache writes while ZFS thinks everything is consistent and written to disk. In the event of a crash your filesystems may be corrupted.

If you do use a RAID Controller use one that works in JBOD (IT) mode and does not have any RAID configuration on it.

Edit: You use WD REDs? I had one WD Red and added it to a pair of Samsung f1s and performance was horrible, like 7 MB Sec writes on my Zpool. This prompted me to buy three seagates and now I easily get 200MB/sec transfers.

Don't know if it is related, but my experience with WD Reds was bad. YMMV ofcourse.

Thanks for the info about the RAID Controller - I was certain there was a reason why one was never mentioned with use in a FreeNAS system. I've had great success so far with the 4x2TB Seagate NAS drives I have in my ESXi box, which are hooked to a RAID Controller. I only bought the WD Reds because they were on sale at the time and I could get the three of them for around $60 each. Since they are for intermediate lab use I'm not too concerned about the performance, but once I finish with my lab I intend to re-purpose the NAS and I'll get much larger disks. The only question then will be get 4TB, 6TB, or 8TB drives? Again, not something that requires an immediate decision, so I can leave it for another time.

Pretty sure I will be ordering another 8GB of RAM, however - poo poo's cheap, and it could be very beneficial in the near-term.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
I used to run a 4-disk ZFS RAIDZ with WD Greens on a N36L with 8GB of RAM with XBMC on it, and the performance was fine at over 80 MBps (not that bad considering how slow those are normally). RAM is not really likely to be a factor with your situation due to the rather light load. All the people talking about how ZFS gobbles up RAM and needs that rather egregious 1GB RAM / 1TB disk rule is running some professional setup trying to push hundreds of MBps in throughput to each client. Try to run a zpool iostat while you're doing writes and you should be able to see if there's a specific drive that's holding up transactions. It's a symptom of a slowly dying hard drive that's oftentimes reported in SMART I've noticed, and you may have gotten a dud. All it takes is one bad drive in a slightly suboptimal RAID layout to cause transactions to choke. This is what SANs and such are supposed to help with that most RAID setups won't handle the best.

mayodreams
Jul 4, 2003


Hello darkness,
my old friend
I have 6 3TB WD Reds in a RAIDZ2 on FreeNas 9.3 in my current 'production' configuration at home. I also threw an old Intel 80GB SSD in as cache. Mine is a VM with 8GB as well.

Since I added the SSD cache, I sustain 120mb/s across my gigabit network to my desktops. What kind of network cards / interfaces are you using? If you are serious about using something like this, I STRONGLY recommend getting some Intel PCI-E nics for your server. The crap Realtek ones on most motherboards are garbage when it comes to actual performance. I have a HD HomeRun Prime setup for CableCard tuners across the the network, and I have never been able to get my DVRS to work reliably with the lovely onboard networking.

Another point about RAIDZ on FreeNas: don't do it for data you care about. They scream up and down about how its depreciated and no one should use it. IMHO, no one should use RAID5 for data they care about.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
I have WD Reds and they work fine.

Also, a Realtek NIC connected to Intel NIC directly via crossover cable only pushed 400mbit over here, whereas Intel to Intel saturated the link with 970mbit. So yeah, gently caress Realtek.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Daylen Drazzi posted:

Thanks for the info about the RAID Controller - I was certain there was a reason why one was never mentioned with use in a FreeNAS system.

Sometimes it can help if the controller in IT mode works better than whatever onboard controller you have. With that said, what ZFS config are you using? You didn't turn on dedup, did you?

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
RAIDZ1 / RAID5 is fine if you accept the risks and mitigate right just like anything somewhat dangerous like driving your car (it's one of the most dangerous things we do routinely!). If you backup what you need and are ok with some downtime, no big deal probably. The math for worst cases tend to think about disk failure rates as independent, static probabilities when that's a pretty big assumption to make because drive failures are just not like that at all. They tend to fail upon restart or when spinning up and down or other mechanical actions besides keep rotating and move the actuator heads. It's why I just keep my drives spinning and don't use power management on them. The possibility of extra life is worth the maybe $10 / yr in power cost difference for me.

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.

Daylen Drazzi posted:

Went with the water cooler for noise reduction - tried an aftermarket cooler I bought originally and then the watercooler. Didn't look back after that.


Air cooling should be quieter than water cooling. Both still have a fan but water cooling adds pump noise into the mix.

Sasquatch!
Nov 18, 2000


I'm looking for the best way to maintain an offsite/cloud backup of my 2-TB Synology DS211j (photo/videos mostly).

I guess the first question is what offsite/cloud service to use, and then the second question is how to upload/sync my files. I'd ideally like for the solution to be as automatic as possible (IF that's possible). And also to only sync changes.

I see that the Synology seems to have built-in apps for backing up to services that I honestly have never herad of (ElephantDrive, Glacier Backup, etc.) as well as direct backup support to Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure. I've seen an idea for backing up to OneDrive using WebDAV (http://www.ytechie.com/2014/11/using-unlimited-onedrive-space-for-backups/). A curveball here is that a lot of backup solutions (Crashplan, Carbonite, etc.) seem to assume that your're backing up data that lives on your computer, whereas that's NOT the case here.

Any personal recommendations or thoughts?

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.

Sasquatch! posted:

I'm looking for the best way to maintain an offsite/cloud backup of my 2-TB Synology DS211j (photo/videos mostly).

I guess the first question is what offsite/cloud service to use, and then the second question is how to upload/sync my files. I'd ideally like for the solution to be as automatic as possible (IF that's possible). And also to only sync changes.

I see that the Synology seems to have built-in apps for backing up to services that I honestly have never herad of (ElephantDrive, Glacier Backup, etc.) as well as direct backup support to Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure. I've seen an idea for backing up to OneDrive using WebDAV (http://www.ytechie.com/2014/11/using-unlimited-onedrive-space-for-backups/). A curveball here is that a lot of backup solutions (Crashplan, Carbonite, etc.) seem to assume that your're backing up data that lives on your computer, whereas that's NOT the case here.

Any personal recommendations or thoughts?

Glacier is amazon

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

Don Lapre posted:

Air cooling should be quieter than water cooling. Both still have a fan but water cooling adds pump noise into the mix.

Depends on the setup. A decent radiator will have enough passive heat transfer capability that the fans should barely need to spin at all to cool a basic NAS CPU, and most of the pumps these days are very quiet, as well. Since the hot air is also being ejected directly out of the case, for a NAS-box it means you may be able to cut down on case fans, too. Either way, it's probably overkill, but if he's happy with it, whatever. Only downside I can immediately think of is you can't really get the system to send you an email warning you that the fluid is low/leaking, whereas you can get it to do so if the fans seize, so arguably you need to check on the physical condition of the box more often. Which again only matters if you want to shove it somewhere and ignore it for months at a time.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Sasquatch! posted:

I'm looking for the best way to maintain an offsite/cloud backup of my 2-TB Synology DS211j (photo/videos mostly).

I guess the first question is what offsite/cloud service to use, and then the second question is how to upload/sync my files. I'd ideally like for the solution to be as automatic as possible (IF that's possible). And also to only sync changes.

I see that the Synology seems to have built-in apps for backing up to services that I honestly have never herad of (ElephantDrive, Glacier Backup, etc.) as well as direct backup support to Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure. I've seen an idea for backing up to OneDrive using WebDAV (http://www.ytechie.com/2014/11/using-unlimited-onedrive-space-for-backups/). A curveball here is that a lot of backup solutions (Crashplan, Carbonite, etc.) seem to assume that your're backing up data that lives on your computer, whereas that's NOT the case here.

Any personal recommendations or thoughts?

I haven't used it with a Synology, but Crashplan is capable of operating 'headless' and with couple of simple configuration file edits, you can use a desktop client on another computer to connect to it.

refleks
Nov 21, 2006



Are there any of the entry-level consumer Synology NAS servers one should avoid? I am looking for something to run Plex and store some photos and music on, and was looking at the DS213J or DS215j.
Consider it a baby's first NAS purchase.

Krailor
Nov 2, 2001
I'm only pretending to care
Taco Defender

refleks posted:

Are there any of the entry-level consumer Synology NAS servers one should avoid? I am looking for something to run Plex and store some photos and music on, and was looking at the DS213J or DS215j.
Consider it a baby's first NAS purchase.

None of the entry level Syno units are great with Plex. They all have anemic CPUs that aren't that great for transcoding. The play units claim to feature hardware transcoding but it doesn't work with Plex.

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.

refleks posted:

Are there any of the entry-level consumer Synology NAS servers one should avoid? I am looking for something to run Plex and store some photos and music on, and was looking at the DS213J or DS215j.
Consider it a baby's first NAS purchase.

If you need transcoding you need a higher end unit.

Flipperwaldt
Nov 11, 2011

Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?



Can probably at least narrow it down to: if it has an ARM cpu, transcoding is not going to happen.

Sasquatch!
Nov 18, 2000


IOwnCalculus posted:

I haven't used it with a Synology, but Crashplan is capable of operating 'headless' and with couple of simple configuration file edits, you can use a desktop client on another computer to connect to it.
I take it you're decently happy with Crashplan?

mayodreams
Jul 4, 2003


Hello darkness,
my old friend

Sasquatch! posted:

I take it you're decently happy with Crashplan?

I've been using CrashPlan+ for years and love it. My family's computer back up to both my server here and to the ~~CLOUD~~. If I am going to restore 50GB of data, I'd rather throw it on a USB drive and roll vs waiting weeks to pull it down.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Sasquatch! posted:

I take it you're decently happy with Crashplan?

Very, coming up on the end of my first four year subscription. Had to restore a few times, painless every time.

The only real problem is that the Java app that runs as the server is resource heavy for a huge file count, but I run it in a VM that doesn't do much else so it doesn't really matter.

refleks
Nov 21, 2006



Krailor posted:

None of the entry level Syno units are great with Plex. They all have anemic CPUs that aren't that great for transcoding. The play units claim to feature hardware transcoding but it doesn't work with Plex.

Thanks, I figured there might be something like that with basic ones.
Foregive my ignorance, but is this a limitation of Plex or just video streaming from Synology in general? I just mentioned Plex as this is something I know.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Plex transcodes. Normal DLNA playback would require your TV or whatever to support all the formats you are trying to play with it.

The "play" variants of the Synology boxes have hardware transcoding, I have no idea if Plex can take advantage of this though.

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Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.
Transcoding takes lots of power and arm CPUs in cheaper nas devices just arnt strong enough.

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