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Guni posted:Hi all-knowledgeable NAS goons! I've asked a few questions in this thread before and got some great advice (which I ultimately have never used due to various reasons). But I have a new set of questions so I can confirm what I'm thinking. I'm about to go balls to the wall with my mini-ITX build and remove my 3.5" bay; so that won't be an option to consider. 1) The NAS will transfer the data around your network at the speeds of your internal network connections. So if you've got gigabit ethernet you can expect up to gigabit ethernet speeds. Your network speed is not limited by your internet speed. The only time this is true is when you're transferring data over the internet. 2) Best to connect everything through a switch. If your modem/router has a built in switch, make sure it's at least gigabit. You can transfer data over wifi, but it's best to have the NAS plugged in via wired ethernet. 3) RAID is NOT backup. RAID is for minimizing downtime. Anything you sync to your NAS is a committed change. If you screw up a document or picture and sync it to the NAS, that change is forever and you don't get your old data back. You should consider a backup solution such as an external hard drive or a cloud backup service. Personally I use a second NAS server and 2 external drives and amazon cloud for backup. Total overkill for my linux ISOs but I'd like to make sure I don't lose anything I've been collecting over the years. Yes, you can use your NAS to backup your PCs and other devices, but as far as it being the only target for your data goes, have a working, tested backup. 4) Synology and QNap both make excellent 2-bay units. I run a pair of the old Synology 212js at work and they're decent, but don't expect rocketing speeds out of them. These are also older models, so I don't know what the newer ones can do. I've also got a 4 bay Qnap that I picked up for about $220 on Woot that has dual gigabit ports and I can get great speeds out of it. Currently running 4x3TB WD Red Pros in Raid6. That's 6TB of usable space with 2 disk redundancy. Again, RAID is NOT backup.
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Jun 29, 2016 12:12
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Interestingly enough, Windows has long had a feature that's been variously called Shadow Copies previously and is now named Previous Versions which can transparently interface with zfs snapshots (and btrfs/hammer/refs snapshots? can someone confirm/deny?) allowing you to access old edits of a file. macOS has added something similar with APFS (and with HFS+ and time machines, if you go looking for the feature, but probably 99% of people don't know it's there) - however it could've been so much better If only Apple had actually based Time Machine on ZFS like some early reports seemed to indicate, instead of just doing HFS+ hardlinks and only now getting around to a inferior CoW filesystem with APFS, at least in terms of data integrity.
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Jun 29, 2016 14:59
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I'm cross posting from the PC Building thread, as maybe this is a more appropriate spot. I'm looking for some initial advice on a new build for a home server. I am perfectly comfortable building my own system, but I have never done anything but gaming builds and I really don't know much about server oriented hardware. My use case is primarily Plex, but also general data storage/syncing for my family. I figure if I am going to build something, I want it to be decent enough and general purpose enough to reasonably handle unknown future uses. So, I am currently planning to run FreeNAS. While I will probably start with just a single pool and 5 or 6 disks, I would like to be able to at least double that down the road. I understand that I need an ECC capable ram/mobo/cpu. What I really need input on is the CPU/Mobo. I just am not familiar enough with this to judge what makes sense vs whats under powered and whats total overkill. At a minimum I need the system to be able to run at least 3 transcoded high bitrate 1080p plex streams at once. I prefer to pay a bit more and make sure it wont complain when several people try and access it at once, even if that is not a super common situation. I don't know if this is an issue that requires any extra attention but of course I need a quality Ethernet board. I will be serving both internally on the LAN and out across the net. I have a symmetric gigabit internet connection. The PC Building thread recommends an ASRock C2750D4I with Intel Avoton C2750 (octo-core Atom) for the NAS, How does this thread feel about that? It seems to be an older chip and some brief googling shows it to be very low power vs consumer Intel stuff. I guess the trade off is lower power consumption? Like I said, I don't know poo poo about server hardware.
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Jun 29, 2016 20:23
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That Asrock board has come up a few times here, but I seem to recall there being Bad Things said about one of the onboard SATA controllers. The plus side of it is the low power consumption, small form factor, and a buttload of SATA ports with no external cards needed. If you aren't scared of used hardware, you'll come out way ahead in terms of power and capability. It's not hard to find a Nehalem-era Supermicro motherboard, CPU, and ECC DDR3 for under $200. Throw in the OEM LSI HBA of your choice and some SAS-SATA adapter cables and you can run pretty much any NAS OS you've ever wanted to on it.
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Jun 29, 2016 20:52
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IOwnCalculus posted:That Asrock board has come up a few times here, but I seem to recall there being Bad Things said about one of the onboard SATA controllers. The plus side of it is the low power consumption, small form factor, and a buttload of SATA ports with no external cards needed. IOwnCalculus posted:If you aren't scared of used hardware, you'll come out way ahead in terms of power and capability. It's not hard to find a Nehalem-era Supermicro motherboard, CPU, and ECC DDR3 for under $200. Throw in the OEM LSI HBA of your choice and some SAS-SATA adapter cables and you can run pretty much any NAS OS you've ever wanted to on it. I'm fine using whatever hardware will work. The biggest hurdle to me understanding what works together and for my use case. For example, the LSI HBA you referenced, when i search that it comes up with a huge range, and I don't know enough to say, thats the one thats correct for me. Same goes for a mobo.
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Jun 29, 2016 21:18
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The big gotchas with buying used server gear is occasionally you get weird non-ATX poo poo. For the sake of discussion, I'm running my home ZFS box on a Supermicro X8SI6, which has a built-in LSI2008, but I already had a Dell M1015 (also LSI2208) from a prior build so now I have way more controller ports than I have drives. To an extent it's going to be how much performance do you need and how much do you want to spend. The only bottlenecks I've seen with said ZFS box are trying to boot some VMs off of a couple of old WD 2TB Reds I have in a ZFS mirror for just that purpose - it just isn't quick there. The main RAIDZ2 array is plenty quick, and I've only got 8GB RAM for ~15TB actual data.
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Jun 29, 2016 21:55
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I'm very happy with my Supermicro X10SL7-F for FreeNAS. It's socket 1150, it works with Celerons to Xeons, built-in 8-port LSI 2308 controller. Lots of FreeNAS users use it with an i3, although I don't think you can do 3 1080 streams with that. Not sure the Avotons can do that either. Think you'll need to move up which means going to a Xeon (i5 doesn't support ECC). But the board + Xeon means you're looking at $400+ just for that, another $100 for 16GB of ECC.
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Jun 29, 2016 22:58
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Bought my Lenovo TS440 for 300 and it came with an LSI controller on board. I could not build one for that kind of money. I hope Lenovo does something like this again with their workstations.
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Jun 30, 2016 08:12
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wooger posted:Ugh, seeing a FreeBSD committer (and founder) using a Mac for this demo always pains me. FreeBSD will never fix itself if none of the devs dogfood it on their own machines. You do know where that specific fbsd committer / founder worked for over a decade right
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Jun 30, 2016 10:11
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phosdex posted:I'm very happy with my Supermicro X10SL7-F for FreeNAS. It's socket 1150, it works with Celerons to Xeons, built-in 8-port LSI 2308 controller. Lots of FreeNAS users use it with an i3, although I don't think you can do 3 1080 streams with that. Not sure the Avotons can do that either. Think you'll need to move up which means going to a Xeon (i5 doesn't support ECC). But the board + Xeon means you're looking at $400+ just for that, another $100 for 16GB of ECC. That does seem like a pretty good board. 14 controller ports if I am reading it right would allow for a lot of down the road expansion. Looks like around $500 (as you said) for that + ram and a Xeon. Doesn't seem to bad a price though if it can run everything I need decently far into the future. Thats a good baseline for comparison, thanks.
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Jun 30, 2016 16:04
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D. Ebdrup posted:Interestingly enough, Windows has long had a feature that's been variously called Shadow Copies previously and is now named Previous Versions which can transparently interface with zfs snapshots (and btrfs/hammer/refs snapshots? can someone confirm/deny?) allowing you to access old edits of a file. macOS has added something similar with APFS (and with HFS+ and time machines, if you go looking for the feature, but probably 99% of people don't know it's there) - however it could've been so much better If only Apple had actually based Time Machine on ZFS like some early reports seemed to indicate, instead of just doing HFS+ hardlinks and only now getting around to a inferior CoW filesystem with APFS, at least in terms of data integrity. Yes, the CIFS shares in FreeNAS expose the ZFS snapshots to Windows machines (if you so choose). There's no setup required, it just works ... if the Windows machine can see the ZFS share presented, and snapshots are on for that share, Windows will see it. They're read-only to the clients, and as many snapshots as you have are visible (into the thousands, even).
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Jun 30, 2016 16:11
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insularis posted:Yes, the CIFS shares in FreeNAS expose the ZFS snapshots to Windows machines (if you so choose). There's no setup required, it just works ... if the Windows machine can see the ZFS share presented, and snapshots are on for that share, Windows will see it. They're read-only to the clients, and as many snapshots as you have are visible (into the thousands, even). This is actually pretty impressive. Surprising even.
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Jun 30, 2016 16:29
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redeyes posted:This is actually pretty impressive. Surprising even. It's incredibly handy. I let the users see their own home folder and department folder snapshots to self-service restore small backups of files/folders for themselves, and with the master "high level" snapshots, I can just roll back the entire Windows share file system in case of a CryptoLocker event (and CryptoLocker has absolutely no write access to any level of ZFS snapshots by default).
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Jun 30, 2016 17:20
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insularis posted:It's incredibly handy. I let the users see their own home folder and department folder snapshots to self-service restore small backups of files/folders for themselves, and with the master "high level" snapshots, I can just roll back the entire Windows share file system in case of a CryptoLocker event (and CryptoLocker has absolutely no write access to any level of ZFS snapshots by default). It's funny because that is exactly the scenario I was thinking of. 
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Jun 30, 2016 18:47
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Crossposting from the PC build thread because I realized this one might be a better venue:Trabant posted:Hello thread. I'm debating whether to build a new system (pending my attempts to clean existing one of malware) so here's a question:
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Jun 30, 2016 20:36
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Um, probably not. The NAS controller probably wont be using Intel RAID and might not even be formatted as NTFS.
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Jun 30, 2016 21:03
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redeyes posted:Um, probably not. The NAS controller probably wont be using Intel RAID and might not even be formatted as NTFS. Yes, it most likely isn't compatible with Intel RAID, but how often do the NAS boxes use stardard Linux mdadm RAID?
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Jun 30, 2016 22:26
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Kinda figured that would be the case. Bah. At least it will make me consolidate data somewhat.
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Jun 30, 2016 23:45
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Nulldevice posted:3) RAID is NOT backup. RAID is for minimizing downtime. Anything you sync to your NAS is a committed change. If you screw up a document or picture and sync it to the NAS, that change is forever and you don't get your old data back. You should consider a backup solution such as an external hard drive or a cloud backup service. Personally I use a second NAS server and 2 external drives and amazon cloud for backup. Total overkill for my linux ISOs but I'd like to make sure I don't lose anything I've been collecting over the years. Yes, you can use your NAS to backup your PCs and other devices, but as far as it being the only target for your data goes, have a working, tested backup. Does this mean I'd be all right with a single-drive NAS plus an external hard drive to back up anything I couldn't easily replace (plus Google Drive for important documents)? I was looking at the Synology DS216play or DS216j.
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Jul 2, 2016 20:18
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Running FreeNAS 9.3 on some older hardware. Got the error code:code:
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Jul 3, 2016 04:23
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30k hours and non-zero reallocated sectors, I'd consider it.
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Jul 3, 2016 04:58
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Uh oh, checked out my other drives: code:code:code:
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Jul 3, 2016 05:18
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The other disks don't have reallocated sectors. There was one with a raw read error rate of 2 and one with UDMA CRC error of 1 but those aren't as big of a deal as long as they don't rapidly increase because those are less about the disk having failing parts in it and more about errors during an operation that a lot of different parts could have had a hand in (bad cables can often cause those if you see a lot of them, etc).
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Jul 3, 2016 05:56
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Cockmaster posted:Does this mean I'd be all right with a single-drive NAS plus an external hard drive to back up anything I couldn't easily replace (plus Google Drive for important documents)? If you're going with the DS216 model you've got room for two disks, so you're best off with using Synology hybrid RAID or RAID1 plus an external drive and cloud backup. This gives you the best possible protection against downtime and data loss. Remember, with hard drives it's not a matter of 'if' drives will fail, it's a matter of 'when' drives will fail. Just remember that any data that isn't backed up off site is vulnerable to loss from fire, flood, plague of locusts, etc. Make sure you have a regularly scheduled backup.
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Jul 4, 2016 14:49
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My Synology DS212j (forgot model #) died after 3 glorious years. I'm buying a QNAP TS-251 to replace it. There any concerns with QNAP? I did some research and didn't find anything.
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Jul 5, 2016 16:04
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Leng posted:I've been looking at doing something similar to you so wanted to check in - how did your build go? It went well! Since I wanted to use it to stream steam games as well (no sense buying an extra 100+ machine when I can just stick it on this since everything is low use and I want to use ds4 controllers), that limited me to only a few possible linux distributions. I just stuck ubuntu on there and installed it as lightweight as possible, getting samba, plex, and steam all set up, using zpool to set up my drives.
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Jul 6, 2016 02:50
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I've just ordered a Synology DS416play. For BitTorrent clients, I was looking at Download Station or Transmission. Is either one conclusively better than the other?
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Jul 7, 2016 00:39
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I recently purchased a Nvidia Shield to replace my Intel NUC running LibreElec, mostly for trying out Plex Media Server on such a low powered device. I've run into a major problem though, my current media storage solution is a 2TB WD external HDD and because of a limitation in Android it's not possible to write over network to attached USB drives. So now it looks like I need a NAS if I want to actually use this thing. My needs are very basic, 4TB of space since I'm already at my limit with the 2TB external and it would be nice to have a BitTorrent client on it. It will be serving media to the Nvidia Shield with a max of 2-3 connections at a time. I really don't care about redundancy or backup since all my media can be easily reobtained and I have a fast internet connection. I've been looking at the WD My Cloud 4TB and the Seagate Personal Cloud 4TB, the thing holding me back is that both of these are old devices, has something better come along? Do I need anything better?
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Jul 7, 2016 16:02
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Kodi has a built in SMB server. Maybe that will allow you to write files to the external drive over the network?
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Jul 7, 2016 16:17
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snuff posted:I recently purchased a Nvidia Shield to replace my Intel NUC running LibreElec, mostly for trying out Plex Media Server on such a low powered device. I've run into a major problem though, my current media storage solution is a 2TB WD external HDD and because of a limitation in Android it's not possible to write over network to attached USB drives. Cockmaster posted:I've just ordered a Synology DS416play. For BitTorrent clients, I was looking at Download Station or Transmission. Is either one conclusively better than the other? I have a similar setup but still run Plex on a computer. The Synology is good at downloading files, you can set it up to do nzbs and torrents. It also has an option of when a directory sees a new .torrent file it'll just process it and download it. You should just get a 2bay synology, the redundancy is good, you'll appreciate it when a drive fails (I had one fail for the first time in my life). Get whatever is the upgrade to the ds212j. It should run $170-220ish. The whole setup is very user friendly and straight forward.
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Jul 7, 2016 21:45
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I'm shopping for a NAS. What I need are: two bays, RAID 1, low power usage (as reasonably possible), support for backing up Windows, Linux, and OS X computers. A Nice To Have would be a USB 3 port with a one button clone to plugged in disk, but it's not super important because I'm planning to automate my offsite backup via other methods. I don't need anything fancy like HDMI ports, HTPC features, an app store etc, or some kind of cloud hosting solution. I'm perfectly comfortable with CLI interfaces. I checked Wirecutter and they recommend the QNAP TS-251 for $250 which seems a bit expensive but not outrageous or anything, I just thought that these things were cheaper is all. Is this what I should buy or is there something that fits my needs better? Boris Galerkin fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Jul 9, 2016 |
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Jul 8, 2016 17:52
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WD MyCloud EX2 should fit that bill: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AWH05KK/ref=psdc_13436301_t2_B00I2P53NY
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Jul 10, 2016 15:45
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Can anyone confirm that the LSI 3008 controller only supports IR mode and not IT mode? Because I just noticed that it might be the case, and it invalidates basically all but one of my new-server plans, and all of them were cheaper than the one based on a Supermicro X10SDV-4C-7TP4F in a Lian-Li PC-A04B and Lian-Li EX-23NB, always assuming that FlexATX can be mounted at on MicroATX, BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Jul 10, 2016 |
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Jul 10, 2016 16:40
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Seems like it supports IT mode just fine with a firmware flash: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lsi3008-sas3-controller.3417/
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Jul 10, 2016 17:34
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I am thinking of building a combined nas/vm server using a xeon d, does anyone run a esx/hyper-v server with the nas in a vm? I've read that freenas doesn't really like being virtualized (don't know how out of date that was).
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Jul 10, 2016 17:38
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priznat posted:I am thinking of building a combined nas/vm server using a xeon d, does anyone run a esx/hyper-v server with the nas in a vm? I've read that freenas doesn't really like being virtualized (don't know how out of date that was). FreeNAS runs fine as a virtualized guest if you set it up properly, but with ESXi you need to do IOMMU to pass-through your HBA in order for ZFS to access them properly, and that option disappeared in 5.5 meaning you have to run 5.1. I'm told that UnRAID can also share its disks via smbd, so you can probably look into that if you're not interested in the above. As far as I know, though, both ESXi, Hyper-V, and UnRAID have problems - the first two because they assume you have your datastore on a seperate NAS/SAN unless you jump through hoops and all three suffer from the virtualization host not having the same data redundancy as your guests do, since both run off a single drive (and even if you go out of your way to buy an SLC flash disk, ESXi and UnRAID are still just one disk failing away from having to start over). *: Meaning you can use beadm, which is forked from Solaris, to manage your boot enviroments and never having to worry about system configuration unless you suffer catastrophic hardware failure of your entire pool plus its backups. BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jul 10, 2016 |
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Jul 10, 2016 18:53
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Uh, I ran ESXi 5.5 with a board that supports Vt-D and PCI-e passthrough was fine, no problems besides annoying reboots. I'm psycho enough to even run OS X in a VM on ESXi on a Supermicro board. Upgraded to ESXi 6, no problem either. Direct access is a pretty important ESXi feature for enterprise, I'm not sure why it would ever go away. Backing up ESXi itself isn't as trivial as a FreeNAS config exactly but it's not an appliance either. There's plenty of info out there to help backup an ESXi setup. And really, even if you're slightly brain dead you could just copy your VM folders once in a while to a backup filesystem whether it's local or remote.
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Jul 10, 2016 23:35
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D. Ebdrup posted:As far as I know, though, both ESXi, Hyper-V, and UnRAID have problems - the first two because they assume you have your datastore on a seperate NAS/SAN unless you jump through hoops and all three suffer from the virtualization host not having the same data redundancy as your guests do, since both run off a single drive (and even if you go out of your way to buy an SLC flash disk, ESXi and UnRAID are still just one disk failing away from having to start over). esxi does not assume you're going to be using a nas/san for datastorage at all. There are no hoops to jump through. You plug in your drives, esxi sees them and you format them as vmfs. Host redundancy is a slightly harder problem but for real, there isn't a lot to configure for the average home user. You may as well just reinstall. All of your datastores will still be there and since vm settings are stored with the vm, they'll still be there.
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Jul 11, 2016 01:01
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5436 posted:I have a similar setup but still run Plex on a computer. The Synology is good at downloading files, you can set it up to do nzbs and torrents. It also has an option of when a directory sees a new .torrent file it'll just process it and download it. You should just get a 2bay synology, the redundancy is good, you'll appreciate it when a drive fails (I had one fail for the first time in my life). Get whatever is the upgrade to the ds212j. It should run $170-220ish. The whole setup is very user friendly and straight forward. I just started using Download Station for torrents, and it's just what I needed. Gotta love the disclaimer on Synology's Download Station page: quote:Important:
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Jul 11, 2016 03:59
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I have a My Cloud PR4100 8TB arriving tomorrow. I went for the 4-bay model because it has upgradable memory. I'm planning on using this as storage for my Plex library and all the music files from my Olive Symphony. Short term, I'm going to plug it into my Linux box running Plex; long term I'll probably buy something to use as the server head so that the transcoding problem is addressed.
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Jul 11, 2016 05:12
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