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sharkytm
Oct 9, 2003

Ba

By

Sharkytm doot doo do doot do doo


Fallen Rib
I assume the answer is the usual "buy the biggest Synology that you can", but I've got a colleague at my old company who has a home office where he does a ton of data processing.
Right now, he's got about 10 2TB or 4TB extrernal drives, all with a mix-match of stuff on them. According to him, he has an actual data volume of ~4TB that needs to be accessible, but backed up. He's currently using Acronis to do drive imaging, and manually dealing with deleting copies of his desktop's drive, all over GigE. Needless to say, this ain't working.

I was thinking about a Synology DS1817+ and sticking with Gigabit Ethernet. If he needs higher speeds, has anyone used the Synology SPF cards to get 10GE? I'd probably just put a card in his desktop and run a cable to the NAS. No need for a switch.

As for drives, AFAIK, it's still WD Red supremacy, right? I'm leaning towards 8x4TB drives, which would give him 26TB of usable space, assuming 2 drives lost to RAID. It looks like the only way to do offsite backup is Backblaze, assuming 6TB of data initial, and 100GB/week, its not horribly expensive.

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Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


If you only need 4TB of data then it will be fine. My beef with Synology are that their boxes are really underspecced compared to the big numbers of how much total capacity you can have, number of expansion boxes etc. Outside of the top end of their range it’s an Atom CPU and 4GB RAM, and the thing gets hammered doing search indexing, array maintenance etc.

And probably not much of a concern to your needs, but AFAIK the expansion shelves would be seen as a new volume and so you won’t be able to span shares across them. This isn’t that uncommon in networked storage but I’ve seen people get disappointed that they can’t just have one massive share called “files” and keep it growing forever.

QuantumNinja
Mar 8, 2013

Trust me.
I pretend to be a ninja.
I'm looking into finally building a NAS and getting all of my hard drives out of my main desktop. Does this list seem like a good setup? (I'm probably just going to install Linux on it and organize a software RAID, if that will work out.)

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Personally I'd look at a used Xeon + Supermicro server board for about the same total budget as your i5/MSI, ECC RAM, and wait for a good deal on drives. Strictly speaking there's nothing wrong with that build, but you underestimate how nice IPMI is.

8-bit Miniboss
May 24, 2005

CORPO COPS CAME FOR MY :filez:
Same, 8TB drives is past my threshold that I would really consider using ECC even if you don't think you need it even for a home server.

dexefiend
Apr 25, 2003

THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!
https://www.serverbuilds.net/anniversary

I love mixing eBay and new stuff.

Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.



Does anyone know offhand how to figure out a drive serial number given the output of zpool status? I've misplaced the piece of paper I had that mapped motherboard port numbers to drives for a homemade NAS that has a failing drive and I'd rather not play guess and check to figure out which one to swap out.

Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.




Dunno why they call that Not Safe for Wallet because it sounds extremely reasonable to me

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost

Munkeymon posted:

Does anyone know offhand how to figure out a drive serial number given the output of zpool status? I've misplaced the piece of paper I had that mapped motherboard port numbers to drives for a homemade NAS that has a failing drive and I'd rather not play guess and check to figure out which one to swap out.

In situations like this and have a hotswap bay setup, I look for the drive that’s failing, and run a dd if=foo of=/dev/null on it and look at the lights for the drive. Otherwise, I hope via lspci -vvv output or from dmesg that something is there. Otherwise, it’s off to the olde Google manual.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





smartctl -i /dev/whatever if you just need the serial, the above is good to find the drive itself if you have hot swap bays.

Methylethylaldehyde
Oct 23, 2004

BAKA BAKA

Munkeymon posted:

Dunno why they call that Not Safe for Wallet because it sounds extremely reasonable to me

Because it's a rabbit hole that ends with you buying tape storage off ebay to set up redundant data locations for your 73TB of perfectly curated 50s television rips.

Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.



necrobobsledder posted:

In situations like this and have a hotswap bay setup, I look for the drive that’s failing, and run a dd if=foo of=/dev/null on it and look at the lights for the drive. Otherwise, I hope via lspci -vvv output or from dmesg that something is there. Otherwise, it’s off to the olde Google manual.

It's a NAS in that it's old computer parts with big hard drives attached - nothing so fancy as hot-swap bays :\

IOwnCalculus posted:

smartctl -i /dev/whatever if you just need the serial, the above is good to find the drive itself if you have hot swap bays.

That sounds familiar (this has happened before), which is why I took the time to note the mapping. Too bad I didn't tape it to the inside of the case or something smart like that. Of course I also didn't bother to write down how I figured it out.

Methylethylaldehyde posted:

Because it's a rabbit hole that ends with you buying tape storage off ebay to set up redundant data locations for your 73TB of perfectly curated 50s television rips.

I mean, I already have an onsite backup NAS (with a failing drive!) so I'm probably beyond help already

BlankSystemDaemon
Mar 13, 2009



The Milkman posted:

I've been running the Ports version in a jail. It lags behind the official release by a fair amount, but otherwise it's not too bad once you actually get it running.

But yeah, the second it breaks I'm just ponying up for a cloud key.
You have three different options for how much breakage you want.

For what it's worth, my unifi jail has survived upgrades from 9.x over 10.x to 11.x.

sharkytm
Oct 9, 2003

Ba

By

Sharkytm doot doo do doot do doo


Fallen Rib

Thanks Ants posted:

If you only need 4TB of data then it will be fine. My beef with Synology are that their boxes are really underspecced compared to the big numbers of how much total capacity you can have, number of expansion boxes etc. Outside of the top end of their range it’s an Atom CPU and 4GB RAM, and the thing gets hammered doing search indexing, array maintenance etc.

And probably not much of a concern to your needs, but AFAIK the expansion shelves would be seen as a new volume and so you won’t be able to span shares across them. This isn’t that uncommon in networked storage but I’ve seen people get disappointed that they can’t just have one massive share called “files” and keep it growing forever.

Was this directed at me? I'm planning on his storage being ~10TB total, with much of it being archive/static data. I wasn't planning any expansion shelves, as that should provide plenty of data, and I'm not fond of the eSATA connection. If he needs more storage in 5 years, I'm sure there'll be other options, or just outright replacing the box.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Yeah sorry it was - a bit of a rambling late night post but the takeaway is that people need to consider what move they're going to make when they fill up their storage.

dexefiend
Apr 25, 2003

THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!

Munkeymon posted:

Dunno why they call that Not Safe for Wallet because it sounds extremely reasonable to me

Yes. I love that I have a ridiculous beast workstation that didn't have a ridiculous budget.

I just recently built bought an Unraid media server. For it, I used a $450 Dell R710 I found using labgopher.

I would have built another E5 Xeon, but my budget was only $450 and I wanted a rackmount case. I couldn't make it work building it myself.

The horsepower/dollar ratio in the V1/V2 E5 Xeons is crazy.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





The only downside to E5 V1/V2s is power usage, but yes, you get a hell of a lot of horsepower for the money. The E56xx generation isn't bad in that regard either but that architecture is just so old now that I wouldn't buy into it at this point.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

TEAM NVIDIA:
FORUM POLICE
For the things where home users really need horsepower, AVX2 usually helps enough to make Haswell-E ES worth the trouble/cost. For everything else there's Threadripper ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(unless you have a really specific need like 80+ PCIe lanes in a single box, or more than 128 GB of RAM, etc)

sharkytm
Oct 9, 2003

Ba

By

Sharkytm doot doo do doot do doo


Fallen Rib

Thanks Ants posted:

Yeah sorry it was - a bit of a rambling late night post but the takeaway is that people need to consider what move they're going to make when they fill up their storage.

Understood.

Another Synology question: Worth getting the DS1817+ vs the DS1817? The non-plus has built-in 10GBe, saving me $100-$200 in upgrade cards. I'm not planning on doing any sort of transcoding, and very limited apps other than maybe BackBlaze.

CopperHound
Feb 14, 2012

A combination of slow internet and transitioning to Ultrabooks has me wondering if there is a way to set up a NAS as a seamless cache or mirror for cloud storage (let's say OneDrive in this instance, but I'd probably also like to cache steam downloads also).

I'm not afraid of some initial setup, but I can't think of a solution that wouldn't involve constant computer janitoring when transitioning between local and remote networks. Also I don't trust myself to keep a NAS secure enough to leave external ports open for it.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002

Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

CopperHound posted:

A combination of slow internet and transitioning to Ultrabooks has me wondering if there is a way to set up a NAS as a seamless cache or mirror for cloud storage (let's say OneDrive in this instance, but I'd probably also like to cache steam downloads also).

I'm not afraid of some initial setup, but I can't think of a solution that wouldn't involve constant computer janitoring when transitioning between local and remote networks. Also I don't trust myself to keep a NAS secure enough to leave external ports open for it.

Rclone can do this I believe. Or you can schedule it to run.

Beaucoup Haram
Jun 18, 2005

I'm currently running 16x Toshiba 3tb drives that are between 3-5 years old, thinking they're about due for replacement before I start seeing failures everywhere. Shucked WD 8tb drives still the best option for value ?

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

Beaucoup Haram posted:

I'm currently running 16x Toshiba 3tb drives that are between 3-5 years old, thinking they're about due for replacement before I start seeing failures everywhere. Shucked WD 8tb drives still the best option for value ?
I have been buying these.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Western-Di...5.c100012.m1985

A variety of sellers, they occasionally drop to $150ish.

Beaucoup Haram
Jun 18, 2005

adorai posted:

I have been buying these.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Western-Di...5.c100012.m1985

A variety of sellers, they occasionally drop to $150ish.

I'm in Australia so shipping makes that deal much more expensive than the new 8tb WD external drives.

Beaucoup Haram fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Sep 26, 2018

100% Dundee
Oct 11, 2004

sharkytm posted:

Another Synology question: Worth getting the DS1817+ vs the DS1817? The non-plus has built-in 10GBe, saving me $100-$200 in upgrade cards. I'm not planning on doing any sort of transcoding, and very limited apps other than maybe BackBlaze.

There's a QNAP 10GBe expansion card that is less than $100 or so that I believe works perfectly in Synology units. I've seen videos where people use it and posters on reddit mention it before, this is the card I believe(https://www.amazon.com/QXG-10G1T-Single-port-Low-profile-pre-loaded-Full-height/dp/B07CW2C2J1). Granted, it's still $90 or so but that's a bargain compared to a lot of the other supported 10GBe card prices.

I can't really help you in regards to which one is better for your purposes though, I don't totally understand any of the differences apart from the slightly faster processor and higher RAM capacity. The synology website has a very good compare function that you can use and see if the extra features that the 1817+ matter to you or outweigh the built in 10GBe ports of the standard 1817. Also to see if they justify the price difference for you.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Beaucoup Haram posted:

I'm in Australia so shipping makes that deal much more expensive than the new 8tb WD external drives.

I haven't found a supplier for oem drives in New Zealand, and I'm not sure what's inside of the external drives in the region. There doesn't seem to be much difference in the price of an external drive and a branded NAS drive here.

If you do locate a good source I'd be interested in knowing.

sharkytm
Oct 9, 2003

Ba

By

Sharkytm doot doo do doot do doo


Fallen Rib

100% Dundee posted:

There's a QNAP 10GBe expansion card that is less than $100 or so that I believe works perfectly in Synology units. I've seen videos where people use it and posters on reddit mention it before, this is the card I believe(https://www.amazon.com/QXG-10G1T-Single-port-Low-profile-pre-loaded-Full-height/dp/B07CW2C2J1). Granted, it's still $90 or so but that's a bargain compared to a lot of the other supported 10GBe card prices.

I can't really help you in regards to which one is better for your purposes though, I don't totally understand any of the differences apart from the slightly faster processor and higher RAM capacity. The synology website has a very good compare function that you can use and see if the extra features that the 1817+ matter to you or outweigh the built in 10GBe ports of the standard 1817. Also to see if they justify the price difference for you.

Yeah, apparently there are Mellanox SFP cards that work too. They're $40/pair, so hardly a cost consideration. I went with the 1817+, the PCI-E slot and more RAM pushed me over to it.

:edit: and 8x8TB WD Essentials. They reportedly HGST drives inside.

sharkytm fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Sep 26, 2018

Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.



dexefiend posted:

Yes. I love that I have a ridiculous beast workstation that didn't have a ridiculous budget.

I just recently built bought an Unraid media server. For it, I used a $450 Dell R710 I found using labgopher.

I would have built another E5 Xeon, but my budget was only $450 and I wanted a rackmount case. I couldn't make it work building it myself.

The horsepower/dollar ratio in the V1/V2 E5 Xeons is crazy.

Dang labgopher is exactly what I didn't know I needed for comparison shopping. Too bad I don't know gently caress all about server parts other than that they cost too much new :v:

adorai posted:

I have been buying these.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Western-Di...5.c100012.m1985

A variety of sellers, they occasionally drop to $150ish.

Quoting this so I can find it later. Thanks!

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Munkeymon posted:

Quoting this so I can find it later. Thanks!

Might be a 15% coupon on eBay tomorrow too.

sharkytm
Oct 9, 2003

Ba

By

Sharkytm doot doo do doot do doo


Fallen Rib

IOwnCalculus posted:

Might be a 15% coupon on eBay tomorrow too.

Yup. PICKSOON is the code.
https://pages.ebay.com/promo/2018/0927/69157.html

Tamba
Apr 5, 2010

I have an old 160 GB SSD that I don't use anymore, and my FreeNAS server has an empty SATA port.
Can I add that as L2ARC, or is there any reason why I shouldn't do that?

Nulldevice
Jun 17, 2006
Toilet Rascal

Tamba posted:

I have an old 160 GB SSD that I don't use anymore, and my FreeNAS server has an empty SATA port.
Can I add that as L2ARC, or is there any reason why I shouldn't do that?

I'll let the experts explain the whys but from my experience unless you're running an enterprise system there is almost no reason to run an L2ARC on a home system. It'll pretty much never see use. You have to be exhausting tons of ARC to get to that point. Basically it serves no benefit.

BlankSystemDaemon
Mar 13, 2009



Have you filled up your system with all the memory it can possibly take? Even the fastest SSDs are orders of magnitude slower than memory, so you should do that first.

Also remember that the records on the L2ARC has to be mapped in the systems memory, for it to work at all. So by adding L2ARC you are decreasing the amount of memory that's used for ARC.

Aside from that, L2ARC not being a panacea for just making everything better regardless of use-case.
SLOG device(s, because they must be mirrored, in case one fails) are similarily not a panacea, because by default they only apply to syncronous writes - of which you're probably not doing very many.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

TEAM NVIDIA:
FORUM POLICE
Yeah, tl;dr: if you need a L2ARC or a SLOG you'll know.

Not clear on why systems like StoreMI/Fuzedrive seem to be so much better at making use of cache drives for scratch space... how come they don't take a similar memory hit? Or do they?

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
L2ARC needs 170 bytes per filesystem block cached. The default block size is 128KB. ZFS does tail packing, though. Do the math.

As for needing it, it depends on what you do. If you run apps and/or games from your NAS, then it has a purpose (so long you configure it to retain streaming data). I suggest a ZVOL block size of 16KB for hosting iSCSI partitions while using an L2ARC. If it's a data repository and you're streaming movies and poo poo from it, it's useless.

100% Dundee
Oct 11, 2004
If anyone is familiar with Synology units, I have a weird question that just recently popped up and I can't figure it out. I was reading online about why my transfer speeds seemed kind of slow or just lower than usual and the one thing it suggested was to change the SMB protocol from SMB1 to either SMB2 or SMB3, whatever the highest thing your device can support is. On my DS1817+ its SMB3 so I changed the maximum SMB protocol to SMB3 and the minimum SMB protocol to SMB2, this immediately improved my transfer speeds and made them super consistent. Previously it would bounce around between 50-80MB/s depending on types of files, how many were transferring, their size, etc. Now it basically just goes right to 113MB/s and flat lines there until the transfer is completed, I'm very happy about this and it's been working great.

The thing I cant figure out is that the unit won't stop transferring data, I can't figure out what its doing or where this data is going. The network resource monitor is literally always fluctuating from 70-140MB/s or so, and it's been doing it 24/hr a day for multiple days in a row. I'm not transferring any actual data to the device and I'm not transferring any data off of the device, so I don't understand where this connection is going or whats being sent or to where. Under the "Connected Users" section it only has 2 users and both of them are me/my home PC so I don't think someone has hacked into my poo poo and is stealing my data remotely or something. What in the world is this thing doing? All of the HDD activity lights are constantly blinking, the fan is always spinning up, it's always using 15-25% of the CPU. I'll attach a photo to see if that helps out at all. I took the photo right after resetting the unit in hope that this would stop this weird transfer stuff so you can see in the bottom right that it's only been up for 2 minutes after the reset.



Any ideas would be greatly appreciated, if I have to change the transfer protocol back or whatever to get this poo poo to stop I'll deal with the slower transfer speeds.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Look in your task manager (on your PC) to see what process is transferring the most data

100% Dundee
Oct 11, 2004

Thanks Ants posted:

Look in your task manager (on your PC) to see what process is transferring the most data

Nothing was being transferred onto or off of the unit when that pic was taken. I spent a few hours playing around with the SMB settings and still have no idea what is/was happening. When I turn SMB off entirely, it completely stops though so that's what I'm doing for now, I figure I can just turn it back on temporarily when I need to transfer files over.

This is a photo of what it looks like now for instance.


None of my googling came up with anything helpful as to why SMB would be doing that. Maybe it's automatically indexing or something weird like that in the background?

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002

by Fluffdaddy
Backups?! That looks like backups.

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Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


The data is going somewhere, if the only connections are your PC then it's something on that PC. You might need to use the all users task manager to see what it is if it's a system process.

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