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Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002

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

bobfather posted:

DrivePool is the best way to do what everyone in this thread does (have lots of storage), but instead they’re obsessed with free software like FreeNAS or other paid options like Unraid. The only downside to DrivePool is that you’ll want the whole suite because all of Stablebit’s softwares are excellent.

Lmao wtf.

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bobfather
Sep 20, 2001

I will analyze your nervous system for beer money

Less Fat Luke posted:

Stablebit Drivepool does exactly what you want but unfortunately isn't free. It'll pool the drives with or without redundancy into one logical view, and if one drive dies it'll only take the files on it.

e;f,b

Add to this that if your drive begins to manifest any symptom of dying (as detected by Stablebit Scanner), DrivePool will automatically duplicate the files found only on that drive to another volume, will avoid placing any new files on the dying drive, and will email you about the imminent drive failure. Scanner will also automatically email you about errors, temperature warnings, and a bunch of other stuff.

bobfather fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Sep 15, 2020

bobfather
Sep 20, 2001

I will analyze your nervous system for beer money

Mission accomplished! (Unraid and FreeNAS are fine pieces of software)

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002

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

bobfather posted:

Mission accomplished! (Unraid and FreeNAS are fine pieces of software)

As an advocate of UnRAID, I'm beginning to think otherwise!

AlternateAccount
Apr 25, 2005
FYGM

bobfather posted:

DrivePool is the best way to do what everyone in this thread does (have lots of storage), but instead they’re obsessed with free software like FreeNAS or other paid options like Unraid. The only downside to DrivePool is that you’ll want the whole suite because all of Stablebit’s softwares are excellent.

Please don’t use Storage Spaces because Microsoft cannot be trusted to keep it stable.

100% agreeing that DrivePool is a Very Good Product. Been using it foreeeeeeever and it's always been great. Also 100% braindead easy setup and maintenance.

Pilfered Pallbearers
Aug 2, 2007

I didn't wanna pay for something, but considering the number of drives I'm running it sounds like buying the drivepool bundle may be worth it.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

I used MS storage spaces for six years with no problems. There's about four extra levels of complexity that the home user doesn't really need, but that's because it was designed to be used in massive data centers so there's some extra obfuscation on top of everything, but you ought to be able to spin something up in under 10 minutes

Before storage spaces, I used stable bit drive pool, I think they have a 30 day demo if you want to take it for a test drive.

After loving around with this poo poo for over a decade, I super wish I'd just shelled out for the Synology way back when, because that's what I use now and Just Works out of the box. If I temporarily need fast expanded local disk, I just plug in a USB 3.X SSD, but I loving love my Synology

Chilled Milk
Jun 22, 2003

No one here is alone,
satellites in every home
I replaced the six 5TB drives (mix of Reds and Toshiba X300s) in my RAIDz2 pool with 14TB shucked easystores. First couple drives took around 16 hours to resilver, but the last couple finished in under 8. The pool was 99%+ full which probably didn't help but overall not too bad at all. And by the time I need more space the vdev expansion stuff ought to be real.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





If I still had reason to run a backup server of my own, I'd still be using Drivepool for it. It is good software.

The only real flaw it has compared to nearly any other solution is that in a worst-case scenario if you're serving a lot of workloads at once, you could end up with all those workloads trying to use only one or two drives instead of spreading that across a whole array. Not an issue for most people.

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002

by Fluffdaddy

IOwnCalculus posted:

If I still had reason to run a backup server of my own, I'd still be using Drivepool for it. It is good software.

The only real flaw it has compared to nearly any other solution is that in a worst-case scenario if you're serving a lot of workloads at once, you could end up with all those workloads trying to use only one or two drives instead of spreading that across a whole array. Not an issue for most people.

True, though i guess you can do a 3 drive mirror.. which is whatever. Still, for a just backups and archival storage and even some spare space, it's as safe as it gets. There is nothing safer. I consider it nearly a backup solution in terms of how failures will not render anything unreadable. Sure its not enterprise ready but it's been serving my files for drat near 10 years now. Never lost a bit.

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

redeyes posted:

True, though i guess you can do a 3 drive mirror.. which is whatever. Still, for a just backups and archival storage and even some spare space, it's as safe as it gets. There is nothing safer. I consider it nearly a backup solution in terms of how failures will not render anything unreadable. Sure its not enterprise ready but it's been serving my files for drat near 10 years now. Never lost a bit.

A bold statement in a thread that apparently is obsessed with ZFS.

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002

by Fluffdaddy

DrDork posted:

A bold statement in a thread that apparently is obsessed with ZFS.

I know, I guess I should qualify that this is for a home user. Not an insane nerd with a home-lab with TBs of incredibly important ISOs. Lets call it the safest solution for non-insane people that just need to work, not learn data center best practices.

Axe-man
Apr 16, 2005

The product of hundreds of hours of scientific investigation and research.

The perfect meatball.
Clapping Larry
I would say the safest the home user can do, is have a backup, no matter how they do it. Even if it is just an usb drive connected to their computer, or NAS.

A consistent, checked, local backup, at the very least will help you more than any RAID setup.

Rooted Vegetable
Jun 1, 2002
Hello, I own both DrivePool and UnRAID. I currently use Unraid as I didn't have a spare windows licence (at the time) for my machine. I also like the change of pace from work.

EDIT: No I dont, I own Drive Bender, not DrivePool.

Rooted Vegetable fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Sep 16, 2020

Warbird
May 23, 2012

America's Favorite Dumbass

What would be the best way to optimize photo viewing/sharing for items being stored and a smb/NFS share? Right now things are slow enough that it's pretty aggravating trying to navigate my directories to pair down or work on photos I have stored there.

Smashing Link
Jul 8, 2003

I'll keep chucking bombs at you til you fall off that ledge!
Grimey Drawer
Wondering what people think about the new Synology DS1621xs+ (https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1621xs+#specs). I am appreciating that I have been well served by Synology over the past 7 years, but kind of wondering why they need to put 5 year old chips in their '2021' product line?

Axe-man
Apr 16, 2005

The product of hundreds of hours of scientific investigation and research.

The perfect meatball.
Clapping Larry
Synology strategy are all about lower power cpus that are quiet and energy efficient that fulfill the server role very well and work as a nas and other things. For synology's line up the DS1621XS+ is great, it can do anything you want to throw at it, from VMs, to surveillance comes with expansion capabilities, and compared to the totally underpowered DS3018xs has about the same power as a Rack with a small form factor.

Also the 21 is all about the year it is launched/intended to fulfill.

IF they went by cpu design year, the J series would be hilariously off from the rest of them.

Really, Synology is all about the whole ecosystem, and the user friendly operating system. As many have built their own or use extremely old racks the same is true with synology, most of the server side applications don't need much processing power, and if used a straight up NAS, or IP SAN, really require very little hardware power unless you are doing commerical or high end stuff.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

TEAM NVIDIA:
FORUM POLICE

ARM machines are always anemic, they are basically fileservers only.

the atom based machines are usually underpowered (Apollo Lake/Gemini Lake is nice but I haven't seen those in NASs yet), have comparatively little expansion ability, and don't support ECC. They are fine for a step above, basic jail/docker/app server hosting and so on. If you intend to run non-transcoding plex or use hardware-accelerated transcoding these are nice.

for the price of the higher-end stuff you can usually build a beefier machine for the same budget. Like, you'll be able to do a ton more RAM and a much faster processor, $1600 probably gets you a 3900X or a high-clocking i3 9300 (still supports ECC) or maybe xeon i5 equivalent, with 32GB of ECC, on an Asrock Rack or Supermicro server board with IPMI and 10 gbe, in an 8-bay NAS chassis with noctua cooling and w/e. There are some turnkey appliance OSs like FreeNAS that will be similar to synology (or I think synology's OS is even open source now? xpenology or something like that?)

The NAS style chassis I have not found in good build quality - the U-NAS 810A is completely functional but after a few years I'd say built a bit cheaply, scratched the front rubber coating a bit (it is super thin) and had some drive tray LEDs die and so on. I know, ringing endorsement, but it works fine and you can put a lot more performance in your server at the same price as a prebuilt.

If you are willing to do a mid-tower chassis the Fractal R7 has a crazy amount of drive space and the R7 XL is nuts (18 drives), And that gives you a lot of flexibility and convenience (and noise/temp reduction) versus a super SFF rig. Or there are shoebox sized cases as well.

I wouldn't say that new Synology you linked is actually that bad, but only 6 bays (4 or 8 are the usual increments) and fairly limited installed/max RAM though. And 2.2 GHz clocks aren't super fantastic. It's actually a great deal as far as prebuilts though, prebuilts are more expensive and that's not bad if you just want something turnkey. Onboard 10gbe, dual M.2s and 8 GB ECC from the start and Skylake architecture for $1600, that beats the crap out of an Atom prebuilt and it's way cheaper than the usual premium-tier stuff.

Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Sep 16, 2020

Raymond T. Racing
Jun 11, 2019

It still really sucks that a combination of corona and just Rosewill things has completely eliminated their 4u cases. They were fantastic for shoving an absolutely absurd number of drives in an affordable rackmount case, but even before they ran out of stock it seems there was a design flaw in the cages of their USB3 variant of the 15 bay that resulted in not actually being able to fit 15 drives in the case.

Axe-man
Apr 16, 2005

The product of hundreds of hours of scientific investigation and research.

The perfect meatball.
Clapping Larry
Synology does release an open source page for its os it is not complete: https://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl/files/?source=navbar

xpenology I have heard is actually an ex employees revenge or something and always about year behind the source. Using it uses all the same calls to synology servers so synology will actively hunt it down and blacklist.

Most of the residential nas are apollo lake (DS918+) and gemini lake (DS920+) now, and they basically designed for low end use (plex server some photo applications maybe a few pc backups etc), but once again i expect little from a residential nas.

Chilled Milk
Jun 22, 2003

No one here is alone,
satellites in every home
I was halfheartedly shopping around to get an idea of what would be involved in moving my cramped Node 304 setup into something rackmount with fancy hotswap bays and the like and I was kinda surprised at how few options there were, at least going off of what was available on Newegg. I guess most idiots going down this path start with used Dells or whatever.

Smashing Link
Jul 8, 2003

I'll keep chucking bombs at you til you fall off that ledge!
Grimey Drawer

Axe-man posted:

Synology strategy are all about lower power cpus that are quiet and energy efficient that fulfill the server role very well and work as a nas and other things. For synology's line up the DS1621XS+ is great, it can do anything you want to throw at it, from VMs, to surveillance comes with expansion capabilities, and compared to the totally underpowered DS3018xs has about the same power as a Rack with a small form factor.

Also the 21 is all about the year it is launched/intended to fulfill.

IF they went by cpu design year, the J series would be hilariously off from the rest of them.

Really, Synology is all about the whole ecosystem, and the user friendly operating system. As many have built their own or use extremely old racks the same is true with synology, most of the server side applications don't need much processing power, and if used a straight up NAS, or IP SAN, really require very little hardware power unless you are doing commerical or high end stuff.


Paul MaudDib posted:

ARM machines are always anemic, they are basically fileservers only.

the atom based machines are usually underpowered (Apollo Lake/Gemini Lake is nice but I haven't seen those in NASs yet), have comparatively little expansion ability, and don't support ECC. They are fine for a step above, basic jail/docker/app server hosting and so on. If you intend to run non-transcoding plex or use hardware-accelerated transcoding these are nice.

for the price of the higher-end stuff you can usually build a beefier machine for the same budget. Like, you'll be able to do a ton more RAM and a much faster processor, $1600 probably gets you a 3900X or a high-clocking i3 9300 (still supports ECC) or maybe xeon i5 equivalent, with 32GB of ECC, on an Asrock Rack or Supermicro server board with IPMI and 10 gbe, in an 8-bay NAS chassis with noctua cooling and w/e. There are some turnkey appliance OSs like FreeNAS that will be similar to synology (or I think synology's OS is even open source now? xpenology or something like that?)

The NAS style chassis I have not found in good build quality - the U-NAS 810A is completely functional but after a few years I'd say built a bit cheaply, scratched the front rubber coating a bit (it is super thin) and had some drive tray LEDs die and so on. I know, ringing endorsement, but it works fine and you can put a lot more performance in your server at the same price as a prebuilt.

If you are willing to do a mid-tower chassis the Fractal R7 has a crazy amount of drive space and the R7 XL is nuts (18 drives), And that gives you a lot of flexibility and convenience (and noise/temp reduction) versus a super SFF rig. Or there are shoebox sized cases as well.

I wouldn't say that new Synology you linked is actually that bad, but only 6 bays (4 or 8 are the usual increments) and fairly limited installed/max RAM though. And 2.2 GHz clocks aren't super fantastic. It's actually a great deal as far as prebuilts though, prebuilts are more expensive and that's not bad if you just want something turnkey. Onboard 10gbe, dual M.2s and 8 GB ECC from the start and Skylake architecture for $1600, that beats the crap out of an Atom prebuilt and it's way cheaper than the usual premium-tier stuff.

Thanks for the answers. Have to admit it's a tempting upgrade from my 1515+, even at the cost, but I just built an Unraid box so will hold off for now. I do appreciate how all the Synology stuff "just works" though.

Warbird
May 23, 2012

America's Favorite Dumbass

Warbird posted:

What would be the best way to optimize photo viewing/sharing for items being stored and a smb/NFS share? Right now things are slow enough that it's pretty aggravating trying to navigate my directories to pair down or work on photos I have stored there.

Expanding on this, I'm using an old Intel DH67BL with a couple of external drives attached via USB 3.0. It seems to be that the quickest wins would be to shuck both drives and attach via SATA. I'm debating getting a m.2 adapter, but I'm not sure I'd get a whole lot of benefit as I'm looking at PCIe 2.0 and that may limit things a good bit. Any insight would be appreciated.

SolusLunes
Oct 10, 2011

I now have several regrets.

:barf:

Buff Hardback posted:

It still really sucks that a combination of corona and just Rosewill things has completely eliminated their 4u cases. They were fantastic for shoving an absolutely absurd number of drives in an affordable rackmount case, but even before they ran out of stock it seems there was a design flaw in the cages of their USB3 variant of the 15 bay that resulted in not actually being able to fit 15 drives in the case.

Yeah, I was really hoping that thing would come back in stock- since it never did, I picked up a case with 10 5.25" slots and just slapped in converters. More expensive, but it works. And now it's hotswappable.

Raymond T. Racing
Jun 11, 2019

SolusLunes posted:

Yeah, I was really hoping that thing would come back in stock- since it never did, I picked up a case with 10 5.25" slots and just slapped in converters. More expensive, but it works. And now it's hotswappable.

It just sucks because I have a spare one (the short depth 8 bay case) that I would have to sell as partially broken with a broken front panel (my L4500 power button didn't work, swapped the front panel PCB from the R4000 over because Rosewill spare parts is very slow), but shipping those things costs a fortune.

Sub Rosa
Jun 9, 2010




I've been using XPenology for years with no real issues. You do have to be careful and follow the forums to make sure you can update to a new version with no gotchas, but I don't think saying you stay years behind is correct.

Axe-man
Apr 16, 2005

The product of hundreds of hours of scientific investigation and research.

The perfect meatball.
Clapping Larry

Sub Rosa posted:

I've been using XPenology for years with no real issues. You do have to be careful and follow the forums to make sure you can update to a new version with no gotchas, but I don't think saying you stay years behind is correct.

Never seen it beyond the website that was about a year behind the current version, i guess you all can actually use the update servers? Man, no wonder why synology wants to blacklist ya :roflolmao:

MMD3
May 16, 2006

Montmartre -> Portland
I have a DS1513+ that has been collecting dust for ~5 years ever since I accidentally overwrote everything I had backed up on it by trying to perform a sync w/ an external drive that was plugged into it. Since then it's just been turned off in the hopes that I could one day recover the ~6 months worth of photo backups that were not also backed up to another drive. I'm not sure how feasible this as I was going through some stuff at the time it happened and didn't exhaust all recovery options since I had the bulk of my files accessible via backup but I'm still hoping maybe I can send the 3 drives that were in it running Synology hybrid raid off to Synology or a service provider to see if they can restore. As soon as I realized what i'd done I just unplugged the NAS in the hopes that it was all just marked as deleted but not actually zeroed out.

So... two part question

1) what are the current best bang for your buck drives to drop in it? I was thinking I'd start with ~3x 6TB as opposed to doing 5x 4TB or something. Probably looking for 7200rpm unless there's a good reason to not bother with higher speed?

2) has anyone had luck with recovering files from a Synology nas that has been marked as deleted? If so who could I contact about doing this?

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

MMD3 posted:

1) what are the current best bang for your buck drives to drop in it? I was thinking I'd start with ~3x 6TB as opposed to doing 5x 4TB or something. Probably looking for 7200rpm unless there's a good reason to not bother with higher speed?

Can't answer the second part, but you basically have two choices for drives: retail, or shucked.

If you want to go retail, you pretty much are stuck looking at Seagate Ironwolf drives (~$160 for 6TB) because WD has decided to shove SMR technology into their sub-8TB sized drives, which is...not great for NAS use if you ever end up needing to rebuild an array.

If you're ok with going shucked, for ~$140 you can get 8TB WD My Books / Easystores and use those. More size for less money is a winning combo in my view.

Axe-man
Apr 16, 2005

The product of hundreds of hours of scientific investigation and research.

The perfect meatball.
Clapping Larry
If you are running BTRFS you MIGHT be able to recover the files, otherwise, i suggest having a recycling bin, or basically never sync, always do one way backups :smith:

A actual data recovery place might be able to get something out of it, but it might not be worth that effort.

MMD3
May 16, 2006

Montmartre -> Portland

DrDork posted:

Can't answer the second part, but you basically have two choices for drives: retail, or shucked.

If you want to go retail, you pretty much are stuck looking at Seagate Ironwolf drives (~$160 for 6TB) because WD has decided to shove SMR technology into their sub-8TB sized drives, which is...not great for NAS use if you ever end up needing to rebuild an array.

If you're ok with going shucked, for ~$140 you can get 8TB WD My Books / Easystores and use those. More size for less money is a winning combo in my view.

Thanks, don't think I want to bother wish shucking so I"ll probably just pay the premium for the ironwolf's. Any thoughts on speed?

Axe-man posted:

If you are running BTRFS you MIGHT be able to recover the files, otherwise, i suggest having a recycling bin, or basically never sync, always do one way backups :smith:

A actual data recovery place might be able to get something out of it, but it might not be worth that effort.

yeah, I had thought I had set it up for one way sync but the utility I used back then was kind of opaque IIRC or I just hosed it up.

I'll do a little more digging into the correct way to re-set it up when I get it running again. Not sure if the 1513+ supports BTRFS or not as it's an older model by this point but hoping it still cuts it for just having a big NAS w/ redundancy. What I was attempting to do was have a scheduled 1-way sync to an external drive of critical files (raw photos + lightroom librar) that I plugged directly into the NAS so I could periodically swap that out for a different drive and always have one be off-site at a family member's house.

MMD3 fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Sep 17, 2020

Brain Issues
Dec 16, 2004

lol

MMD3 posted:

Thanks, don't think I want to bother wish shucking so I"ll probably just pay the premium for the ironwolf's. Any thoughts on speed?

It really takes less than 1 minute to shuck, but if you're concerned about having a warranty I get it.

MMD3
May 16, 2006

Montmartre -> Portland

Brain Issues posted:

It really takes less than 1 minute to shuck, but if you're concerned about having a warranty I get it.

if it's really as easy as taking a screwdriver/dremel to the case then I guess I'm good w/ that.

Any concerns about speed with those? My primary use for the NAS would be storing my raw photos and media so I'd be pointing Plex at it for playback of movies and pointing my Lightroom catalog at it for editing photos.

Brain Issues
Dec 16, 2004

lol

MMD3 posted:

if it's really as easy as taking a screwdriver/dremel to the case then I guess I'm good w/ that.

Any concerns about speed with those? My primary use for the NAS would be storing my raw photos and media so I'd be pointing Plex at it for playback of movies and pointing my Lightroom catalog at it for editing photos.

Yeah all you need is a flathead screwdriver and the case slides apart, then you use a phillips head to take the USB connector off the drive. It really takes about 1 minute or less once you've opened a couple.

Speed is fine, I'm currently using 7 of these shucked drives in my Synology. (1x8TB, 3x10TB, and 3x14TB).

Lightroom will likely be considerably slower versus an SSD, but this is true for any HDD vs SSD. Plex will be totally fine, that's what I use mine for.

Edit: One thing you could consider doing is putting an SSD into one of your Synology's bays and using that drive as a separate volume for pictures. Then use shucked 14tb drives in the other bays as a volume for Plex.

Brain Issues fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Sep 18, 2020

Less Fat Luke
May 23, 2003

Exciting Lemon
I hate the amount of waste shucking creates, like goddamn just sell the same binned bare drives with the smaller warranty for slightly less :(

Raymond T. Racing
Jun 11, 2019

Less Fat Luke posted:

I hate the amount of waste shucking creates, like goddamn just sell the same binned bare drives with the smaller warranty for slightly less :(

At least for easystores, AFAIK the difference is being made up by Best Buy kickbacks. Amazon only drops the price of the Elements in response to Best Buy doing so and probably ends up losing money on the deal.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

TEAM NVIDIA:
FORUM POLICE

Buff Hardback posted:

At least for easystores, AFAIK the difference is being made up by Best Buy kickbacks. Amazon only drops the price of the Elements in response to Best Buy doing so and probably ends up losing money on the deal.

wait like best buy is kicking in a bit on the easystores?

why?

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

MMD3 posted:

if it's really as easy as taking a screwdriver/dremel to the case then I guess I'm good w/ that.

Any concerns about speed with those?

I think my most recent shuck took me 5 minutes because I was on a work zoom call and didn't have access to any tools. I was stuck doing it with a few credit cards like a schmuck instead of my usual flathead screwdiver and the sound of plastic tabs snapping.

Raymond T. Racing
Jun 11, 2019

Paul MaudDib posted:

wait like best buy is kicking in a bit on the easystores?

why?

I don't know if it's ever been confirmed but I think it's a combination of factors.

1. they might be loss leaders to get you into the store, which would be best buy kickbacks to WD
2. WD just doesn't care. it's overall cheaper for them to make one set of drives for OEM enterprise use and externals than segmenting production lines to make lower quality drives for certain markets

Factor 2 is relatively common (this is not intended as a derail, just a much more expensive example),the Standard Range Model 3 (which is still sold, just off menu), it's exactly the same physically as the Standard Range+ Model 3 even though it was originally planned to not have a glass roof and some other stuff. The money Tesla would have saved by not putting in the glass roof and the other physical creature comforts they were planning on removing were offset by having to make a second production line as well as any regulatory testing for a SKU that wasn't going to move many units comparatively to others.


I think that's probably where WD slots into. They don't move enough externals compared to bare drive market that it doesn't make sense to make a crappier hard drive for their externals, with it being uncertain whether or not Best Buy throws kickbacks at WD when they're on sale to keep the prices low

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Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002

Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)
Just got my 2700x/x470d4u mobo set up and goddamn, the IPMI is so handy.

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