|
Have you considered Unraid? They’re running a Cyber Monday sale. https://unraid.net/cyber-weekend-2022
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2022 18:02
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 23, 2024 17:57 |
|
|
There is also Snapraid. Little more hands on than unpaid but it is free.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2022 18:19
|
|
|
Mofabio posted:I'm thinking of getting rid of RAID. I've been managing mdadm and now ZFS clusters on DIY NASes and I'm starting to realize that the downsides (even drive wear so everything fails around the same time, the potential for loving a whole cluster at once by user error, can't physically just move a drive to another computer and use it there, can't just give a drive to a friend, difficult expandability, can't stagger backups across the drives meaning the least-important data is as protected as the most-important in the cluster) outweigh the upsides (automated redundancy vs an rsync tangle, JBOD). I went from a pretty basic proxmox install to unraid a couple of years ago and never looked back.
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2022 14:29
|
|
|
e.pilot posted:I went from a pretty basic proxmox install to unraid a couple of years ago and never looked back. How was that better than the basic proxmox? Never used unraid and from the website it's not clear (to me) why would I want it over some other solutions.
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2022 15:49
|
|
|
Volguus posted:How was that better than the basic proxmox? Never used unraid and from the website it's not clear (to me) why would I want it over some other solutions. I'd say the closest analogy is mergerFS plus SnapRaid, but it does a few things differently:
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2022 17:24
|
|
|
Oh, interesting, thanks. So, some kind of a RAID, but not quite.
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2022 18:21
|
|
|
I've had to recover a 12TB drive recently in Unraid and the process couldn't have been smoother - I could start the array without the missing drive and it would be simulated using the parity drive. The next day, I plugged in a new 12TB drive and Unraid rebuilt it in about 24 hours, all while my docker containers were running without issue. Don't drop a drive on basement pavement, kids.
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2022 19:10
|
|
|
UnRAID is having a Black Friday sale BTW. 30% off the pro license and nice upgrade prices.
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2022 19:28
|
|
|
Mofabio posted:I'm thinking of getting rid of RAID. I've been managing mdadm and now ZFS clusters on DIY NASes and I'm starting to realize that the downsides (even drive wear so everything fails around the same time, the potential for loving a whole cluster at once by user error, can't physically just move a drive to another computer and use it there, can't just give a drive to a friend, difficult expandability, can't stagger backups across the drives meaning the least-important data is as protected as the most-important in the cluster) outweigh the upsides (automated redundancy vs an rsync tangle, JBOD). Just out of interest, how many years do you generally run a set of drives before replacing them with a new set / upgrading to a new server?
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2022 19:42
|
|
|
Does anyone have a data recovery service for a mechanical hard drive failure that they can recommend? It's a Seagate Barracuda from an old iMac, it sounds like the heads might have failed. There's so many different vendors and places that seem like scams/bait-and-switch operations that it's hard to get a sense of what's legit. Desert Data Recovery in AZ seems like it has a good reputation from some Reddit threads, but that's still only based on a few recommendations i've found. There doesn't seem to be one go-to vendor. I'm in VA if that makes a difference, or if anyone knows of something local.
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2022 20:12
|
|
|
Any good Black Friday deals on drives or storage hardware?
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2022 21:26
|
|
|
Talorat posted:Any good Black Friday deals on drives or storage hardware? I haven't looked extensively but Amazon has a lot of sales on WD stuff. 20TB Elements $330: https://smile.amazon.com/Elements-Desktop-External-external-storage/dp/B09VCXWPQG 16TB Elements $240: https://smile.amazon.com/Elements-Desktop-Drive-Compatible-WDBWLG0160HBK-NESN/dp/B08KTRKB6S There's also some discounts on the Red Plus and Pro drives on the WD sale landing page which has a huge URL: drat, look at that huge URL, WD black friday deals on amazon There's probably some more around, I know I got an email from WD's store last night for "up to 50% off" but most of the products they had on sale were about the same or more expensive than the amazon ones right now. Probably worth a look. https://www.westerndigital.com/promo/black-friday There's likely to be some good hardware sales on Cyber Monday as well.
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2022 23:47
|
|
|
Hughlander posted:https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-18tb-external-usb-3-0-hard-drive-black/6427995.p?skuI=&skuId=6427995 This is also still going on, and according to shucks.top is the all time low price for an 18TB
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2022 23:57
|
|
|
Another storage question for today. I'm on a Mac, which filesystem is better for an external hard drive these days, HFS or APFS? I'm consolidating all my old external hard drives into one new 5tb external. I'm a little worried that if I choose HFS that Apple will deprecate it and i'll have to reformat. APFS is also 'new' and I've heard some people still don't trust it 100%, but maybe those are just ubernerd worryowrts. Any opinions?
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 01:03
|
|
|
frogbs posted:Another storage question for today. I'd worry a lot more about a random external drive failing in physical ways than about APFS issues taking it out, if that helps? I'd also format it exFAT so I could use it on more computers, but 
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 01:15
|
|
|
Wibla posted:Just out of interest, how many years do you generally run a set of drives before replacing them with a new set / upgrading to a new server? I think about 5 years. Unraid looks perfect and I wish I'd picked it a couple years ago, last refresh. It took forever to get my bash scripts, the arr's, a Logitech Media Server, beets, custom qbittorrent all working the way I like it, and I don't want to have to reinstall an OS and learn docker and learn another linux and set everything up again. Hindsight. My setup now is an Odroid H2 SBC, which has only 2 power lanes for SATA. I'm currently committing the mortal ZFS sin, and running half the array off USB3, meaning I effectively have zero parity right now. So my plan is to plug in an NVMe-->5x SATA card, shuck the externals, up the voltage to the SBC from 14V to 19V, daisy-chain SATA power such that most of the time only one drive per rail is active, use ZFS to plug the write hole, and set up a unison cronjob to clone whatever data I never want to lose across 0, 1, or 2 drives. And then, a few years later, replace it with something sensible.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 02:30
|
|
|
Talorat posted:Any good Black Friday deals on drives or storage hardware? 14tb WD or Segate drives for $209 seems pretty solid https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-plus-sata-3-5-hdd#WD140EFGX https://www.newegg.com/seagate-ironwolf-st14000vn0008-14tb/p/N82E16822184759?Item=N82E16822184759
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 02:37
|
|
|
Would it make sense to pay $10 more for those or shuck easystore drives? Don't care about the effort or the money, just curious if there is any difference between them.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 03:58
|
|
|
K8.0 posted:Would it make sense to pay $10 more for those or shuck easystore drives? Don't care about the effort or the money, just curious if there is any difference between them. Check the warranties. Externals may have 2 or 3 years, vs internal drives getting 3 or 5. Plus there's the whole shucking possibly causing warranty trouble, though I've seen plenty of people say they were able to put the drive back in the enclosure and get the warranty just fine. IMO shucking externals is only worth it when the price is significantly less, such that a drive failure means you don't really care whether you have a warranty or not.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 04:29
|
|
|
frogbs posted:Another storage question for today. exFat
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 04:44
|
|
|
Ordered 3 16TB Red Pros, seemed to have the best price/GB and I like the pros being 7200rpm. I currently have 4 HGST 7200 6TB and I'm closing in on using up all my space so that'll be good to get those in. Options are limited in Canada, and I did consider getting a few of the 14TB easystores from bestbuy but it wasn't a huge discount from basic drives. Going to spring for the Unraid pro upgrade too and slap a couple more SSDs in for caching stuff. Anyone transfer their unraid usb boot? Thinking about getting a new usb stick for this, I've always been a bit nervous about the one I have mine on, it's a 4GB OCZ and kind of ancient now. It doesn't get a lot of writes so should be fine, but still.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 06:04
|
|
|
Computer viking posted:I'd worry a lot more about a random external drive failing in physical ways than about APFS issues taking it out, if that helps? In my experience exFat has been a data black hole. If you initially format the drive on Windows with exFat it will not be readable on most Macs (post Catalina I think). I think MacOS can only mount partitions with a very specific block size. I’ve also heard it lacks some of the janitorial features of more modern formats like HFS and APFS. And yes, I’ll be backing this external drive up offsite as well in case it fails. Edit: lol, exFat is not journaled, so I’m not going to rely on it for anything remotely important. frogbs fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Nov 26, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 06:36
|
|
|
APFS makes no promises about data integrity nor even using checksumming, with Apple engineers instead proclaiming that users should trust the hardware - because that's worked so well in the past. Adam Leventhal wrote a series of posts over at dtrace.org about it back around when it came out. Meanwhile, ZFS on macOS is still an ongoing project, with the aim being to codify it in OpenZFS.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 07:22
|
|
|
BlankSystemDaemon posted:APFS makes no promises about data integrity nor even using checksumming, with Apple engineers instead proclaiming that users should trust the hardware - because that's worked so well in the past. Interesting, thank you for the info! I think I’m going to stick with HFS for now.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 17:32
|
|
|
It's kind of an interesting question - does the journaling in HFS+ make it easier to recover in case of damage than the metadata checksums and unspecific "novel copy on write mechanism metadata scheme" of APFS? I have no answers, except that if your backups are good enough it should hopefully not matter.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 17:51
|
|
|
frogbs posted:Interesting, thank you for the info! I think I’m going to stick with HFS for now. Do you need the interoperability of HFS? APFS isn't as good as ZFS, but it sounds better than HFS at least.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 18:36
|
|
|
Computer viking posted:It's kind of an interesting question - does the journaling in HFS+ make it easier to recover in case of damage than the metadata checksums and unspecific "novel copy on write mechanism metadata scheme" of APFS? I have no answers, except that if your backups are good enough it should hopefully not matter. No, a journaled FS is strictly inferior to the copy-on-write concept. CoW don't have a journal because they don't need it -- all the bad things that a journal tries to prevent simply don't happen if you never alter data in place. The downsides of CoW in general are performance overhead & fragmentation. For an external HDD I'd generally think those don't matter that much. The only thing I'd have a slight question about is that APFS is described as "optimized of SSD", which raises a possibility that fragmentation might have been low on their priorities -- SSDs don't care about it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 19:22
|
|
|
Journals exist only for crash consistency, and don't work if the underlying disk experiences any number of issues. Copy-on-write filesystems can achieve the same (better, really) crash consistency by having transactional updates using atomic operations. EDIT: Err, upon re-reading it, it seems that the APFS isn't transactional at all - so it's strictly worse than HFS+. BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Nov 26, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 23:07
|
|
|
Yeah, they was sort of what I was wondering about - I got the impression Apple's was being a bit cagey about just how CoW it actually is.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 23:31
|
|
|
What makes it extra dubious is that they have fsck_apfs - if a filesystem is atomically transactional with copy-on-write, it by definition can't need a fsck. Interestingly, I've also had a lost+found show up after a panic I've had on my 2012 Macbook Pro (which is basically a glorified alarm clock, since Apple stopped pushing updates for it). In the blog post linked above from Adam, he does mention that it's possible that it's only the metadata that's copy-on-write, and also mentioned is a later conversation which seems to indicate that it isn't atomic.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2022 23:36
|
|
|
I'm in the market for a NAS and I am too lazy to build my own. I'm a software engineer and have built many computers over the years, am familiar with different types of RAID, etc, but I really don't want to sink a bunch of time into this and my main use for this thing is just photo storage. I want something I can unbox, plug into a wifi 6 router, and forget about, but I'm open a BYOD solution and I assume that's where I'll probably end up. With black friday/cyber monday deals going on I figure this is as good a time to buy as any. Does anyone have any recs in that space? I skimmed the OP but it said it was last updated in 2012, so I just jumped to the end of the thread... Edit: I should add I'm looking for around 20 TB of storage overall. Maybe a 4 bay enclosure running RAID 5, but that is not a hard requirement. armorer fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Nov 27, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 02:34
|
|
|
armorer posted:I'm in the market for a NAS and I am too lazy to build my own. I'm a software engineer and have built many computers over the years, am familiar with different types of RAID, etc, but I really don't want to sink a bunch of time into this and my main use for this thing is just photo storage. I want something I can unbox, plug into a wifi 6 router, and forget about, but I'm open a BYOD solution and I assume that's where I'll probably end up. With black friday/cyber monday deals going on I figure this is as good a time to buy as any. Does anyone have any recs in that space? I skimmed the OP but it said it was last updated in 2012, so I just jumped to the end of the thread... HPE microserver gen10+ with OS of your choice
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 05:33
|
|
|
e.pilot posted:HPE microserver gen10+ with OS of your choice Have a good place to buy them and get a decent price? Also is the v2 worth it?
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 06:10
|
|
|
Boner Wad posted:Have a good place to buy them and get a decent price? They seem to be pretty consistently decently priced on amazon, there’s a 5% off coupon on the bring your own drives E2224 model right now. That’s where I got mine a few years back. The older gen10 is a little better value if you don’t need the extra processing power or smaller footprint of the gen10+ e: just looked at the prices on the older gen10, they’re selling for sub $300 now with no drives, that’s a crazy good value
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 06:29
|
|
|
armorer posted:but I really don't want to sink a bunch of time into this and my main use for this thing is just photo storage. I want something I can unbox, plug into a wifi 6 router, and forget about So just a basic Synology box? That seems to be what you're looking for. If you're just doing basic storage stuff and not running lots of add-ons or docker containers or other homelabs stuff, you can turn on automatic updates and not have to do any active maintenance. Actually forget that it exists until it emails you that a drive has died 5 years from now. OTOH if you do want to do homelabs stuff, these prices e.pilot posted:e: just looked at the prices on the older gen10, they’re selling for sub $300 now with no drives, that’s a crazy good value
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 16:50
|
|
|
Klyith posted:So just a basic Synology box? That seems to be what you're looking for. If you're just doing basic storage stuff and not running lots of add-ons or docker containers or other homelabs stuff, you can turn on automatic updates and not have to do any active maintenance. Actually forget that it exists until it emails you that a drive has died 5 years from now. Forgetting that it exists until it emails me that a drive has died is pretty much exactly what I want. That said, I will look into both options and see what I'm missing if I opt for the boring appliance. I have way too many hobbies that I sink time into these days, and while I have plenty of technical understanding to get more out of a cheaper and more capable device, I have very little motivation for it in this case! I really just need a thing to dump a bunch of data on that will do that one job well.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 17:50
|
|
|
I get this goes against the ethos of this thread, but I'm looking for advice about moving away from a NAS. I've been running a home NAS for probably 15 years, from Drobo to N40L running Ubuntu+ZFS, to the same N40L running Xpenology. I have 12tb of redundant capacity in there, but anything of irreplacable value is backed up on other cloud services. Right now this is all really aging hardware and a bit of a Heath Robinson setup - I have four 2tb internal SATA drives (some of those may be the whole 15 years old), and when I was running low on space a couple of years back but not wanting to invest a lot, I mounted three 2tb 2.5" USB drives I already had inside the case (not even shucked, just hooked up to a USB hub). Given the age of the hardware and hackiness of this setup I also have an external 12tb which I use Synology's USB copy feature to plug in occasionally and mirror the lot to a cold backup. With the combination of recently becoming a dad, moving to an (inefficient) house with lots of improvements to make, and rising energy costs (UK) I'm finding it harder to justify the expense/complication of running an extra box 24/7 for the amount I actually need to access it. Factors 1 and 2 also mean I don't really want to spend over the odds on a replacement solution. I'm thinking of just moving back to a single big (12tb) drive in my PC that I can just boot/WoL when I need to access something. Obviously I'd be losing redundancy here, but would be hoping to still do something similar to the USB Copy for a cold backup. Is there a Windows feature/3rd party software that can replace Synology's USB Copy feature? i.e. not doing a full disk clone or taking images, but mirroring delta updates to an external filesystem. Alternatively are there any "better" solutions that would markedly reduce the energy footprint (~60w) without being a large investment? My option B was to also pick up a 2-bay Synology DS220+, but that would go from "£200 for a 12tb drive" to "£500 for a 12tb drive and new enclosure", and while it would be better for redundancy I'd lose my cold backup unless I spent another £200 for another drive. Even if the DS220+ ran at 15w (quoted, but I don't think that includes the drives), it would take 5.5 years to turn a profit on that outlay.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 02:27
|
|
|
Froist posted:I'm thinking of just moving back to a single big (12tb) drive in my PC that I can just boot/WoL when I need to access something. Obviously I'd be losing redundancy here, but would be hoping to still do something similar to the USB Copy for a cold backup. Is there a Windows feature/3rd party software that can replace Synology's USB Copy feature? i.e. not doing a full disk clone or taking images, but mirroring delta updates to an external filesystem. 1. You can use Windows' built in File History to do backups. Dead simple, multiple versions of files kept. But I think it's real dumb about deltas and tends to over-consume drive space. 2. If you can nerd out with a little bit of command line, robocopy or rsync can do this type of thing. I rolled my own backup system based on robocopy for several years (then I quit windows this year). Probably I should have been using rsync the whole time -- it has built-in options to do what I was doing without all the batch hackery. But my thing worked well enough. 3. Various other backup software does this stuff well. Incremental backups are a pretty standard feature. Re: redundancy, if you want to get 2 drives you can mirror them using ntfs raid or storage spaces in windows.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 03:36
|
|
|
I'll soon be migrating to a new NAS (Synology DS918+ to Asustor Lockerstor Gen2) and I'm wondering about three things. Which file system should I use? The NAS supports EXT4 Btrfs, NTFS, HFS+ and exFAT. I've heard of NTFS and exFAT from Windows but am not familiar with the others. As mentioned above, my devices mostly run Windows. Should I enable NFS? The manual says that, if enabling NFS, I "will be able to access your NAS via UNIX or Linux operating systems". My desktop runs Windows but I do have a media player that I believe runs a version of Linux (currently I'm using SMB to connect from it to my old NAS). Can I go from Raid0 straight to Raid5? Ideally I'd put 3x 10tb in Raid0 in the new NAS, copy over all the data, add a fourth drive to the new NAS and change it from raid0 to raid5 while retaining all the data on it. Is that possible?
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 09:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 23, 2024 17:57 |
|
|
Does the NAS have to be on 24x7? I have Unraid running on a newer Microserver and cut the energy consumption to a third of what it was by running a shutdown script each day at about 3am and then using a £10 TP-Link smart plug to turn it back on each evening, with the BIOS configured to boot whenever AC power is restored.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 10:06
|
|
