NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

insta: Jan 28, 2009

The "obsolete technology" thread laughed at anybody who's using RAID5 -- and while I sorta laughed along with them, I quickly ran over here to see what I "should" be doing instead, or if what I have is good enough.

My current fileserver setup is:

* Ubuntu 19.04
* Athlon(tm) 5350 APU
* 16GB RAM
* LSI SAS2008 HBA in IT mode
* 4x (eventually 8x?) WD Red 6TB
* mdadm RAID-5
* LVM volume
* ext4 filesystem

I have Totally Cool and Totally Not :filez:

things running, but not Plex.

Am I doing something wrong? :ohdear:

# ¿ Jul 6, 2020 22:16

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 22:05

insta: Jan 28, 2009

Charles posted:

If you get more Red 6tb beware that you'll probably get SMR drives. You have to get red pro or plus or whatever.

I don't need to match them, I'm just wondering if I should be doing something with btrfs/LVM to make better use of my equipment instead of these very segregated layers.

rufius posted:

I run RAID5 in my little 4-bay with the HGST Ultrastar drives. They're the ones Backblaze has had the lowest failure rates on so I'm pretty confident I'll have a shot at replacing a drive in a timely manner if I run into an issue.

Maybe I'll go with these next, I just want to make sure I've got the underlying setup good to go

# ¿ Jul 6, 2020 22:36

insta: Jan 28, 2009

Just double-checking before I wander back out, my mdadm+LVM+ext4 setup is optimal-enough, and there isn't some major advantage I'd get from a combined volume-aware setup like btrfs or a LVM-RAID?

# ¿ Jul 7, 2020 00:27

insta: Jan 28, 2009

KozmoNaut posted:

Yeah, it's going in a Fractal Design Node 304, which fits nicely in our Ikea Kallax underneath the TV. I ended up at $60 for the PSU, ~$20 less than the Seasonic.

It's not really an issue. Say a rating of 200,000 load/unload cycles and one happens every hour 24/7, that's over 22 years of cycles. Seagate Ironwolf drives (just as an example) are rated for 600,000 load/unload cycles. I've got the spindown timeout set to 1 hour in my desktop too, it's long enough that they don't spin down just to spin up again 5 minutes later, but short enough that they aren't just spinning all the time.

I've used relatime forever (and it's the default now anyway), and I've never had issues with disks spinning down. The OS and logs etc. will be on an SSD, not the array

The motherboard has two Intel SATA ports and two ASM1061 SATA ports (on the PCIe bus), both work perfectly according to what I've read. The additional SATA controller I've ordered also has an ASM1061 controller, so it should be fine

At that low of power draw, you may be in DC-DC converter territory. You'd have a competitive price point, too.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2020 19:15

insta: Jan 28, 2009

Well, I turbofucked my NAS, so now I get to start fresh.

I have 8x 6TB drives in an 8x bay so it's not going to expand drive count, but I can see myself maybe doing the "swap one at a time" upgrade to 12TB if those get 'cheap enough' later. I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I have a poo poo-tier CPU and 16geebees of RAM, plus a 180GB SSD dedicated for a cache. The machine is going to store media for home Plex usage, nothing intense.

What's the best stack to organize this? It was formerly MDADM + LVM + ext4, but MDADM poo poo itself hard when I tried to grow the array from 4 to 8 and now I'm mad at it. LVM behind the scenes still seems to use MDADM if I build the array there, but I haven't tried assembling an array from scratch with all 8 drives, so I don't know how it'll hold up.

btrfs directly across the volumes? Go back to mdadm + lvm? Use lvm's raid directly?

# ¿ Nov 6, 2020 16:18

insta: Jan 28, 2009

link on Amazon?

# ¿ Nov 10, 2020 19:30

insta: Jan 28, 2009

drat it

# ¿ Nov 10, 2020 20:36

insta: Jan 28, 2009

QuantumNinja posted:

I currently have an R720 Dell that's basically a glorified plex server and warming an entire room of my house. I'm just trying to downsize, basically. I understand cooling is a thing, but will a mini-itx with a few SSDs and some Noctuas significantly save me on my electric bill without ruining buffering speed?

I have this doing Plex duty: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08F6SWV7V/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 It has hardware transcoding support, and draws like 8 watts from the wall. Pair that with a Synology or something similar, and you can put the whole thing on a bookshelf and it'll be quiet and look good.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2020 16:33

insta: Jan 28, 2009

If it's just managing letters, you can do some cool things with junction mounts and RAID inside windows itself.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2020 21:40

insta: Jan 28, 2009

You mean rent 3x external 14TB drives from Best Buy?

# ¿ Dec 1, 2020 01:23

insta: Jan 28, 2009

priznat posted:

Yeah that m.2 vga is probably going to be a bit niche to find, we deal with a direct sale vendor at work and they were offering them for $17ea.

Setting up with a gpu then going headless after install is probably going to be the better option just due to it being a pain to find in non b2b.

You could sell as many of those as you wanted on eBay for > $17, fwiw.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2020 06:32

insta: Jan 28, 2009

Yeah, that just sounds like a thing drive manufacturers would exploit for higher density storage.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2021 20:20

insta: Jan 28, 2009

Can the thread give me only good feedback on the QNAP TS-873A for a home lab? I plan to put 64gb ecc ram, a 10gbe card in it, some nvme drives as cache, 8x12tb drives for Linux ISOs, and run docker containers on other machines with network attached storage. It will only be doing file storage duty, and MAYBE be a Swarm coordinator.

I have already bought it so no negative feedback or better suggestions thx

# ¿ Sep 22, 2023 01:02

insta: Jan 28, 2009

If you're hitting the IOPS limit of a PCIe 2.0 HBA in a home lab, you're in a pretty decent spot regardless

# ¿ Oct 9, 2023 14:18

insta: Jan 28, 2009

A modern (> 120gb) drive showing reallocated sectors has filled its internal allocation of spare sectors and is now dying badly enough to be calling for help. Stop benchmarking it and start getting data off that drive, like today.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2023 16:12

insta: Jan 28, 2009

Quietly ignoring the vulnerabilities since I just went all-in on QNAP (behind the router/firewall though)...

Am I smart or stupid for using SMR drives with round-robin mergerfs+rsync in a pair of 5-bay USB3 enclosures for backups? I don't care all that much how long they take, and round-robin seems to let each drive get a few hundred megs of data before leaving that drive alone, so the next drive can start getting data while that one does its stupid SMR thing.

yay/nay?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2024 16:24

insta: Jan 28, 2009

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

It sounds to me like a recipe for dataloss without a good backup strategy in place.

that is the backup strategy. it's backing up my 50tb ISO collection to avoid redownloading them. the 18 gigabytes of old family photos are scattered around so many cloud providers and other backup areas they'll survive an atmosphere-stripping solar flare.

the array they're backing up is 8x Exos x16 CMR drives in raid-z6 with scrubs and alerting, and i have spare drives in ESD polybags ready to swap in same-day.

quote:

I think it's a bad call. You already have a ton of SMR drives? At today's prices SMR isn't even cheaper through any channels that normal people have access to.

I got them cheap, they were about 40% less-per-TB than the enterprise drives they're backing up

# ¿ Feb 14, 2024 16:34

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 22:05

insta: Jan 28, 2009

TopTon on AliExpress has a few N100-based boards that'll do what you want, and they run on a 12v barrel plug, drawing like 16w total.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2024 15:32

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of