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Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
So, I'm kind of stuck debating what to do here, and hopefully you guys can suggest something.

Right now I've got a dedicated file server (running Windows Server2k8) that handles a lot of my additional workload. It has all my file storage (with zero mirroring or backups right now), handles AirVideo and Orb Transcoding, torrents, and hosting of all media/etc. My desktop PC has an 80 GB SSD and I offload as much as possible to the server. I work for a major software manufacturer and can get most any software I need cheaply and legally, so I'm not really worried about software costs.

However, the server's busted. 1 GB of RAM isn't showing up, I've lost one HDD already and miraculously got it online long enough to pull data off. I'm finally in a position to rebuild it, but with what?

Needs:
Some form of fault tolerance. Partial mirroring through WDS is acceptable.
Low cost, although I have some leeway. I'd prefer a lot cost/GB.
High software compatibility - I need at least AirVideo and Orb to work, and some torrent client.
At least 4 drives.

Unneeded:
Performance - not looking for super high data transfer rates.
100% uptime forever - I'm going to be doing periodic backups of important data to a fire safe and potentially to a PO box via platters, so I don't need enterprise level fault tolerance.
Crazy expandability

My ideas:

1. Set up a mildly powerful box with VMWare ESXi - my question here is how ESXi handles raids / other options. This would give me the ability to roll up whatever I need - a linux box for testing, BSD for NAS stuff, and win2k8 for airvideo, etc. This is my personal favorite option, but if I'm correct implies a full need for a hardware raid controller, probably running Raid-5 or Raid-1. (oh, I guess I need a recommendation for a drive controller.)

2. Run Windows Home Server and use the WFS pseudo-drive spanning tech it has and set up mirroring for important files.

3. Just set up a traditional NAS using BSD or what have you.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Jul 14, 2010

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Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

dj_pain posted:

This is the best option. Once you have a OS setup for your raid and with and setup raw device mapping to your hard drives you can pretty much do what ever you want.

Question I edited in briefly after you replied: given a cost comparison, should I go with Raid-1 or Raid-5? From what I understand, it's a lot easier to handle Raid-1 on a cheap controller card with mediocre drives, right?

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

adorai posted:

Personally I run 2 servers -- one for esxi, and one for opensolaris. That way I didn't have to spend any money on a controller on the whitelist, I just present an iSCSI lun. Going with two might cost a little bit more, but gives you way more flexibility.

I think that's what I'm going to go with once I realized that ESXi is incredibly loving picky about raid controllers, and additionally once I realized that Raid-Z lets me actually use inexpensive disks rather than premium-quality RAID drives. :D So I guess my new plan is to move the stuff my server does onto my main PC and use hyper-v or another host OS based virtualization thing on my desktop and just run VMs when I need to.

I'll be able to recycle my current cpu in my server and upgrade the board to one with 8 slots and then move to opensolaris and ZFS. Pretty excited about ZFS after reading about it.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
So, I'm preparing to setup a new box for my home network. I posted a ways back about it and it sounds like my best bet is an OpenSolaris box.

To recap needs:
* Must interface with Windows 7 as well as SMB does now, if not better. A little setup time is fine though.
* Must hold at least 6 TB of usable space, prefer to have more.
* Preferably fire and forget, I'd like to set it up, throw it under my desk on my UPS and forget about it for a few months at a time.
* ZFS / RAID-Z support.

What I don't need:
* User-friendliness on the setup. I'm more than capable of operating in a *nix environment given some tinker time.
* Super high speed file handling.
* Corporate level drive protection, although I might use double-parity as a slight failsafe and keep a few extra drives around.
* Small form-factor: I have space for a tower under my desk, don't mind putting it there.

So here's my current plan - pick up a ton of cheap disks, throw together a RAID-Z array on a box using OpenSolaris. My biggest blocker here is hardware choices. Can anyone recommend a build setup for this, or is my best bet cross-referencing the opensolaris hardware compatibility guide with newegg and just hoping it works?

Alternately, does anyone have any alternative ideas?

Edit: So yeah apparently for some weird reason, OpenSolaris has an HCL that doesn't suck rear end. This kind of blows my mind. I can easily build a parts list from this.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 10:38 on Oct 6, 2010

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
Out of curiosity, can anyone recommend an opensolaris supported motherboard? Most of the ones I can find are out of manufacturing now; has anyone built a system lately and could recommend a base?

Specifically one for running an opensolaris based NAS system.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Oct 19, 2010

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

FISHMANPET posted:

Yeah, you really can't go wrong with an Intel chipset. You also can't really go wrong with an AMD chipset either. You can putz around the HCL, find motherboards that work, and then find the same chipset. But I think you'll be pretty golden with just about anything Intel or AMD makes. Solaris likes Nvidia graphics, but that's only really an issue if you want to use it as a desktop. A temp card can be used to install, and I've got a 2mb PCI ATI Radeon card that I can use for the text console on my server.
E:


That small board looks awesome. Dual Intel Nics (which are $40 a piece) and remote management!

Is there any real reason to run dual nics if I'm connecting to a single LAN, just out of curiosity? I'm planning on running Nexenta, since it looks pretty cool and is solaris-based.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

necrobobsledder posted:

NIC teaming is one benefit of multiple NICs on a single network segment, and it lets you get above, say, gigabit speeds without requiring you to buy a lot more expensive equipment. I'm planning on using it for my setups later on instead of running 10g ethernet everywhere and could use a card like this for my setup. After all, 10g ethernet is really expensive and overkill for home use (even if you're running tons of stuff). Your switch (and also OS) will need to support either the 802.3 standard, Cisco's Etherchannel, or some other random standard to support multiple NICs demuxed to one logical network node.

Ah, I had entirely forgotten about NIC teaming. Unfortunately I'm running a DD-WRT'd buffalo router as my gigabit switch right now, with the option of a linksys gigabit switch to expand - and I doubt either of those will support 802.3ab or whatever. :(

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
So, I went out and bought some parts without doing enough research, being incredibly tired and figuring I could make things work with FreeNAS, but I'm getting weird lockups. I'm assumign it's my HDDs as per the thread, here's the parts list:

5x Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB 5900RPM drives (probably the culprit)
Motherboard - MSI 870A-G54
Processor - Athlon 250 dualcore
2 GB of RAM

Currently running FreeNAS with ZFS - and beyond simply disliking the terrible UI and the fact that half the poo poo doesn't seem to work, I'm getting lockups. I would be happy to try out OpenIndiana, and I can find my way around *nix environments, but if it's an issue with ZFS, then I doubt that'll help.

So given my lack of a good raid controller, what are my best options? I'm looking for something that I can fire and forget, and don't care terribly about getting more than 50 MBps out of it. Do I need to buckle down and get a raid controller and go for hardware raid?

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Telex posted:

what do you mean by lockups?

coredumps or something different?

I'm not having any issues with those drives, I just made a zfs with them and it seems fine.

What isn't fine, are USB devices which seem to poo poo on FreeNAS on a regular basis and I'm hoping that as soon as I'm done migrating data from my backup drives over to the raid arrays, it'll stop loving core dumping halfway through my rsyncs.

It's helpful to look up the error codes when you get a core dump, they usually mean something helpful to figuring out what the actual problem might be. In my case, I guess I'm using lovely USB docks.

Well specifically what I'm seeing is that the entire server seems to lock up. Earlier in the thread someone mentioned that ZFS didn't play nice with those drives, and I'll come back to find a teracopy has skipped like 9000 files with various errors, and then I can't browse to the SMB share.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Zhentar posted:

Even if it's a ZFS issue, the FreeBSD version is something like 10 revisions behind Solaris, so it's still likely to help.

Welp, since I don't have much to lose, I'll reinstall with OpenIndiana tomorrow :D

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Falcon2001 posted:

Welp, since I don't have much to lose, I'll reinstall with OpenIndiana tomorrow :D

Update: my hardware apparently isn't supported by OpenIndiana...or at least it won't load at all. Just hangs there after the selection screen on both USB and ISO.

Edit: Freenas 7 looks to be a lot better than 8 for some reason, and seems more stable. Let's see if it has the same issues with freezing.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Nov 24, 2010

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
Right now I'm running a ZFS server on FreeNAS that has both fairly lame performance and periodic system hangs. I threw the PC together myself a year or so ago, but I'm debating picking up a real raid controller and switching to RAID-5. Can anyone either confirm I'm an idiot and I'm doing something wrong or recommend a mid-range RAID-5 card?

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

evil_bunnY posted:

Don't tell us what you're running or anything useful like that 8-]

Well, I mean I didn't specify hardware but I did say I was running FreeNAS and ZFS. I don't have the hardware specs in front of me. :( In terms of what it's doing, it's 100% a file server and doesn't do anything else right now. I know I have 5x2TB normal desktop drives in there as far as hard drives go, and I think a pretty basic setup for the mobo/ram/proc, nothing fancy but built recently so it's got a dual core.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Sep 22, 2012

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Longinus00 posted:

Since you don't seem to know anything about your own setup besides the fact that it has 5 hard drives I'd recommend you buy an off the shelf solution instead of a raid5 card. For the record nothing you've told us is in anyway helpful to answer your original question.

Sorry, didn't mean to sound snarky, but I guess I'm not understanding what I'm missing here other than the exact hardware specs. I guess I was mostly wondering if other people were experiencing issues with FreeNAS running ZFS and if I'd have better luck switching to a RAID-5 array.

I swear I'm not just being internet passive aggressive here, I'm honestly looking for help. :( Just don't understand what I'm not telling you guys.

Specific hardware:
5x Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB 5900RPM drives
Motherboard - MSI 870A-G54
Processor - Athlon 250 dualcore
2 GB of RAM, unsure of exact speed.

Software:
FreeNAS - 0.7.2 Sabanda (revision 5543) (Haven't updated yet, just been living with the problem for a while now)

Previously I didn't go with a standard RAID-5 array due to people talking up ZFS really highly and an article I read that said that it can be a lot more expensive to setup RAID5.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Sep 22, 2012

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

DrDork posted:

Problem found. Spend $30, get 8GB of RAM, and then check back in. ZFS really, really wants you to have a lot of RAM for it to play with--2GB backing 10TB of HDDs is at least 6GB of RAM too little.

And for "periodic hangs" are you talking the entire system locking up for a bit, or are you only seeing that with network transfers and the like? I ask because FreeNAS/NAS4Free have pretty spotty drivers for a lot of integrated NICs (mostly the RealTek ones), and you may find that you get better transfer performance and reliability by stepping up to an Intel Pro1000 or other "approved" NIC.

Thanks! I can easily toss more RAM at it, it's not problem. And by hangs I mean the entire system locks up and stops responding - although notably I manage it entirely from the network so maybe it is just the NIC. I'll throw more RAM at it first and see if that alleviates any of the issues and if not, toss a better NIC in.

Thanks a ton :)

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
I have a weird issue - I'm running the latest version of FreeNas, and I'm using an Intel Pro/1000GT network card - in my settings on ifconfig I can clearly see it's autonegotiating with my switch at 100 mbps - but I can't figure out why. It's a gigabit router, other devices connect at gigabit with no issues.

Devices in question:
NAS running FreeNas 9.1.1 Release with a Intel Pro/1000 GT NIC
Buffalo wzr-hp-g300nh running latest DD-WRT
(for testing) - My desktop running win8

Here's what I've done so far:

* Verified that the network adapter is supported by FreeBSD 9.1.1 via http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/hardware.html#ETHERNET
* Verified cable was Cat5E and not some jacked up cat5.
* Verified pins all look good on cable.
* Swapped cable between router/NAS to another cable, no improvement.
* Swapped ethernet cables between my desktop/router and nas/router to no effect. Desktop still manages gigabit.


Alright, leaving this here for posterity's sake, but I fixed it by switching to the onboard realtek instead of the Intel. Why doesn't the intel work? god only knows. At this point I'm just quitting while I'm ahjead.

Edit: to make this post useful: anyone know how to install a 7zip unzipper directly on FreeNAS? Pretty slow over the network.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Sep 1, 2013

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

D. Ebdrup posted:

Once you've got jails setup, install with "pkg install p7zip" for the binary version. All you need is described in the freenas documentation.

Ah, alright - I was having trouble finding a summary of what exactly a jail was, but I tracked it down and managed to put one together.

Edit: sort of good. Was trying to figure out why I was getting long hangs and as far as I can tell the PKGBeta repository is down? (at least according to https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng#Availability_of_pkgs_for_Download ) - I guess at this point I need to go ask the FreeBSD thread for help rather than the storage thread. Either way, thanks.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Sep 1, 2013

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
So I built a NAS around three years ago and had middling results. Custom built pc running freenas and it's been pretty good, but I'm looking to replace it and just get an appliance instead, that won't take up space under my desk and be easier to swap drives into if/when they fail.

I was thinking of getting a diskstation and 4x 4TB drives, probably the WD Reds. It's pretty simple but are there any significant problems with either the Seagate NAS or WD Red drives, or any of the major NAS appliance enclosures? Unsure if there's any gotchas like there are with SSDs.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Mr Shiny Pants posted:

If you just want a Nas why not get a Microserver? They practically give the N54L away and if you want more horsepower you can get the GEN8 version.

I have the older one and it runs Ubuntu like a champ with ZFS as my filesystem. It saturates Gbit Ethernet easily and is rock solid.

Hmm. I was considering it. When I set up my NAS way back when ZFS wasn't really working all that well on *nix (from what I heard), so it's all fine and dandy now?

Alternately, I thought that ZFS was a bit of a memory hog, is it working fine with the 2GB or whatever that the microserver comes with?

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
Ironically I kind of am looking for more of the brainless part. As someone who's configured linux/etc and ran it as a server for a while, going from basic FreeNAS to 'I want to install an unzipping program on this directly' and navigating FreeBSD was very painful.

I don't run much in the way of applications/etc on my NAS, it's just there for storage and maybe a few extras, so having the huge wide openness of *nix isn't really worth it for me. A friend of mine has a diskstation and it seems like pretty much what I want. NAS part works fine with no hassles, the few apps you can install are basically all the ones I need. (audio browser, file browser, etc)

Are there distros like FreeNAS/NAs4Free that run on straight linux rather than FreeBSD? Honestly that might be enough, but constantly running into the 'it's just like linux EXCEPT' was really frustrating.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

evol262 posted:

FreeBSD has a more consistent filesystem and better documentaton than many Linux distros.

It's not that different. Linux is "just like Linux EXCEPT (it's RPM-based instead of .deb and you have no idea where to find packages, or it's busybox and doesn't have a package manager or bash or any normal utilities, or it's an ancient version of CentOS heavily tweaked and you can't get anything modern, or...)". Especially appliances.

FreeNAS, NAS4Free, and Nexenta (which is even further from Linux) are best of breed.

You can use OpenFiler if you don't mind something based on CentOS5 which hasn't had a release in years. Or OpenMediaVault, which is newer and maybe ok, but really lacking in plugin support and you'll have to touch the shell a lot. Or use Amahi, but then you're way past just a NAS, since it's fundamentally a home server designed to run a ton of apps.

I guess I haven't looked up Linux documentation in a while, but I found FreeBSD to be frighteningly badly documented. Stuff like the default package manager in the latest release pointing to an empty repo because of an almost year-old security issue instead of the nearly identical one that apparently everyone used anyway, etc.

Part of it was also just that FreeNAS itself had big gaps in the documentation that assumed you were already FreeBSD savvy. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it was certainly painful for it to suddenly just drop huge parts of an in-depth tutorial without a link or anything.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

DrDork posted:

You may want to look at NAS4Free, then. I found it to both had better documentation, and completely abstract away EVERYTHING FreeBSD related to the point where if you didn't want to tinker much (and you don't need to, usually), you need all of like 6 clicks/button presses to install and get up and running.

Might do that if I can find a good deal on a Microserver and plenty of RAM.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
Fair enough then, I guess I'd amend my complaint to 'hard to find answers to questions for' rather than documented well.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

GokieKS posted:

I'm familiar with his posts and I agree that it's a very useful guide, though I'm not sure why you linked it in response to me - I was talking about when I first started using ZFS with FreeBSD 8, a long time ago, and I was referring to BSD, not ZFS.


OK, I digress, if you were looking for documentation as an academic exercise, yeah, the handbook is nice. But for "I ran into this issue and I need to know how to fix it", it's definitely easier for a popular Linux distro as you said.

The whole package management kerfluffle with BSD is a great example. The documentation is almost certainly explicit on how package management works, how to set up a repository, what they are, and exact specs about it. None of that answers the question 'why does my main repo contain zero packages'.

Either way I'm not like anti-BSD or anything and I certainly recognize that systems like applicances have huge problems if you try to exceed their functionality compared to a full BSD install, but my goal is to just not have to learn a new OS to setup basic functionality on my NAS. I'll check out NAS4Free and see how it goes - might boot it on my laptop or something to test out the UI.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

hifi posted:

Are you talking about the empty pkg repos as a result of the security breech? There are packages available now and I'm pretty sure that pkg was still in beta at the time there weren't any packages available.

And if you are using that as an example of how FreeBSD documentation is bad, then compare their official documentation on it to that of the kernel.org breech (there isn't any).

Suffice to say 'documentation' wasn't really what I meant (earlier post made that clear) but instructions were. Nowhere in that does it say 'here's a good alternative repo to use' or anything like that, and in the process of finding out I got a lot of flak from neckbeards on the internet for not 'already knowing about the other repo'. Either way good to hear it's gone for now, the whole experience just soured me on FreeBSD a bit.

Edit: Wow, I can pick up a latest-gen Microserver for less than the price of some more decked out appliances, that's pretty awesome. Close to convinced to go with Nas4Free.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Jul 13, 2014

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

DrDork posted:

With appliances, you're paying for the convenience of "just plug it in," and because they look nice(ish), not because they get you the best price:performance (or anywhere close to it, usually).

Yeah, I actually just expected the Microserver to be pricier. After filling it with RAM it's on par pricewise with the Synology DS412+ and the QNAP TS-451, and will do a lot more.

I just have to convince myself I'm going to use all the 'more' that it will do when I haven't so far on my current NAS, especially when it requires futzing around with an OS I'm not familiar with. :\ Otherwise I'll probably end up getting a QNAP TS-420 or a Synology DS 414.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
So anyone familiar enough with the HP G2020T to estimate if it would do double duty as NAS and minecraft server? That'd probably be my main pull towards a custom solution again, since it's soaking up resources on my desktop right now. Let's assume 16GB of RAM in there to go along with it.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
Pretty close to pulling the trigger on a HP Microserver. Anything I'm forgetting here?

3x WD Red WD40EFRX 4TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" NAS (the goal being to start with the same size as my current array which still has some space on it and then slap in another drive here in a little bit if I need to).

HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 Ultra Micro Tower Server System Intel Pentium G2020T 2.5GHz 2C/2T 2GB

Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) ECC Unbuffered Server Memory Model CT2KIT102472BD160B

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Moey posted:

What are you going to run for an OS? If you are using ZFS, remember you cannot add additional disks into an existing pool. May want to grab that 4th drive now.

For reals? Good thing you mentioned that. Also, upon further investigation I'm apparently unlikely to be able to use this for a minecraft server so now I'm debating whether I should try and build out a real server to pull double-duty or just say gently caress it and get an appliance again and then throw some more RAM in my main machine.

Honestly it just keeps coming back to not really needing much more than a straight up NAS. Not running a website or anything intensive means that the difference between a synology box and NAS4Free comes down to geek cred and UI, neither of which are all that crazy important to me.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Don Lapre posted:

If it can run java it should be able to run a minecraft server.

Question is run vs run effectively, the MC thread was under the impression it would be underpowered (and this is probably true since the whole MC being pretty badly optimized thing). Mostly just don't want to buy it just so I can find out it's not going to work and have to return it.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
I've got a Synology NAS that I've had for almost exactly three years now, with some WD drives in there. At what point should I consider proactively replacing drives to get ahead of MTBF or should I just wait until they fail and replace one at a time? It's just N+1 so losing two drives'd nuke it.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Paul MaudDib posted:

Backblaze's data shows that SMART is very accurate (when the numbers change you have a problem) but has a high false-negative rate (lots of drives fail without SMART data changes).

Generally speaking I think 4 years is a good time to start thinking about it, and 5 years is time to proactively change over, but there are no hard-and-fast rules, some drives will live to be 10-15 years old if you let them.

As always, be sure you have backups of anything irreplaceable.

Cool, thanks. I know that RAID isn't backup, so I should probably figure out some sort of offsite backup for the important poo poo.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
How often should I consider proactively replacing disks? My NAS runs 24x7 but doesn't see a lot of day to day use. I'm running 4x Western Digital WD40EFRX 4 TB WD Red, all purchased almost exactly 4 years ago.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Hadlock posted:

I get irrationally nervous when my disks get > 5 years old

If I were you I would start saving for a replacement and plan on replacing the whole unit. At that point you don't know if the motherboard, power supply or disk is going to blow first. Plus CPU/controller chips have gotten a lot smaller/faster/cooler which means fewer cooling fans/noise

Yeah, was getting a little nervous but it also doesn't seem like a super big problem either from what I read?. I'm running 4x4tb in a Synology DS414, but honestly I'm thinking of downsizing, so I might get away with moving to a smaller unit and seeing if I can sell this old one after wiping it. I've never gone over 60% capacity on it and simply don't have the storage requirements that I did when I built it.

On the other hand, it looks like if I were to rebuild I'd probably still end up with a 4-bay unit and maybe just only throw in three 6tb drives. I still want to be able to lose a drive and replace it and keep going.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
I've been putting off setting up offsite backups for too long, so wanted to get some recommendations before I spend a ton of time digging in.

I've got a 10 TB Synology NAS and two main computers to back up - I don't need full backups necessarily, so folder selection is important. I'd like something reasonably simple that I don't have to fiddle with much and that isn't going to be a pain to run. Data recovery speed isn't particularly important to me, this is mostly just a peace of mind setup so a fire doesn't wipe out all of my poo poo. I am reasonably technically savvy, but that tends to go hand in hand with fiddly bullshit, which I'd really like to avoid if possible.

The only weird thing I can think of is that it would be nice to be able to store something on the same service that isn't necessarily an incremental backup; for example, if I wanted to push up a bunch of old game saves but not have them locally. This is sort of a different mode to most backup setups I've seen.

I'd prefer something reasonably cheap but I can afford to pay more for a better product.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug
Any good places to watch for deals on HDDs/etc? Need to buy a couple high capacity HDDs to upgrade my NAS.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Catatron Prime posted:

What is the consensus around M-Disc? Is it a reasonable 10-20 year shelf stable archival backup for docs and pictures in case of a complete NAS hardware failure? I've got glacier backing things up, but I can't say I've actually tested the restore procedure and I'm wary of what is actually getting backed up with how cheap my monthly bill is.

I'd just test your recovery instead of investing into a whole new technology. If you have a good reason to keep stuff local then mdisk is probably fine but... Off-site cloud backups solve a couple problems at once.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Chimp_On_Stilts posted:

My old portable external backup drive is dying and that's a good reason to finally get the NAS I've been thinking about for a while.

I don't have experience here, but I also don't need anything fancy. I just need a box on my network with a lot of space, probably in RAID 1 since I'm sick of urgently swapping to a new drive when an old one decides to start dying.

So, I think I'll buy a Synology 2 Bay DiskStation DS223j and two identical drives for it. I haven't picked drives yet, but I'll get at least 10TB from a company I recognize like Seagate or WD.

Anything wrong with this plan? Again, I am trying to keep this simple. I have no special needs.

I'm a big fan of Synology, been running one for a while now. They have a Hybrid Raid setup (that will essentially be Raid 1 on a two bay, but it means you don't really need to worry about configuration/etc). You're definitely getting an underpowered appliance rather than a full computer that happens to have a mess of disks, but I've been quite happy with my Synology - it does everything I want it to.

Synology has the whole alphabet soup mess of models, but basically the DS223J is the entry level version. If you have any interest in using your NAS for anything else such as :files: etc then the DS223 might be worth springing for, but otherwise it's probably perfectly fine to stick with the J model.

Edit:

Chimp_On_Stilts posted:


EDIT: I'm poking around for good deals on HDDs and I found Seagate Exos x12 12TB drives @ just $99 for 12TB. Of course, they're "renewed", not new.

$99 for 12TB is a great price, but would I be crazy to get a renewed drive for a backup system? Park of me is thinking "if the thing is in a RAID1 (or maybe RAID5 if I get a bigger box) it'll be ok". But still, renewed drives for a NAS? Someone talk me out of this.

I, personally, would not touch 'renewed' drives with a ten foot pole, especially for something I want to work. Sure, RAID buys you some peace of mind on drive failures, but that prices seems suspiciously good. Storage ain't cheap, you're going to need to drop some dough. But it's up to you ultimately, so your call. If you had a 4-bay or something like that it might be more reasonable to buy cheap crappy drives and just burn through them.

Last note, I would definitely recommend getting a bit more space than you need - nothing worse than realizing you just need 1-2 TB more and having to drop cash all over again.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Nov 28, 2023

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Flipperwaldt posted:

What model are you using? I basically want to update my knowledge on whether the current day arm powered ones are worth buying. They weren't in the past imo.

I'm using a DS718+, downgraded from a four bay model I don't remember specifically, just because I didn't need all the space and the processor/etc was worse on that fourbay. It's a celeron model and not one of the ARM ones so that helps a little bit, I've had no issues with performance on it, and even ran a few minor services from it, although not much.

Chimp_On_Stilts posted:

You make good points. I'll just shell out for new drives, I'm fortunate that I can afford it. No reason to cheap out when the whole drat reason I'm doing this is I'm sick of my storage drives failing (this is the second time in ~10 years which isn't a ton, but it's still annoying).

You're right about capacity too. I think I'll read a bit more about Synology and maybe get a 4 bay so I can get a lot of storage.

For home use, would y'all recommend RAID 1? RAID 5? No RAID at all? Might impact how many drive bays I get.

Just use the Synology Hybrid Raid if you're on Synology, you can dig into the details but it's perfectly fine. Also honestly you probably don't need a four bay model most likely if you're just getting started, since individual disks are pretty huge these days, but it depends on your space requirements.

Eletriarnation posted:

Not saying you're wrong, it's entirely possible that the failure rate is higher on renewed drives - but I think the fact that you (and many people) don't trust them could by itself explain the price being "suspiciously good". The companies selling these drives have to price them at a level that will sell, and so much of the potential market won't really consider anything but new drives.

I think you've got a good point, ultimately a lot of it is all risk analysis, but we don't really know what the failure rate/etc are. I would definitely trust drives if I had more bays though, having one of four drives fail is a lot safer than having one of two, although the two additional drives also mean you'll have more failures over time.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Nov 28, 2023

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Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Chimp_On_Stilts posted:

Do y'all do cloud backups for large amounts of data from your NAS? (Like, 30TB+)

I've been pricing options, even building my own thing by just buying raw storage on Google Cloud or whatever, and it's all pretty expensive (which isn't a surprise).

I'm guessing most NAS owners probably don't have an offsite backup and are thus vulnerable to their house burning down or whatever. Are there good, affordable options for very large amounts of data?

Surprised this didn't get an answer, but Amazon S3 Glacier is basically dirt cheap offsite storage, and is basically what I'm probably going to use. Their deep storage (which is hard to retrieve but for most personal backups that shouldn't be a regular concern) would be around 30 bucks a month for 30 TB, give or take. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/. I'm not sure if anyone else can match that price, but I'll look around myself. Whenever I finally get around to setting up my offsite setup I'll post in here with details.

That being said, the answers you did get (don't bother backing up poo poo you can get again like movies/etc) are also good, because 30 bucks a month is still a few hundred a year and why bother backing something up you can either stream or download again.

Alternatives to a cloud storage provider would be things like 'having a set of drives in a safety deposit box/etc' but honestly like...none of those are super great options.

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