[ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

[Alex Carver via Ale]

I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.

Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.



One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
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[Jim Kinney via Ale]

Always diy. Buying premade is cheating.

Xfs or ext4. Unless you plan on shrinking a partition, xfs.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.
One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
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[Derek Atkins via Ale]

I built myself a FreeNAS box and I'm quite happy with it.
The system has room for 24 drives; I have 6 x 4TB in ZRAID2 so 16T usable
space. I'm looking to buy 6 x 6TB drives early 2019 to extend the array.

-derek

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.
One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
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--
Derek Atkins 617-623-3745
***@ihtfp.com www.ihtfp.com
Computer and Internet Security Consultant

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[Alex Carver via Ale]

What case are you using for this?

Post by Derek Atkins via Ale
I built myself a FreeNAS box and I'm quite happy with it.
The system has room for 24 drives; I have 6 x 4TB in ZRAID2 so 16T usable
space. I'm looking to buy 6 x 6TB drives early 2019 to extend the array.
-derek

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.
One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
_______________________________________________
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[Derek Atkins via Ale]

Post by Alex Carver via Ale

Post by Derek Atkins via Ale
I built myself a FreeNAS box and I'm quite happy with it.
The system has room for 24 drives; I have 6 x 4TB in ZRAID2 so 16T usable
space. I'm looking to buy 6 x 6TB drives early 2019 to extend the array.

What case are you using for this?

I used the Norco RPC-4224. I replaced the fans and installed a quiet
power supply.

-derek
--
Derek Atkins 617-623-3745
***@ihtfp.com www.ihtfp.com
Computer and Internet Security Consultant
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[James Baker via Ale]

I've considered building one recently as well.
The problem that I ran into was the case...
I'd like a nice small one (like the pre-mades have).
Trouble is that I couldn't find a small one that I liked (or hardly at all).

-----Original Message-----
From: Ale [mailto:ale-***@ale.org] On Behalf Of Alex Carver via Ale
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2018 3:26 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <***@ale.org>
Subject: [ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.

Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.



One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
_______________________________________________
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[dev null zero two via Ale]

+1 FreeNAS but it's pretty inflexible, though adding drives for RAID
expansion is slated on their upcoming features.
I've been running an 8x 4 TB RAID-Z2 setup with 10 Gb fiber for quite a
while and it's rock solid.

Unraid seems to pretty flexible as far as options go, but not as performant
as FreeNAS.

Post by James Baker via Ale
I've considered building one recently as well.
The problem that I ran into was the case...
I'd like a nice small one (like the pre-mades have).
Trouble is that I couldn't find a small one that I liked (or hardly at all).
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2018 3:26 PM
Subject: [ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?
I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.
One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
_______________________________________________
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[Derek Atkins via Ale]

Hi,

Post by dev null zero two via Ale
+1 FreeNAS but it's pretty inflexible, though adding drives for RAID
expansion is slated on their upcoming features.

I am curious in what ways you find it inflexible.

I'm also curious why you say that "adding drives is for a future release"?
Or do you mean adding driving to an existing RAIDZ2 as opposed to
building a second RAIDZ2 and adding it to the zpool?

-derek
--
Derek Atkins 617-623-3745
***@ihtfp.com www.ihtfp.com
Computer and Internet Security Consultant

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[dev null zero two via Ale]

oops, looks like our back and forth got dropped from ALE cuz I fat fingered
a reply!

reddit.com/r/datahoarder is a great resource for NAS stuff.
though prepare to feel woefully inadequate (though a lot of people are
using cloud storage so their numbers aren't totally realistic - like I
currently have 133 TB of space used but 113 TB of that is in the cloud :-P
) as those folks are hardcore.

" Interesting. I've never considered the rebalancing ramifications of
adding new drives to an array. If you're, say, 80% full then all existing
drives would have 80% usage. If you add a new drive, it'll be 0%, so by
definition most new data will have to go there, unless the raid array
moves content from the existing drives onto the new one. Seems...
strange."
yeah, it's delicate while it's doing the re-balancing as it's essentially
resilvering the array, but it's a great feature if you want to future proof
by buying a 24 bay case and only filling half and adding drives as you need.
its one of the most requested ZFS features and apparently it's finally
under development, but who knows when it will see the light of day.

Interesting. I've never considered the rebalancing ramifications of
adding new drives to an array. If you're, say, 80% full then all
existing
drives would have 80% usage. If you add a new drive, it'll be 0%, so by
definition most new data will have to go there, unless the raid array
moves content from the existing drives onto the new one. Seems...
strange.
Anyways, I'm fine with the replace-existing-drives-with-larger-ones
strategy.
I'm also fine with the add new drives in a new raid strategy.
I don't think I'd ever use the "add a new drive to an existing array".
This is especially true as my system has nice 6-bay stacks that work
great
for a nice 6-drive RAIDZ2 array per column!
-derek

"adding driving to an existing RAIDZ2" *this.*
Right now if you want to grow in size, you either build a second array

and

add it to the zpool, or you swap out drives, one at a time, with larger
capacity and then grow the array.
Modern RAID implementations let you add same size (and even different

size

with some solutions!) drives ad-hoc to an array and let it grow without
issue.
Ceph has some cool distributed NAS uses as well.

Post by Derek Atkins via Ale
Hi,

Post by dev null zero two via Ale
+1 FreeNAS but it's pretty inflexible, though adding drives for RAID
expansion is slated on their upcoming features.

I am curious in what ways you find it inflexible.
I'm also curious why you say that "adding drives is for a future release"?
Or do you mean adding driving to an existing RAIDZ2 as opposed to
building a second RAIDZ2 and adding it to the zpool?
-derek
--
Derek Atkins 617-623-3745
Computer and Internet Security Consultant

--
Derek Atkins 617-623-3745
Computer and Internet Security Consultant

[Alex Carver via Ale]

That was one of my considerations as well. Boxed units have compact
cases (with the drawer slides for the drives) which seems to be hard to
replicate with conventional cases that tend to cover multiple use cases
(general purpose desktop, gaming machine, etc.) so a conventional case
tends to have unused space.

Post by James Baker via Ale
I've considered building one recently as well.
The problem that I ran into was the case...
I'd like a nice small one (like the pre-mades have).
Trouble is that I couldn't find a small one that I liked (or hardly at all).
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2018 3:26 PM
Subject: [ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?
I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.

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[James Taylor via Ale]

I’ve been using sles server based iscsi for shared storage and backup for years.
I recently purchased a Synology ds1815+ to replace it.
It is smaller and has the benefit of name cache.
Part of the reason I replace my current servers with the Synology was that the hardware was getting very long in the tooth for primary storage us, and the new box is way smaller, quieter and uses a lot less power.
-jt

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.
One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
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[Jeff Hubbs via Ale]

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc.

Avoid them all. I have never seen such a device used where a situation
didn't eventually arise where it wouldn't have been a crisis if it had
instead been a proper admin-controlled Linux system running Samba, NFS,
etc.

The horrors come down to one simple characteristic: having your *only*
access to the shared filesystem be over the network using the associated
protocol. An enterprise-grade 26-drive file server I built for A
Previous Employer^tm was able to scan its shared-out filesystem for
viruses using ClamAV at over 200MiB/s and was awesome for performing
searches for files that a user had misplaced due to an errant mouse
drag. It made squashfs files as online backups every night in parallel
with printing to tape over a captive net shared with an auxiliary
warm-spare file server and a derelict Sun Sunfire connected to a SCSI
tape library.

I could go on and on but really, prefab NASses are for people who don't
have a way to do anything else. That's perfectly fine, of course - but
we run Linux to not be constrained like that.

[Jim Kinney via Ale]

+1^n

Buying a nas is like using a mac. Sure. It's easy. Until it's not.

Building a nas makes it yours.

Post by Jeff Hubbs via Ale

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc.

Avoid them all. I have never seen such a device used where a situation
didn't eventually arise where it wouldn't have been a crisis if it had
instead been a proper admin-controlled Linux system running Samba, NFS,
etc.
The horrors come down to one simple characteristic: having your *only*
access to the shared filesystem be over the network using the
associated
protocol. An enterprise-grade 26-drive file server I built for A
Previous Employer^tm was able to scan its shared-out filesystem for
viruses using ClamAV at over 200MiB/s and was awesome for performing
searches for files that a user had misplaced due to an errant mouse
drag. It made squashfs files as online backups every night in parallel
with printing to tape over a captive net shared with an auxiliary
warm-spare file server and a derelict Sun Sunfire connected to a SCSI
tape library.
I could go on and on but really, prefab NASses are for people who don't
have a way to do anything else. That's perfectly fine, of course - but
we run Linux to not be constrained like that.

[Raylynn Knight via Ale]

Almost all NAS sold today are running Linux, so you can make it yours if you desire. Root access to QNAP, Synology and Netgear NAS systems is relatively easy.

Ray

Post by Jim Kinney via Ale
+1^n
Buying a nas is like using a mac. Sure. It's easy. Until it's not.
Building a nas makes it yours.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc.

Avoid them all. I have never seen such a device used where a situation didn't eventually arise where it wouldn't have been a crisis if it had instead been a proper admin-controlled Linux system running Samba, NFS, etc.
The horrors come down to one simple characteristic: having your *only* access to the shared filesystem be over the network using the associated protocol. An enterprise-grade 26-drive file server I built for A Previous Employertm was able to scan its shared-out filesystem for viruses using ClamAV at over 200MiB/s and was awesome for performing searches for files that a user had misplaced due to an errant mouse drag. It made squashfs files as online backups every night in parallel with printing to tape over a captive net shared with an auxiliary warm-spare file server and a derelict Sun Sunfire connected to a SCSI tape library.
I could go on and on but really, prefab NASses are for people who don't have a way to do anything else. That's perfectly fine, of course - but we run Linux to not be constrained like that.
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[Raj Wurttemberg via Ale]

I'm very much a DIY person and I've run FreeNAS boxes before. They run great
and they can be fun to toy with. Now though... family and other real-life
events have gotten me to the point where I just want something that works
and works 24x7. I don't have time to fool around with drives or the
configuration, I just want to slap in a new drive, do a few clicks, and go
back to whatever I was doing.

I just recently bought a QNAP 453B (
https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/ts-453be ) and my life has been much more
simple. They Synology offering should be similar (I'm impartial on the
two).

- Dual NICs for port trunking (802.11ab)
- RAID5 or RAID6 support
- Think and thin volumes with on the fly expansion
- User and group security, Access Based Enumeration
- Network access protection
- Samba, NFS, SFTP, AFP, iSCSI, file support
- Network recycle bin
- SNMP
- AD integration
- iTunes server, Time Machine Server, DLNA media server
- LDAP, SQL, Syslog, tftp, NTP, server
- Backup to AWS, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google, Azure, or another QNAP with
history and versioning
- Volume snapshots
- Real Time Remote Replication to another QNAP
- Phone, e-mail, and, IM alerts
- Power saving on off-times
- Simple (frequent!) firmware updates
- Cloud access to files through myQnap.com
- DDNS, Automatic SSL certificates through Lets Encrypt
- Only draws 30W / Very small form factor

I haven't even gotten into all of the apps you can install either!
Containers, KVM, OpenStanck, OwnCloud, SugarCRM, WordPress, IFTT, Joomla,
MediaWiki, OpenVPN.... sooo many more.

DIY or pre-built... Go with what makes you happy, they're all good! :)

/Raj

-----Original Message-----
From: Ale <ale-***@ale.org> On Behalf Of Alex Carver via Ale
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2018 3:26 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <***@ale.org>
Subject: [ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the next
year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish NAS box
for storing backup images of the various computers, recording video from IP
security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared area for files
that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.

Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology, QNAP,
etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing, whether
they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a motherboard, some
SATA cards and a case.



One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
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[DJ-Pfulio via Ale]

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.

If you have more money than time, buy, but expect to be inflexible for
everything you might want in the future. Did the NAS boxes ever get
over their approved disk model lists?

If you have more time than money, build your own. It is pretty amazing
what $150 will get you if you have an old case laying around. Adding
more disks through external storage arrays is pretty easy now, thanks to
USB3.

I've described my NAS setup here a few times over the years. It has been
running non-stop for over 5 yrs now. Every few years a HDD will fail,
which is a non-issue because rsync mirrors are used for the huge data
areas. No RAID, since this data doesn't need to be HA. I use ext4 with
LVM. The disks are 4TB or 8TB in size, in pairs.
D1 --> bD1
D2 --> bD2
D3 --> bD3
.... you get the idea. Simplicity.

If I were starting over today, I'd use ZFS to be notified about data
corruption, but I probably wouldn't use RAIDz. No need for HA on this
storage.

If you are looking for storage cases, check out Addonics.com to get some
ideas. I haven't looked recently.

If you go cheap on the disk arrays, be certain to put the WWN for each
disk somewhere it can be seen without removing. It is easy to know
which disk fails by WWN, but cheap JBOD arrays don't have lights next to
each disk showing Ok/Failed. When looking at 8-4TB disks with 1 failed,
it is nice to know which should be pulled. Or spend $300+ for a fancy
array that has the lights.
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[Edward O. Holcroft via Ale]

I have used several Synology boxes over the years and they have treated me
well, by and large. I've various models ranging from simple RAID 1 to a
pretty decent rack mount 40TB unit.

The built in apps are also cool and provide some very easy ways to do stuff
like sync to S3 and so on. They also seem pretty good about releasing
security updates. Raj gave a pretty good overview of some of the plus
points. I can tell you though that having replaced and upgraded drives in
FreeNAS it is very, very simple. The drive switching methodology should
really not be a deciding factor between FreeNAS and Synology.

These Synology units have not (totally) failed on me over several years now
and do the job they were put in place to do (basic file serving and
archival in a Windows desktop environment). I also have one that I use for
simple config file backups with scp.

However:
1. I had the File manager fail on my on a unit (twice, about a year apart)
due to a bad update. This locked me out of managing my own files. OK, so
shit happens, but the ONLY way I could get this resolved was through
Synology support who did some magic remotely (I had to open ssh to their IP
on my firewall the first time, but the second time on a newer DSM version
all I had to do was enable "Remote Support" ). Kudos to Synology support
who fixed it in no time on a device that was well out of warranty. BUT this
sort of thing leaves me with a very bad taste in my mouth. The idea of
being handcuffed to a vendor for their secret sauce when things go wrong is
not the way I like to do things.
2. One of their platform updates changed the security so that you can no no
longer ssh in as root. It also changed (read: broke) the way sudo works.
This broke one of my backup schemes. Well I made a few changes and I was
back in action. BUT, once again this is proprietary thinking stuck on top
of an open platform. Maybe root ssh is a bad idea. But I'll decide whether
I have strong or weak security protocols in place, thank you very much, not
the vendor.
3. The only real technical issue I have with Synology is that they do not
support FDE (maybe this has changed but the units I have do not). This was
very surprising to me. If you use their soft encryption then you run into
140 character filename length limits which would never work for the
ridiculous ways our people name their files.

This kind of handcuffing worries me and to my way of thinking the
convenience of Synology is too great a price to pay for being told how to
use the system and potentially being screwed when something goes really
wrong. I for one would much rather deal with the challenge of finding the
right case and power supply than being dictated to in a way that feels way
too "propriety" for my liking. Beware that root access to Synology is not
like root access to your Linux box ... there is stuff you cannot get to on
Synology.

So my answer, having tried Synology is, roll your own. My next NAS box will
almost certainly be FreeNAS which I have been testing for about a year now
as it looks like everything I need in a NAS without the handcuffs.

ed

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.
One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
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[Alex Carver via Ale]

Lots of votes for DIY NAS.

Assuming that I choose that route, I'd be aiming for relatively low cost
(not including the cost of the drives, that's a sunk cost no matter the
array). To this end I don't need a machine that can transcode video,
run fifteen application servers, VMs, or much of anything else. I just
need a box that can handle SMB/CIFS/NFS for file storage from remote
machines (mix of *x, Windows, Mac), can run rdiff-backup over ssh (some
of my smaller machines back up using rdiff-backup for simplicity), can
send me an email if something is wrong, has two or more Gigabit ports so
I can divide network streams (one coming from cameras on a VLAN, the
other coming from the other machines), and the ability to support plenty
of drives without much extra hardware (at least four plus an OS drive
without needing a SATA card, more SATA ports is better though).

I wanted to avoid hyperexpensive motherboards. I did some searching
after all the input on this thread came in and most of the build guides
for DIY NAS boxes max out the system so much so that you can run Plex,
Xen, an email server, an IoT server, cloud synchronization and like
fifteen other things, none of which I want. I just want a giant file
bucket. I want to send big files/backups to the machine and, in a
reasonable amount of time, have those files stored to disk and done. At
the same time, that much horsepower is also using a lot of electricity
so minimizing that load would be great if I don't actually need it.
That simplifies cooling as well as I'd be able to use passive cooling or
slow fans.

The build guides were using things like $600-$1000 motherboards from
Supermicro and such that had 10 GbE ports, one had SFP slots for fiber,
another used a Core i7 processor and 128 GB of RAM, one even had a
Radeon graphics card in it. Half of them used over 100 Watts idle with
a significant chunk going to the motherboard rather than the drives.
Surely a simple file server does not need nearly that much horsepower to
take data from an Ethernet port and shove it through a SATA port to a
disk. The most taxing application for this thing would be continuously
recording multiple camera streams using H.264 (around 100-200 kBps on
average) or MJPEG (500-600 kBps) to disk over one of its ports.

So for those of you that did DIY, how much horsepower did you seek out
for the system and how little can I get away with for the most basic
file serving application without drastically harming performance?
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[DJ-Pfulio via Ale]

65W Pentium G3258 CPU with 4G of RAM. MB and CPU was $99 total at
purchase 5+ yrs ago. It can transcode one 1080p stream to 720p via plex
server. It has over 24TB currently connected.

But I don't use it as an OS backup server. That goes to another machine
with a 2TB USB3 HDD. I backup about 20 systems with rdiff-backup. It is
mix of VMs and physical. Generally I have 60-180 days of versioned
backups. I don't backup media files via rdiff-backup and I don't backup
everything, just enough to recreate the system in 30-45minutes if
something happens.

Happy to share my backup techniques. Come to ALE-NW almost any Sunday.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
Lots of votes for DIY NAS.
Assuming that I choose that route, I'd be aiming for relatively low cost
(not including the cost of the drives, that's a sunk cost no matter the
array). To this end I don't need a machine that can transcode video,
run fifteen application servers, VMs, or much of anything else. I just
need a box that can handle SMB/CIFS/NFS for file storage from remote
machines (mix of *x, Windows, Mac), can run rdiff-backup over ssh (some
of my smaller machines back up using rdiff-backup for simplicity), can
send me an email if something is wrong, has two or more Gigabit ports so
I can divide network streams (one coming from cameras on a VLAN, the
other coming from the other machines), and the ability to support plenty
of drives without much extra hardware (at least four plus an OS drive
without needing a SATA card, more SATA ports is better though).
I wanted to avoid hyperexpensive motherboards. I did some searching
after all the input on this thread came in and most of the build guides
for DIY NAS boxes max out the system so much so that you can run Plex,
Xen, an email server, an IoT server, cloud synchronization and like
fifteen other things, none of which I want. I just want a giant file
bucket. I want to send big files/backups to the machine and, in a
reasonable amount of time, have those files stored to disk and done. At
the same time, that much horsepower is also using a lot of electricity
so minimizing that load would be great if I don't actually need it.
That simplifies cooling as well as I'd be able to use passive cooling or
slow fans.
The build guides were using things like $600-$1000 motherboards from
Supermicro and such that had 10 GbE ports, one had SFP slots for fiber,
another used a Core i7 processor and 128 GB of RAM, one even had a
Radeon graphics card in it. Half of them used over 100 Watts idle with
a significant chunk going to the motherboard rather than the drives.
Surely a simple file server does not need nearly that much horsepower to
take data from an Ethernet port and shove it through a SATA port to a
disk. The most taxing application for this thing would be continuously
recording multiple camera streams using H.264 (around 100-200 kBps on
average) or MJPEG (500-600 kBps) to disk over one of its ports.
So for those of you that did DIY, how much horsepower did you seek out
for the system and how little can I get away with for the most basic
file serving application without drastically harming performance?

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
***@ale.org
https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
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http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

[Alex Carver via Ale]

My current backup is a USB hard drive on another machine. That drive is
filling fast and the number of devices needing backup is actually
increasing over time plus the need to occasionally share files across
machines is showing up which means a NAS is making more sense. Also
since I want to have the IP security cameras recording at all times, it
makes far more sense to drop that onto a dedicated device (and dedicated
network VLAN) with plenty of storage space for a few days or a week of
non-stop recording from multiple cameras (at least ten cameras).

Don't care about media streaming though, Plex would be a completely
different machine build dedicated to that purpose, not a NAS. A DVR
machine is another project on the list but that's not going to be
related to the NAS in any way (not even for storage). This NAS is
solely dedicated to total system images (Time Machine for the Macs,
Mondo/dd for the *nix, Windows Backup for the Windows machine, etc.)
hence the need for space, the cameras (more space), and shared files
without resorting to sneaker-net or just firing up local shares on the
individual machines (which I do now but it sometimes decides not to
work). Across the machines there's probably about 2-3 TB of OS/programs
to archive and another 4-6 TB of user data (I was planning to start with
a 4 x 4TB or 6 x 4TB array).

Post by DJ-Pfulio via Ale
65W Pentium G3258 CPU with 4G of RAM. MB and CPU was $99 total at
purchase 5+ yrs ago. It can transcode one 1080p stream to 720p via plex
server. It has over 24TB currently connected.
But I don't use it as an OS backup server. That goes to another machine
with a 2TB USB3 HDD. I backup about 20 systems with rdiff-backup. It is
mix of VMs and physical. Generally I have 60-180 days of versioned
backups. I don't backup media files via rdiff-backup and I don't backup
everything, just enough to recreate the system in 30-45minutes if
something happens.
Happy to share my backup techniques. Come to ALE-NW almost any Sunday.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
Lots of votes for DIY NAS.
Assuming that I choose that route, I'd be aiming for relatively low cost
(not including the cost of the drives, that's a sunk cost no matter the
array). To this end I don't need a machine that can transcode video,
run fifteen application servers, VMs, or much of anything else. I just
need a box that can handle SMB/CIFS/NFS for file storage from remote
machines (mix of *x, Windows, Mac), can run rdiff-backup over ssh (some
of my smaller machines back up using rdiff-backup for simplicity), can
send me an email if something is wrong, has two or more Gigabit ports so
I can divide network streams (one coming from cameras on a VLAN, the
other coming from the other machines), and the ability to support plenty
of drives without much extra hardware (at least four plus an OS drive
without needing a SATA card, more SATA ports is better though).
I wanted to avoid hyperexpensive motherboards. I did some searching
after all the input on this thread came in and most of the build guides
for DIY NAS boxes max out the system so much so that you can run Plex,
Xen, an email server, an IoT server, cloud synchronization and like
fifteen other things, none of which I want. I just want a giant file
bucket. I want to send big files/backups to the machine and, in a
reasonable amount of time, have those files stored to disk and done. At
the same time, that much horsepower is also using a lot of electricity
so minimizing that load would be great if I don't actually need it.
That simplifies cooling as well as I'd be able to use passive cooling or
slow fans.
The build guides were using things like $600-$1000 motherboards from
Supermicro and such that had 10 GbE ports, one had SFP slots for fiber,
another used a Core i7 processor and 128 GB of RAM, one even had a
Radeon graphics card in it. Half of them used over 100 Watts idle with
a significant chunk going to the motherboard rather than the drives.
Surely a simple file server does not need nearly that much horsepower to
take data from an Ethernet port and shove it through a SATA port to a
disk. The most taxing application for this thing would be continuously
recording multiple camera streams using H.264 (around 100-200 kBps on
average) or MJPEG (500-600 kBps) to disk over one of its ports.
So for those of you that did DIY, how much horsepower did you seek out
for the system and how little can I get away with for the most basic
file serving application without drastically harming performance?

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

_______________________________________________
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[Edward O. Holcroft via Ale]

If you're really just after a big file bucket, you won't need huge
horsepower for transcoding and the likes. But FreeNAS likes lots of memory.

You can set the HDD's on FreeNAS to spin down or even switch of when not
used for a preset period of time. That may help a bit with electricity
consumption in a home.

My test box at home:
Processor:
AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 925 Processor (4 cores)
Memory:
8 GiB
11TB of usable drive space (3x6TB RAID5) plus 1x6TB hot spare that is kept
plugged in but offline.
FreeNAS itself runs off an 8GB USB stick.

FreeNAS recommends 1GB RAM per TB of storage, so I am a bit on the thin
side but it works fine at home. If there were lots of people connecting
that might be a problem. Your IP camera might make things more demanding of
resources, and not so sure about HDD standby mode being viable for a
security camera scenario.

ed

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
Lots of votes for DIY NAS.
Assuming that I choose that route, I'd be aiming for relatively low cost
(not including the cost of the drives, that's a sunk cost no matter the
array). To this end I don't need a machine that can transcode video,
run fifteen application servers, VMs, or much of anything else. I just
need a box that can handle SMB/CIFS/NFS for file storage from remote
machines (mix of *x, Windows, Mac), can run rdiff-backup over ssh (some
of my smaller machines back up using rdiff-backup for simplicity), can
send me an email if something is wrong, has two or more Gigabit ports so
I can divide network streams (one coming from cameras on a VLAN, the
other coming from the other machines), and the ability to support plenty
of drives without much extra hardware (at least four plus an OS drive
without needing a SATA card, more SATA ports is better though).
I wanted to avoid hyperexpensive motherboards. I did some searching
after all the input on this thread came in and most of the build guides
for DIY NAS boxes max out the system so much so that you can run Plex,
Xen, an email server, an IoT server, cloud synchronization and like
fifteen other things, none of which I want. I just want a giant file
bucket. I want to send big files/backups to the machine and, in a
reasonable amount of time, have those files stored to disk and done. At
the same time, that much horsepower is also using a lot of electricity
so minimizing that load would be great if I don't actually need it.
That simplifies cooling as well as I'd be able to use passive cooling or
slow fans.
The build guides were using things like $600-$1000 motherboards from
Supermicro and such that had 10 GbE ports, one had SFP slots for fiber,
another used a Core i7 processor and 128 GB of RAM, one even had a
Radeon graphics card in it. Half of them used over 100 Watts idle with
a significant chunk going to the motherboard rather than the drives.
Surely a simple file server does not need nearly that much horsepower to
take data from an Ethernet port and shove it through a SATA port to a
disk. The most taxing application for this thing would be continuously
recording multiple camera streams using H.264 (around 100-200 kBps on
average) or MJPEG (500-600 kBps) to disk over one of its ports.
So for those of you that did DIY, how much horsepower did you seek out
for the system and how little can I get away with for the most basic
file serving application without drastically harming performance?
_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

[Alex Carver via Ale]

I didn't expect the drives to spin down much (if at all) given the
streaming/recording of the cameras but I don't always have to do that.
Nominal power draw from an active drive is about 15 Watts so a 4x array
is going to pull around 60 Watts on its own not including the
motherboard. That part is fine, I just didn't want a motherboard setup
that was also drawing an additional 100 Watts to power things I didn't
need. I figured something closer to an Atom based board (but not one of
the C2x series with the hardware failure) might work better as that
would have a total power closer to 10 Watts. I might be back to some of
the more expensive Supermicro boards to get the multiple GigE ports.

As part of the plan, I was going to use slower 5400 RPM drives and very
large, slow RPM fans to keep things quiet (and cooler) since this will
be in earshot of bedrooms (I don't have a better place for it to go). I
don't mind if a backup takes a few hours since they'd go at night so I
wasn't planning on high performance file transfer, just a file bucket
that isn't super slow.

Post by Edward O. Holcroft via Ale
If you're really just after a big file bucket, you won't need huge
horsepower for transcoding and the likes. But FreeNAS likes lots of memory.
You can set the HDD's on FreeNAS to spin down or even switch of when not
used for a preset period of time. That may help a bit with electricity
consumption in a home.
AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 925 Processor (4 cores)
8 GiB
11TB of usable drive space (3x6TB RAID5) plus 1x6TB hot spare that is kept
plugged in but offline.
FreeNAS itself runs off an 8GB USB stick.
FreeNAS recommends 1GB RAM per TB of storage, so I am a bit on the thin
side but it works fine at home. If there were lots of people connecting
that might be a problem. Your IP camera might make things more demanding of
resources, and not so sure about HDD standby mode being viable for a
security camera scenario.
ed

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
Lots of votes for DIY NAS.
Assuming that I choose that route, I'd be aiming for relatively low cost
(not including the cost of the drives, that's a sunk cost no matter the
array). To this end I don't need a machine that can transcode video,
run fifteen application servers, VMs, or much of anything else. I just
need a box that can handle SMB/CIFS/NFS for file storage from remote
machines (mix of *x, Windows, Mac), can run rdiff-backup over ssh (some
of my smaller machines back up using rdiff-backup for simplicity), can
send me an email if something is wrong, has two or more Gigabit ports so
I can divide network streams (one coming from cameras on a VLAN, the
other coming from the other machines), and the ability to support plenty
of drives without much extra hardware (at least four plus an OS drive
without needing a SATA card, more SATA ports is better though).
I wanted to avoid hyperexpensive motherboards. I did some searching
after all the input on this thread came in and most of the build guides
for DIY NAS boxes max out the system so much so that you can run Plex,
Xen, an email server, an IoT server, cloud synchronization and like
fifteen other things, none of which I want. I just want a giant file
bucket. I want to send big files/backups to the machine and, in a
reasonable amount of time, have those files stored to disk and done. At
the same time, that much horsepower is also using a lot of electricity
so minimizing that load would be great if I don't actually need it.
That simplifies cooling as well as I'd be able to use passive cooling or
slow fans.
The build guides were using things like $600-$1000 motherboards from
Supermicro and such that had 10 GbE ports, one had SFP slots for fiber,
another used a Core i7 processor and 128 GB of RAM, one even had a
Radeon graphics card in it. Half of them used over 100 Watts idle with
a significant chunk going to the motherboard rather than the drives.
Surely a simple file server does not need nearly that much horsepower to
take data from an Ethernet port and shove it through a SATA port to a
disk. The most taxing application for this thing would be continuously
recording multiple camera streams using H.264 (around 100-200 kBps on
average) or MJPEG (500-600 kBps) to disk over one of its ports.
So for those of you that did DIY, how much horsepower did you seek out
for the system and how little can I get away with for the most basic
file serving application without drastically harming performance?
_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

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[Jim Kinney via Ale]

Bear in mind that every byte served passes through the cpu and the pci bus twice. Often the bottle neck is the IO on the drive. But once a sizeable controller is in use, the cpu becomes critical.

I tend to size cpu to allow 1 core per client served plus 1 core for overhead as long as budget will allow. But I deal with stuff larger than home use.

For home use, with 3-5 users, network bandwidth will also be an issue. If the drives are used in parallel as stripes, be sure to size the joined stripe partitions so different uses will hit different drives. Size the total drive count per controller to be 3-5 times the combined drive IO bandwidth of the bus to allow cache flush and seek time. I would rather migrate a drive array to a new host with more bandwidth than migrate data to a new drive array.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
Lots of votes for DIY NAS.
Assuming that I choose that route, I'd be aiming for relatively low cost
(not including the cost of the drives, that's a sunk cost no matter the
array). To this end I don't need a machine that can transcode video,
run fifteen application servers, VMs, or much of anything else. I just
need a box that can handle SMB/CIFS/NFS for file storage from remote
machines (mix of *x, Windows, Mac), can run rdiff-backup over ssh (some
of my smaller machines back up using rdiff-backup for simplicity), can
send me an email if something is wrong, has two or more Gigabit ports so
I can divide network streams (one coming from cameras on a VLAN, the
other coming from the other machines), and the ability to support plenty
of drives without much extra hardware (at least four plus an OS drive
without needing a SATA card, more SATA ports is better though).
I wanted to avoid hyperexpensive motherboards. I did some searching
after all the input on this thread came in and most of the build guides
for DIY NAS boxes max out the system so much so that you can run Plex,
Xen, an email server, an IoT server, cloud synchronization and like
fifteen other things, none of which I want. I just want a giant file
bucket. I want to send big files/backups to the machine and, in a
reasonable amount of time, have those files stored to disk and done.
At
the same time, that much horsepower is also using a lot of electricity
so minimizing that load would be great if I don't actually need it.
That simplifies cooling as well as I'd be able to use passive cooling or
slow fans.
The build guides were using things like $600-$1000 motherboards from
Supermicro and such that had 10 GbE ports, one had SFP slots for fiber,
another used a Core i7 processor and 128 GB of RAM, one even had a
Radeon graphics card in it. Half of them used over 100 Watts idle with
a significant chunk going to the motherboard rather than the drives.
Surely a simple file server does not need nearly that much horsepower to
take data from an Ethernet port and shove it through a SATA port to a
disk. The most taxing application for this thing would be continuously
recording multiple camera streams using H.264 (around 100-200 kBps on
average) or MJPEG (500-600 kBps) to disk over one of its ports.
So for those of you that did DIY, how much horsepower did you seek out
for the system and how little can I get away with for the most basic
file serving application without drastically harming performance?
_______________________________________________
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http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

[Jim Lynch via Ale]

I put together a NAS (diy) with 4 x 4Tb drives, a 120 Gb SSD boot.  I
run zfs configured as striped/mirror giving me 8 Tb of space.  Since
it's a NAS and the limit is the network, striping doesn't really buy me
anything.

Been working for a couple of years until the MB quit just before the
warranty ran out.  Have the replacement in hand, but haven't put it back
together yet.

Jim.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.
One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
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[Alex Carver via Ale]

A fun revelation: I went to FreeNAS's website to look at the software
and apparently iXsystems sells a "home" server ready to go. So they're
yet another boxed NAS source in addition to being the OS of choice for
DIY. A hybrid of the two options. The case is nice, though, and has
activity/status indicators for each drive, which seems to be something
hard to find with ordinary cases. They're using a fanless motherboard
so there's at least a little noise reduction. Looks like possibly an
Atom as they're quoting only 17 Watts TDP and 80 Watts total when
populated with eight drives. The empty four bay is $1k and the eight
bay is $1,350.
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[James Taylor via Ale]

That is expensive compared to a similar Synology unit, which has an intel processor and has four 1Gb ports that can be bonded.
Or if you're feeling extravagent, a 10GB plugin module.
A fun revelation: I went to FreeNAS's website to look at the software
and apparently iXsystems sells a "home" server ready to go. So they're
yet another boxed NAS source in addition to being the OS of choice for
DIY. A hybrid of the two options. The case is nice, though, and has
activity/status indicators for each drive, which seems to be something
hard to find with ordinary cases. They're using a fanless motherboard
so there's at least a little noise reduction. Looks like possibly an
Atom as they're quoting only 17 Watts TDP and 80 Watts total when
populated with eight drives. The empty four bay is $1k and the eight
bay is $1,350.
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[Alex Carver via Ale]

Doesn't seem to be much more expensive considering the motherboard is
running almost $400 without a processor (plus another $200 for the
processor), add the RAM for $150 (32 GB), and a case with indicators for
each sled (I can't find any, if you know of one that has individual
drive indicators let me know). There's also the extra SATA DOM module
installed which they're selling for $100 preloaded with FreeNAS.

Bonding I don't actually need so that's a lost cost and there's no
chance of 10 Gbps here anytime soon. By then the whole set of hardware
will need replacement.

Post by James Taylor via Ale
That is expensive compared to a similar Synology unit, which has an intel processor and has four 1Gb ports that can be bonded.
Or if you're feeling extravagent, a 10GB plugin module.
A fun revelation: I went to FreeNAS's website to look at the software
and apparently iXsystems sells a "home" server ready to go. So they're
yet another boxed NAS source in addition to being the OS of choice for
DIY. A hybrid of the two options. The case is nice, though, and has
activity/status indicators for each drive, which seems to be something
hard to find with ordinary cases. They're using a fanless motherboard
so there's at least a little noise reduction. Looks like possibly an
Atom as they're quoting only 17 Watts TDP and 80 Watts total when
populated with eight drives. The empty four bay is $1k and the eight
bay is $1,350.
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[Phil Turmel via Ale]

You can put something like that together yourself from a wide selection
of iTX mobos. Cheap and power-efficient. I ran one like that for
several years in a 1U 4-bay hot-swap case. In that one, I populated the
single PCIe slot with a decent radeon graphics card for MythTV, but such
could have easily been an LSI SAS controller in a bigger box.

It was this enclosure:

http://www.idotpc.com/thestore/pc/ITS-1916H-1U-ITX-4-Front-Load-Hot-Swappable-Drives-Rackmount-Case-and-Bare-bone-Unit-p1114.htm

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
A fun revelation: I went to FreeNAS's website to look at the software
and apparently iXsystems sells a "home" server ready to go. So they're
yet another boxed NAS source in addition to being the OS of choice for
DIY. A hybrid of the two options. The case is nice, though, and has
activity/status indicators for each drive, which seems to be something
hard to find with ordinary cases. They're using a fanless motherboard
so there's at least a little noise reduction. Looks like possibly an
Atom as they're quoting only 17 Watts TDP and 80 Watts total when
populated with eight drives. The empty four bay is $1k and the eight
bay is $1,350.

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[Alex Carver via Ale]

That case is guaranteed not to be quiet. The power supply fans are too
small. I'd be looking for a case that could be populated with very
large diameter (like 120 mm) low RPM fans to keep the whole thing as
silent as possible. My current daily driver computer has three 120 mm
fans running at around 500 RPM or less, one on the oversize CPU heat
pipe cooler/radiator, another on the drive cage and the one in the power
supply. All of this is in a mid-tower case. I almost never hear the
machine even with three hard drives installed unless I put my ear up
next to it. That's the kind of thing I want for the NAS as well since
they'll be in the same room, big fans, nearly silent (hence using 5400
RPM drives). The case doesn't have to be small, I have plenty of
physical space for a big tower. I just need low power, near silence,
and the extra-nice-but-can-skip-if-alternative-exists individual
indicators for drive activity/health.

Post by Phil Turmel via Ale
You can put something like that together yourself from a wide selection
of iTX mobos. Cheap and power-efficient. I ran one like that for
several years in a 1U 4-bay hot-swap case. In that one, I populated the
single PCIe slot with a decent radeon graphics card for MythTV, but such
could have easily been an LSI SAS controller in a bigger box.
http://www.idotpc.com/thestore/pc/ITS-1916H-1U-ITX-4-Front-Load-Hot-Swappable-Drives-Rackmount-Case-and-Bare-bone-Unit-p1114.htm

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
A fun revelation: I went to FreeNAS's website to look at the software
and apparently iXsystems sells a "home" server ready to go. So they're
yet another boxed NAS source in addition to being the OS of choice for
DIY. A hybrid of the two options. The case is nice, though, and has
activity/status indicators for each drive, which seems to be something
hard to find with ordinary cases. They're using a fanless motherboard
so there's at least a little noise reduction. Looks like possibly an
Atom as they're quoting only 17 Watts TDP and 80 Watts total when
populated with eight drives. The empty four bay is $1k and the eight
bay is $1,350.

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[Phil Turmel via Ale]

Ah, yes. Forgot about your low-noise requirement. That wasn't one of
my concerns for that system. It's mounted in the ceiling of the
basement, under the wall supporting the big screen in the family room.
Out of earshot. Small and low-power were my only major criteria.

I still think you'd do well with an iTX mobo, even in a larger case.
Lots of ATX and EATX cases will have the mobo support points for iTX, too.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
That case is guaranteed not to be quiet. The power supply fans are too
small. I'd be looking for a case that could be populated with very
large diameter (like 120 mm) low RPM fans to keep the whole thing as
silent as possible. My current daily driver computer has three 120 mm
fans running at around 500 RPM or less, one on the oversize CPU heat
pipe cooler/radiator, another on the drive cage and the one in the power
supply. All of this is in a mid-tower case. I almost never hear the
machine even with three hard drives installed unless I put my ear up
next to it. That's the kind of thing I want for the NAS as well since
they'll be in the same room, big fans, nearly silent (hence using 5400
RPM drives). The case doesn't have to be small, I have plenty of
physical space for a big tower. I just need low power, near silence,
and the extra-nice-but-can-skip-if-alternative-exists individual
indicators for drive activity/health.

Post by Phil Turmel via Ale
You can put something like that together yourself from a wide selection
of iTX mobos. Cheap and power-efficient. I ran one like that for
several years in a 1U 4-bay hot-swap case. In that one, I populated the
single PCIe slot with a decent radeon graphics card for MythTV, but such
could have easily been an LSI SAS controller in a bigger box.
http://www.idotpc.com/thestore/pc/ITS-1916H-1U-ITX-4-Front-Load-Hot-Swappable-Drives-Rackmount-Case-and-Bare-bone-Unit-p1114.htm

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
A fun revelation: I went to FreeNAS's website to look at the software
and apparently iXsystems sells a "home" server ready to go. So they're
yet another boxed NAS source in addition to being the OS of choice for
DIY. A hybrid of the two options. The case is nice, though, and has
activity/status indicators for each drive, which seems to be something
hard to find with ordinary cases. They're using a fanless motherboard
so there's at least a little noise reduction. Looks like possibly an
Atom as they're quoting only 17 Watts TDP and 80 Watts total when
populated with eight drives. The empty four bay is $1k and the eight
bay is $1,350.

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[DJ-Pfulio via Ale]

The loudest part of my NAS is the external array and it is quieter than
both other computers on the same rack. Maybe I'm getting old, but if I
don't see the power light on the front of the device, I don't hear it.
The computer does have a "Bronze" PSU from Seasonic that was a deal at
the time. 5 internal disks and 5 externals.
Be certain to label the HDD WWN where you can read it before swapping
failed disks. SMART header data will show it.

Using less watts is good for lots of reasons, but saving $5/yr doesn't
make it worth spending $100 more on the solution for me. Run the actual
cost comparison with your real electrical costs is all I'm saying.

iXsystems is a long-time sponsor of SELF. Over the years, they probably
gave a few talks about their systems. They do go out of their way to
keep the FreeNAS project FLOSS. I wouldn't have any concerns over their
corporate support of the project.

Post by Phil Turmel via Ale
Ah, yes. Forgot about your low-noise requirement. That wasn't one of
my concerns for that system. It's mounted in the ceiling of the
basement, under the wall supporting the big screen in the family room.
Out of earshot. Small and low-power were my only major criteria.
I still think you'd do well with an iTX mobo, even in a larger case.
Lots of ATX and EATX cases will have the mobo support points for iTX, too.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
That case is guaranteed not to be quiet. The power supply fans are too
small. I'd be looking for a case that could be populated with very
large diameter (like 120 mm) low RPM fans to keep the whole thing as
silent as possible. My current daily driver computer has three 120 mm
fans running at around 500 RPM or less, one on the oversize CPU heat
pipe cooler/radiator, another on the drive cage and the one in the power
supply. All of this is in a mid-tower case. I almost never hear the
machine even with three hard drives installed unless I put my ear up
next to it. That's the kind of thing I want for the NAS as well since
they'll be in the same room, big fans, nearly silent (hence using 5400
RPM drives). The case doesn't have to be small, I have plenty of
physical space for a big tower. I just need low power, near silence,
and the extra-nice-but-can-skip-if-alternative-exists individual
indicators for drive activity/health.

Post by Phil Turmel via Ale
You can put something like that together yourself from a wide selection
of iTX mobos. Cheap and power-efficient. I ran one like that for
several years in a 1U 4-bay hot-swap case. In that one, I populated the
single PCIe slot with a decent radeon graphics card for MythTV, but such
could have easily been an LSI SAS controller in a bigger box.
http://www.idotpc.com/thestore/pc/ITS-1916H-1U-ITX-4-Front-Load-Hot-Swappable-Drives-Rackmount-Case-and-Bare-bone-Unit-p1114.htm

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
A fun revelation: I went to FreeNAS's website to look at the software
and apparently iXsystems sells a "home" server ready to go. So they're
yet another boxed NAS source in addition to being the OS of choice for
DIY. A hybrid of the two options. The case is nice, though, and has
activity/status indicators for each drive, which seems to be something
hard to find with ordinary cases. They're using a fanless motherboard
so there's at least a little noise reduction. Looks like possibly an
Atom as they're quoting only 17 Watts TDP and 80 Watts total when
populated with eight drives. The empty four bay is $1k and the eight
bay is $1,350.

_______________________________________________
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***@ale.org
https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
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[Alex Carver via Ale]

I'm currently paying $0.12/kWh for my usage tier not including taxes and
surcharges. I'm fortunately still in the middle of the tier otherwise
it would be $0.21/kWh. Each Watt adds up to about $1.50 per year. so
the difference between a system running 100 W and one running 50 W does
make a difference especially for a 24/7 machine.

Post by DJ-Pfulio via Ale
The loudest part of my NAS is the external array and it is quieter than
both other computers on the same rack. Maybe I'm getting old, but if I
don't see the power light on the front of the device, I don't hear it.
The computer does have a "Bronze" PSU from Seasonic that was a deal at
the time. 5 internal disks and 5 externals.
Be certain to label the HDD WWN where you can read it before swapping
failed disks. SMART header data will show it.
Using less watts is good for lots of reasons, but saving $5/yr doesn't
make it worth spending $100 more on the solution for me. Run the actual
cost comparison with your real electrical costs is all I'm saying.
iXsystems is a long-time sponsor of SELF. Over the years, they probably
gave a few talks about their systems. They do go out of their way to
keep the FreeNAS project FLOSS. I wouldn't have any concerns over their
corporate support of the project.

Post by Phil Turmel via Ale
Ah, yes. Forgot about your low-noise requirement. That wasn't one of
my concerns for that system. It's mounted in the ceiling of the
basement, under the wall supporting the big screen in the family room.
Out of earshot. Small and low-power were my only major criteria.
I still think you'd do well with an iTX mobo, even in a larger case.
Lots of ATX and EATX cases will have the mobo support points for iTX, too.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
That case is guaranteed not to be quiet. The power supply fans are too
small. I'd be looking for a case that could be populated with very
large diameter (like 120 mm) low RPM fans to keep the whole thing as
silent as possible. My current daily driver computer has three 120 mm
fans running at around 500 RPM or less, one on the oversize CPU heat
pipe cooler/radiator, another on the drive cage and the one in the power
supply. All of this is in a mid-tower case. I almost never hear the
machine even with three hard drives installed unless I put my ear up
next to it. That's the kind of thing I want for the NAS as well since
they'll be in the same room, big fans, nearly silent (hence using 5400
RPM drives). The case doesn't have to be small, I have plenty of
physical space for a big tower. I just need low power, near silence,
and the extra-nice-but-can-skip-if-alternative-exists individual
indicators for drive activity/health.

Post by Phil Turmel via Ale
You can put something like that together yourself from a wide selection
of iTX mobos. Cheap and power-efficient. I ran one like that for
several years in a 1U 4-bay hot-swap case. In that one, I populated the
single PCIe slot with a decent radeon graphics card for MythTV, but such
could have easily been an LSI SAS controller in a bigger box.
http://www.idotpc.com/thestore/pc/ITS-1916H-1U-ITX-4-Front-Load-Hot-Swappable-Drives-Rackmount-Case-and-Bare-bone-Unit-p1114.htm

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
A fun revelation: I went to FreeNAS's website to look at the software
and apparently iXsystems sells a "home" server ready to go. So they're
yet another boxed NAS source in addition to being the OS of choice for
DIY. A hybrid of the two options. The case is nice, though, and has
activity/status indicators for each drive, which seems to be something
hard to find with ordinary cases. They're using a fanless motherboard
so there's at least a little noise reduction. Looks like possibly an
Atom as they're quoting only 17 Watts TDP and 80 Watts total when
populated with eight drives. The empty four bay is $1k and the eight
bay is $1,350.

_______________________________________________
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https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
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http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

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[Jim Kinney via Ale]

Hmm. That $annual$ difference is in the range I spend monthly on beer
:-)
Not that there's anything relating the two other than "ale".
Just Sayin'

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
I'm currently paying $0.12/kWh for my usage tier not including taxes
andsurcharges. I'm fortunately still in the middle of the tier
otherwiseit would be $0.21/kWh. Each Watt adds up to about $1.50 per
year. sothe difference between a system running 100 W and one running
50 W doesmake a difference especially for a 24/7 machine.
The loudest part of my NAS is the external array and it is quieter
thanboth other computers on the same rack. Maybe I'm getting old,
but if Idon't see the power light on the front of the device, I don't
hear it.The computer does have a "Bronze" PSU from Seasonic that was
a deal atthe time. 5 internal disks and 5 externals.Be certain to
label the HDD WWN where you can read it before swappingfailed
disks. SMART header data will show it.
Using less watts is good for lots of reasons, but saving $5/yr
doesn'tmake it worth spending $100 more on the solution for me. Run
the actualcost comparison with your real electrical costs is all I'm
saying.
iXsystems is a long-time sponsor of SELF. Over the years, they
probablygave a few talks about their systems. They do go out of their
way tokeep the FreeNAS project FLOSS. I wouldn't have any concerns
over theircorporate support of the project.
Ah, yes. Forgot about your low-noise requirement. That wasn't one
ofmy concerns for that system. It's mounted in the ceiling of
thebasement, under the wall supporting the big screen in the family
room.Out of earshot. Small and low-power were my only major
criteria.
I still think you'd do well with an iTX mobo, even in a larger
case.Lots of ATX and EATX cases will have the mobo support points for
iTX, too.
That case is guaranteed not to be quiet. The power supply fans are
toosmall. I'd be looking for a case that could be populated with
verylarge diameter (like 120 mm) low RPM fans to keep the whole thing
assilent as possible. My current daily driver computer has three 120
mmfans running at around 500 RPM or less, one on the oversize CPU
heatpipe cooler/radiator, another on the drive cage and the one in
the powersupply. All of this is in a mid-tower case. I almost never
hear themachine even with three hard drives installed unless I put my
ear upnext to it. That's the kind of thing I want for the NAS as
well sincethey'll be in the same room, big fans, nearly silent (hence
using 5400RPM drives). The case doesn't have to be small, I have
plenty ofphysical space for a big tower. I just need low power, near
silence,and the extra-nice-but-can-skip-if-alternative-exists
individualindicators for drive activity/health.
You can put something like that together yourself from a wide
selectionof iTX mobos. Cheap and power-efficient. I ran one like
that forseveral years in a 1U 4-bay hot-swap case. In that one, I
populated thesingle PCIe slot with a decent radeon graphics card for
MythTV, but suchcould have easily been an LSI SAS controller in a
bigger box.

http://www.idotpc.com/thestore/pc/ITS-1916H-1U-ITX-4-Front-Load-Hot-Swappable-Drives-Rackmount-Case-and-Bare-bone-Unit-p1114.htm

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
A fun revelation: I went to FreeNAS's website to look at the
softwareand apparently iXsystems sells a "home" server ready to
go. So they'reyet another boxed NAS source in addition to being the
OS of choice forDIY. A hybrid of the two options. The case is nice,
though, and hasactivity/status indicators for each drive, which seems
to be somethinghard to find with ordinary cases. They're using a
fanless motherboardso there's at least a little noise
reduction. Looks like possibly anAtom as they're quoting only 17
Watts TDP and 80 Watts total whenpopulated with eight drives. The
empty four bay is $1k and the eightbay is $1,350.
_______________________________________________Ale mailing
ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists athttp://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
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ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists athttp://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

[Alex Carver via Ale]

This post might be inappropriate. Click to display it.

[Steve Litt via Ale]

On Mon, 3 Dec 2018 10:07:00 -0800

A small, passively cooled ITX/mITX motherboard (like one of
the supermicros) and some big 140 mm fans at low speed would make the
whole thing pretty quiet.

They make 200mm fans, and those things are very, very quiet while
moving quite a bit of air.

SteveT

Steve Litt
December 2018 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
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[Alex Carver via Ale]

Post by Steve Litt via Ale
On Mon, 3 Dec 2018 10:07:00 -0800

A small, passively cooled ITX/mITX motherboard (like one of
the supermicros) and some big 140 mm fans at low speed would make the
whole thing pretty quiet.

They make 200mm fans, and those things are very, very quiet while
moving quite a bit of air.

Well, I know, I have a catalog with fans of all sizes but standard
computer cases only support a typical size of 120 mm with some
supporting 140 mm. Cases with mount points (and vents) large enough to
support even bigger fans are harder to get.
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[DJ-Pfulio via Ale]

Dremel the side panel?

Don't tell me you don't have plexiglass there for the RGB lighting. Gotta have
that. Adding a 200mm fan shouldn't be too hard.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale

Post by Steve Litt via Ale
They make 200mm fans, and those things are very, very quiet while
moving quite a bit of air.

Well, I know, I have a catalog with fans of all sizes but standard
computer cases only support a typical size of 120 mm with some
supporting 140 mm. Cases with mount points (and vents) large enough to
support even bigger fans are harder to get.

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[Alex Carver via Ale]

That would work assuming the cases were actually 200 mm wide. Most are
about 175 mm wide (tower style).

Post by DJ-Pfulio via Ale
Dremel the side panel?
Don't tell me you don't have plexiglass there for the RGB lighting. Gotta have
that. Adding a 200mm fan shouldn't be too hard.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale

Post by Steve Litt via Ale
They make 200mm fans, and those things are very, very quiet while
moving quite a bit of air.

Well, I know, I have a catalog with fans of all sizes but standard
computer cases only support a typical size of 120 mm with some
supporting 140 mm. Cases with mount points (and vents) large enough to
support even bigger fans are harder to get.

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[Chris Fowler via Ale]

Maybe too late to give you a decent reply.

I have two concerns with backups.

1. Theft
2. Hardware failure.

#1 gives me the most anxiety when I travel or we are on vacation.

One way I have solved this is with a Ctera backup appliance that has cloud sync and ranking of my on data by value to tag for that sync. I did not have equivalent cloud storage as I had within the NAS. High value data was replicated to their storage system.

The 2nd way was with NextCloud on a VM at Digital Ocean. It still solves both, but because I'm using 100% VM at DO I don't have the storage space I would have with a NAS.

The newer version of NextCloud works very well. The Android app works and on Linux I'm using Webdav to sync. I also use Dropbox.

My final redundant safe guard for #1 is that I rsync to an encrypted USB stick that goes on my keychain. I also rsync the Nextcloud and Dropbox to that. I also have a 4T passport drive that is encrypted that I backup to and can take with me when I travel.

I believe most people only design their backup to focus on #2. I had a friend whose truck was broken into in Atlanta and they took everything. He had no cloud backup.

Whatever you use, make sure there is a way for it to do some sort of cloud backup. If you use a box NAS make sure it supports rsync clients connecting (preferably via SSH). It be nice if you could schedule rsync on it. The Ctera allowed me to do both. If you make a NextCloud appliance you'll have root access to the Linux underneath and you can do any type of backup you want. Three years ago when I played with NC on a Beaglebone Black The underlying storage was really a Webdav share from box.com. A bit odd, but that allowed me to use the NC in house with 100% cloud backup. I was also just having fun with it.

I've recently been using NC at DO to test eventual replacement of my use of Dropbox. It'd be nice if I could get a VM at one of these providers with access to 1T of space. Rackspace and DigitalOcean tie storage space to CPU/mem. Hard to scale only one of those.

Sent: Friday, November 30, 2018 3:26:19 PM
Subject: [ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?
I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.
One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
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[Alex Carver via Ale]

This post might be inappropriate. Click to display it.

[Jerald Sheets via Ale]

If you’re talking for business…. Amazon Glacier.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
Can't do cloud backup. Number one, I don't like it, I'm not in control.
Number two: I have a 3 Mbps uplink on a good day. Mirroring the NAS to
the cloud would take a century (over 2 TB of data that would be high value).
I'm not concerned about theft but I would watch for hardware failure so
I'd have a local copy (probably one super large drive hanging off the
system that spins up once in a while to mirror the array).

Post by Chris Fowler via Ale
Maybe too late to give you a decent reply.
I have two concerns with backups.
1. Theft
2. Hardware failure.
#1 gives me the most anxiety when I travel or we are on vacation.
One way I have solved this is with a Ctera backup appliance that has cloud sync and ranking of my on data by value to tag for that sync. I did not have equivalent cloud storage as I had within the NAS. High value data was replicated to their storage system.
The 2nd way was with NextCloud on a VM at Digital Ocean. It still solves both, but because I'm using 100% VM at DO I don't have the storage space I would have with a NAS.
The newer version of NextCloud works very well. The Android app works and on Linux I'm using Webdav to sync. I also use Dropbox.
My final redundant safe guard for #1 is that I rsync to an encrypted USB stick that goes on my keychain. I also rsync the Nextcloud and Dropbox to that. I also have a 4T passport drive that is encrypted that I backup to and can take with me when I travel.
I believe most people only design their backup to focus on #2. I had a friend whose truck was broken into in Atlanta and they took everything. He had no cloud backup.
Whatever you use, make sure there is a way for it to do some sort of cloud backup. If you use a box NAS make sure it supports rsync clients connecting (preferably via SSH). It be nice if you could schedule rsync on it. The Ctera allowed me to do both. If you make a NextCloud appliance you'll have root access to the Linux underneath and you can do any type of backup you want. Three years ago when I played with NC on a Beaglebone Black The underlying storage was really a Webdav share from box.com. A bit odd, but that allowed me to use the NC in house with 100% cloud backup. I was also just having fun with it.
I've recently been using NC at DO to test eventual replacement of my use of Dropbox. It'd be nice if I could get a VM at one of these providers with access to 1T of space. Rackspace and DigitalOcean tie storage space to CPU/mem. Hard to scale only one of those.

Sent: Friday, November 30, 2018 3:26:19 PM
Subject: [ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?
I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.
Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.
One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
_______________________________________________
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htt

[DJ-Pfulio via Ale]

I worry about

a) Data corruption / software bugs / human stupidity
b) HW failures
c) Lightning damage / Tornado
c) Fire destroying the building

in that order. I've experienced all of the first 3 faults. Had about
$400 in computer stuff fried by lightning over the years. Not the
computers, just peripherals.

The most common problem is human stupidity, which makes verioned backups
absolutely critical for me. ;)

Post by Jerald Sheets via Ale
If you’re talking for business…. Amazon Glacier.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
Can't do cloud backup. Number one, I don't like it, I'm not in control.
Number two: I have a 3 Mbps uplink on a good day. Mirroring the NAS to
the cloud would take a century (over 2 TB of data that would be high value).
I'm not concerned about theft but I would watch for hardware failure so
I'd have a local copy (probably one super large drive hanging off the
system that spins up once in a while to mirror the array).

Post by Chris Fowler via Ale
Maybe too late to give you a decent reply.
I have two concerns with backups.
1. Theft
2. Hardware failure.
#1 gives me the most anxiety when I travel or we are on vacation.
One way I have solved this is with a Ctera backup appliance that has cloud sync and ranking of my on data by value to tag for that sync. I did not have equivalent cloud storage as I had within the NAS. High value data was replicated to their storage system.

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[Alex Carver via Ale]

Nope, not business, this is entirely personal. No cloud storage.

Post by Jerald Sheets via Ale
If you’re talking for business…. Amazon Glacier.

Post by Alex Carver via Ale
Can't do cloud backup. Number one, I don't like it, I'm not in control.
Number two: I have a 3 Mbps uplink on a good day. Mirroring the NAS to
the cloud would take a century (over 2 TB of data that would be high value).
I'm not concerned about theft but I would watch for hardware failure so
I'd have a local copy (probably one super large drive hanging off the
system that spins up once in a while to mirror the array).

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[Chris Fowler via Ale]

Sent: Tuesday, December 4, 2018 9:15:44 AM
Subject: Re: [ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?
If you’re talking for business
. Amazon Glacier.

As a business owner business and personal are pretty much the same. :) Or they seem to mix sometimes.

I found a good link on automating glacier

https://medium.com/@cetteup/how-to-set-up-a-sync-backup-to-aws-glacier-on-linux-ubuntu-16-04-a96754fd9e1c

[Solomon Peachy via Ale]

Post by Chris Fowler via Ale
#1 gives me the most anxiety when I travel or we are on vacation.

If you're worried about something portable being stolen, then yes,
you need two local copies appropriately separated. (And to be honest,
when I'm on the road, my upstream bandwidth is usually extremely
limited, rendering any sort of remote backup infeasible..)

If you're worried about your home/office being broken into, then I
suspect they're going to clean out a lot of more obviously valuable
targets first. On the other hand, if these bad guys are after your
storage specifically, then this probably isn't an appropriate forum for
assistance.

30 days of nightly incremental backups of my "hot set" of critical data
takes about 700-800 GB of an external drive. My bulk storage is about
9TB of RAID5, of which ~3TB of irreplacable stuff is archived onto
optical media.

I actually do have a nice cabin in the woods that can act as a
geographically-separated mirror of the truly important stuff, but it's
not climate controlled (killing hard drives) and is an highly attractive
nusiance when it comes to lightning strikes (killing everything else..)

- Solomon