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36TB FreeNAS Home Server Build
- grubles 11y agoECC RAM should be the minimum requirement if using ZFS.
- mrb 11y agoECC RAM should be the minimum requirement on any serious file server.
- colechristensen 11y ago>If your system supports it and your budget allows for it, install ECC RAM. There are some threads of overstatement of the necessity of ECC RAM or the opposite, but the above is the best advice. It might be more wise to invest your money more efficiently in backup resources than more expensive RAM.
- grubles 11y agoThe aforementioned quote should be: "If you value your data, you should use ECC RAM. Especially so, if you use a checksumming filesystem such as btrfs or zfs." There is no use investing money in offsite backups if the onsite backup is corrupted already from faulty RAM.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- voltagex_ 11y agoPfft. Outside of a few specialist areas, most people's data isn't backed up, and if it is, it's on SD cards, thumbdrives, iCloud or the occasional portable USB hard disk tossed in a backpack. The most difficult thing about setting up a home NAS was swallowing the cost and reading about all the tradeoffs I'd inadvertently made.
- grubles 11y agoWe are discussing the OP which is a 36 TB storage system, which warrants things such as ECC RAM + ZFS. A home NAS, for the typical end user, will not reach 36 TB. Storage a small percentage of that on AWS or Torsnap will, over time, cost more than the ECC RAM.
- post_break 11y agoThis is all great info. The only thing I shudder at is that there is one huge single point of failure. I've learned one thing when building huge dumb storage devices, build two and mirror them. I've got 32TB of storage mirrored so if one hits the fan I've got an exact copy.
- beachstartup 11y agoi would recommend you also do snapshots. mirroring will just replicate a bad fuckup. as for OP, i share your concerns - i'm skeptical of the reliability of consumer gear in an application like this, especially in the absence of an actual backup solution (maybe he doesn't care). he calls it a backup server, but it's actively serving files.
- pfarnsworth 11y agoYes, I agree, mirroring will help when a disk goes back, but it won't help if you accidentally delete data. This is the one that people tend to forget a lot, which is ironically the original reason for having backups.
- foobarian 11y agoI have two sets of drives on my home server and keep them mirrored using a nightly rsync. It's infrequent enough that I can recover from accidents.
- XorNot 11y agoThis is why people should use ZFS (or BTRFS) - snapshots. My home server runs a minutely, hourly, daily and monthly snapshot job. Cryptolocker could have a field day and the most likely scenario is at worst I'd lose a day of data - more likely maybe 15 minutes worth.
- post_break 11y agoI'd love to but my OS limits me from running ZFS.
- dr_ick 11y agoIf you are into this type of thing, check out the storage form on [H]ardForum: http://hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=29 http://hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=29 Specifically, the showoff thread: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1847026 http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1847026
- xupybd 11y agoWow what on earth are you doing (at home) that you need that much space backed up with that level of reliability?
- jvolkman 11y agoHaving fun.
- foobarian 11y agoTwo words: "kids" "videos". Between me and my wife we have our phones, a SLR, and then there are other people's phones. Whenever they fill up I dump them onto my file server and delete from the phone; it's amazing how fast the terabytes get filled up. Nice problem to have I guess.
- FraKtus 11y agoSame here and shooting picture of kids in raw format needs space :-)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- click170 11y agoThis post covers everything except the cost. The cost will vary from region to region and country to country, but it would have been nice to get a ballpark figure for what this cost.
- skeletonjelly 11y agoAnd power consumption!
- Viper007Bond 11y agoI have 3 NASes but my largest is a similar build with 7 drives (6x6TB WD Red + an old WD Black for the OS). It pulls about 70 watts. Full specs here: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Viper007Bond/saved/xwP9TW https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Viper007Bond/saved/xwP9TW
- jbaiter 11y agoI just put together a list from this post on pcpartspicker: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/9f3s99 http://pcpartpicker.com/p/9f3s99 It sums up to around $2600.
- sosuke 11y ago$2,870.15 from Amazon right now which isn't as bad as I expected. That is a great build you've put together. After losing a 3TB drive of thankfully replaceable data I have been eyeing a similar setup but not as intense. https://amzn.com/w/MHNNS9EDAORX https://amzn.com/w/MHNNS9EDAORX Side note, I would love to have a list or something on Amazon because the wish list isn't right. A purchase list perhaps? It doesn't include the quantity by default when clicking Add to Cart. I had thought about adding in the Amazon Associates code but I've never actually had that make any money.
- jimmcslim 11y agoLooking forward to FreeNAS 10 when it is available. Thinking about rebuilding my HP N54L microserver currently running Windows Server 2012 R2 with a 'virtual' NAS, Ubuntu + ZFS, running under Hyper-V (yes, this is unnecessarily complicated). It would be great if whatever virtualisation is built into FreeNAS supports the AMD Turion II the N54L uses but support for AMD virtualisation sometimes seems a bit spotty (not supported in SmartOS for example).
- voltagex_ 11y agoI found the FreeNAS community to be a bit difficult to work in - less than 32GB of ECC RAM? Using something other than RAIDZ2 with 6+ high performance drives? You're terrible, and you'll lose all your data!
- teslabox 11y agoI was put off by this part of the FreeNAS community too. Eventually I found NAS4Free (a fork of FreeNAS), which seems to work rather well on the "old" dual-core AMD computer that I wanted to use. http://www.nas4free.org/ http://www.nas4free.org/
- barrkel 11y agoFWIW, I run 10 4G WD red disks in raidz2 using ZFS on Linux on Ubuntu 14.04 with only 4G of RAM (it's an old motherboard, doesn't support any more). No problems and perfectly acceptable performance for mostly backup and streaming workloads.
- Amezarak 11y agoThe FreeNAS community is definitely not very friendly and they'll jump on you if you have any problem whatsoever and you didn't follow one of their recommendations, but let's not misquote them. The FreeNAS forum folks say 8GB minimum ECC memory and don't suggest "high performance" drives, merely drives with firmware hypothetically optimized for NAS applications. RAIDZ-2 is recommended on lots of drives for the same reason RAID6 is, so that's not something unique to the FreeNAS community. https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hardware-recommendations-read-this-first.23069/ https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hardware-recomm...
- esaym 11y agoAnd the word 'watt' is no where in the article. I'd be curious to the yearly power costs. I've been the eying the Lenovo Thinkserver TS-140: http://amzn.com/B00FE2G79C http://amzn.com/B00FE2G79C with a Xeon E3-1225v3. Some comments state that it has an idle draw of less then 40 watts. Which is hard to believe. My Dual core intel atom box idles at about 50 watts (of course there is no difference between idle and full load draw with the atom, just super slow either way...)
- sosuke 11y agoI must assume I'm wrong in this calculation but 40 watts seems pretty cheap in cost. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+watts+in+kwh+per+month http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+watts+in+kwh+per+mon... at a 3.3 cents per kWh rate is just under a $1 per month right? On the top tier of my local utility it would still be under $4 per month. http://www.austinenergy.com/wps/portal/ae/rates/residential-rates/residential-electric-rates-and-line-items http://www.austinenergy.com/wps/portal/ae/rates/residential-...
- brandmeyer 11y ago1 W draws about 9 kW-hr/year, so for residential pricing of about 10 c/kW-hr, you get about 1 $/W-yr.
- esaym 11y agoI think most Americans pay between $0.20 and $0.40 per kWh. I am lucky though that here it is only $0.06. But in summer months it goes to $0.14 for every kWh over 600. Staying under 1000 kwh's a month is hard to do.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago$.106 and free weekends.
- slavik81 11y agoSpeaking of summer, if you're trying to cool the house with an air conditioner, you can multiply the effective wattage of the computer by 3.
- grawlinson 11y agoI'd rather have a rack-mount, rather than that case. In my opinion, it would be a bit easier to replace faulty hard drives. Otherwise, it seems quite neat!
- otterpro 11y agoI'd also prefer 19" racks, but for home server, I'd advise against it due to the fact that most rack cases are unbearably noisy thanks to higher RPM fans and the way the air flow is designed in the case. I'd like to put in quiet, slow 120mm fans, but I've not seen 19" rack case that could easily accommodate them.
- wandererer 11y agoAs someone with a similar build (Freenas, 8x3tb raidz2 main array, 3tb scratch/hot spare, 2tb scratch, and 500gb ssd for jails) I would love a rackmount for drive accessibility, but I can't justify 10x the case cost and additional engineering in making it as quiet and clean as my fractal design R4. Rackmount stuff just isn't designed to be either of those, high static pressure fans and expectation of pre-filtered air. (That said I'd totally be willing to pay ~500$ if such a case existed)
- SirMaster 11y ago10x the cost? I picked up a 24 bay supermicro case on eBay for $265. This came with 24 hotswap bays and even a SAS2 expander backplane so I only have to connect 1 cable from the motherboard SAS controller to the case, and all 24 disks just work. As far as making it quiet. Well that consisted of buying a $11 fan wall, installing 3 120mm Noctua PWM fans inside it and writing a simple script to govern the fan speeds based on the HDD temperatures to keep them in check with the minimum fan speeds necessary. It's sitting in my bedroom next to my bed and I can hardly hear it. I will concede the dust issue, but I have a normal air filter in my room and don't normally have dust issues with my computers. Maybe I clean them out once a year in the spring if they need it.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoI know that ZFS is cool and LVM isn't, but I literally just finished repairing my LVM-based home NAS, and it left me with a good feeling about LVM. Overall, a stack of md, LVM and XFS is a lot more complicated than ZFS, but each piece is more understandable in isolation.
- skeletonjelly 11y agoZFS is a filesystem which does waaaay more than LVM does as a container. It's not just that it's "cool". Rapid filesystem snapshots, checksums, dedupe, do some research and you'll see why it's recommended.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoLVM does snapshots & checksums. dedupe and compression require huge amounts of memory and cause problems with databases. I've used ZFS before, and I switched back.
- voltagex_ 11y agoI have a ~8TB NAS on an Atom C2758 system. I've loaded less than 4TB so far and FreeNAS is really getting on my nerves. Am I "protected" from a single drive failure with LVM? Can I grow the storage size by swapping out one drive at a time? If so, I might just go to Debian and be done with it, although FreeBSD 10's bhyve hypervisor looks really good.
- unethical_ban 11y agoWhat's the problem?
- voltagex_ 11y agoThe FreeBSD 9 base makes it really hard to mount ext4 drives (no FUSE until 10), the security patching regime relies on upgrading the whole rootfs (see the SSH client vuln today) and I'm in unfamiliar territory on a BSD having used Linux for the last decade.
- lewisl9029 11y agoI personally think SilverStone's DS380 would make for a better case for something like this. 8x hot-swap 3.5in bays + 4x 2.5in bays in M-ITX form factor. http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=452 http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=452 It's what I'm using right now for my server and I love it. I have it filled up with 6 drives and haven't had any issues with heat so far. Can't say the same about the ASUS P9A-I motherboard I'm using it with though...
- adamst85 11y agoI second the DS380, had a HD failure the other day and it was easy to hot swap. +1 for the case -1 for Seagate Barracuda's
- gravypod 11y agoWhat I hate about FreeNAS is that it is not permissive of what kind of disks you put in. I bought a Drobo5N just because I was able to slap any drives I wanted, in any size or configuration and it would just work. When FreeNAS can handle that, automatically and on the fly, I'll switch to that.
- psophis 11y agoThere's a very active subreddit[0] that discusses a lot of stuff like this. Worth checking out if you've considered having a server in your home. [0] https://reddit.com/r/homelab https://reddit.com/r/homelab
- TheCowboy 11y agoThis guy also does his own periodic FreeNAS system builds: http://blog.brianmoses.net/2015/01/diy-nas-2015-edition.html http://blog.brianmoses.net/2015/01/diy-nas-2015-edition.html http://blog.brianmoses.net/2015/05/diy-nas-econonas-2015.html http://blog.brianmoses.net/2015/05/diy-nas-econonas-2015.htm...
- agumonkey 11y agoOh the irony. I have an HP54L microserver that I used to boot BSD from the exact same usb key (sandisk cruzer fit). One day boot hanged badly, cold reboot fubared some data, I had to make a spare boot key which didn't have the ZFS disk config. I failed to reimport the ZFS pool properly, wiping the root nodes off the drive. 3TB of mostly inaccessible data sleeping. I still hope that I find the time and brain resources to write a program to reconstruct the metadata from the fs nodes still on disk. ZFS sources analysis gave some hint about magic numbers and other patterns that could help scan and infer node positions. Anyway, as always, be cautious. And, when too many things are down, don't fiddle.
- brandon272 11y agoAlso /r/datahoarder
- colindean 11y agoThe author probably bought all of those hard drives at once, from the same vendor. They're very likely in the same batch. What if something goes bad with a drive? Well, ZFS to the rescue. Maybe even two. What if the whole batch was bad? I've built my NAS with not quite as much storage but more drives using drives from different vendors and different batches from different manufacturers.
- rsync 11y agoIt is good to be concerned about batching disk drives, as you imply. However, given that the problems that arise with a bad batch are physical ones, properly burning in the drives does, I think, alleviate those concerns. We burn ours in for 5-6 days[1] before we put them into production and history shows this weeds out the bad ones. If there was an entirely bad batch, we would catch it that way. In my opinion, far, far more likely to find yourself with fake-new drives than with an actual "bad batch". We see that all the time from amazon sellers that claim brand new drives, but SMART says otherwise... [1] with a zero tolerance policy for even the tiniest deviation from normal in the SMART output. Even a blip and that drive is out.
- rgbrenner 11y agoIf there was an entirely bad batch, we would catch it that way. You're a very optimistic guy. That test would not have caught IBM deathstars or the more recent Seagate 3tb barracuda failures. I lost 6 of the 8 drives in my NAS due to that last one.. luckily not all at the same time.
- pfarnsworth 11y agoI used to build my own stuff, but now I buy Synology. It's really convenient, has great UI and support, a bunch of different packages you can install, etc. Although I ran into a problem a couple of months after setting it up where the NAS became so slow, it was unusable. I saw that my IOWait was 100%, so I figured it was a disk, but nothing indicated a problem. Eventually I was able to get to a log that showed that one of the drives had some weird error messages, so I bought a new drive from Amazon that came the next day, pulled the drive, and replaced it and instantly everything was okay again. I would have expected something on Synology's status programs to show a problem, but they were all green, so that was annoying.
- voltagex_ 11y agoThe Linux kernel can do some really strange things when a drive fails. I had an external drive fail to the point where if I wrote to it, commands like ls would fail and be unkillable until I rebooted the system. I wonder if that's similar to what you were experiencing, masked by the shiny UI
- rincebrain 11y agoIt's not limited to Linux - the problem is that, while you can go around resetting increasingly large parts of the IO stack, lots of devices in the path may or may not actually respond to "off" or "reset" when they're in a bad state, so a drive being in a bad state can cause the entire IO path it's in to go south for the winter if nobody is smart enough in the path. This is one of the actual reasons that enterprise drives can be better - almost all of them support an equivalent of TLER (time-limited error recovery), which is basically a programmable timeout on read/write errors. Most parts of the IO stack, hardware and software, on every platform I've used deal a lot better with explicit errors than a device that hasn't appeared to vanish but is acting like a black hole.
- Jedd 11y ago> It's really convenient, ... > ... would have expected something on Synology's status > programs to show a problem, but they were all green, > so that was annoying. So perhaps not all that convenient. I went down the QNap path a couple of years ago, on the assumption it'd be robust, well patched, more convenient, and basic functionality would work / be tested. I was wrong on most counts, and am now basically scared off these low-end SOHO systems entirely.
- voltagex_ 11y agoI wonder if the author has run into many problems with FreeNAS, or the terrible community. I've seen posts on the forum where the problem was with Samba not authing correctly but the first response is "You don't have enough RAM". At least they're patching the SSH CVE from today, but it's not just a pkg upgrade, it's a tarball that upgrades the whole root drive.
- voltagex_ 11y agoI'm regretting building my NAS. It's expensive, the storage is small (16TB of drives gave me ~7.9TB of usable space) and any question or doubt about your configuration prompts responses like: http://blog.ociru.net/2013/04/05/zfs-ssd-usage#comment-1722341810 http://blog.ociru.net/2013/04/05/zfs-ssd-usage#comment-17223...
- windowsworkstoo 11y ago> the storage is small What did you expect here? 50% is typical trade off these days in disk arrays.
- Bromlife 11y agoIs this because of hot swaps? I would be pretty disappointed by a 50% usable for RAID6. But I don't include the hotswap(s) in this equation.
- windowsworkstoo 11y agoRight I was talking about RAID10, the only RAID that is sensible to use these days... Even with ZFS as I understand it, you should just set up your storage pool then mirror it and be done....boom 50%
- voltagex_ 11y agoYeah I ended up going with mirrored vdevs for the ability to expand to 6TB drives later... then I was told (in IRC) that a single bit-flip would cause a complete pool failure.
- simcop2387 11y agoI'm curious how that is?
- cmurf 11y agoUhh if they're mirrored, a bit flip is not only detected by ZFS but also corrected, whether it happens passively during a normal file read, or scrubbing, or presumably a resilver.
- unethical_ban 11y agoThe OP bought 6x6TB drives. I truly hope that they didn't configure it to be a 36TB zpool. That should be RAIDZ2 at the very least. Heck, I have 4x2TB drives and I am running RAIDZ2. a 2TB drive took 24 hours to rebuild the data on the replacement disk. I would probably be linear, so 72 hours to rebuild a 6TB drive, during which time the other drives are doing tons of reads.
- daurnimator 11y agoThe article says they're using RAIDZ2
- unethical_ban 11y agoI stand corrected; I see that now. The HN submission is in error, then.
- SirMaster 11y agoWhy is it in error? It's 6x6=36TB. Parity is still storing data. Who says the data storage total number has to be for only user data? My ZFS pool is 12x4TB in RAIDZ2 and when I query zpool list I get: name size alloc free tank 43.5T 25.3T 18.2T The size reported by ZFS itself is 43.5TiB which is close to the 48TB that 12x4TB is.
- unethical_ban 11y agoEh. I suppose. When any of my friends discuss NAS size, we quote it in "usable space". So you have a 40TB usable NAS. I have a 4TB usable NAS with 4x2TB in RAIDZ2.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoWhat I would like is more discussion of choosing FreeBSD vs FreeNAS. The author was inexperienced and so chose FreeNAS for "ease of use". But what, other than a GUI, does FreeNAS really provide? I've never read a detailed explanation. The forums on freenas.org don't seem to address this fundamental question. Everything seems to be predicated on the choice already having been made, nothing helps people make the choice in the first place. Perhaps FreeNAS is more aggressive than FreeBSD about patching storage related bugs? Can anyone point to a detailed discussion about choosing vanilla FreeBSD vs FreeNAS?
- vincentkriek 11y agoI think the main advantage of FreeNAS is the the GUI and the support tooling around this web interface. This means creating storage pools and datasets and managing those. Creating and managing jails as well as access control and sharing. It really makes managing the nas a lot more easy.
- devonkim 11y agoFreeNAS is distributed and supported as an all-in-one appliance primarily. The boot process is generally expected to be run off of USB flash drives because, similar to how VMware ESXi works, is typically expected to be run on systems where installation to a local disk is not only a waste of space but potentially dangerous (mounting your USB device with write wears it out faster than if it was read-only with RAMdisks mounted). I generally build my file servers so that each disk is part of the data pool and the boot device is a USB flash drive that either shipped with the computer by the OEM (HP, Dell, Cisco, etc.) or one I imaged myself and put onto the available USB port on the motherboard (not the rear or forward ports typically in server hardware for security reasons at least). It comes with a lot of features in the web interface that any decent FreeBSD admin could install and manage, and many out of the box settings are optimized for situations that are common for SOHO file servers. This buys a bit of time and makes it easier for others to maintain that may not be FreeBSD gurus necessarily. There are a few tunings (sysctl stuff) and customized options specific to ZFS servers that FreeNAS offers as well. For example, most ZFS users don't have an encrypted scratch partition created on each drive in their ZFS vdevs, but FreeNAS creates them for you by default as a strong recommendation unless you explicitly turn it off with a slightly obscure setting in the web GUI.
- vitriol83 11y agointeresting article. a few more points which may be of interest - in addition to raid it's worth having automated off-site backup. the best solution i could find is duplicity as its encrypted and supports a bunch of backends. - freebsd supports full disk encryption using geli. with some work its possible to make it boot (only) from a usb key, so some protection if the server is stolen. I believe newer versions of Intel Atom support hardware AES acceleration, so this isn't a large overhead. - if the memory requirements of ZFS are too large (which to be honest for a soho application they are!), then you can use UFS together with freebsd software raid1 (gmirror)
- sqldba 11y agoDidn't seem to list the total price.
- KaiserPro 11y agoThere is a lot of cargo cult about this. Firstly the claim that freebsd has wider testing is utter trash. In terms of TBs installed ZFS on linux >> freenas/freebsd the amount of money behind ZoL is now surprisingly large. Also, extensive memtest of ECC ram is pointless, ECC ram has checksumming built into the chip which will tell you if there is a memory error and correct it if possible. As for most drive fail in the first hours: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/ evidence says other wise. Infant mortality is a thing, but its a matter of months, not hours. (internal QA grabs most of the ones that die within a few hours.) The best way to combat simultaneous failure is to mix hardrive types, this makes it much less likley that a single fault class will be triggered on all disks.
- nitin_flanker 11y agoHow does it tell which drive has failed? or is not working properly? I never worked with NAS rigs, but I sure have plan to setup one for my home.
- KaiserPro 11y agoThere are a number of ways. The most visible, even if you are not using ZFS is using the SMART output http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/using-smartctl-to-get-smart-status-information-on-your-hard-drives/ http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/using... There are a number of metrics that might indicate the health of the drive not all raid cards support this, however most consumer devices do. If you have a card that doesn't do this, either its a highend jobby with another mechanism, or a pile of shite. second when you actually bump into a hard error, you'll see things in /var/log/messages that say "disk timed out, retrying" (but then you're probably fucked by then) However using ZFS/BTRFS data is checksum'd when written and read. This means that bit flips and otherwise silent bit rot has a greater chance of being caught early. Performing "scrub" (consistency checks) often means you're more likely to catch errors early. (this is another reason why you'll want, but ECC ram. as it'll tell you when you get bit flips in ram, which undermines on disk checksums) Part of the reason why people choose raid6/z2 is because it takes a long time to rebuild an array after a disk crash. It involves reading all the data again and computing the hamming code to recover the lost data. when you buy a job lot of disks, they tend to be the same batch, which means they could be prone to the same bug/defect. So this general means that multiple disk failure happen at the same time. having another parity disk means you can withstand more failure before total loss. However, none of these mechanisms are a replacement for a backup. even if you have a 36 gig raid, you still need a backup. There will always be a time where something goes horrifically wrong and you need to get access to an archived version. anyone who fights against this has yet to experience the fun of total failure.
- legulere 11y agoBut why? I'll assume the media mentioned in the article that's stored is illegal. From the cost of that home server you could very likely legally watch everything and actually support financing the creation of new stuff. Even if that's not true, how many of the movies you watched do you watch more than once? And 24 TB? How do you find time to watch that much stuff?
- XorNot 11y ago> how many of the movies you watched do you watch more than once If I don't watch it more then once, why would I keep it at all, or need a media server in the first place? All your statements contradict each other.
- glogla 11y agoGiven the author talks about "workplace", I would more expect something like storing his own videos and photos (4k and RAW are huge), instead of digital hoarding of pirated media.
- soylentcola 11y agoYep. I have a more modest setup but the amount of media I've ripped from owned CDs/DVDs and the number of raw photos far outweighs the handful of pirated movies I've picked up over the years. Mainly I use my NAS as a bit of protection against losing those files that would be difficult or impossible to recover if my local storage in the workstation failed. Online backup is good too but for quicker or more frequent access, a NAS fills the gap nicely. The other big storage hog is security cam video. There are occasional reports of burglaries in my neighborhood and sometimes I just like to know if a package was ever dropped off or someone bumped the car while parallel parking. So I picked up a couple of inexpensive IP cameras and rather than shelling out monthly for some unreliable and potentially insecure "cloud" storage plan, I use Synology's Surveillance Station IP cam software to manage recording, playback, and storage of camera footage. The amount of space on the NAS means I can easily keep a week or more worth of recordings from both cameras and with the actual NAS being stashed away out of easy view, it's unlikely to be stolen in the event of a burglary. Granted I could include those files in online storage but currently I don't have it set up that way. Either way, the point is that many modern homes have plenty of sources of large files outside of pirated movies that can make a NAS useful.
- Rasell 11y agoThis is how these World War 1 battlefields look like after 100 years! http://goo.gl/6wJWCe http://goo.gl/6wJWCe
- jonathankoren 11y agoWhen I built my home NAS, I started with FreeNAS, but it was a pain. The instance of ECC RAM, the lack of USB support[], the community that seemed more focused on office solutions exclusively were killers, and a hermetically sealed distribution were all killers. I switched to Linux based OpenMediaVault[1] and all my problems went away. It uses the same UI as FreeNAS, but defaults to EXT4, supports USB backups, and lets me do anything I want on it. It's great. [] The answer to multiple independent requests about backing up the NAS to a USB enclosure, and met with a refrain of "USB drives are crap, so you're stupid for using them. You should back up your NAS to another NAS, that you never move." Fuck you. I know the limits of my failure model. [1] http://www.openmediavault.org/ http://www.openmediavault.org/