19 ms·

The Cheapest NAS

342 points by henry_flower 2y ago

leros 2y ago
That's pretty cool. Fits their use case for sure. I would probably opt to spend a little more for a gigabit port. From what I've seen watching Jeff Geerling, you can setup a pretty reasonable performing NAS on something on these small SBCs.
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  Any of the latest generation Arm SBCs is actually pretty adequate for NAS purposes, especially if that's all you want to run on it. If you get a Pi 4 or Pi 5, or one of the Rockchip boards with RK3566 or RK3588 (the latter is much more pricey, but can get gigabit-plus speeds), you can either attach a USB hard drive or SSD, or with most of them now you could add on an M.2 drive or an adapter for SATA hard drives/SSDs, and even do RAID over 1 Gbps or sometimes 2.5 Gbps with no issue. Some people choose to run OpenMediaVault (which is fine), though I have my NASes set up using Ansible + ZFS running on bare Debian, as it's simpler for me to manage that way: https://github.com/geerlingguy/arm-nas https://github.com/geerlingguy/arm-nas I would go with Radxa or maybe Libre Computer if you're not going the Raspberry Pi route, they both have images for their latest boards that are decent, though I almost always have issues with HDMI output, so be prepared to set things up over SSH or serial console.
Scene_Cast2 2y ago
Note that it doesn't look like it has ECC, so make sure to have backups. Fancy file systems like ZFS don't remove the need for ECC.
- coconut08 2y ago
  been using zfs on my home nas without ecc for well over a decade and never had any problems. i've seen people claiming this since before i started using zfs and it seems so unnecessary for some random home project.
  - EvanAnderson 2y ago
    Unless you've verified hashes of your files over time you may be having problems and not realizing it.
    - theshrike79 2y ago
      If a single byte flips in a 4-10GB video file, nobody will ever notice it. There aren't that many cases where it actually matters.
    - loeg 2y ago
      I believe ZFS does periodic checksuming (scrubbing).
      - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
        Strictly speaking I don't think ZFS itself does, but it is very common for distros to ship a cronjob that runs `zpool scrub` on a schedule (often but not always default enabled).
    - ratboy666 2y ago
      They did mention ZFS, so verified hashes of each file block. I hope they are scrubbing, and have at least one snapshot.
      - mmh0000 2y ago
        ZFS does nothing to protect you against RAM corrupting your data before ZFS sees it. All you'll end up with is a valid checksum of the now bad data. You can Google more, but, I'll just leave this from the first page of the openZFS manual: Misinformation has been circulated that ZFS data integrity features are somehow worse than those of other filesystems when ECC RAM is not used. This is not the case: all software needs ECC RAM for reliable operation and ZFS is no different from any other filesystem in that regard.[1] [1] https://openzfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html https://openzfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html
      - 2y ago
- jnovek 2y ago
  > so make sure to have backups Can you (or someone) suggest a backup scheme? I have a 28TB NAS. Almost everything I've looked into is expensive or intended more for enterprise tier. Are there options for backup in the "hobbyist" price range?
  - Dxtros 2y ago
    if your talking cloud backup Wasabi (which uses S3) is the cheapest i could find it’s pay as you go and they don’t charge for upload/download. The pay as you go is $6.99 per TB which would be pretty pricey at 28 TB, but it’s super cheap for my 4tb NAS.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    I have a NAS that has 18 TB effective storage, 36 TB mirrored. It all gets backed up to a B2 back blaze which is about six dollars per terabyte - but I'm currently only using about 8 TB at the moment so it's only about 50 bucks a month. So this might be on the higher end of the price range if you're using up all 28 TB uncompressed since that's about $168 per month though...
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    AWS, GCP, and Azure all offer cold storage for about $1 per TB per month. If you want any cheaper you need to build a second NAS. You could also take the awkward route and add one or two large drives to your desktop, mirror there, and back that up to backblaze (not B2). The other suggestions you got for hot storage strike me as the wrong way to handle this, if you're considering $80 per year per TB for backups then just make another NAS.
    - vunderba 2y ago
      For the OP - be careful with AWS, the closest pricing to one dollar per terabyte is S3 Glacier Deep Archive and you'd be surprised how expensive a full restore can be in the event that you need to do so in terms of restore pricing, egress cost, etc. Another NAS isn't really a good solution (unless you can place it in a different house) - the goal of a cloud back up is that it's offsite.
- hitsurume 2y ago
  I know ECC is a special type of ram, but how does it help a NAS/Raid setup?
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    Data that's about to be written to disk often resides in ram for some period of time - bit flips in non-ECC ram can silently corrupt the data before writing it out. ZFS doesn't prevent this though it might detect it with checksumming. https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/ https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...
  - eric__cartman 2y ago
    If you're unlucky enough to experience memory errors in one of the intermediate buffers files go through while being copied from one computer to another an incorrect copy of the file might get written to disk. When running software RAID, memory errors could also cause data to be replicated erroneously and raise an error the next time it's read. That said if the memory is flaky enough that these errors are common it's highly likely that the operating system will crash very frequently and the user will know something is seriously wrong. If you want to make sure that files have been copied correctly you can flush all kernel buffers and run diff -r between the source and destination directory to make sure that everything is the same. It's probably way more likely to experience data loss due to human error or external factors such as a power surge than bad ram. I personally thoroughly test the memory before a computer gets put into service and assume it's okay until something fails or it gets replaced. The only machine I've ever seen that would corrupt random data on a disk was heavily and carelessly overclocked (teenage me cared about getting moar fps in games, and not having a reliable workstation lol)
    - barnabee 2y ago
      I wonder whether something like Syncthing would notice a hash difference with data corruption caused by such a memory error? And whether it’d correct it or propagate the issue…
- theshrike79 2y ago
  I've had non-ECC NAS systems for over 20 years and I've had exactly zero cases where memory corruption was an issue. It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for personal setups.
  - jjav 2y ago
    > It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for personal setups. My personal files are ultimately a lot more important to me and much more irreplaceable than any files at work. I'd never run a NAS without ZFS and ECC.
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      I don’t think I’ve ever had ECC, and have never had any issues. What kind of problems would you expect to see?
      - averageRoyalty 2y ago
        Non shielded RAM is subject to bit flipping. Non-ECC always carries this risk in general computing, but the problem is compounded when you run a filesystem like ZFS which uses memory as a significant storage element for write cache. If it would hugely impact your life if a bit were flipped from a 0 to 1 in your stored data - say you make videos or store your bitcoin wallet key on your NAS - you are running a risk not using ECC. You may not have had issues or ever have issues with non-ECC. Your car may never be stolen if you leave the keys in either, but it's not a good risk proposition for most people.
      - toast0 2y ago
        Well part of it is you likely won't see the problem until a long time after it happens. But on servers with ECC and reporting I saw several different patterns: a) 99%+ (or something) of the servers had zero reported errors for their lifetime. Memory usually works, no problems experienced. b) Some of the servers reported one error, one time, and then all was well for the rest of their life. If this happens without ECC, and you're lucky, it's in some memory that doesn't really matter and it's no big deal. Or maybe it crashes your kernel because it's in the right spot (flip a bit in a pointer/return address and it's easy to crash). Or maybe it managed to flip a bit in a pending write and your file is stored wrong and the zfs checksum is calculated on the wrong data. If you're really unlucky, you could probably write bad metadata and have a real hard time mounting the filesystem later? c) some servers reported the same address with a correctable error once a day; probably one bit stuck, any time data transits that address, that bit is still stuck, and that will likely cause trouble. If it's used for kernel memory, you'll probably end up crashing sooner or later. d) some servers had a lot more ram errors; sometimes a slow ramp to a hundred a day, once or twice a rapid ramp to so many that the system spent most of its time handling machine check exceptions, but did manage to stay online but developed a queue it could never process. Once you're at these levels, you'll probably get crashes, but you might write some bad data first. Ram testing helps on systems without ECC, but you won't really know if/when the ram has gone from working 100% to working almost 100%. I have a desktop that was running fine for a while, tests fine, but crashes in ways that have to be bad ram, and removing one stick seems to have fixed it.
- singron 2y ago
  This is only 1 disk, so you are way more likely to lose all your data due to an ordinary single disk failure than to some ram errors.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  ECC for nerds is like gear heads arguing about motor oil.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Only if one set of gear heads was arguing that you don't really need it.
- Lammy 2y ago
  Hate to see this downvoted because I have personally lost files to ZFS on failing non-ECC memory. It was all my most-used stuff too because those were the files I was actually accessing, then it would compare checksum in memory to checksum on disk and decide disk was the one that was wrong. I noticed via audible blips appearing in my FLACs and verified with `flac -t <bad_flac>`.
jstanley 2y ago
When people set up these NAS's, how are they accessing the files? NFS? SFTP? And how are you accessing it when away from home? A VPN that you're permanently connected to? Is there a good way to do NAT hole-punching? Syncthing kind of does what I want, in that it lets all my computers sync the same files no matter what network they're on, but it insists on always copying all the files ("syncing") whereas I just want them stored on the NAS but accessible everywhere. Nextcloud kind of does what I want but when I tried it before it struck me as flaky and unreliable, and seemed to do a load of stuff I don't want or need.
- sleepybrett 2y ago
  Mostly CIFS, I use tailscale to put my laptop inside of my home network wherever I go.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Depends on your use case. I just use scp and access the NAS box through Tor when traveling, so I don’t have to open up any ports.
- universa1 2y ago
  Regarding the connectivity: tailscale... So far I am happy with them and the free plan hasn't been kneecapped afterwards (so far).
  - stavros 2y ago
    Even if it is, you can run Headscale on a server somewhere (or just pay).
  - BXlnt2EachOther 2y ago
    IIRC they have improved the free plan over time, and even mailed users suggesting the relaxed limits might enable moving from paid to free tier [1]. I barely use my tailnet now, might have more of a case for it later, but they are near the top of my "wishing you success but please don't get acquired by a company that will ruin it" list. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615848
CyberDildonics 2y ago
Is there any NAS software that just lets you add disks whenever you want, while using them for redundancy if they aren't full? I wish something was as easy as adding another disk and having the redundancy go up, then removing a disk and having the redundancy go down.
- loeg 2y ago
  Windows Storage Spaces kinda works like this.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  If you just want a mirror, that's easy (I like ZFS but any software RAID should let you add/remove mirrored disks easily). If you mean mirror until it's full then automatically convert to striped, I don't think anyone does that and I don't think anyone would want that, because people who care enough about protecting their data to use a mirror don't want it to automatically stop being a mirror.
- pwg 2y ago
  Mergerfs plus SnapRAID comes close to your ask: https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/mergerfs/ https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/mergerfs/
- kcb 2y ago
  Unraid is probably the closest to that.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  https://www.greyhole.net/ https://www.greyhole.net/ (Not great for many tiny files or file contents changing a lot.)
woleium 2y ago
The image builder for this board looks dodgy af: "The distribution builder is a proprietary commercial offering as it involves a lot of customer IP and integrations so it cannot be public." Seems like a supply side injector to me!
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Yeah, reading through the linked https://hub.libre.computer/t/source-code-git-repository-for-bootloaders-and-firmwares/2743/5 https://hub.libre.computer/t/source-code-git-repository-for-... really sours my opinion of Libre Computer - shipping with UEFI so you can just use generic images is a huge advantage, but creating your default images (and firmware! which is worse, IMO) with a proprietary process is such a big red flag that it makes me question the whole thing. If the firmware is FOSS and you can build it yourself using only FOSS inputs (which isn't obvious to me from that discussion), then you could do that and any old image (again, UEFI to support generic images is a huge win) and it would be fine, but the fact that that's not the default really makes me question the values/culture of the company.
  - rustcleaner 2y ago
    Too bad TALOS II is a $5K motherboard. It actually is open down to the brass firmware tacks!
    - 15155 2y ago
      Are the schematics and gerbers provided somewhere?
- efxhoy 2y ago
  Impossible, they even put “libre” in the name!
- superkuh 2y ago
  Yet another reason to avoid the cargo-culting that is "NAS" for home use cases. Just put the disks in your computers.
iforgotpassword 2y ago
My secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of businesses use them and upgrade on a regular schedule. If you care about power consumption like I do, you can Google "$model energy consumption white paper" which contains very accurate data about idle usage, for example https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy-consumption-ESPRIMO-P9013.pdf https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy... In one case I had a nuc where on Linux after enabling power saving features for the sata controller, idle usage even fell to 5W when the pdf claimed 9. Having an actual pc instead of a random sbc ensures best connectivity, expandability, and software support forever. With almost all sbcs you're stuck with a random-ass kernel from when the damn thing was released, and you basically have to frankenstein together your own up-to-date distro with the old kernel because the vendor certainly doesn't care about updating the random armbian fork they created for that thing.
- k8sToGo 2y ago
  I have a nuc but how do I connect 6 hdds to it?
  - edmundsauto 2y ago
    Add a disk shelf :). Basically supplies power and data cabling for just a rack of drives. Those get interfaced with the NUC via a host based adapter.
    - justin_murray 2y ago
      Can you elaborate? What’s the economic way to do this?
      - inhumantsar 2y ago
        Used PCIe HBA cards pulled from retired servers can be found on eBay for ~$50. They have external facing ports and/or internal facing ports. External is the way to go if you're using a small form factor PC like a business class Lenovo. These are almost all low profile cards, so they will fit in any SFF PC with a PCIe slot. There are special cables which will connect one port on the card to four SATA- or SAS-based disks. The PC's PSU will need SATA power on its cables or else you'll need to scavenge a separate PSU and use the paper clip trick (or better yet, a purpose built connector) to get it to power things on without a motherboard connected. Once you have all of that, then it's just a matter of housing the disks. People have done this with everything from threaded rod and plastidip to 3D printed disk racks to used enterprise JBOD enclosures (Just a Bunch Of Disks, no joke). Total cost for this setup, excluding the disks, can easily be done for less than $200 if you're patient and look for local deals, like a Craiglist post for a bunch of old server hardware that says "free, just come haul it away". Check or r/DataHoarder on reddit or ServeTheHome's blog
loeg 2y ago
The cheapest NAS is usually just taking some old desktop PC and repurposing it headless. :-)
- rasz 2y ago
  or even better - old laptop
  - criddell 2y ago
    Or a Raspberry Pi you have kicking around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l30sADfDiM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l30sADfDiM8
  - askvictor 2y ago
    Yep, optimised for power consumption, and comes with a built in UPS
    - danparsonson 2y ago
      Just be careful leaving an old battery permanently on charge: https://youtu.be/2Z9190ruyIM https://youtu.be/2Z9190ruyIM
- derekdahmer 2y ago
  Assuming power is free. Even small wattage differences add up quickly for a server running 24/7 and those older CPUs can be very inefficient.
  - loeg 2y ago
    5 year old CPUs today (i.e., 2019 era chips) are generally pretty efficient.
  - RockRobotRock 2y ago
    The cost of your sanity also adds up quickly :)
rasz 2y ago
>total 43 So the price of used Sandy Bridge or newer laptop (optionally cracked screen) with 1Gbit ethernet, USB3, couple SATA, couple PCIE lanes (ExpressCard and mpcie slots) and build-in UPS.
haunter 2y ago
Personally I like the Dell/HP/Lenovo Micro PCs. For ~200€ you can get one with an i5-10500T, 16GB DDR4, and 256GB NVMe SSD and it can be upgraded to 64GB RAM with lot of storage (1x NVMe + 1x 2,5")
- cchance 2y ago
  I mean you can get one for 50$ on ebay with similar ram and hd, just with a 6700 or 8700 which is more than enough for a NAS lol
dariosalvi78 2y ago
I had an old RaspberryPi model 2 around, installed OpenMediavault, a couple of USB HDs and off I went [1]. Amazing what you can do with old hardware! [1] https://bochovj.wordpress.com/ https://bochovj.wordpress.com/
cchance 2y ago
I mean wtf wouldn't you just buy a G1 Elite Slice, or any of the various NUC's you can buy for 50$ and get you a full Intel computer with a 6700 or 8700 cpu 4-8gb of ram and a full drive slot, and normally extra space for a m2 and a gbit nic lol
nfriedly 2y ago
My NAS is just my old gaming PC - I swapped out the GPU with a more basic one, and I add another hard drive or two every time storage gets low. It works great and costs me very little in both money and time. I'm currently at 46TB or storage, and I recently threw in a 2.5Gbps NIC when I upgraded the rest of my home network. (Mine certainly uses more electricity than the one in the article, but I pay $0.07/kwh, and run a few docker images that take advantage of the added performance, so I'm happy with it.)
- wildzzz 2y ago
  That's basically my setup. I used to have a dedicated gaming PC and a desktop server but haven't used them in a few years. They both have something wrong with them so I'm just going to frankenstein them together into something pretty good. A 10 year old core i7, 16gb of ram, and an old Nvidia quadro is more than enough to run a bunch of apps and Plex transcoding on top of basic file serving.
superkuh 2y ago
The entire concept of network attached storage is kind of cargo-cult in the vast majority of personal use cases. Just put the drives in your computer. Fewer abstraction layers, fewer problems, cheaper, faster, less fragile, easier to debug and fix if problems do happen. It's just not as hip or cool sounding as "NAS".
- transpute 2y ago
  > Just put the drives in your computer NAS works with phones, tablets and laptops with egregiously expensive, non-expandable storage. On iOS/iPadOS, use SSH/SFTP to workaround business-model-challenged "Files" client.
  - superkuh 2y ago
    A NAS is not magical. It is just a rather limited computer. Anything a NAS can do so can a normal desktop, and it'll do it better. Sharing files over a network is one of these things. Managing the files is way, way, better since you just use your normal desktop file manager rather than some NAS web stuff that'll break due to CA TLS issues in a few years.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - transpute 2y ago
      Among many features, ZFS offers storage snapshots, deduplication and file integrity.
    - ac29 2y ago
      Desktop computers are becoming increasingly uncommon. I'm a pretty technologically inclined person and I havent owned a desktop in years. For most people, laptops have been more than capable enough for their needs for a long time. And for general purpose computing, smartphones are pretty heavily used too.
      - 2y ago
test6554 2y ago
Everyone is an expert at storage as long as everything is working great. It's when stuff fails that you feel like an idiot and wished you had one extra hdd in your RAID array or a secondary NAS you were backing up to or one extra site you offloaded your data to. I don't do cheap any more. But I can see the appeal.
- rovr138 2y ago
  These are all strategies and the price point of the unit doesn’t affect it. Need extra drives, buy extra drives. Need extra NAS for backups?, buy an extra NAS. Need an offsite copy?, buy space and get an offsite NAS and drives for an offsite copy. Price point of the unit doesn’t change anything here.
  - dudus 2y ago
    Synology sure provides an expensive but complete package for home office and enthusiasts. Just buy it and be done with it. It's certainly more expensive than DIY it yourself using off the shelf components and things bought out of online classifieds. But for most people that have no interest in tinkering or don't know what to do, just paying the price of a complete solution might be worth it.
    - MobileVet 2y ago
      Totally. If you enjoy the config and have the time, by all means. If you just want it to work, by a Synology. Mine has been running strong for several years now and has docker images for my unify controller, pi hole and Plex. Took minimal time to setup and none since that day. Love it Edit: And my encrypted cloud backup in Backblaze B2 was equally as easy to setup and costs a whopping $2 a month for every family pic, video and doc. I have triple backup, with mirrored RAID for one of those. No effort, maximum peace of mind.
      - gerdesj 2y ago
        Redundancy and backup are not the same thing. RAID gets you redundancy but if you get pwnd, you get redundantly pwnd! So you backup to elsewhere. Now you have two copies of your data. Cool. Now you probably can recover from a silly mistake from up to a week ago or whatever your retention period is. However, if you don't monitor your backups, you'll never notice certain snags such as ransomware. OK, that might be low risk for your home backups. It's quite hard to get the balance right but I think that you might not be quite as protected as you think you are. Why not buy a cheap hard disk and clone all your data to it every three or six months and stash it somewhere? I have a similar argument with a colleague of mine, to the point that I will probably buy a LTO multi head unit myself and some tapes. RAID is not a backup, its a data integrity thing. It ensures that what you save now stays saved correctly into the future. It protects now. Backups protect the past. Think long and hard about what might go wrong and take suitable steps. For you I think a simple, regular off line back up will work out quite well with minimal cost, for disaster recovery.
squarefoot 2y ago
I'm happy with XigmaNAS (BSD) on a used mini-pc and a multiple USB3.1 HDD enclosure. Speed is excellent as is stability. Having some memory and CPU cycles to spare, I also am playing with Home Assistant Supervised run as a Virtualbox VM inside of it. Regarding that LaFrite board, I mailed a while ago LoverPi, which appears to be the only one selling it, to ask them if they accept PayPal, but got no reply. Does anyone know of a distributor in the EU or a different worldwide seller?
rullopat 2y ago
Ignorant person question here: “why they make NAS servers without ECC memory?”
- dylan604 2y ago
  non-ECC is cheaper. i can't think of any other possible reason. anything else would be a lie to cover up being cheap
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Because they barely do anything. It's like like there's 4TB of RAM in there churning away at multiple databases. It's debatable if you even need it in enterprise servers.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    You absolutely, positively, 100% need it on anything that carries data you care about. I personally consider it a hard requirement for a NAS. I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere.
    - kevinkeller 2y ago
      > I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere. If you have disks set up in RAID 1 or RAID 6, would you still lose data though?
      - extesy 2y ago
        Absolutely. Imagine you are saving a text file to NAS with a super-secret password to your Bitcoin wallet, for example "password". While it was in memory before it reached disk, one bit was flipped and the file contents became "pastword" which OS happily saved on your RAID. And now you've lost your Bitcoins forever.
      - ttyprintk 2y ago
        Consider all the RAM along a network transmission. Maybe you’re using authenticated encryption, maybe your transfer has an internal or out of band checksum. Maybe not.
mschuster91 2y ago
> 100Mb may seem like a joke nowadays, but the main purpose of such a toy NAS for me is to keep a copy of a directory with ~200K small files. Having 1Gb would only marginally improve the syncing speed even if the SBC supported USB 3.0. He's wrong here. The most important thing with small files is latency, and a 1000M network will have significantly less latency than a 100M network. Anyone running TimeMachine over network knows what I mean - local attached storage is blazing fast (particularly SSDs), wired network storage is noticeably worse performing, and wifi is dog f...ing slow.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  So I am a network dummy, but why would 100M vs 1000M have a difference in latency unless the pipe was saturated?
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    Even in an otherwise unsaturated link, the ping packet will take 1/10th of the time to be transmitted, as the transmission clock is 10x faster.
jamesy0ung 2y ago
It’s ironic they call themselves Libre Computer, but don’t release the tools to allow users to create their own images
LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
Performancewise this looks similar to https://gist.github.com/SvenKortekaas/60387b0428b1592e5c9ec0e94230284e https://gist.github.com/SvenKortekaas/60387b0428b1592e5c9ec0... , where the aluminum-case and baseboard were available for about 11USD for a time. (ex. shipping, OFC) The fitting SBC was about the same price, the most expensive part was the high-efficiencý (GAN) wall-wart, and 2.5" Disk. I know this, because I ordered this eons ago :-) Still running somewhere, that thing. 24/7 since then, with some reboots, because updates... Runs Armbian, if you like to, or anything else if you are willing to mess more. Seems to be still on sale, according to https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=85&product_id=222 https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...
lannisterstark 2y ago
You can find ex-corporate dell optiplexes or hp prodesks for like $40 for i5-7/8xxx on eBay in the US. They're fantastic.
321launch 2y ago
Odroid HC-4 is only $73... and lightyears ahead https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  It's triple the price so I would hope it's lightyears ahead. But if you're open to paying that much, well, I was considering that specific board along with some others, then I found an entire 12th gen Intel mini-PC for only 50% more and immediately changed my mind.
shiggaz 2y ago
I found an ex-office HP computer with and i5-4670 on the side of the road and have been thinking about setting it up as a home server. Does anyone have a recommendation for how to set it up as a NAS, VPN, Home Assistant and Plex server?
- raihansaputra 2y ago
  Home Assistant + plugins/extensions ~might be the easiest. Unsure about the VPN part. If you want to tinker and do some sysadmin work, then go install Proxmox and have separate containers for each as you wish.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    Tailscale VPN addon for HomeAssistant is relatively simple to set up. You can use it to access your home network remotely ("site to site networking") or to proxy your network traffic through your home network when you're away ("exit node")
    - raihansaputra 2y ago
      Yeah Tailscale is great. I assumed VPN as in tunneling the whole network external traffic through the machine. I haven't searched for something like that. Might even need a full blown router service/VM.
hajimuz 2y ago
100MB LAN port is unqualified for a NAS…
markhahn 2y ago
cost and power are legitimate motives. I'd probably have started with a rpi-02 though: storage and ethernet over USB is not going to win any races, though it'll compete with what he ended up with...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sandreas 2y ago
I would question all these Raspberry PI-ish NAS attempts, especially when it includes some power adapters and milling out cases. It all feels so fiddly and sluggish while still being "not that cheap". Storing my important personal data on an USB-drive somewhat feels risky. It probably wouldn't burn a house down, but still... The real benefit is the small form factor and the "low" power consumption. Paying 43 bucks for the whole thing - now asking myself if it is worth saving a few bucks and living with 100Mbit network speed, instead of spending 150 bucks and having 2.5Gig. There are so many (also "used") alternatives out there: - Fujitsu Futro S920 (used < 75, ~10W) - FriendlyElec NanoPI R6C (< 150, ~2W, https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=291 https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...) - FriendlyElec Nas Kit (< 150, ~5W, https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=294 https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...) - Dell T20 / T30 (used < 100, ~25W) - Fujitsu Celsius W570 (used < 100, ~15W) My personal NAS / Homeserver: Fujitsu D3417-B Intel Xeon 1225v5 64GB ECC RAM WD SN850x 2TB NVMe Pico PSU 120 More expensive, but reliable, powerful and drawing <10W Idle.
- poulpy123 2y ago
  You are comparing apple and oranges: the SBC used by the author has a consumption of 0.75W idle and 4W Full load
  - sandreas 2y ago
    No I don't. The FriendlyElec NanoPI R6C can be brought to 1W Idle including NVMe SSD and 2.5GBe (and REAL transfer rates of >200MB/s). It's more expensive, but totally worth it in my opinion. See https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/ultra-low-power-ssd-nas-1g-0-85w-idle-2-5g-1-00w-idle.1340466/ https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/ultra-low-powe... Since it has neither ECC nor support for common Open Source NAS Operating Systems, I still would not buy it as my daily driver. I just don't think that a difference of 5W Idle Power is worth the effort of milling out stuff, using USB-Storage and the additional maintenance effort keeping this system up to date.
Yodel0914 2y ago
Although not quite as cheap, I bought a mini pc (Intel N-95, 8GB, 256GB) for not a whole lot more. It has room for a 4TB SSD in a built-in enclosure, which I mirror to an external 4TB HDD nightly. Important stuff is cloud-synced and manually backed up monthly to a external HDD that lives at work. It also runs Jellyfin, minimserver, syncthing etc. One of the nice things is that it has a full sync of my cloud storage, so I don't have think about backing up individual devices much any more: I create a file on my laptop, it syncs to cloud storage, then to the minipc. From that point on it's part of the regular nightly/monthly backup routine. If I hit the 4TB limit it might be a pain, as I'm not sure it'll support an 8TB SSD.
- timbit42 2y ago
  Cloud storage isn't a backup any more than RAID 1 is.
  - danparsonson 2y ago
    Of course it is. PC explodes -> download the cloud copy. Not to be relied on by itself, but it absolutely qualifies as a backup.
    - remram 2y ago
      Backup solutions usually need to cover more scenarios than "PC explodes". In fact solutions for that are usually called "disaster recovery" instead. A real backup solution ought to cover the case where you deleted the wrong file, and you find out the next day. Or it got corrupted somehow (PCs and disks can explode slowly) and you find out the next time you open it, a week later. If the cloud service happily replicated that change, it can't be used to restore anything.
      - Yodel0914 2y ago
        > A real backup solution ought to cover the case where you deleted the wrong file, and you find out the next day. Or it got corrupted somehow (PCs and disks can explode slowly) and you find out the next time you open it, a week later. If the cloud service happily replicated that change, it can't be used to restore anything. a) my cloud storage has file versioning b) as I mentioned, I have a ~24hr old snapshot as well as a ~30d old snapshot The worst practical case is that I lose a month's data, and I'm fine with that.
beAbU 2y ago
As other comments in this thread, I want to echo the value for money that is to be had in refurbished SFF office PCs that come available on the second-hand market. I picked up an HP ultradesk something or other for dirt cheap a while back. When I got it it turned out to be surplus stock, so not even second hand - was brand new, for maybe 20% the retail price. Dead quiet, and super power efficient. It's not the most powerful CPU, but it's 10th or 11th generation which is perfect for hardware encoding for my media server use case. It does not have all the hardware for RAID and multiple hard drives and all that, but one NVME boot disk, and one 16TB spinning rust disk is more than enough for my needs. It's media, so I'm not worried about losing any of it. These boxes are cheap enough that you can get multiple ones responsible for multiple different things in a single "deployment". At one point I had a box for NAS, a box for media server, a box for my CCTV IP cameras and a box running homeassistant. All humming along nicely. Thankfully I was never masochistic enough to try some kubernetes thing orchestrating all the machines together. This is all obviously for the homelab/personal use case. Would not recommend this for anything more serious. But these machines just work, and they are bog standard X86 PCs, which removes a lot of the hardware config and incompatibility bullshit associated with more niche platforms.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  I'd rather have 2 devices with a single drive, each having its own copy of the data than one with a RAID 1.
jokethrowaway 2y ago
Same reason I'm not buying another raspberry pi, I'd rather have solar panels and an old reliable pc running somewhere
meowmeow20 2y ago
My "NAS" and homeserver is an old Lenovo ThinkCentre mini PC with a large SSD inside. My "RAID" is an rclone cloud backup. Might be a bit scuffed but it works really well, at least for me.
INTPenis 2y ago
Personally I don't want to put too much stuff on my router/firewall. The reason I run OpenBSD on it is because I want it to be as secure as possible, it has the final word in my network and it's the outer most device of my network. For storage I've been using Synology for a long time, first ds411+slim and now a ds620slim. I love the slim form factor, only 2.5" drives. It just works™
banish-m4 2y ago
Cheap, but not necessarily good, expandable, or resilient. Although, I can tell you what not to do: a 45 drive SAS/2 or /3 4U JBOD case takes way too much power to use all the time and uses screaming 1U fans and PSUs by default. I do have 45 drives in various XFS on md raid10 arrays. Don't even mention ZoL ZFS because that was a fucking disaster of undocumented, under-tested, and SoL "support" for something that should only be used on a proper Sun box like a Thumper. XFS and md are fairly bulletproof. Perhaps one can Ceph their way into significant storage with a crap ton of tiny DIY boxes, but it's going to be a pain to deploy and manage, take lots of space, and probably damn expensive to physically install, network, and provide UPS for.
HelloNurse 2y ago
What convenient solutions exist for graceful shutdown of a NAS, without data loss or other drama, in case of power outage? It seems a more pressing concern than flipped bits or network failures.
- switch007 2y ago
  A filesystem designed to survive sudden power loss? Which is most modern ones right?
- Snoddas 2y ago
  The common solution is having an UPS and a NAS that supports graceful shutdown when the UPS detects powerloss
- badgersnake 2y ago
  My Helios64 has a built in backup battery. I'm not sure they are available anymore (and I wouldn't recommend anyway for other reasons) but I imagine other NASs have similar setups.
okasaki 2y ago
If you need to add storage to just one computer (at a time), consider just getting a hard drive enclosure. It's much simpler, cheaper, more secure, and faster than a NAS. You can turn it into a NAS at any time by adding a mini pc or similar.
ulnarkressty 2y ago
I'd say the cheapest NAS would be an external HDD plugged in your WiFi router - most of them have at least one USB port nowadays, with some offering advanced features like photo gallery etc.
crabbone 2y ago
> up-to-date Debian OP has a perverse sense of humor :) ---- But, not to waste space on this mindless joke, here's my (or, more precisely, my wife's) success story. So, I've had it with a laptop and built myself a PC. Money wasn't really a problem, I just wanted to make sure I will have enough of everything, and spares, if necessary. So, I've got a be quiet case with eight caddies and a place for a SATA SSD. It's expensive... but it doubles as my main workstation, so I don't have any regrets about spending more on it! It has a ton of room for installing fans. It has like ten of them at this point, plus liquid cooling. The wifi modem that was built into the mobo that I bought doesn't have a good Linux driver... but the case has a ton of space, and so I could stick an external PCIe wifi modem. And I still have plenty of room left. Anyways. My wife was given some space for her research in the institute she works for. And they get this space through some unknown company with vanishing IT support, where, in the end, all the company does is putting a fancy HTML front-end on Azure cloud services, sometimes mismanaging the underlying infrastructure. While the usage was uncomfortable but palatable, she continued using it. Then the bill came, and oh dear! And then she needed to use a piece of software that really, absolutely, unquestionably needs to be able to create symlinks. And the unknown company with vanishing IT has put together their research environment in such a way that NAS is connected via SMB, and... no symlinks. So... I bought a bunch of 4T hard-drives, and now she has all the space she needs for her research. She doesn't even pay for electricity :(
ChuckMcM 2y ago
Interesting cheap low power system. My brain connects "NAS" with "Data I value" and there isn't anything in the author's system that is focused on enhancing the data integrity. Not saying that is bad, just saying it's the thing that often makes commercial NAS system both more expensive and more power consumptive. I've got an 8 drive RAID-6 setup as a ZFS pool[1]. More power, last I checked about 50W when idle, close to 150W when "working", but I think at this point I've had failures in nearly every piece that ended up replacing something but never lost any data, never corrupted any files. Replaced the power supply, the mother board, and two drives. I haven't had to replace any memory but I do have an extra stick "spare" because that is the kind of thing that ages out and is hard to replace (it's DDR3 memory but I've had systems with DDR2 so really hard to get DIMMS for). That said, I do see a lot of value in low power systems like that of the author and run a couple. The way I do the energy calculation though is that I boot them off internal storage (MMC/SD) and then mount a root filesystem from the NAS. That way they don't have any storage power cost directly, they are easy to replace, and the power consumed by my NAS is amortized over a number of systems. giving it some less obvious economics. [1] It is an iXSystems FreeNAS based system.
bastawhiz 2y ago
> The remedy is to turn UAS off via adding usb-storage.quirks=152d:0578:u to the kernel cmdline. This is the point where I'd have thrown it in the trash and given up. I simply don't know how people have the patience to debug past stuff like this: I get that the point of the project is to be cheap and simple, but this is expensive in time and decidedly not simple.
theLastOfCats 2y ago
Old PC or terramaster enclosure from aliexpress
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
vermaden 2y ago
Its very hard to beat Dell Wyse 3030 LT with USB attached disks. - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/silent-fanless-dell-wyse-3030-lt-freebsd-server/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/silent-fanless-del... I use that and the costs are about $20-25 for a used Dell Wyse 3030 and $60 for used 5TB 2.5 HDD from Seagate in USB 3.0 case. Then the power bills will also be tiny as it draw about 3.8W when idle and 10.3 W with CPU and disks stressed to maximum. The only limitation is 'only' 2GB RAM - but with ZFS ARC set to 32MB minimum and 64MB maximum RAM is not an issue. % grep arc /etc/sysctl.conf vfs.zfs.arc.min=33554432 vfs.zfs.arc.max=67108864 Regards.
- metadat 2y ago
  Note: S.M.A.R.T. status info can't be read from USB attached drives. You have no idea if they're throwing errors indicating imminent doom.
  - vermaden 2y ago
    On FreeBSD getting S.M.A.R.T. status over USB drive works without any problem: # smartctl -a /dev/da0 smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE-p1 amd64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Western Digital Elements / My Passport (USB, AF) Device Model: WDC WD50NDZW-11A8JS1 Serial Number: WD-WXP2EA07UYLA LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2be7aef41 Firmware Version: 01.01A01 User Capacity: 5,000,947,523,584 bytes [5.00 TB] Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical Rotation Rate: 5400 rpm Form Factor: 2.5 inches TRIM Command: Available, deterministic Device is: In smartctl database 7.3/5528 ATA Version is: ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5 SATA Version is: SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s) Local Time is: Sat May 11 10:26:04 2024 CEST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity was never started. Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 4680) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x1b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. No Conveyance Self-test supported. No Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 560) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x30b5) SCT Status supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 253 253 021 Pre-fail Always - 3508 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 4626 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 083 083 000 Old_age Always - 12789 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 139 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 58 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 192 192 000 Old_age Always - 24665 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 086 083 000 Old_age Always - 66 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 No self-tests have been logged. [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t] Selective Self-tests/Logging not supported The above only provides legacy SMART information - try 'smartctl -x' for more
RockRobotRock 2y ago
Jeez just buy a real computer. Optiplexes are dirt cheap

342 points by henry_flower 2y ago

That's pretty cool. Fits their use case for sure. I would probably opt to spend a little more for a gigabit port. From what I've seen watching Jeff Geerling, you can setup a pretty reasonable performing NAS on something on these small SBCs.

geerlingguy 2y ago
Any of the latest generation Arm SBCs is actually pretty adequate for NAS purposes, especially if that's all you want to run on it. If you get a Pi 4 or Pi 5, or one of the Rockchip boards with RK3566 or RK3588 (the latter is much more pricey, but can get gigabit-plus speeds), you can either attach a USB hard drive or SSD, or with most of them now you could add on an M.2 drive or an adapter for SATA hard drives/SSDs, and even do RAID over 1 Gbps or sometimes 2.5 Gbps with no issue. Some people choose to run OpenMediaVault (which is fine), though I have my NASes set up using Ansible + ZFS running on bare Debian, as it's simpler for me to manage that way: https://github.com/geerlingguy/arm-nas https://github.com/geerlingguy/arm-nas I would go with Radxa or maybe Libre Computer if you're not going the Raspberry Pi route, they both have images for their latest boards that are decent, though I almost always have issues with HDMI output, so be prepared to set things up over SSH or serial console.

Scene_Cast2 2y ago

Note that it doesn't look like it has ECC, so make sure to have backups. Fancy file systems like ZFS don't remove the need for ECC.

coconut08 2y ago
been using zfs on my home nas without ecc for well over a decade and never had any problems. i've seen people claiming this since before i started using zfs and it seems so unnecessary for some random home project.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  Unless you've verified hashes of your files over time you may be having problems and not realizing it.
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    If a single byte flips in a 4-10GB video file, nobody will ever notice it. There aren't that many cases where it actually matters.
  - loeg 2y ago
    I believe ZFS does periodic checksuming (scrubbing).
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      Strictly speaking I don't think ZFS itself does, but it is very common for distros to ship a cronjob that runs `zpool scrub` on a schedule (often but not always default enabled).
  - ratboy666 2y ago
    They did mention ZFS, so verified hashes of each file block. I hope they are scrubbing, and have at least one snapshot.
    - mmh0000 2y ago
      ZFS does nothing to protect you against RAM corrupting your data before ZFS sees it. All you'll end up with is a valid checksum of the now bad data. You can Google more, but, I'll just leave this from the first page of the openZFS manual: Misinformation has been circulated that ZFS data integrity features are somehow worse than those of other filesystems when ECC RAM is not used. This is not the case: all software needs ECC RAM for reliable operation and ZFS is no different from any other filesystem in that regard.[1] [1] https://openzfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html https://openzfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html
    - 2y ago
jnovek 2y ago
> so make sure to have backups Can you (or someone) suggest a backup scheme? I have a 28TB NAS. Almost everything I've looked into is expensive or intended more for enterprise tier. Are there options for backup in the "hobbyist" price range?
- Dxtros 2y ago
  if your talking cloud backup Wasabi (which uses S3) is the cheapest i could find it’s pay as you go and they don’t charge for upload/download. The pay as you go is $6.99 per TB which would be pretty pricey at 28 TB, but it’s super cheap for my 4tb NAS.
- vunderba 2y ago
  I have a NAS that has 18 TB effective storage, 36 TB mirrored. It all gets backed up to a B2 back blaze which is about six dollars per terabyte - but I'm currently only using about 8 TB at the moment so it's only about 50 bucks a month. So this might be on the higher end of the price range if you're using up all 28 TB uncompressed since that's about $168 per month though...
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  AWS, GCP, and Azure all offer cold storage for about $1 per TB per month. If you want any cheaper you need to build a second NAS. You could also take the awkward route and add one or two large drives to your desktop, mirror there, and back that up to backblaze (not B2). The other suggestions you got for hot storage strike me as the wrong way to handle this, if you're considering $80 per year per TB for backups then just make another NAS.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    For the OP - be careful with AWS, the closest pricing to one dollar per terabyte is S3 Glacier Deep Archive and you'd be surprised how expensive a full restore can be in the event that you need to do so in terms of restore pricing, egress cost, etc. Another NAS isn't really a good solution (unless you can place it in a different house) - the goal of a cloud back up is that it's offsite.
hitsurume 2y ago
I know ECC is a special type of ram, but how does it help a NAS/Raid setup?
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  Data that's about to be written to disk often resides in ram for some period of time - bit flips in non-ECC ram can silently corrupt the data before writing it out. ZFS doesn't prevent this though it might detect it with checksumming. https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/ https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...
- eric__cartman 2y ago
  If you're unlucky enough to experience memory errors in one of the intermediate buffers files go through while being copied from one computer to another an incorrect copy of the file might get written to disk. When running software RAID, memory errors could also cause data to be replicated erroneously and raise an error the next time it's read. That said if the memory is flaky enough that these errors are common it's highly likely that the operating system will crash very frequently and the user will know something is seriously wrong. If you want to make sure that files have been copied correctly you can flush all kernel buffers and run diff -r between the source and destination directory to make sure that everything is the same. It's probably way more likely to experience data loss due to human error or external factors such as a power surge than bad ram. I personally thoroughly test the memory before a computer gets put into service and assume it's okay until something fails or it gets replaced. The only machine I've ever seen that would corrupt random data on a disk was heavily and carelessly overclocked (teenage me cared about getting moar fps in games, and not having a reliable workstation lol)
  - barnabee 2y ago
    I wonder whether something like Syncthing would notice a hash difference with data corruption caused by such a memory error? And whether it’d correct it or propagate the issue…
theshrike79 2y ago
I've had non-ECC NAS systems for over 20 years and I've had exactly zero cases where memory corruption was an issue. It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for personal setups.
- jjav 2y ago
  > It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for personal setups. My personal files are ultimately a lot more important to me and much more irreplaceable than any files at work. I'd never run a NAS without ZFS and ECC.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    I don’t think I’ve ever had ECC, and have never had any issues. What kind of problems would you expect to see?
    - averageRoyalty 2y ago
      Non shielded RAM is subject to bit flipping. Non-ECC always carries this risk in general computing, but the problem is compounded when you run a filesystem like ZFS which uses memory as a significant storage element for write cache. If it would hugely impact your life if a bit were flipped from a 0 to 1 in your stored data - say you make videos or store your bitcoin wallet key on your NAS - you are running a risk not using ECC. You may not have had issues or ever have issues with non-ECC. Your car may never be stolen if you leave the keys in either, but it's not a good risk proposition for most people.
    - toast0 2y ago
      Well part of it is you likely won't see the problem until a long time after it happens. But on servers with ECC and reporting I saw several different patterns: a) 99%+ (or something) of the servers had zero reported errors for their lifetime. Memory usually works, no problems experienced. b) Some of the servers reported one error, one time, and then all was well for the rest of their life. If this happens without ECC, and you're lucky, it's in some memory that doesn't really matter and it's no big deal. Or maybe it crashes your kernel because it's in the right spot (flip a bit in a pointer/return address and it's easy to crash). Or maybe it managed to flip a bit in a pending write and your file is stored wrong and the zfs checksum is calculated on the wrong data. If you're really unlucky, you could probably write bad metadata and have a real hard time mounting the filesystem later? c) some servers reported the same address with a correctable error once a day; probably one bit stuck, any time data transits that address, that bit is still stuck, and that will likely cause trouble. If it's used for kernel memory, you'll probably end up crashing sooner or later. d) some servers had a lot more ram errors; sometimes a slow ramp to a hundred a day, once or twice a rapid ramp to so many that the system spent most of its time handling machine check exceptions, but did manage to stay online but developed a queue it could never process. Once you're at these levels, you'll probably get crashes, but you might write some bad data first. Ram testing helps on systems without ECC, but you won't really know if/when the ram has gone from working 100% to working almost 100%. I have a desktop that was running fine for a while, tests fine, but crashes in ways that have to be bad ram, and removing one stick seems to have fixed it.
singron 2y ago
This is only 1 disk, so you are way more likely to lose all your data due to an ordinary single disk failure than to some ram errors.
Spooky23 2y ago
ECC for nerds is like gear heads arguing about motor oil.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Only if one set of gear heads was arguing that you don't really need it.
Lammy 2y ago
Hate to see this downvoted because I have personally lost files to ZFS on failing non-ECC memory. It was all my most-used stuff too because those were the files I was actually accessing, then it would compare checksum in memory to checksum on disk and decide disk was the one that was wrong. I noticed via audible blips appearing in my FLACs and verified with `flac -t <bad_flac>`.

jstanley 2y ago

When people set up these NAS's, how are they accessing the files? NFS? SFTP? And how are you accessing it when away from home? A VPN that you're permanently connected to? Is there a good way to do NAT hole-punching? Syncthing kind of does what I want, in that it lets all my computers sync the same files no matter what network they're on, but it insists on always copying all the files ("syncing") whereas I just want them stored on the NAS but accessible everywhere. Nextcloud kind of does what I want but when I tried it before it struck me as flaky and unreliable, and seemed to do a load of stuff I don't want or need.

sleepybrett 2y ago
Mostly CIFS, I use tailscale to put my laptop inside of my home network wherever I go.
adastra22 2y ago
Depends on your use case. I just use scp and access the NAS box through Tor when traveling, so I don’t have to open up any ports.
universa1 2y ago
Regarding the connectivity: tailscale... So far I am happy with them and the free plan hasn't been kneecapped afterwards (so far).
- stavros 2y ago
  Even if it is, you can run Headscale on a server somewhere (or just pay).
- BXlnt2EachOther 2y ago
  IIRC they have improved the free plan over time, and even mailed users suggesting the relaxed limits might enable moving from paid to free tier [1]. I barely use my tailnet now, might have more of a case for it later, but they are near the top of my "wishing you success but please don't get acquired by a company that will ruin it" list. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615848

CyberDildonics 2y ago

Is there any NAS software that just lets you add disks whenever you want, while using them for redundancy if they aren't full? I wish something was as easy as adding another disk and having the redundancy go up, then removing a disk and having the redundancy go down.

loeg 2y ago
Windows Storage Spaces kinda works like this.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
If you just want a mirror, that's easy (I like ZFS but any software RAID should let you add/remove mirrored disks easily). If you mean mirror until it's full then automatically convert to striped, I don't think anyone does that and I don't think anyone would want that, because people who care enough about protecting their data to use a mirror don't want it to automatically stop being a mirror.
pwg 2y ago
Mergerfs plus SnapRAID comes close to your ask: https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/mergerfs/ https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/mergerfs/
kcb 2y ago
Unraid is probably the closest to that.
actionfromafar 2y ago
https://www.greyhole.net/ https://www.greyhole.net/ (Not great for many tiny files or file contents changing a lot.)

woleium 2y ago

The image builder for this board looks dodgy af: "The distribution builder is a proprietary commercial offering as it involves a lot of customer IP and integrations so it cannot be public." Seems like a supply side injector to me!

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Yeah, reading through the linked https://hub.libre.computer/t/source-code-git-repository-for-bootloaders-and-firmwares/2743/5 https://hub.libre.computer/t/source-code-git-repository-for-... really sours my opinion of Libre Computer - shipping with UEFI so you can just use generic images is a huge advantage, but creating your default images (and firmware! which is worse, IMO) with a proprietary process is such a big red flag that it makes me question the whole thing. If the firmware is FOSS and you can build it yourself using only FOSS inputs (which isn't obvious to me from that discussion), then you could do that and any old image (again, UEFI to support generic images is a huge win) and it would be fine, but the fact that that's not the default really makes me question the values/culture of the company.
- rustcleaner 2y ago
  Too bad TALOS II is a $5K motherboard. It actually is open down to the brass firmware tacks!
  - 15155 2y ago
    Are the schematics and gerbers provided somewhere?
efxhoy 2y ago
Impossible, they even put “libre” in the name!
superkuh 2y ago
Yet another reason to avoid the cargo-culting that is "NAS" for home use cases. Just put the disks in your computers.

iforgotpassword 2y ago

My secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of businesses use them and upgrade on a regular schedule. If you care about power consumption like I do, you can Google "$model energy consumption white paper" which contains very accurate data about idle usage, for example https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy-consumption-ESPRIMO-P9013.pdf https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy... In one case I had a nuc where on Linux after enabling power saving features for the sata controller, idle usage even fell to 5W when the pdf claimed 9. Having an actual pc instead of a random sbc ensures best connectivity, expandability, and software support forever. With almost all sbcs you're stuck with a random-ass kernel from when the damn thing was released, and you basically have to frankenstein together your own up-to-date distro with the old kernel because the vendor certainly doesn't care about updating the random armbian fork they created for that thing.

k8sToGo 2y ago
I have a nuc but how do I connect 6 hdds to it?
- edmundsauto 2y ago
  Add a disk shelf :). Basically supplies power and data cabling for just a rack of drives. Those get interfaced with the NUC via a host based adapter.
  - justin_murray 2y ago
    Can you elaborate? What’s the economic way to do this?
    - inhumantsar 2y ago
      Used PCIe HBA cards pulled from retired servers can be found on eBay for ~$50. They have external facing ports and/or internal facing ports. External is the way to go if you're using a small form factor PC like a business class Lenovo. These are almost all low profile cards, so they will fit in any SFF PC with a PCIe slot. There are special cables which will connect one port on the card to four SATA- or SAS-based disks. The PC's PSU will need SATA power on its cables or else you'll need to scavenge a separate PSU and use the paper clip trick (or better yet, a purpose built connector) to get it to power things on without a motherboard connected. Once you have all of that, then it's just a matter of housing the disks. People have done this with everything from threaded rod and plastidip to 3D printed disk racks to used enterprise JBOD enclosures (Just a Bunch Of Disks, no joke). Total cost for this setup, excluding the disks, can easily be done for less than $200 if you're patient and look for local deals, like a Craiglist post for a bunch of old server hardware that says "free, just come haul it away". Check or r/DataHoarder on reddit or ServeTheHome's blog

loeg 2y ago

The cheapest NAS is usually just taking some old desktop PC and repurposing it headless. :-)

rasz 2y ago
or even better - old laptop
- criddell 2y ago
  Or a Raspberry Pi you have kicking around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l30sADfDiM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l30sADfDiM8
- askvictor 2y ago
  Yep, optimised for power consumption, and comes with a built in UPS
  - danparsonson 2y ago
    Just be careful leaving an old battery permanently on charge: https://youtu.be/2Z9190ruyIM https://youtu.be/2Z9190ruyIM
derekdahmer 2y ago
Assuming power is free. Even small wattage differences add up quickly for a server running 24/7 and those older CPUs can be very inefficient.
- loeg 2y ago
  5 year old CPUs today (i.e., 2019 era chips) are generally pretty efficient.
- RockRobotRock 2y ago
  The cost of your sanity also adds up quickly :)

rasz 2y ago

>total 43 So the price of used Sandy Bridge or newer laptop (optionally cracked screen) with 1Gbit ethernet, USB3, couple SATA, couple PCIE lanes (ExpressCard and mpcie slots) and build-in UPS.

haunter 2y ago

Personally I like the Dell/HP/Lenovo Micro PCs. For ~200€ you can get one with an i5-10500T, 16GB DDR4, and 256GB NVMe SSD and it can be upgraded to 64GB RAM with lot of storage (1x NVMe + 1x 2,5")

cchance 2y ago
I mean you can get one for 50$ on ebay with similar ram and hd, just with a 6700 or 8700 which is more than enough for a NAS lol

dariosalvi78 2y ago

I had an old RaspberryPi model 2 around, installed OpenMediavault, a couple of USB HDs and off I went [1]. Amazing what you can do with old hardware! [1] https://bochovj.wordpress.com/ https://bochovj.wordpress.com/

cchance 2y ago

I mean wtf wouldn't you just buy a G1 Elite Slice, or any of the various NUC's you can buy for 50$ and get you a full Intel computer with a 6700 or 8700 cpu 4-8gb of ram and a full drive slot, and normally extra space for a m2 and a gbit nic lol

nfriedly 2y ago

My NAS is just my old gaming PC - I swapped out the GPU with a more basic one, and I add another hard drive or two every time storage gets low. It works great and costs me very little in both money and time. I'm currently at 46TB or storage, and I recently threw in a 2.5Gbps NIC when I upgraded the rest of my home network. (Mine certainly uses more electricity than the one in the article, but I pay $0.07/kwh, and run a few docker images that take advantage of the added performance, so I'm happy with it.)

wildzzz 2y ago
That's basically my setup. I used to have a dedicated gaming PC and a desktop server but haven't used them in a few years. They both have something wrong with them so I'm just going to frankenstein them together into something pretty good. A 10 year old core i7, 16gb of ram, and an old Nvidia quadro is more than enough to run a bunch of apps and Plex transcoding on top of basic file serving.

superkuh 2y ago

The entire concept of network attached storage is kind of cargo-cult in the vast majority of personal use cases. Just put the drives in your computer. Fewer abstraction layers, fewer problems, cheaper, faster, less fragile, easier to debug and fix if problems do happen. It's just not as hip or cool sounding as "NAS".

transpute 2y ago
> Just put the drives in your computer NAS works with phones, tablets and laptops with egregiously expensive, non-expandable storage. On iOS/iPadOS, use SSH/SFTP to workaround business-model-challenged "Files" client.
- superkuh 2y ago
  A NAS is not magical. It is just a rather limited computer. Anything a NAS can do so can a normal desktop, and it'll do it better. Sharing files over a network is one of these things. Managing the files is way, way, better since you just use your normal desktop file manager rather than some NAS web stuff that'll break due to CA TLS issues in a few years.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - transpute 2y ago
    Among many features, ZFS offers storage snapshots, deduplication and file integrity.
  - ac29 2y ago
    Desktop computers are becoming increasingly uncommon. I'm a pretty technologically inclined person and I havent owned a desktop in years. For most people, laptops have been more than capable enough for their needs for a long time. And for general purpose computing, smartphones are pretty heavily used too.
    - 2y ago

test6554 2y ago

Everyone is an expert at storage as long as everything is working great. It's when stuff fails that you feel like an idiot and wished you had one extra hdd in your RAID array or a secondary NAS you were backing up to or one extra site you offloaded your data to. I don't do cheap any more. But I can see the appeal.

rovr138 2y ago
These are all strategies and the price point of the unit doesn’t affect it. Need extra drives, buy extra drives. Need extra NAS for backups?, buy an extra NAS. Need an offsite copy?, buy space and get an offsite NAS and drives for an offsite copy. Price point of the unit doesn’t change anything here.
- dudus 2y ago
  Synology sure provides an expensive but complete package for home office and enthusiasts. Just buy it and be done with it. It's certainly more expensive than DIY it yourself using off the shelf components and things bought out of online classifieds. But for most people that have no interest in tinkering or don't know what to do, just paying the price of a complete solution might be worth it.
  - MobileVet 2y ago
    Totally. If you enjoy the config and have the time, by all means. If you just want it to work, by a Synology. Mine has been running strong for several years now and has docker images for my unify controller, pi hole and Plex. Took minimal time to setup and none since that day. Love it Edit: And my encrypted cloud backup in Backblaze B2 was equally as easy to setup and costs a whopping $2 a month for every family pic, video and doc. I have triple backup, with mirrored RAID for one of those. No effort, maximum peace of mind.
    - gerdesj 2y ago
      Redundancy and backup are not the same thing. RAID gets you redundancy but if you get pwnd, you get redundantly pwnd! So you backup to elsewhere. Now you have two copies of your data. Cool. Now you probably can recover from a silly mistake from up to a week ago or whatever your retention period is. However, if you don't monitor your backups, you'll never notice certain snags such as ransomware. OK, that might be low risk for your home backups. It's quite hard to get the balance right but I think that you might not be quite as protected as you think you are. Why not buy a cheap hard disk and clone all your data to it every three or six months and stash it somewhere? I have a similar argument with a colleague of mine, to the point that I will probably buy a LTO multi head unit myself and some tapes. RAID is not a backup, its a data integrity thing. It ensures that what you save now stays saved correctly into the future. It protects now. Backups protect the past. Think long and hard about what might go wrong and take suitable steps. For you I think a simple, regular off line back up will work out quite well with minimal cost, for disaster recovery.

squarefoot 2y ago

I'm happy with XigmaNAS (BSD) on a used mini-pc and a multiple USB3.1 HDD enclosure. Speed is excellent as is stability. Having some memory and CPU cycles to spare, I also am playing with Home Assistant Supervised run as a Virtualbox VM inside of it. Regarding that LaFrite board, I mailed a while ago LoverPi, which appears to be the only one selling it, to ask them if they accept PayPal, but got no reply. Does anyone know of a distributor in the EU or a different worldwide seller?

rullopat 2y ago

Ignorant person question here: “why they make NAS servers without ECC memory?”

dylan604 2y ago
non-ECC is cheaper. i can't think of any other possible reason. anything else would be a lie to cover up being cheap
bongodongobob 2y ago
Because they barely do anything. It's like like there's 4TB of RAM in there churning away at multiple databases. It's debatable if you even need it in enterprise servers.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  You absolutely, positively, 100% need it on anything that carries data you care about. I personally consider it a hard requirement for a NAS. I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere.
  - kevinkeller 2y ago
    > I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere. If you have disks set up in RAID 1 or RAID 6, would you still lose data though?
    - extesy 2y ago
      Absolutely. Imagine you are saving a text file to NAS with a super-secret password to your Bitcoin wallet, for example "password". While it was in memory before it reached disk, one bit was flipped and the file contents became "pastword" which OS happily saved on your RAID. And now you've lost your Bitcoins forever.
    - ttyprintk 2y ago
      Consider all the RAM along a network transmission. Maybe you’re using authenticated encryption, maybe your transfer has an internal or out of band checksum. Maybe not.

mschuster91 2y ago

> 100Mb may seem like a joke nowadays, but the main purpose of such a toy NAS for me is to keep a copy of a directory with ~200K small files. Having 1Gb would only marginally improve the syncing speed even if the SBC supported USB 3.0. He's wrong here. The most important thing with small files is latency, and a 1000M network will have significantly less latency than a 100M network. Anyone running TimeMachine over network knows what I mean - local attached storage is blazing fast (particularly SSDs), wired network storage is noticeably worse performing, and wifi is dog f...ing slow.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
So I am a network dummy, but why would 100M vs 1000M have a difference in latency unless the pipe was saturated?
- mschuster91 2y ago
  Even in an otherwise unsaturated link, the ping packet will take 1/10th of the time to be transmitted, as the transmission clock is 10x faster.

jamesy0ung 2y ago

It’s ironic they call themselves Libre Computer, but don’t release the tools to allow users to create their own images

LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago

Performancewise this looks similar to https://gist.github.com/SvenKortekaas/60387b0428b1592e5c9ec0e94230284e https://gist.github.com/SvenKortekaas/60387b0428b1592e5c9ec0... , where the aluminum-case and baseboard were available for about 11USD for a time. (ex. shipping, OFC) The fitting SBC was about the same price, the most expensive part was the high-efficiencý (GAN) wall-wart, and 2.5" Disk. I know this, because I ordered this eons ago :-) Still running somewhere, that thing. 24/7 since then, with some reboots, because updates... Runs Armbian, if you like to, or anything else if you are willing to mess more. Seems to be still on sale, according to https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=85&product_id=222 https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...

lannisterstark 2y ago

You can find ex-corporate dell optiplexes or hp prodesks for like $40 for i5-7/8xxx on eBay in the US. They're fantastic.

321launch 2y ago

Odroid HC-4 is only $73... and lightyears ahead https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/

Dylan16807 2y ago
It's triple the price so I would hope it's lightyears ahead. But if you're open to paying that much, well, I was considering that specific board along with some others, then I found an entire 12th gen Intel mini-PC for only 50% more and immediately changed my mind.

shiggaz 2y ago

I found an ex-office HP computer with and i5-4670 on the side of the road and have been thinking about setting it up as a home server. Does anyone have a recommendation for how to set it up as a NAS, VPN, Home Assistant and Plex server?

raihansaputra 2y ago
Home Assistant + plugins/extensions ~might be the easiest. Unsure about the VPN part. If you want to tinker and do some sysadmin work, then go install Proxmox and have separate containers for each as you wish.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  Tailscale VPN addon for HomeAssistant is relatively simple to set up. You can use it to access your home network remotely ("site to site networking") or to proxy your network traffic through your home network when you're away ("exit node")
  - raihansaputra 2y ago
    Yeah Tailscale is great. I assumed VPN as in tunneling the whole network external traffic through the machine. I haven't searched for something like that. Might even need a full blown router service/VM.

hajimuz 2y ago

100MB LAN port is unqualified for a NAS…

markhahn 2y ago

cost and power are legitimate motives. I'd probably have started with a rpi-02 though: storage and ethernet over USB is not going to win any races, though it'll compete with what he ended up with...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sandreas 2y ago

I would question all these Raspberry PI-ish NAS attempts, especially when it includes some power adapters and milling out cases. It all feels so fiddly and sluggish while still being "not that cheap". Storing my important personal data on an USB-drive somewhat feels risky. It probably wouldn't burn a house down, but still... The real benefit is the small form factor and the "low" power consumption. Paying 43 bucks for the whole thing - now asking myself if it is worth saving a few bucks and living with 100Mbit network speed, instead of spending 150 bucks and having 2.5Gig. There are so many (also "used") alternatives out there: - Fujitsu Futro S920 (used < 75, ~10W) - FriendlyElec NanoPI R6C (< 150, ~2W, https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=291 https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...) - FriendlyElec Nas Kit (< 150, ~5W, https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=294 https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...) - Dell T20 / T30 (used < 100, ~25W) - Fujitsu Celsius W570 (used < 100, ~15W) My personal NAS / Homeserver: Fujitsu D3417-B Intel Xeon 1225v5 64GB ECC RAM WD SN850x 2TB NVMe Pico PSU 120 More expensive, but reliable, powerful and drawing <10W Idle.

poulpy123 2y ago
You are comparing apple and oranges: the SBC used by the author has a consumption of 0.75W idle and 4W Full load
- sandreas 2y ago
  No I don't. The FriendlyElec NanoPI R6C can be brought to 1W Idle including NVMe SSD and 2.5GBe (and REAL transfer rates of >200MB/s). It's more expensive, but totally worth it in my opinion. See https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/ultra-low-power-ssd-nas-1g-0-85w-idle-2-5g-1-00w-idle.1340466/ https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/ultra-low-powe... Since it has neither ECC nor support for common Open Source NAS Operating Systems, I still would not buy it as my daily driver. I just don't think that a difference of 5W Idle Power is worth the effort of milling out stuff, using USB-Storage and the additional maintenance effort keeping this system up to date.

Yodel0914 2y ago

Although not quite as cheap, I bought a mini pc (Intel N-95, 8GB, 256GB) for not a whole lot more. It has room for a 4TB SSD in a built-in enclosure, which I mirror to an external 4TB HDD nightly. Important stuff is cloud-synced and manually backed up monthly to a external HDD that lives at work. It also runs Jellyfin, minimserver, syncthing etc. One of the nice things is that it has a full sync of my cloud storage, so I don't have think about backing up individual devices much any more: I create a file on my laptop, it syncs to cloud storage, then to the minipc. From that point on it's part of the regular nightly/monthly backup routine. If I hit the 4TB limit it might be a pain, as I'm not sure it'll support an 8TB SSD.

timbit42 2y ago
Cloud storage isn't a backup any more than RAID 1 is.
- danparsonson 2y ago
  Of course it is. PC explodes -> download the cloud copy. Not to be relied on by itself, but it absolutely qualifies as a backup.
  - remram 2y ago
    Backup solutions usually need to cover more scenarios than "PC explodes". In fact solutions for that are usually called "disaster recovery" instead. A real backup solution ought to cover the case where you deleted the wrong file, and you find out the next day. Or it got corrupted somehow (PCs and disks can explode slowly) and you find out the next time you open it, a week later. If the cloud service happily replicated that change, it can't be used to restore anything.
    - Yodel0914 2y ago
      > A real backup solution ought to cover the case where you deleted the wrong file, and you find out the next day. Or it got corrupted somehow (PCs and disks can explode slowly) and you find out the next time you open it, a week later. If the cloud service happily replicated that change, it can't be used to restore anything. a) my cloud storage has file versioning b) as I mentioned, I have a ~24hr old snapshot as well as a ~30d old snapshot The worst practical case is that I lose a month's data, and I'm fine with that.

beAbU 2y ago

As other comments in this thread, I want to echo the value for money that is to be had in refurbished SFF office PCs that come available on the second-hand market. I picked up an HP ultradesk something or other for dirt cheap a while back. When I got it it turned out to be surplus stock, so not even second hand - was brand new, for maybe 20% the retail price. Dead quiet, and super power efficient. It's not the most powerful CPU, but it's 10th or 11th generation which is perfect for hardware encoding for my media server use case. It does not have all the hardware for RAID and multiple hard drives and all that, but one NVME boot disk, and one 16TB spinning rust disk is more than enough for my needs. It's media, so I'm not worried about losing any of it. These boxes are cheap enough that you can get multiple ones responsible for multiple different things in a single "deployment". At one point I had a box for NAS, a box for media server, a box for my CCTV IP cameras and a box running homeassistant. All humming along nicely. Thankfully I was never masochistic enough to try some kubernetes thing orchestrating all the machines together. This is all obviously for the homelab/personal use case. Would not recommend this for anything more serious. But these machines just work, and they are bog standard X86 PCs, which removes a lot of the hardware config and incompatibility bullshit associated with more niche platforms.

prmoustache 2y ago
I'd rather have 2 devices with a single drive, each having its own copy of the data than one with a RAID 1.

jokethrowaway 2y ago

Same reason I'm not buying another raspberry pi, I'd rather have solar panels and an old reliable pc running somewhere

meowmeow20 2y ago

My "NAS" and homeserver is an old Lenovo ThinkCentre mini PC with a large SSD inside. My "RAID" is an rclone cloud backup. Might be a bit scuffed but it works really well, at least for me.

INTPenis 2y ago

Personally I don't want to put too much stuff on my router/firewall. The reason I run OpenBSD on it is because I want it to be as secure as possible, it has the final word in my network and it's the outer most device of my network. For storage I've been using Synology for a long time, first ds411+slim and now a ds620slim. I love the slim form factor, only 2.5" drives. It just works™

banish-m4 2y ago

Cheap, but not necessarily good, expandable, or resilient. Although, I can tell you what not to do: a 45 drive SAS/2 or /3 4U JBOD case takes way too much power to use all the time and uses screaming 1U fans and PSUs by default. I do have 45 drives in various XFS on md raid10 arrays. Don't even mention ZoL ZFS because that was a fucking disaster of undocumented, under-tested, and SoL "support" for something that should only be used on a proper Sun box like a Thumper. XFS and md are fairly bulletproof. Perhaps one can Ceph their way into significant storage with a crap ton of tiny DIY boxes, but it's going to be a pain to deploy and manage, take lots of space, and probably damn expensive to physically install, network, and provide UPS for.

HelloNurse 2y ago

What convenient solutions exist for graceful shutdown of a NAS, without data loss or other drama, in case of power outage? It seems a more pressing concern than flipped bits or network failures.

switch007 2y ago
A filesystem designed to survive sudden power loss? Which is most modern ones right?
Snoddas 2y ago
The common solution is having an UPS and a NAS that supports graceful shutdown when the UPS detects powerloss
badgersnake 2y ago
My Helios64 has a built in backup battery. I'm not sure they are available anymore (and I wouldn't recommend anyway for other reasons) but I imagine other NASs have similar setups.

okasaki 2y ago

If you need to add storage to just one computer (at a time), consider just getting a hard drive enclosure. It's much simpler, cheaper, more secure, and faster than a NAS. You can turn it into a NAS at any time by adding a mini pc or similar.

ulnarkressty 2y ago

I'd say the cheapest NAS would be an external HDD plugged in your WiFi router - most of them have at least one USB port nowadays, with some offering advanced features like photo gallery etc.

crabbone 2y ago

> up-to-date Debian OP has a perverse sense of humor :) ---- But, not to waste space on this mindless joke, here's my (or, more precisely, my wife's) success story. So, I've had it with a laptop and built myself a PC. Money wasn't really a problem, I just wanted to make sure I will have enough of everything, and spares, if necessary. So, I've got a be quiet case with eight caddies and a place for a SATA SSD. It's expensive... but it doubles as my main workstation, so I don't have any regrets about spending more on it! It has a ton of room for installing fans. It has like ten of them at this point, plus liquid cooling. The wifi modem that was built into the mobo that I bought doesn't have a good Linux driver... but the case has a ton of space, and so I could stick an external PCIe wifi modem. And I still have plenty of room left. Anyways. My wife was given some space for her research in the institute she works for. And they get this space through some unknown company with vanishing IT support, where, in the end, all the company does is putting a fancy HTML front-end on Azure cloud services, sometimes mismanaging the underlying infrastructure. While the usage was uncomfortable but palatable, she continued using it. Then the bill came, and oh dear! And then she needed to use a piece of software that really, absolutely, unquestionably needs to be able to create symlinks. And the unknown company with vanishing IT has put together their research environment in such a way that NAS is connected via SMB, and... no symlinks. So... I bought a bunch of 4T hard-drives, and now she has all the space she needs for her research. She doesn't even pay for electricity :(

ChuckMcM 2y ago

Interesting cheap low power system. My brain connects "NAS" with "Data I value" and there isn't anything in the author's system that is focused on enhancing the data integrity. Not saying that is bad, just saying it's the thing that often makes commercial NAS system both more expensive and more power consumptive. I've got an 8 drive RAID-6 setup as a ZFS pool[1]. More power, last I checked about 50W when idle, close to 150W when "working", but I think at this point I've had failures in nearly every piece that ended up replacing something but never lost any data, never corrupted any files. Replaced the power supply, the mother board, and two drives. I haven't had to replace any memory but I do have an extra stick "spare" because that is the kind of thing that ages out and is hard to replace (it's DDR3 memory but I've had systems with DDR2 so really hard to get DIMMS for). That said, I do see a lot of value in low power systems like that of the author and run a couple. The way I do the energy calculation though is that I boot them off internal storage (MMC/SD) and then mount a root filesystem from the NAS. That way they don't have any storage power cost directly, they are easy to replace, and the power consumed by my NAS is amortized over a number of systems. giving it some less obvious economics. [1] It is an iXSystems FreeNAS based system.

bastawhiz 2y ago

> The remedy is to turn UAS off via adding usb-storage.quirks=152d:0578:u to the kernel cmdline. This is the point where I'd have thrown it in the trash and given up. I simply don't know how people have the patience to debug past stuff like this: I get that the point of the project is to be cheap and simple, but this is expensive in time and decidedly not simple.

theLastOfCats 2y ago

Old PC or terramaster enclosure from aliexpress

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

vermaden 2y ago

Its very hard to beat Dell Wyse 3030 LT with USB attached disks. - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/silent-fanless-dell-wyse-3030-lt-freebsd-server/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/silent-fanless-del... I use that and the costs are about $20-25 for a used Dell Wyse 3030 and $60 for used 5TB 2.5 HDD from Seagate in USB 3.0 case. Then the power bills will also be tiny as it draw about 3.8W when idle and 10.3 W with CPU and disks stressed to maximum. The only limitation is 'only' 2GB RAM - but with ZFS ARC set to 32MB minimum and 64MB maximum RAM is not an issue. % grep arc /etc/sysctl.conf vfs.zfs.arc.min=33554432 vfs.zfs.arc.max=67108864 Regards.

metadat 2y ago
Note: S.M.A.R.T. status info can't be read from USB attached drives. You have no idea if they're throwing errors indicating imminent doom.
- vermaden 2y ago
  On FreeBSD getting S.M.A.R.T. status over USB drive works without any problem: # smartctl -a /dev/da0 smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE-p1 amd64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Western Digital Elements / My Passport (USB, AF) Device Model: WDC WD50NDZW-11A8JS1 Serial Number: WD-WXP2EA07UYLA LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2be7aef41 Firmware Version: 01.01A01 User Capacity: 5,000,947,523,584 bytes [5.00 TB] Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical Rotation Rate: 5400 rpm Form Factor: 2.5 inches TRIM Command: Available, deterministic Device is: In smartctl database 7.3/5528 ATA Version is: ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5 SATA Version is: SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s) Local Time is: Sat May 11 10:26:04 2024 CEST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity was never started. Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 4680) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x1b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. No Conveyance Self-test supported. No Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 560) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x30b5) SCT Status supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 253 253 021 Pre-fail Always - 3508 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 4626 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 083 083 000 Old_age Always - 12789 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 139 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 58 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 192 192 000 Old_age Always - 24665 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 086 083 000 Old_age Always - 66 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 No self-tests have been logged. [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t] Selective Self-tests/Logging not supported The above only provides legacy SMART information - try 'smartctl -x' for more

RockRobotRock 2y ago

Jeez just buy a real computer. Optiplexes are dirt cheap