4 ms·

>Lastly what you shouldn't ever do is get one of those consumers NAS boxes. They are made with no concern for noise at all, and manufacturing cheapness constrai

>Lastly what you shouldn't ever do is get one of those consumers NAS boxes. They are made with no concern for noise at all, and manufacturing cheapness constraints tend to make them literally pessimal at it. I had a QNAP I got rid of that couldn't have been more effective at amplifying drive noise if it had been designed for that on purpose. Is there any solution that lets me mix and match drive sizes as well as upgrade? I'm slowly getting more and more into self hosting as much of digital life as possible, so I don't want to be dependent on Synology, but they offered a product that let me go from a bunch of single drives with no redundancy to being able to repurpose them into a solution where I can swap out drives and most importantly grow. As far as I can tell theres no open source equivalent. As soon as I've set up a file system with the drives I already have the only solution is to buy the same amount of drives with more space once I run out.

kiney 2y ago
BTRFS
mrighele 2y ago
> As soon as I've set up a file system with the drives I already have the only solution is to buy the same amount of drives with more space once I run out. Recent versions of zfs support raidz expansion [1], which let you add extra disks to a raidz1/2/3 pool. It has a number of limitations, for example you cannot change the type of pool (mirror to raidz1, raidz1 to raidz2 etc.) but if you plan to expand your pool one disk at a time it can be useful. Just remember that 1) old data will not take advantage of the extra disk until you copy it around and 2) the size of the pool is limited by the size of the smallest disk in the pool. [1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15022 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15022
kccqzy 2y ago
I might be misunderstanding your needs but my home server uses just LVM. When I run out of disk space, I buy a new drive, use `pvcreate` followed by `vgextend` and `lvextend`.
- tharkun__ 2y ago
  This. I've been running LVM and Linux software RAID for like 20 years now. The only limits (for me at least) are: smallest device in a raid determines size of that array. But that's fine since I then LVM them together anyhow. It does let you mix+match and upgrade though really I always just buy two drives but it helped when starting and I experimented with just LVM without RAID too. I have to know RAID and LVM instead of trusting some vendor UI. That's a good thing. I can fix stuff in case it were to break. I found as drives went to Terabytes it was better to have multiple smaller partitions as the raid devices even when on the same physical drive. Faster rebuild in case of a random read error. I use raid1. YMMV I still have the same LVM partitions / data that I had 20 years ago but also not. All the hardware underneath has changed multiple times, especially drives. I still use HDDs and used to have root on RAID+LVM too but have switched for a single SSD. I reinstalled the OS for that part but the LVM+RAID setup and its data stayed intact. If anything ever happens to the SSD with the OS, I don't care. I'll buy a new one, install an OS and I'm good to go.
devilbunny 2y ago
And I've never used a QNAP, but I'm on my second Synology and their drive carriages all use rubber/silicone grommets to isolate drive vibration from the case. It's not silent - five drives of spinning rust will make some noise regardless - but it sits in a closet under my stairs that backs up to my media cabinet and you have to be within a few feet to hear it even in the closet over background noise in the house. I don't use any of their "personal cloud" stuff that relies on them. It's just a Linux box with some really good features for drive management and package updates. You can set up and maintain any other services you want without using their manager. The ease with which I could set it up as a destination for Time Machine backups has absolutely saved my bacon on at least one occasion. My iMac drive fell to some strange data corruption and would not boot. I booted to recovery, pointed it at the Synology, and aside from the restore time, I only lost about thirty minutes' work. The drive checked out fine and is still going strong. Eventually it will die, and when it does I'll buy a new Mac and tell it to restore from the Synology. I have double-disk redundancy, so I can lose any two of five drives with no loss of data so long as I can get new drives to my house and striped in before a third fails. That would take about a week, so while it's possible, it's unlikely. If I were really paranoid about that, I'd put together a group buy for hard drives from different manufacturers, different runs, different retailers, etc., and then swap them around so none of us were using drives that were all from the same manufacturer, factory, and date. But I'm not that paranoid. If I have a drive go bad, and it's one that I have more than one of the same (exact) model, I'll buy enough to replace them all, immediately replace the known-bad one, and then sell/give away the same-series.
charrondev 2y ago
So I’ve got a setup like this: It’s an 8Bay Synology 1821+. Cost about $1300 for the machine, 32GB of ECC memory, and the 10gbe network card. I have 4 8Tb drives in a btrfs volume with 1 drive redundancy giving me 21TB of space. All the important stuff gets also backed up to another 8TB drive periodically and sent to glacier. The way synology’s shr1 setup works seems to be like RAID5 + a bit more flexibility so I can add more drives to the array but as long as they are 8TB or larger. The docker manager seems to work pretty well. I run a few services there and mount certain volumes into them. A few DNS records and some entries into the reverse proxy in the control panel of it and you can run whatever you want. Most critically power draw is very low and it’s very quiet which was an important consideration to me.
Marsymars 2y ago
> Is there any solution that lets me mix and match drive sizes as well as upgrade? Probably more than one, but on my non-Synology box I use SnapRAID, which can take any number/size of drives. Downside is that it isn’t realtime, you have to schedule a process to sync your parity: http://www.snapraid.it/ http://www.snapraid.it/
edmundsauto 2y ago
I started thinking about this a year ago. Unraid works great for me. Just bought another 32tb to extend to 104tb usable space, 8gb to 20gb drives. It’s a JBOD with dual parity setup, next upgrade path requires a disk shelf but hopefully that won’t be for a couple of years.

kiney 2y ago

BTRFS

mrighele 2y ago

> As soon as I've set up a file system with the drives I already have the only solution is to buy the same amount of drives with more space once I run out. Recent versions of zfs support raidz expansion [1], which let you add extra disks to a raidz1/2/3 pool. It has a number of limitations, for example you cannot change the type of pool (mirror to raidz1, raidz1 to raidz2 etc.) but if you plan to expand your pool one disk at a time it can be useful. Just remember that 1) old data will not take advantage of the extra disk until you copy it around and 2) the size of the pool is limited by the size of the smallest disk in the pool. [1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15022 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15022

kccqzy 2y ago

I might be misunderstanding your needs but my home server uses just LVM. When I run out of disk space, I buy a new drive, use `pvcreate` followed by `vgextend` and `lvextend`.

tharkun__ 2y ago
This. I've been running LVM and Linux software RAID for like 20 years now. The only limits (for me at least) are: smallest device in a raid determines size of that array. But that's fine since I then LVM them together anyhow. It does let you mix+match and upgrade though really I always just buy two drives but it helped when starting and I experimented with just LVM without RAID too. I have to know RAID and LVM instead of trusting some vendor UI. That's a good thing. I can fix stuff in case it were to break. I found as drives went to Terabytes it was better to have multiple smaller partitions as the raid devices even when on the same physical drive. Faster rebuild in case of a random read error. I use raid1. YMMV I still have the same LVM partitions / data that I had 20 years ago but also not. All the hardware underneath has changed multiple times, especially drives. I still use HDDs and used to have root on RAID+LVM too but have switched for a single SSD. I reinstalled the OS for that part but the LVM+RAID setup and its data stayed intact. If anything ever happens to the SSD with the OS, I don't care. I'll buy a new one, install an OS and I'm good to go.

devilbunny 2y ago

And I've never used a QNAP, but I'm on my second Synology and their drive carriages all use rubber/silicone grommets to isolate drive vibration from the case. It's not silent - five drives of spinning rust will make some noise regardless - but it sits in a closet under my stairs that backs up to my media cabinet and you have to be within a few feet to hear it even in the closet over background noise in the house. I don't use any of their "personal cloud" stuff that relies on them. It's just a Linux box with some really good features for drive management and package updates. You can set up and maintain any other services you want without using their manager. The ease with which I could set it up as a destination for Time Machine backups has absolutely saved my bacon on at least one occasion. My iMac drive fell to some strange data corruption and would not boot. I booted to recovery, pointed it at the Synology, and aside from the restore time, I only lost about thirty minutes' work. The drive checked out fine and is still going strong. Eventually it will die, and when it does I'll buy a new Mac and tell it to restore from the Synology. I have double-disk redundancy, so I can lose any two of five drives with no loss of data so long as I can get new drives to my house and striped in before a third fails. That would take about a week, so while it's possible, it's unlikely. If I were really paranoid about that, I'd put together a group buy for hard drives from different manufacturers, different runs, different retailers, etc., and then swap them around so none of us were using drives that were all from the same manufacturer, factory, and date. But I'm not that paranoid. If I have a drive go bad, and it's one that I have more than one of the same (exact) model, I'll buy enough to replace them all, immediately replace the known-bad one, and then sell/give away the same-series.

charrondev 2y ago

So I’ve got a setup like this: It’s an 8Bay Synology 1821+. Cost about $1300 for the machine, 32GB of ECC memory, and the 10gbe network card. I have 4 8Tb drives in a btrfs volume with 1 drive redundancy giving me 21TB of space. All the important stuff gets also backed up to another 8TB drive periodically and sent to glacier. The way synology’s shr1 setup works seems to be like RAID5 + a bit more flexibility so I can add more drives to the array but as long as they are 8TB or larger. The docker manager seems to work pretty well. I run a few services there and mount certain volumes into them. A few DNS records and some entries into the reverse proxy in the control panel of it and you can run whatever you want. Most critically power draw is very low and it’s very quiet which was an important consideration to me.

Marsymars 2y ago

> Is there any solution that lets me mix and match drive sizes as well as upgrade? Probably more than one, but on my non-Synology box I use SnapRAID, which can take any number/size of drives. Downside is that it isn’t realtime, you have to schedule a process to sync your parity: http://www.snapraid.it/ http://www.snapraid.it/

edmundsauto 2y ago

I started thinking about this a year ago. Unraid works great for me. Just bought another 32tb to extend to 104tb usable space, 8gb to 20gb drives. It’s a JBOD with dual parity setup, next upgrade path requires a disk shelf but hopefully that won’t be for a couple of years.