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Self hosting 10TB in S3 on a framework laptop and disks
- ddxv 1y agoJust wanted to share a quiet successful self hosting.
- myself248 1y agoIt's weird to me that "owning a computer that runs stuff" is now "self-hosting", just feels like an odd phrasing. Like there's an assumption that all computers belong to someone else now, so we have to specify that we're using our own.
- mlnj 1y agoLet's not kid ourselves that maintaining 10TB with resiliency handling and other controls built in is something that is trivial. It is only trivial due to the offerings that Cloud computing has made easy. Self-hosting implies those features without the cloud element and not just buying a computer.
- rokkamokka 1y ago10tb fits on one disk though - it may not be trivial but it's not overly complicated setting up a raid-1. Off-site redundancy and backup of course does make it more complicated however.
- mlnj 1y agoAnd all of those things are more steps than "buying a computer". Reminds me of the "Dropbox can be built in a weekend"
- Symbiote 1y agoYou can buy a 10TB+ external drive which uses RAID1. You can also buy a computer with this — not a laptop, and I don't know about budget desktops, but on Dell's site (for example) it's just a drop-down selection box.
- znpy 1y agoMoot point. It really depends on your expectations. Self-hosting 10TB in an enterprise context is trivial. Self hosting 10TB at home is easy. The thing is: once you learn enough ZFS, whether you’re hosting 10 or 200TB it doesn’t change much. The real challenge is justifying to yourself spending for all those disks. But if it’s functional to yourself spending hobby…
- JustFinishedBSG 1y ago> Let's not kid ourselves that maintaining 10TB with resiliency handling and other controls built in is something that is trivial. It is though. People in tech need to stop pretending everything they are doing is super complicated.
- vachina 1y agoWe call it self hosting because it is typically hosted by someone else, get it?
- immibis 1y agoKind of like how installing got renamed to side-loading.
- mingus88 1y agoThink services You can own a computer and not run any services at all. Most people do. Deciding to run your own services, like email, means a lot of work that most people aren’t interested or capable of doing. It’s the difference between using your computer to consume things or produce things.
- layer8 1y agoIt’s not clear from the blog post if the S3 is accessible from outside their home. I agree with the parent that purely local services aren’t what typically counts as “self-hosting”.
- fpoling 1y agoDoes this JBOD consist of SSD? HDDs in that amount can be rather noisy.
- ddxv 1y agoYeah they are HDs and are surprisingly noisy.
- canpan 1y agoNeat. Depending on your use case it might make sense. Still I wonder what they use for backup? For many use cases downtime is acceptable, but data loss is generally not. Did I miss it in the post?
- ddxv 1y agoOP here. There I currently have some things syncd to a cloud S3. The long term plan would be to replicate the setup at another location to take advantage of garage region/nodes, but need to wait for the money for that.
- n4bz0r 1y agoGetting into S3 myself and really curious about what Garage has to offer vs the more mature alternatives like Minio. From what I gather, it kinda works better with small (a few kilobytes) files or something?
- photon-torpedo 1y agoMinio recently started removing features from the community version. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136108
- znpy 1y agoHow awful. It seems to be a pattern nowadays? Some former colleagues still using gitlab ce tell me they also removed features from their self-hosted version, particularly from their runners.
- sneak 1y agoYeah, there's a trend of people who don't actually believe in software freedoms releasing a subset of their proprietary software under free software licenses and pretending. It's really just a bait and switch to try to get free community engagement around a commercial product. It's fundamentally dishonest. I call it "open source cosplay". They're not real open source projects (in the sense that if you write a feature under a free software license that competes with their paid proprietary software, there's zero percent chance it will be upstreamed, even if all of the users of the project want it) so they shouldn't get the credit for being such just because they slapped a free software license on a fraction of their proprietary code. Invariably they also want contributors to sign a rights-assignment CLA so they can reuse free software contributions (that they didn't pay for) in their for-profit proprietary project. Never sign a CLA that assigns rights. Some open source projects flat-out illegally "relicensed" open source contributions as a proprietary license when they wanted to start selling software (CapRover). Some just start removing features or refuse to integrate features (Minio, Mattermost, etc). Many (such as Minio) use nonfree fake open source licenses like the AGPL[1]. It's all a scam by people who don't care about software freedoms. If you believe in software freedoms, you never release any software that isn't free software. [1]: https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/ https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/
- ocharles 1y agoWhat enclosure houses the JBOD?
- Hikikomori 1y agoDon't know about that one but can recommend Terramaster DAS, they don't cheap out on the controller. I have a d4-320 connected to my NUC.
- qudat 1y agoVery cool! I replaced my mainboard on my framework and am trying to convert it to a backup for my nas. Could you talk a little more about your zfs setup? I literally just want it to be a place to send snapshots but I’m worried about the usb connection speed and the accidentally unplugging it and losing data
- cgdstnc 1y agoi'd be stressed out while watering those plants.
- scottarthur 1y agoI have an ancient Qnap NAS (2015) which is on borrowed time and I’m trying to figure out what to replace it with. Keep going back and forth between rolling my own with a Jonsbo case vs. a prebuilt like the new Ubiquti boxes. This is an attractive third option of a modest compute box (raspy, NUC, etc.) paired with a JBOD over USB. Can you still use something like TrueNAS with a setup like that?
- j45 1y agoLocal storage should be like a home appliance, not something we build even though we can. When things inevitably need attention it’s not about diy.
- n4bz0r 1y agoIf you don't mind using m.2 drives, check out Beelink ME Mini. The m.2 drives are going to be limited by the PCIe 3.0 x1 bus [1], but you get a very neat and small appliance-like box that can handle home storage workloads really well. Just keep in mind that you'll need an additional OS drive: TrueNAS will probably wear that eMMC out in a matter of a year or two. [0] https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-me-mini-n150 https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-me-mini-n150 [1] https://youtu.be/TkFfTekB3eM?t=1034 https://youtu.be/TkFfTekB3eM?t=1034
- igtztorrero 1y agoAmazing, I will try Garage. What brand of HDD did you use?
- UI_at_80x24 1y agoRead up on backblaze hard drive reports. Great source of info
- ddxv 1y agoI went with IronWolf, likely due to price, though interestingly they are 25% more expensive than when I bought them six months ago.
- yodon 1y agoPrevious discussion of Garage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41013004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41013004
- rmoriz 1y agoWith the metadata only on the internal drive, isn't this a SPOF?
- Havoc 1y agoGiven that it's JBOD over USB I don't think this is aimed at redundancy
- rmoriz 1y agoI thought zfs is doing the RAID.
- Havoc 1y agoIt could be. Author didn't specify. zfs isn't inherently redundant or RAID so it may or may not have redundancy
- ddxv 1y agoYeah, this was an effort to get around cloud costs for large amounts of 'low value' data that I have but use in my other home servers for processing. I still sync some smaller result sets to an S3 in the cloud for redundancy as well as for CDN uses.
- andix 1y agoI really don't get it. Do they host it on Amazon S3 or do they self-host it on a NAS?
- wiether 1y agoThey built an object storage system exposing an S3-compatible API, by using https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
- andix 1y agoOkay, weird to call it S3, if it is just object storage somewhere else. Its like saying "EKS" if you mean Kubernetes, or talking about "self hosting EC2" by installing qemu.
- miduil 1y ago> weird to call it S3 I feel that is a bit of an unfair assessment. AWS S3 was the first S3-compatible API provider, nowadays most cloud providers and bunch of self hosted software supports S3(-Compatible) APIs. Call it Object Store (which is a bit unspecific) or call it S3-Compatible. EKS and EC2 on the other hand are a set of tools and services, operated by AWS for you - with some APIs surrounding them that are not replicated by any other party (at least for production use).
- bobmcnamara 1y agoYou can even do S3-on-ZFS
- niles 1y agoWhich solutions do you find stable?
- bobmcnamara 1y agoWouldn't consider myself qualified to answer, but I'm not aware of any problems we had with our Oracle ZFS storage appliance.
- awill 1y ago>>About 5 months ago I made the decision to start self hosting my own S3. It is eleven nines of durability? No. You didn't build S3. You built a cheapo NAS.
- Havoc 1y agoI think it's pretty obvious he's talking about the protocol not the amazon service...
- awill 1y agotitle is 'Self hosting 10TB IN S3.' Yes, it's obvious, but it's a terrible title. I don't really get the point. It's trivial to have storage however you want an shove the S3 API on top.
- ddxv 1y agoIn hindsight you are correct about the title not being accurate. "It's trivial to have storage" I'd argue this wasn't trivial for me. Buying $1k of drives+JBOD, acquiring the second hand laptop, getting ZFS working with USB took a couple tries and finally moving my projects to using the dual local network S3 object storage vs cloud S3 took a fair amount of time. "however you want an shove the S3 API on top." You're right here too. I did find this part pleasantly trivial, which I didn't know before, and hence the article about how pleased I was that this part ended being trivial and has remained trivial once the other parts were setup.
- Datagenerator 1y agoAnd won't be charged for ingres, egress or IOPS etc, it's better than bad, it's good. Happy times.
- evanreichard 1y agoI love Garage. It just works. I have Garage running on a few older Odroid HC2's, primarily for k8s Velero backup, and it's just set and forget.
- rob_c 1y ago10TB, you could just mirror 2 drives with that, seen people serving 10PB at home by this point I'm sorry to say
- sandreas 1y agoI'd rather go with an old Dell T30 and 2x10TB Seagate Exos in ZFS RAID1 mode (Mirror). This thing would make me nervous every day, even with a daily backup in place... While the Dell T30 would also make me nervous, you could at least plug the disks into any other device and are not wiring up everything with some easy to pull out cables ;) However, garage sounds nice :-) Thanks for posting.
- magicalhippo 1y agoI've been using ZFS for quite a while, and I had a realization some time ago that for a lot of data, I could tolerate a few hours worth of loss. So instead of a mirror, I've set up two separate one-disk pools, with automatic snapshots of the primary pool every few hours, which are then zfs send/recv to the other pool. This gives me a lot more flexibility in terms of the disks involved, one could be SSD other spinning rust for example, at the cost of some read speed and potential uptime. Depending on your needs, you could even have the other disk external, and only connect it every few days. I also have another mirrored RAID pool for more precious data. However almost all articles on ZFS focus on the RAID aspect, while few talk about the less hardware demanding setup described above.
- oarsinsync 1y agoI opted to use a two disk mirror, and offline the slow disk. Hourly cronjob to online the slow disk, wait, and then offline it again. Gives me the benefit of automatic fixes in the event of bit rot in any blocks more then an hour old too.
- j1elo 1y agoThat sounds cool; is it possible to just query the ZFS system to know when it has finished synchronizing the slow disk, before bringing it offline again? Do you think that stopping and spinning the disk again, 24 times a day, is not going to cause much wear to the motors?
- oarsinsync 1y ago
- VTimofeenko 1y agoIf it's just the mainboard and no screen, OP could put it in a dedicated case like the CoolerMaster one: https://www.coolermaster.com/en-global/products/framework/ https://www.coolermaster.com/en-global/products/framework/
- ddxv 1y agoThose are pretty cool. I meant to highlight more, that the laptop has done super well. I can't even tell it's on as I hear no fan / no heat. I guess laptops are pretty good for this as they are great at sipping power when there is a low load.
- smileybarry 1y agoBack in 2012 or so, I reused an old netbook (an Asus Eee PC) with an Atom CPU & 1GB of RAM, installed Ubuntu Server, and used it as a home server. It handled the printer, DNS-VPN proxying for streaming, and a few other things admirably for years. (And ironically was resilient to Spectre because its Atom CPU was before Intel added speculative execution) Eventually, the thing that kicked the bucket was actually the keyboard (and later the fan started making "my car won't start" noises occasionally). Even the horribly-slow HDD (that handled Ubuntu Server surprisingly well) hadn't died yet.
- VTimofeenko 1y agoI have the original mainboard (i5, 11th gen) the laptop came with in that coolermaster case. Generally really quiet, but fans have kicked in a few times and it was pretty noticeable. Since it's VESA mountable, I might just move it into the rack at some point and let the rack fans take care of everything.
- t_mahmood 1y agoOne question, are you keeping it plugged in continuously, or disconnect it, sometimes? Because keeping it 100% will slowly degrade the battery, and during power loss it might fail. In my country it's possible to have power loss occasionally, so having the battery on good health is important. I'm planning to setup two unused laptops, and a mobile for servers (different purposes) and power management, battery health has been an issue.
- j1elo 1y agoI'd like more ellaboration on the technical side. Not literally how to do the same and what commands to use, but more in the line of how are the ZFS pools configured, or if Garage is opinionated and configures it all by itself. Are there mirrors in there? Or it's just individual pools that sync from some disks to others? I have 2 USB disks and want to make a cheapo NAS but I always doubt between making a ZFS mirror, making 2 independent pools and use one to backup the other, or just go the alternate route and use SnapRAID and then be able to mix more older HDDs for maximum usage of the hardware I already own.
- ddxv 1y agoMy understanding is that Garage is not opinionated and could easily have worked without ZFS. I installed ZFS in Ubuntu, and then later installed Garage. As for the ZFS setup, I kept it simple and did RAID5/raidz1. I'm no expert in that, and have been starting to think about it again as the pool approaches 33% full. I saw this comment in another thread here that sounded interesting as well by magicalhippo: "I've been using ZFS for quite a while, and I had a realization some time ago that for a lot of data, I could tolerate a few hours worth of loss. So instead of a mirror, I've set up two separate one-disk pools, with automatic snapshots of the primary pool every few hours, which are then zfs send/recv to the other pool." This caught my attention as it matches my usecase well. My original idea was that RAID5 would be good incase a HD fails, and that I would replicate the setup at another location, but the overall costs (~$1k USD) are enough that I haven't done that yet.
- Forgeties79 1y agoIf you know where to look/are a little lucky, you can get an adequate RAID5 going for like $500-800 depending on the storage you need. I grabbed a QNAP 4 bay (no SSD caching) and 4x refurbished enterprise HDD's (14tb/ea) for just under $700 all-in last november if memory serves. Pretty reasonable for a 42tb RAID5 IMO.
- throwaway270925 1y ago> doubt between making a ZFS mirror, making 2 independent pools You will gain protection agains bit-rot and self-healing (via scrubs) with a mirror. Also faster reads. > mix more older HDDs You can do this with ZFS too! As long as you have two HDDs of the same size (or similar size, as to not loose too much to unused space), you can also add them as a mirrored zdev to your existing pool (or make an new one for backups as you wrote). Only the two disks in a mirror need to be of similar size, not all disks in a pool.
- OutOfHere 1y agoWhy are you calling it S3? That is a proprietary Amazon cloud technology. Why not call it what is it is, e.g. ZFS, file store, or object store? Let's not dilute terms.
- thakoppno 1y ago> Garage implements the Amazon S3 API and thus is already compatible with many applications. https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
- OutOfHere 1y agoYes, it's S3 API compatible, but it's not S3. The originally submitted article title misleads by claiming it's S3. There is no valid excuse.
- ddxv 1y agoThat's a good point, it is S3 compatible object storage, not just S3. My experience with AWS S3 has impacted the way I use object storage and since this project is syncd to another S3 compatible object storage using the S3 protocol, in my head I just call it all S3.
- tcdent 1y agoThanks for the lead on Garage S3. Everyone's always recommending minIO and Ceph which are just not fun to work with.
- 6ak74rfy 1y agoZFS is RAM hungry, plus doesn't like USB connections (like the article implied). So, I've been eyeing btrfs as a way to setup my NAS drives. Would I miss something in that setup?
- irusensei 1y agoZFS is not RAM hungry. The only official memory requirements that exist specify 768MB system RAM and thats the whole OS (Solaris 9) minimum requirement. Just like any other file system ZFS will use memory if available and release it when other parts of the system need it. https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gitgn/index.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gitgn/index.ht... Also ZFS is perfectly happy with USB connections. In fact it's the best type of FS to have if your storage is unreliable due to its self healing capabilities. Not that modern USB is unreliable nowadays and there are plenty of DAS solutions that rely on 3.x USB.
- darkteflon 1y agoI’ve not heard of garage before but it looks quite interesting. I use s3 a lot for work but for homelab backups I’ve always just used borg on borgbase. Now I’m wondering whether I could use garage to pair a local node and AWS glacier for cheap redundancy of a large media library (I’m assuming that ~all of the reading is automatically done from the local node). TFA doesn’t really talk much about the actual experience of using garage - would love to hear more opinions from those who use it for self-hosting. Edit: Realised you can’t use glacier since storage has to be mounted to the ec2 compute running the garage binary as a filesystem. So doesn’t really make sense as media library backup over just scheduling a periodic borg / restic backup to glacier directly.
- ddxv 1y agoI haven't needed to interact with Garage itself specifically. I've been using Boto3 / awscli / s3cmd / rclone for everything S3 API related and it's worked great. Garage was a few commands to setup, turn on, get API keys setup, and then left to run on it's own for the past 4 months. So in that sense, I've loved it.
- d3Xt3r 1y agoAnother alternative is ZeroFS[1], just store your stuff directly to S3. [1] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS
- darkteflon 1y agoThat looks very interesting - will look into it, thanks.
- mbreese 1y agoYou could still pair to AWS S3 and have an aggressive lifecycle policy to move the data to glacier after a short time window. I had this setup at a previous job for data. After X days it would switch from standard tier to glacier. In your case, X could equal 1.
- import 1y agoNice to see Garage mentioned. I was deciding between S3-compatible self-hosted alternatives and ended up choosing SeaweedFS. It seems to require less manual configuration compared to Garage
- cowsandmilk 1y agoWhat do you use self-hosted S3 for? I feel like all the use cases I can think of would be better served by a network attached file system.
- gerdesj 1y agoA fair few things want blob object storage like S3. NFS does not scale to ridiculous levels horizontally or vertically. S3 does things like de-duplication and other funky tricks. So if you want to use an app that needs S3 then you need to deploy S3 and not NFS. I run a minio cluster (S3) for Veeam backups at work. I also run multiple NFS for Veeam and VMware datastores. Tools for the job mate!
- ddxv 1y agoI use a self-hosted s3 compatible object storage for cheap storage of Android apks and logs. I do push various processed items to Digital Ocean Spaces, so having the ability to use rclone / the same functions for both is useful.
- alimbada 1y agoThe article didn't load for me (HN hug of death) so I was confused too as are many others in this comment thread (and some have been downvoted for simply asking). Just use the correct terminology; if you're in tech you know there's no room or excuse for ambiguity.
- krunger 1y agoNot sure that framework adds anything here, I host around the same on a RPi5 and a few disks. Instead of ZFS I use lvm2, it's pretty good on the RPi5. ZFS eats up too much RAM for what I use it for there.
- irusensei 1y agoI do something similar with Minio although I still have most of my stuff on normal file system.