4 ms·
I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in. The author is using a ThinkP
by leobg 1y ago
I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in.
The author is using a ThinkPad T430.
Any experiences?
- tw04 1y agoIf you don’t need any performance it’s a great backup strategy. If your only way of connecting the drives to the laptop is USB I would be concerned about data integrity if it’s important data.
- amelius 1y agoWhy is USB so bad at data integrity. Doesn't it have error detection/correction? If so, that sounds like a huge design flaw.
- beagle3 1y agoIndividual writes are safe, in my Experience with thousands of uSB drives in many configurations, some with 12 2tb drives hanging on multiple USB hubs at the same time. However, there are disconnects/reconnects every now and then. If you use a standard raid over these usb drives, almost every disconnect/reconnect will trigger a rebuild — and rebuilds take many hours. If you are unlucky enough to have multiple disconnects during a rebuild, you are in trouble.
- amelius 1y agoI've had bitflips with USB transfers of 1-10TB. I don't remember the specifics, but my personal confidence in USB is low.
- beala 1y agoThe official TrueNAS docs recommend against using USB drives [1]. My understanding is that between the USB controller, flaky connectors and cables, and usb-to-sata bridges of varying quality, there are just too many unknowns to guarantee a reliable experience. For example, I’ve heard that some usb-to-sata controllers will drop commands and not report SMART data. That said, there are of course many people on the internet who have thrown caution to the wind and report that it’s working fine for them. Personally I’m in the process of building a NAS with an old 9th gen Intel i5. Many mobos support 6 SATA ports and three mirrored 20 TB pairs is enough storage for me. I’m guessing it’ll be a bit more power hungry than a ugreen/synology/etc appliance but there will also be plenty of headroom for running other services. [1] https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/13.0/gettingstarted/corehardwareguide/ https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/13.0/gettingstarted/coreha...
- mannyv 1y agoBeen using like 7 external usb drives with 40-50tb total for a few years with no issues. Not raid, just backing up drive to drive. No controller or drive issues. Mix of seagate and wd 8/12/16gb. I hate blanket recommendations like this by docs. To me, it just sounds like some guy had a problem a few times and now it's canon. It's like saying "avoid Seagate because their 3tb drives sucked." Well they did, but now they seem to be fine.
- zettabomb 1y agoRAID is much different. You can try it over USB, you won't have a good time. TrueNAS is primarily talking about RAID users.
- beala 1y agoYes I should have specified that this advice is specific to RAID configurations in NAS applications. If you're occasionally copying data to an external USB drive, that's totally fine. That's what they were designed for. The issue is that they were not designed for continuous use, or much more demanding applications like rebuilding/resilvering a drive. It's during these applications that issues occur, which is a double whammy, because it can cause permanent data loss if your USB drive fails during a recovery operation. I did a little more research after posting my last comment and came across this helpful post on the TrueNAS forums going into more depth: https://forums.truenas.com/t/why-you-should-avoid-usb-attached-drives-for-data-pool-disks/1499 https://forums.truenas.com/t/why-you-should-avoid-usb-attach...
- jcalvinowens 1y agoYMMV. I have a 4-drive 20TB mdraid10 across two different $50 USB3.0 2-drive enclosures, I've read petabytes off this array with years of uptime and absolutely zero problems. And it runs on one of those $300 off brand NUCs. The 2.5G NIC is the bottleneck on reads.
- Yokolos 1y ago
- whazor 1y agoWhen I used a laptop as server, the battery became a spicy pillow. I think laptops are not designed to be running continuously and on warmer temperatures than normal.
- dapperdrake 1y agoThinkpads can use tlp to cap battery charge at 80%. It works.
- m2has 1y agoI’ve use an P51 for about a year now with no issues. I initially bought 6bay DAS, but I’ve since moved to pure SSD storage inside the laptop.
- dheera 1y ago> I was about to buy a NAS. The UNAS Pro 8 just came out and I'm thinking about getting it, switching away from my aging Synology setup ... only thing I wish it had was a UPS server as my Synology currently serves that purpose to trigger other machines to shut down ...
- ericd 1y agoI'm considering doing the same, I guess one would basically just be splitting functions, a dedicated NAS, and a dedicated server for all the functions that Synos tend to perform (generally not very well, but at least with pretty low power usage).
- Xss3 1y agoI think they just released some new prosumer ups.
- VTimofeenko 1y agoI believe Synology's UPS monitoring is based on nut-server[1]. In my setup, I am running the server on a separate machine that reads UPS state over USB and Synology is just a client. Maybe UNAS could also just work as a client. [1]: https://networkupstools.org/ https://networkupstools.org/
- rovr138 1y agoYou can. It works fine if you know the limitations. An important one is, drives could disconnect, so traditional RAID wouldn't be good. If you want redundancy, look at something like SnapRAID, http://www.snapraid.it http://www.snapraid.it If you want to combine into a single volume, consider rclone. These remotes specifically are the ones I'm thinking could be useful, - https://rclone.org/local/ https://rclone.org/local/ - https://rclone.org/combine/ https://rclone.org/combine/ - https://rclone.org/cache/ https://rclone.org/cache/ Good luck o7
- phil21 1y agoI ran an old Thinkpad as a home router and small home server/NAS device for quite a long time, usually swapping out my old work upgrades every 3 years or so. They all had onboard gige so it worked fine - native vlan for the inbound Comcast connection, tagged vlans out to a switch for the various LAN connections. They were from the era of DVD drives so I was able to put an extra HDD in the DVD slot to expand storage with. One model even had a eSATA port. They worked great. Built-in UPS and they come with a reliable crash cart built-in!
- tombert 1y agoI don't use a laptop, but I use something fairly adjacent: the Beelink SER6 (https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-4-75GHz-PCIe4-0-Supports-HDMI2-1/dp/B0CG66FVVG https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-4-75GHz-PCIe4-0-Supports-HDMI...), which is basically a gaming laptop converted into a small desktop. For the most part, it has actually been pretty great. It's quiet, has a CPU that is much better than I expected, and a decent enough GPU to do hardware transcoding for Jellyfin without much issue. I use USB chassis of hard drives to work as the "NAS" part, and it works fairly well, and this box is also my router (using a 10 GbE thunderbolt adapter) though my biggest issue comes with large updates in NixOS. For reasons that are still not completely clear to me, when I do a very large system update (rebuilding Triton-llvm for Immich seems to really do it), the internal network will consistently cut out until I reboot the machine. I can log in through the external interface with Tailscale and my phone, so the machine itself is fine, but for whatever reason the internal network will die. And that's kind of the price you pay for using a non-server to do server work. It will generally work pretty well, but I find that it does require a bit more babysitting than a rack mount server did.
- IgorPartola 1y agoFor me it was important to have ECC RAM and laptops pretty much never have that. My personal recommendation is an old IBM/Lenovo workstation tower as the base. I bought one for $35 on eBay and added $40 of RAM (32GB). A $10 UPS from Goodwill with a $25 battery from Amazon, and whatever hard drives you want. I run Ubuntu and ZFS on it but next time would probably opt for FreeBSD for a nicer OS.
- yyhhsj0521 1y agoWhy is it important for an NAS to have ECC RAM?
- cerved 1y agoI own this and it's worth it's weight in gold https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-H-TF https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-H-T... Yes. It's pricey but it's never been a problem. It can connect like 12 HDDs with 256GB ram and has 10GBe and runs at a tiny TDP. Has IPMI. Fits in a tiny case. The only issue I had with this motherboard was that it was difficult to find someone who sold it. Love it Also I don't see the built-in UPS. The external drives still use external power
- sedawkgrep 1y agoThat's an amazing board. I had no idea something like this existed.
- cyberax 1y agoWow. It even has ECC!
- smartbit 1y agoHow much power does it use?
- cerved 1y agoNot a lot. Idk 25W TDP for the 16 core?
- hypercube33 1y agoI see a lot of people using M710 mini desktops - I think you can pop a pcie 10gbe card in and a m.2 SATA card and 3d print a disk stand?
- dapperdrake 1y agoUsed a Lenovo X220T with a cracked screen and missing keyboard a few years back. Worked like a champ (as a server). Cooling was much better without the keyboard.
- reliablereason 1y agoThe laptop batteries tend to go bad(either just stop working or expand and become a major fire hazard) after a year or two as they are not built to be fully charged for years on end. I tried doing it twice and that is what happened both times. Would not recommend; if you want a UPS just buy one, the small ones are not that expensive, like 70 USD.
- hddherman 1y agoOn my ThinkPad T430, I have a weekly full discharge cycle set up using "tlp recalibrate BAT0", it helps avoid that issue and helps confirm that the battery is still functional.
- dapperdrake 1y agoOn Thinkpads tlp(8) can set a maximum battery charge threshold of 80%. The embedded controller takes care of it. Never had problems. Makes batteries live way longer.
- muro 1y agoAfter a year or two is exaggerating - it's rare to see issues within 5 years.
- nicman23 1y agoi had a m.2 to pci-e for a sata controller. worked fine but the ups thing is a bit non workable as the drives are not powered by the laptop