Home NAS

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
16,066
Location
USA
I am trying to decide on two bays of NAS. Should I alloctate a spare "hot" drive? It's not clear if the drive is spinning always or if it it powered, but the NAS only spins it up when there is a need to resilver the array.
 

ddrueding

Fixture
Joined
Feb 4, 2002
Messages
19,439
Location
Horsens, Denmark
I wish the average high here in summers was only 21°C. I have a feeling if global warming continues places like Norway/Sweden/Denmark, and Canada, are going to be attractive places for climate change refugees. The southern USA will probably become a ghost town.
Interestingly the weather here now is just about what the weather was in Monterey, California in the '80s. Only another few years and it'll get there.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
16,066
Location
USA
I'm trying to access different arrays. For some really stupidly reason, the QNAP have segregated the OS and FS so the QTS Hero is ONLY ZFS and the QTS is only EXt4. The only way to change is to flash the firmwares each time, which is not feasible. So now I have two QNAPs locally and two QNAP external drives, and yet another NAS in a different region-zone and not all compatible! It's a cluster....
Synolology Allows EXT4 and brfts volumes in the same system. But that ship has sailed due to lack of compatibility with normal hard drives.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
21,109
Location
I am omnipresent
Website
s-laker.org
I really do think your frustration at existing NAS products is a compelling argument for building some kind of appliance device. There are a number of ITX boards with integrated Celeron CPUs, 6x SATA, 4x2.5Gbps LAN and an M.2 port that are very affordable. Combine with something like a Silverstone DS380 and you have a pretty good low power build with tons of flexibility from FreeNAS or TrueNAS.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
16,066
Location
USA
I just wanted to reuse some old drives and send them to another region-zone. 🤷‍♂️
As Roseanne Roseannadanna said, "It just goes to show you. It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another."
 

ddrueding

Fixture
Joined
Feb 4, 2002
Messages
19,439
Location
Horsens, Denmark
Putting it in storage isn't useless, but one of the advantages to having it powered up is that when failures do happen you can fix the system and get the redundancy back. In storage failures are less likely, but what is more likely is that enough failures will happen to overcome the redundancy and it will lose data.

Just my 2c
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
16,066
Location
USA
I don't have IT like options anywhere. The Best I could do is have someone place it in storage.
 

ddrueding

Fixture
Joined
Feb 4, 2002
Messages
19,439
Location
Horsens, Denmark
All good. I'd consider it sitting there good for a year or two, but at that point it should be spun up, a consistency check run, and any drives that failed replaced and array rebuilt. That may be paranoid, but I don't like unknowns, and with it offline it feels like Schrödinger's hardware.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
16,066
Location
USA
It will have to shipped to me somewhere and then connect to a sucky 4.5.x QNAP.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
21,109
Location
I am omnipresent
Website
s-laker.org
MaxDigitalData is offering what appear to be rebadged 7200rpm Seagate Drives with a three year warranty for EXTREMELY reasonable prices. 14TB for $129? 16TB for $169? I'm assuming they're pulled working datacenter drives, but the specs on Amazon say they're SATA and don't mention whether they're renewed or not.
 

Handruin

Administrator
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
13,627
Location
USA
Interesting that they sell their own labeled drives but also their labeled drives but marked as "Renewed" for even a little less money. Some searches hint that MDD wipes the smart data on them before rebranding.

I'm not sure what I would trust these with. I do need to pull the trigger on refreshing my 6TB HDDs sooner than later.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
16,066
Location
USA
They went down the tubes a while ago. MAC users get Thunderbowls SSDs and Win/Lindux users have real NAS or storage servers
 

ddrueding

Fixture
Joined
Feb 4, 2002
Messages
19,439
Location
Horsens, Denmark
48TB of nearly silent storage with a 10Gb link and low power consumption for $3500 is very tempting for me at the moment. Would be nice to be able to have my local NAS in my office instead of buried in a distant closet.

 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
16,066
Location
USA
The 10W Celerion Jasper Lakes 11th gen CPU is quite underpowered, but it's a good trend. The older QNAP M.2 SSD NAS has only four NVMes and 2.5GbE. I would not be using those cheap DRAMless QLC SSDs, but that's me. Why not just put SSDs inside your computer case? You'd get more bandwidth even with SATA III drives on a RAID controller and mnay times more with various M.2s on the board or a PCIe card.
 
Last edited:

ddrueding

Fixture
Joined
Feb 4, 2002
Messages
19,439
Location
Horsens, Denmark
I do lots of experimentation and general shenanigans with both my desktop and my home server. I want a thing to hold my stuff that I don't mess with. Just an appliance that I don't have to worry about. I have an online backup (AWS), so I'm not really worried about data loss, just downtime. I think SSDs are reliable enough that I'll swing for a 12-drive RAID-0 so that the CPU doesn't have to do much work. I don't think the performance of the SSDs is that big a factor if they only have a single 10Gb port to connect to. We'll see; I have too many things on my shopping list at the moment.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
21,109
Location
I am omnipresent
Website
s-laker.org
That system is kind of weird though. It doesn't support being an iSCSI target, so you'd be doing SMB or maybe NFS. That's definitely less than ideal for running VMs, and it's not like the local CPU could manage such a thing. All SSD media storage is cool from a bragging rights perspective though.

My primary storage server/VM host is running on a pair of 16 Core Haswell Xeon CPUs, so I feel the power draw pain, but whatever miracle Lenovo worked with cooling an RD550, at least the damned thing barely makes any noise.
 

Handruin

Administrator
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
13,627
Location
USA
That Asustor is a neat machine even if it's not ideally something I'd want. Having "only" a single 10Gb port isn't a big deal either. I think many people (not you all) underestimate how much data it's actually capable of moving and usually isn't the bottleneck.

I would also love to reduce the power draw of my old NAS which is a dual socket E5-2670 (~2012). That's great to hear the RD550 isn't super loud given its 1U size. I would like a 12-bay 3.5" rack mount and had looked at Lenovo but they're pricey. Did you buy yours new?
 

ddrueding

Fixture
Joined
Feb 4, 2002
Messages
19,439
Location
Horsens, Denmark
Fortunately I don't need it as primary storage for VMs as the server has a 2TB M.2 in it and that's overkill for my Factorio docker and sandbox. Backing up over SMB is fine. After doing so much work to quiet my office down, I can't have a spinning disk in here. At the moment my old Synology box is in a utility closet only accessible over WiFi. 6E, but still painful.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
21,109
Location
I am omnipresent
Website
s-laker.org
I would also love to reduce the power draw of my old NAS which is a dual socket E5-2670 (~2012). That's great to hear the RD550 isn't super loud given its 1U size. I would like a 12-bay 3.5" rack mount and had looked at Lenovo but they're pricey. Did you buy yours new?

One of my customers closed their office during the pandemic and I just brought it home. Their setup is a just VMs in my datacenter now. Which are also sitting on an RD550.

I added a second PSU and switched the single CPU for a pair of bigger boys (I think I went E5 2670 v3 to now having 2698s, which cost me IIRC $100) and quadrupled the RAM. Only down side is that it doesn't have U.2 bays. Much like having an older Thinkpad, the parts are readily available and right now at least, they're dirt cheap. I have copies of customer VMs on hand and my home lab needs are met.

It's not silent, but I can't hear it with the ceiling fan in the back bedroom turned on, except when it first powers on. Then it makes a noise that can wake the dead for about 10 seconds.
 
Top