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.
Home NAS
- Thread starter LiamC
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ddrueding
Fixture
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.
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.
Synolology Allows EXT4 and brfts volumes in the same system. But that ship has sailed due to lack of compatibility with normal hard drives.
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Fatwah on Western Digital
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.
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Fatwah on Western Digital
Do you have a datacenter to host such a system in another region or do you have a second residence somewhere besides California?
ddrueding
Fixture
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
Just my 2c
ddrueding
Fixture
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.
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Fatwah on Western Digital
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.
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Fatwah on Western Digital
I probably will soon.
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.
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.
Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
In case anyone missed it, Drobo has ceased sales...
arstechnica.com
Drobo, having stopped sales and support, reportedly files Chapter 7 bankruptcy
Company posted in January that it had "transitioned to a self-service model."
arstechnica.com
ddrueding
Fixture
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.
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.
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ddrueding
Fixture
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.
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Fatwah on Western Digital
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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Fatwah on Western Digital
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.