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The Cheapest NAS
- rullopat 2y agoIgnorant person question here: “why they make NAS servers without ECC memory?”
- dylan604 2y agonon-ECC is cheaper. i can't think of any other possible reason. anything else would be a lie to cover up being cheap
- bongodongobob 2y agoBecause they barely do anything. It's like like there's 4TB of RAM in there churning away at multiple databases. It's debatable if you even need it in enterprise servers.
- kstrauser 2y agoYou absolutely, positively, 100% need it on anything that carries data you care about. I personally consider it a hard requirement for a NAS. I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere.
- kevinkeller 2y ago> I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere. If you have disks set up in RAID 1 or RAID 6, would you still lose data though?
- extesy 2y agoAbsolutely. Imagine you are saving a text file to NAS with a super-secret password to your Bitcoin wallet, for example "password". While it was in memory before it reached disk, one bit was flipped and the file contents became "pastword" which OS happily saved on your RAID. And now you've lost your Bitcoins forever.
- ttyprintk 2y agoConsider all the RAM along a network transmission. Maybe you’re using authenticated encryption, maybe your transfer has an internal or out of band checksum. Maybe not.
- benlivengood 2y agoIn raid1 all you need is a bit flip in RAM between writing to disks to cause a permanent error (one disk gets the flipped bit, the other does not). Raid6 will repair single bit errors, assuming a bit wasn't flipped before/during the erasure code calculation when writing the data.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 2y agoThere's a lot of places the file can get corrupted on its way to your drive. The memory of the NAS itself is only one of those. If you want any certainty you need to verify it after writing, so ECC RAM is not enough. And once you do set up that verification, you don't need the ECC RAM anymore.
- rullopat 2y agoCan you tell us HOW to setup a NAS so that it doesn't need ECC RAM?
- Dylan16807 2y agoThat differs based on the program you're using to put files onto the NAS. But I'll note the even with ECC you need to double check things in case there was corruption on the drive wires or in many other places. With the right filesystem you can find some of those locally during a scrub, but double checking end-to-end isn't much harder.
- ClumsyPilot 2y agoI am not sure this is correct - there could be an error not only in the data, but also in instructions - but flip could cause data to be written to an incorrect location of the hard disk.
- Dylan16807 2y agoPossible, but I bet the risk of writing/losing the wrong sector based on that kind of RAM bit flip is a lot less than the other sources of writing/losing the wrong sector.
- PhilipRoman 2y agoStoring error correcting codes/checksums/signatures and sending them along the data seems like a more cost effective solution. Without those you need to ensure that every single link in the chain supports ECC (and all the hardware works perfectly) ECC may still be needed for the actual processing, but I don't see a point on having it on a NAS (especially considering you need to send the data over a network to read or write it)
- leros 2y agoThat's pretty cool. Fits their use case for sure. I would probably opt to spend a little more for a gigabit port. From what I've seen watching Jeff Geerling, you can setup a pretty reasonable performing NAS on something on these small SBCs.
- geerlingguy 2y agoAny of the latest generation Arm SBCs is actually pretty adequate for NAS purposes, especially if that's all you want to run on it. If you get a Pi 4 or Pi 5, or one of the Rockchip boards with RK3566 or RK3588 (the latter is much more pricey, but can get gigabit-plus speeds), you can either attach a USB hard drive or SSD, or with most of them now you could add on an M.2 drive or an adapter for SATA hard drives/SSDs, and even do RAID over 1 Gbps or sometimes 2.5 Gbps with no issue. Some people choose to run OpenMediaVault (which is fine), though I have my NASes set up using Ansible + ZFS running on bare Debian, as it's simpler for me to manage that way: https://github.com/geerlingguy/arm-nas https://github.com/geerlingguy/arm-nas I would go with Radxa or maybe Libre Computer if you're not going the Raspberry Pi route, they both have images for their latest boards that are decent, though I almost always have issues with HDMI output, so be prepared to set things up over SSH or serial console.
- Scene_Cast2 2y agoNote that it doesn't look like it has ECC, so make sure to have backups. Fancy file systems like ZFS don't remove the need for ECC.
- coconut08 2y agobeen using zfs on my home nas without ecc for well over a decade and never had any problems. i've seen people claiming this since before i started using zfs and it seems so unnecessary for some random home project.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoUnless you've verified hashes of your files over time you may be having problems and not realizing it.
- loeg 2y agoI believe ZFS does periodic checksuming (scrubbing).
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoStrictly speaking I don't think ZFS itself does, but it is very common for distros to ship a cronjob that runs `zpool scrub` on a schedule (often but not always default enabled).
- theshrike79 2y agoIf a single byte flips in a 4-10GB video file, nobody will ever notice it. There aren't that many cases where it actually matters.
- ratboy666 2y agoThey did mention ZFS, so verified hashes of each file block. I hope they are scrubbing, and have at least one snapshot.
- jstanley 2y agoWhen people set up these NAS's, how are they accessing the files? NFS? SFTP? And how are you accessing it when away from home? A VPN that you're permanently connected to? Is there a good way to do NAT hole-punching? Syncthing kind of does what I want, in that it lets all my computers sync the same files no matter what network they're on, but it insists on always copying all the files ("syncing") whereas I just want them stored on the NAS but accessible everywhere. Nextcloud kind of does what I want but when I tried it before it struck me as flaky and unreliable, and seemed to do a load of stuff I don't want or need.
- sleepybrett 2y agoMostly CIFS, I use tailscale to put my laptop inside of my home network wherever I go.
- adastra22 2y agoDepends on your use case. I just use scp and access the NAS box through Tor when traveling, so I don’t have to open up any ports.
- universa1 2y agoRegarding the connectivity: tailscale... So far I am happy with them and the free plan hasn't been kneecapped afterwards (so far).
- stavros 2y agoEven if it is, you can run Headscale on a server somewhere (or just pay).
- BXlnt2EachOther 2y agoIIRC they have improved the free plan over time, and even mailed users suggesting the relaxed limits might enable moving from paid to free tier [1]. I barely use my tailnet now, might have more of a case for it later, but they are near the top of my "wishing you success but please don't get acquired by a company that will ruin it" list. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615848
- CyberDildonics 2y agoIs there any NAS software that just lets you add disks whenever you want, while using them for redundancy if they aren't full? I wish something was as easy as adding another disk and having the redundancy go up, then removing a disk and having the redundancy go down.
- pwg 2y agoMergerfs plus SnapRAID comes close to your ask: https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/mergerfs/ https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/mergerfs/
- loeg 2y agoWindows Storage Spaces kinda works like this.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoIf you just want a mirror, that's easy (I like ZFS but any software RAID should let you add/remove mirrored disks easily). If you mean mirror until it's full then automatically convert to striped, I don't think anyone does that and I don't think anyone would want that, because people who care enough about protecting their data to use a mirror don't want it to automatically stop being a mirror.
- kcb 2y agoUnraid is probably the closest to that.
- actionfromafar 2y agohttps://www.greyhole.net/ https://www.greyhole.net/ (Not great for many tiny files or file contents changing a lot.)
- woleium 2y agoThe image builder for this board looks dodgy af: "The distribution builder is a proprietary commercial offering as it involves a lot of customer IP and integrations so it cannot be public." Seems like a supply side injector to me!
- efxhoy 2y agoImpossible, they even put “libre” in the name!
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoYeah, reading through the linked https://hub.libre.computer/t/source-code-git-repository-for-bootloaders-and-firmwares/2743/5 https://hub.libre.computer/t/source-code-git-repository-for-... really sours my opinion of Libre Computer - shipping with UEFI so you can just use generic images is a huge advantage, but creating your default images (and firmware! which is worse, IMO) with a proprietary process is such a big red flag that it makes me question the whole thing. If the firmware is FOSS and you can build it yourself using only FOSS inputs (which isn't obvious to me from that discussion), then you could do that and any old image (again, UEFI to support generic images is a huge win) and it would be fine, but the fact that that's not the default really makes me question the values/culture of the company.
- rustcleaner 2y agoToo bad TALOS II is a $5K motherboard. It actually is open down to the brass firmware tacks!
- 15155 2y agoAre the schematics and gerbers provided somewhere?
- superkuh 2y agoYet another reason to avoid the cargo-culting that is "NAS" for home use cases. Just put the disks in your computers.
- iforgotpassword 2y agoMy secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of businesses use them and upgrade on a regular schedule. If you care about power consumption like I do, you can Google "$model energy consumption white paper" which contains very accurate data about idle usage, for example https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy-consumption-ESPRIMO-P9013.pdf https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy... In one case I had a nuc where on Linux after enabling power saving features for the sata controller, idle usage even fell to 5W when the pdf claimed 9. Having an actual pc instead of a random sbc ensures best connectivity, expandability, and software support forever. With almost all sbcs you're stuck with a random-ass kernel from when the damn thing was released, and you basically have to frankenstein together your own up-to-date distro with the old kernel because the vendor certainly doesn't care about updating the random armbian fork they created for that thing.
- djupblue 2y agoParkytowers is site about repurposing thin clients of various kinds, it's a goldmine for finding out power consumption, Linux compatibility, possible hardware mods, etc: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml
- jtwaleson 2y agoI'm looking for a machine like this (affordable, small, low power usage) with 64GB memory. If anyone has any recommendations I'm all ears.
- transpute 2y agoSome Lenovo Tiny models, https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thinkcentre-thinkstation-tiny-project-tinyminimicro-reference-thread.34925/ https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thi...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoOld business laptops work well
- loeg 2y agoThe cheapest NAS is usually just taking some old desktop PC and repurposing it headless. :-)
- rasz 2y agoor even better - old laptop
- criddell 2y agoOr a Raspberry Pi you have kicking around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l30sADfDiM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l30sADfDiM8
- askvictor 2y agoYep, optimised for power consumption, and comes with a built in UPS
- danparsonson 2y agoJust be careful leaving an old battery permanently on charge: https://youtu.be/2Z9190ruyIM https://youtu.be/2Z9190ruyIM
- derekdahmer 2y agoAssuming power is free. Even small wattage differences add up quickly for a server running 24/7 and those older CPUs can be very inefficient.
- loeg 2y ago5 year old CPUs today (i.e., 2019 era chips) are generally pretty efficient.
- RockRobotRock 2y agoThe cost of your sanity also adds up quickly :)
- rasz 2y ago>total 43 So the price of used Sandy Bridge or newer laptop (optionally cracked screen) with 1Gbit ethernet, USB3, couple SATA, couple PCIE lanes (ExpressCard and mpcie slots) and build-in UPS.
- haunter 2y agoPersonally I like the Dell/HP/Lenovo Micro PCs. For ~200€ you can get one with an i5-10500T, 16GB DDR4, and 256GB NVMe SSD and it can be upgraded to 64GB RAM with lot of storage (1x NVMe + 1x 2,5")
- cchance 2y agoI mean you can get one for 50$ on ebay with similar ram and hd, just with a 6700 or 8700 which is more than enough for a NAS lol
- dariosalvi78 2y agoI had an old RaspberryPi model 2 around, installed OpenMediavault, a couple of USB HDs and off I went [1]. Amazing what you can do with old hardware! [1] https://bochovj.wordpress.com/ https://bochovj.wordpress.com/
- cchance 2y agoI mean wtf wouldn't you just buy a G1 Elite Slice, or any of the various NUC's you can buy for 50$ and get you a full Intel computer with a 6700 or 8700 cpu 4-8gb of ram and a full drive slot, and normally extra space for a m2 and a gbit nic lol
- nfriedly 2y agoMy NAS is just my old gaming PC - I swapped out the GPU with a more basic one, and I add another hard drive or two every time storage gets low. It works great and costs me very little in both money and time. I'm currently at 46TB or storage, and I recently threw in a 2.5Gbps NIC when I upgraded the rest of my home network. (Mine certainly uses more electricity than the one in the article, but I pay $0.07/kwh, and run a few docker images that take advantage of the added performance, so I'm happy with it.)
- wildzzz 2y agoThat's basically my setup. I used to have a dedicated gaming PC and a desktop server but haven't used them in a few years. They both have something wrong with them so I'm just going to frankenstein them together into something pretty good. A 10 year old core i7, 16gb of ram, and an old Nvidia quadro is more than enough to run a bunch of apps and Plex transcoding on top of basic file serving.
- superkuh 2y agoThe entire concept of network attached storage is kind of cargo-cult in the vast majority of personal use cases. Just put the drives in your computer. Fewer abstraction layers, fewer problems, cheaper, faster, less fragile, easier to debug and fix if problems do happen. It's just not as hip or cool sounding as "NAS".
- transpute 2y ago> Just put the drives in your computer NAS works with phones, tablets and laptops with egregiously expensive, non-expandable storage. On iOS/iPadOS, use SSH/SFTP to workaround business-model-challenged "Files" client.
- superkuh 2y agoA NAS is not magical. It is just a rather limited computer. Anything a NAS can do so can a normal desktop, and it'll do it better. Sharing files over a network is one of these things. Managing the files is way, way, better since you just use your normal desktop file manager rather than some NAS web stuff that'll break due to CA TLS issues in a few years.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- transpute 2y agoAmong many features, ZFS offers storage snapshots, deduplication and file integrity.
- ac29 2y agoDesktop computers are becoming increasingly uncommon. I'm a pretty technologically inclined person and I havent owned a desktop in years. For most people, laptops have been more than capable enough for their needs for a long time. And for general purpose computing, smartphones are pretty heavily used too.
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- test6554 2y agoEveryone is an expert at storage as long as everything is working great. It's when stuff fails that you feel like an idiot and wished you had one extra hdd in your RAID array or a secondary NAS you were backing up to or one extra site you offloaded your data to. I don't do cheap any more. But I can see the appeal.
- szundi 2y agoDo 2x cheap then, you need backup anyway.
- rovr138 2y agoThese are all strategies and the price point of the unit doesn’t affect it. Need extra drives, buy extra drives. Need extra NAS for backups?, buy an extra NAS. Need an offsite copy?, buy space and get an offsite NAS and drives for an offsite copy. Price point of the unit doesn’t change anything here.
- dudus 2y agoSynology sure provides an expensive but complete package for home office and enthusiasts. Just buy it and be done with it. It's certainly more expensive than DIY it yourself using off the shelf components and things bought out of online classifieds. But for most people that have no interest in tinkering or don't know what to do, just paying the price of a complete solution might be worth it.
- MobileVet 2y agoTotally. If you enjoy the config and have the time, by all means. If you just want it to work, by a Synology. Mine has been running strong for several years now and has docker images for my unify controller, pi hole and Plex. Took minimal time to setup and none since that day. Love it Edit: And my encrypted cloud backup in Backblaze B2 was equally as easy to setup and costs a whopping $2 a month for every family pic, video and doc. I have triple backup, with mirrored RAID for one of those. No effort, maximum peace of mind.
- squarefoot 2y agoI'm happy with XigmaNAS (BSD) on a used mini-pc and a multiple USB3.1 HDD enclosure. Speed is excellent as is stability. Having some memory and CPU cycles to spare, I also am playing with Home Assistant Supervised run as a Virtualbox VM inside of it. Regarding that LaFrite board, I mailed a while ago LoverPi, which appears to be the only one selling it, to ask them if they accept PayPal, but got no reply. Does anyone know of a distributor in the EU or a different worldwide seller?
- mschuster91 2y ago> 100Mb may seem like a joke nowadays, but the main purpose of such a toy NAS for me is to keep a copy of a directory with ~200K small files. Having 1Gb would only marginally improve the syncing speed even if the SBC supported USB 3.0. He's wrong here. The most important thing with small files is latency, and a 1000M network will have significantly less latency than a 100M network. Anyone running TimeMachine over network knows what I mean - local attached storage is blazing fast (particularly SSDs), wired network storage is noticeably worse performing, and wifi is dog f...ing slow.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoSo I am a network dummy, but why would 100M vs 1000M have a difference in latency unless the pipe was saturated?
- mschuster91 2y agoEven in an otherwise unsaturated link, the ping packet will take 1/10th of the time to be transmitted, as the transmission clock is 10x faster.
- jamesy0ung 2y agoIt’s ironic they call themselves Libre Computer, but don’t release the tools to allow users to create their own images
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y agoPerformancewise this looks similar to https://gist.github.com/SvenKortekaas/60387b0428b1592e5c9ec0e94230284e https://gist.github.com/SvenKortekaas/60387b0428b1592e5c9ec0... , where the aluminum-case and baseboard were available for about 11USD for a time. (ex. shipping, OFC) The fitting SBC was about the same price, the most expensive part was the high-efficiencý (GAN) wall-wart, and 2.5" Disk. I know this, because I ordered this eons ago :-) Still running somewhere, that thing. 24/7 since then, with some reboots, because updates... Runs Armbian, if you like to, or anything else if you are willing to mess more. Seems to be still on sale, according to https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=85&product_id=222 https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...
- lannisterstark 2y agoYou can find ex-corporate dell optiplexes or hp prodesks for like $40 for i5-7/8xxx on eBay in the US. They're fantastic.
- 321launch 2y agoOdroid HC-4 is only $73... and lightyears ahead https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/
- Dylan16807 2y agoIt's triple the price so I would hope it's lightyears ahead. But if you're open to paying that much, well, I was considering that specific board along with some others, then I found an entire 12th gen Intel mini-PC for only 50% more and immediately changed my mind.
- shiggaz 2y agoI found an ex-office HP computer with and i5-4670 on the side of the road and have been thinking about setting it up as a home server. Does anyone have a recommendation for how to set it up as a NAS, VPN, Home Assistant and Plex server?
- raihansaputra 2y agoHome Assistant + plugins/extensions ~might be the easiest. Unsure about the VPN part. If you want to tinker and do some sysadmin work, then go install Proxmox and have separate containers for each as you wish.
- dns_snek 2y agoTailscale VPN addon for HomeAssistant is relatively simple to set up. You can use it to access your home network remotely ("site to site networking") or to proxy your network traffic through your home network when you're away ("exit node")
- raihansaputra 2y agoYeah Tailscale is great. I assumed VPN as in tunneling the whole network external traffic through the machine. I haven't searched for something like that. Might even need a full blown router service/VM.
- hajimuz 2y ago100MB LAN port is unqualified for a NAS…
- markhahn 2y agocost and power are legitimate motives. I'd probably have started with a rpi-02 though: storage and ethernet over USB is not going to win any races, though it'll compete with what he ended up with...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sandreas 2y agoI would question all these Raspberry PI-ish NAS attempts, especially when it includes some power adapters and milling out cases. It all feels so fiddly and sluggish while still being "not that cheap". Storing my important personal data on an USB-drive somewhat feels risky. It probably wouldn't burn a house down, but still... The real benefit is the small form factor and the "low" power consumption. Paying 43 bucks for the whole thing - now asking myself if it is worth saving a few bucks and living with 100Mbit network speed, instead of spending 150 bucks and having 2.5Gig. There are so many (also "used") alternatives out there: - Fujitsu Futro S920 (used < 75, ~10W) - FriendlyElec NanoPI R6C (< 150, ~2W, https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=291 https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...) - FriendlyElec Nas Kit (< 150, ~5W, https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=294 https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...) - Dell T20 / T30 (used < 100, ~25W) - Fujitsu Celsius W570 (used < 100, ~15W) My personal NAS / Homeserver: Fujitsu D3417-B Intel Xeon 1225v5 64GB ECC RAM WD SN850x 2TB NVMe Pico PSU 120 More expensive, but reliable, powerful and drawing <10W Idle.
- poulpy123 2y agoYou are comparing apple and oranges: the SBC used by the author has a consumption of 0.75W idle and 4W Full load
- sandreas 2y agoNo I don't. The FriendlyElec NanoPI R6C can be brought to 1W Idle including NVMe SSD and 2.5GBe (and REAL transfer rates of >200MB/s). It's more expensive, but totally worth it in my opinion. See https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/ultra-low-power-ssd-nas-1g-0-85w-idle-2-5g-1-00w-idle.1340466/ https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/ultra-low-powe... Since it has neither ECC nor support for common Open Source NAS Operating Systems, I still would not buy it as my daily driver. I just don't think that a difference of 5W Idle Power is worth the effort of milling out stuff, using USB-Storage and the additional maintenance effort keeping this system up to date.
- Yodel0914 2y agoAlthough not quite as cheap, I bought a mini pc (Intel N-95, 8GB, 256GB) for not a whole lot more. It has room for a 4TB SSD in a built-in enclosure, which I mirror to an external 4TB HDD nightly. Important stuff is cloud-synced and manually backed up monthly to a external HDD that lives at work. It also runs Jellyfin, minimserver, syncthing etc. One of the nice things is that it has a full sync of my cloud storage, so I don't have think about backing up individual devices much any more: I create a file on my laptop, it syncs to cloud storage, then to the minipc. From that point on it's part of the regular nightly/monthly backup routine. If I hit the 4TB limit it might be a pain, as I'm not sure it'll support an 8TB SSD.
- timbit42 2y agoCloud storage isn't a backup any more than RAID 1 is.
- danparsonson 2y agoOf course it is. PC explodes -> download the cloud copy. Not to be relied on by itself, but it absolutely qualifies as a backup.
- remram 2y agoBackup solutions usually need to cover more scenarios than "PC explodes". In fact solutions for that are usually called "disaster recovery" instead. A real backup solution ought to cover the case where you deleted the wrong file, and you find out the next day. Or it got corrupted somehow (PCs and disks can explode slowly) and you find out the next time you open it, a week later. If the cloud service happily replicated that change, it can't be used to restore anything.
- Yodel0914 2y ago> A real backup solution ought to cover the case where you deleted the wrong file, and you find out the next day. Or it got corrupted somehow (PCs and disks can explode slowly) and you find out the next time you open it, a week later. If the cloud service happily replicated that change, it can't be used to restore anything. a) my cloud storage has file versioning b) as I mentioned, I have a ~24hr old snapshot as well as a ~30d old snapshot The worst practical case is that I lose a month's data, and I'm fine with that.
- meowmeow20 2y agoMy "NAS" and homeserver is an old Lenovo ThinkCentre mini PC with a large SSD inside. My "RAID" is an rclone cloud backup. Might be a bit scuffed but it works really well, at least for me.
- beAbU 2y agoAs other comments in this thread, I want to echo the value for money that is to be had in refurbished SFF office PCs that come available on the second-hand market. I picked up an HP ultradesk something or other for dirt cheap a while back. When I got it it turned out to be surplus stock, so not even second hand - was brand new, for maybe 20% the retail price. Dead quiet, and super power efficient. It's not the most powerful CPU, but it's 10th or 11th generation which is perfect for hardware encoding for my media server use case. It does not have all the hardware for RAID and multiple hard drives and all that, but one NVME boot disk, and one 16TB spinning rust disk is more than enough for my needs. It's media, so I'm not worried about losing any of it. These boxes are cheap enough that you can get multiple ones responsible for multiple different things in a single "deployment". At one point I had a box for NAS, a box for media server, a box for my CCTV IP cameras and a box running homeassistant. All humming along nicely. Thankfully I was never masochistic enough to try some kubernetes thing orchestrating all the machines together. This is all obviously for the homelab/personal use case. Would not recommend this for anything more serious. But these machines just work, and they are bog standard X86 PCs, which removes a lot of the hardware config and incompatibility bullshit associated with more niche platforms.
- prmoustache 2y agoI'd rather have 2 devices with a single drive, each having its own copy of the data than one with a RAID 1.
- jokethrowaway 2y agoSame reason I'm not buying another raspberry pi, I'd rather have solar panels and an old reliable pc running somewhere
- INTPenis 2y agoPersonally I don't want to put too much stuff on my router/firewall. The reason I run OpenBSD on it is because I want it to be as secure as possible, it has the final word in my network and it's the outer most device of my network. For storage I've been using Synology for a long time, first ds411+slim and now a ds620slim. I love the slim form factor, only 2.5" drives. It just works™
- banish-m4 2y agoCheap, but not necessarily good, expandable, or resilient. Although, I can tell you what not to do: a 45 drive SAS/2 or /3 4U JBOD case takes way too much power to use all the time and uses screaming 1U fans and PSUs by default. I do have 45 drives in various XFS on md raid10 arrays. Don't even mention ZoL ZFS because that was a fucking disaster of undocumented, under-tested, and SoL "support" for something that should only be used on a proper Sun box like a Thumper. XFS and md are fairly bulletproof. Perhaps one can Ceph their way into significant storage with a crap ton of tiny DIY boxes, but it's going to be a pain to deploy and manage, take lots of space, and probably damn expensive to physically install, network, and provide UPS for.
- HelloNurse 2y agoWhat convenient solutions exist for graceful shutdown of a NAS, without data loss or other drama, in case of power outage? It seems a more pressing concern than flipped bits or network failures.
- switch007 2y agoA filesystem designed to survive sudden power loss? Which is most modern ones right?
- Snoddas 2y agoThe common solution is having an UPS and a NAS that supports graceful shutdown when the UPS detects powerloss
- badgersnake 2y agoMy Helios64 has a built in backup battery. I'm not sure they are available anymore (and I wouldn't recommend anyway for other reasons) but I imagine other NASs have similar setups.
- okasaki 2y agoIf you need to add storage to just one computer (at a time), consider just getting a hard drive enclosure. It's much simpler, cheaper, more secure, and faster than a NAS. You can turn it into a NAS at any time by adding a mini pc or similar.
- ulnarkressty 2y agoI'd say the cheapest NAS would be an external HDD plugged in your WiFi router - most of them have at least one USB port nowadays, with some offering advanced features like photo gallery etc.
- crabbone 2y ago> up-to-date Debian OP has a perverse sense of humor :) ---- But, not to waste space on this mindless joke, here's my (or, more precisely, my wife's) success story. So, I've had it with a laptop and built myself a PC. Money wasn't really a problem, I just wanted to make sure I will have enough of everything, and spares, if necessary. So, I've got a be quiet case with eight caddies and a place for a SATA SSD. It's expensive... but it doubles as my main workstation, so I don't have any regrets about spending more on it! It has a ton of room for installing fans. It has like ten of them at this point, plus liquid cooling. The wifi modem that was built into the mobo that I bought doesn't have a good Linux driver... but the case has a ton of space, and so I could stick an external PCIe wifi modem. And I still have plenty of room left. Anyways. My wife was given some space for her research in the institute she works for. And they get this space through some unknown company with vanishing IT support, where, in the end, all the company does is putting a fancy HTML front-end on Azure cloud services, sometimes mismanaging the underlying infrastructure. While the usage was uncomfortable but palatable, she continued using it. Then the bill came, and oh dear! And then she needed to use a piece of software that really, absolutely, unquestionably needs to be able to create symlinks. And the unknown company with vanishing IT has put together their research environment in such a way that NAS is connected via SMB, and... no symlinks. So... I bought a bunch of 4T hard-drives, and now she has all the space she needs for her research. She doesn't even pay for electricity :(
- ChuckMcM 2y agoInteresting cheap low power system. My brain connects "NAS" with "Data I value" and there isn't anything in the author's system that is focused on enhancing the data integrity. Not saying that is bad, just saying it's the thing that often makes commercial NAS system both more expensive and more power consumptive. I've got an 8 drive RAID-6 setup as a ZFS pool[1]. More power, last I checked about 50W when idle, close to 150W when "working", but I think at this point I've had failures in nearly every piece that ended up replacing something but never lost any data, never corrupted any files. Replaced the power supply, the mother board, and two drives. I haven't had to replace any memory but I do have an extra stick "spare" because that is the kind of thing that ages out and is hard to replace (it's DDR3 memory but I've had systems with DDR2 so really hard to get DIMMS for). That said, I do see a lot of value in low power systems like that of the author and run a couple. The way I do the energy calculation though is that I boot them off internal storage (MMC/SD) and then mount a root filesystem from the NAS. That way they don't have any storage power cost directly, they are easy to replace, and the power consumed by my NAS is amortized over a number of systems. giving it some less obvious economics. [1] It is an iXSystems FreeNAS based system.
- bastawhiz 2y ago> The remedy is to turn UAS off via adding usb-storage.quirks=152d:0578:u to the kernel cmdline. This is the point where I'd have thrown it in the trash and given up. I simply don't know how people have the patience to debug past stuff like this: I get that the point of the project is to be cheap and simple, but this is expensive in time and decidedly not simple.
- theLastOfCats 2y agoOld PC or terramaster enclosure from aliexpress
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- vermaden 2y agoIts very hard to beat Dell Wyse 3030 LT with USB attached disks. - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/silent-fanless-dell-wyse-3030-lt-freebsd-server/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/silent-fanless-del... I use that and the costs are about $20-25 for a used Dell Wyse 3030 and $60 for used 5TB 2.5 HDD from Seagate in USB 3.0 case. Then the power bills will also be tiny as it draw about 3.8W when idle and 10.3 W with CPU and disks stressed to maximum. The only limitation is 'only' 2GB RAM - but with ZFS ARC set to 32MB minimum and 64MB maximum RAM is not an issue. % grep arc /etc/sysctl.conf vfs.zfs.arc.min=33554432 vfs.zfs.arc.max=67108864 Regards.
- metadat 2y agoNote: S.M.A.R.T. status info can't be read from USB attached drives. You have no idea if they're throwing errors indicating imminent doom.
- vermaden 2y agoOn FreeBSD getting S.M.A.R.T. status over USB drive works without any problem: # smartctl -a /dev/da0 smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE-p1 amd64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Western Digital Elements / My Passport (USB, AF) Device Model: WDC WD50NDZW-11A8JS1 Serial Number: WD-WXP2EA07UYLA LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2be7aef41 Firmware Version: 01.01A01 User Capacity: 5,000,947,523,584 bytes [5.00 TB] Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical Rotation Rate: 5400 rpm Form Factor: 2.5 inches TRIM Command: Available, deterministic Device is: In smartctl database 7.3/5528 ATA Version is: ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5 SATA Version is: SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s) Local Time is: Sat May 11 10:26:04 2024 CEST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity was never started. Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 4680) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x1b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. No Conveyance Self-test supported. No Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 560) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x30b5) SCT Status supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 253 253 021 Pre-fail Always - 3508 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 4626 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 083 083 000 Old_age Always - 12789 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 139 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 58 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 192 192 000 Old_age Always - 24665 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 086 083 000 Old_age Always - 66 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 No self-tests have been logged. [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t] Selective Self-tests/Logging not supported The above only provides legacy SMART information - try 'smartctl -x' for more
- RockRobotRock 2y agoJeez just buy a real computer. Optiplexes are dirt cheap