[HN Gopher] The Cheapest NAS
___________________________________________________________________
The Cheapest NAS
Author : henry_flower
Score : 306 points
Date : 2024-07-03 16:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sigwait.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (sigwait.org)
| leros wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| Any 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| Note 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.
| risho wrote:
| been 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 wrote:
| Unless you've verified hashes of your files over time you may
| be having problems and not realizing it.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| If 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.
| loeg wrote:
| I believe ZFS does periodic checksuming (scrubbing).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Strictly 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).
| ratboy666 wrote:
| They did mention ZFS, so verified hashes of each file
| block. I hope they are scrubbing, and have at least one
| snapshot.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| ZFS does nothing to protect you against RAM corrupting
| your data before ZFS sees it. All you'll end up with is a
| valid checksum of the now bad data.
|
| You can Google more, but, I'll just leave this from the
| first page of the openZFS manual:
| Misinformation has been circulated that ZFS data
| integrity features are somehow worse than those of other
| filesystems when ECC RAM is not used. This is not the
| case: all software needs ECC RAM for reliable operation
| and ZFS is no different from any other filesystem in that
| regard.[1]
|
| [1] https://openzfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction
| .html
| mafro wrote:
| Why would one snapshot help?
| ratboy666 wrote:
| One snapshot would help because, if EVERYTHING collapses,
| and you need data recovery, the snapshot provides a
| basepoint for the recovery. This should allow better
| recovery of metadata. Not that this should EVER happen --
| it is just a good idea. I use Jim Salter's syncoid/sanoid
| to make snapshots, age them out, and send data to another
| pool.
|
| I agree that ECC is a damn good idea - I use it on my
| home server. But, my lappy (i5 thinkpad) doesn't have it.
| risho wrote:
| i've heard people say this, like i said, since before i
| started using zfs and i've never had an issue with a
| corrupted file. there's a few things that could be
| happening: i'm the luckiest person who has ever lived,
| these bit flip events don't happen nearly as often as
| people like to pretend they do, or when they do happen they
| aren't likely to be a big deal.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I have some JPEGs with bit flips. I could tell because
| they display ugly artifacts at the point of the bit flip.
| (You can see the kind of artifacts I'm talking about
| here: https://xn--andreasvlker-cjb.de/2024/02/28/image-
| formats-bit...)
|
| I'd happened to archive the files to CD-R's incidentally.
| I was able to compare those archived files to the ones
| that remained on my file server. There were bit flips
| randomly in some of the files.
|
| After that happened I started hashing all of my files and
| comparing hashes when I migrate files during server
| upgrades. Prior to using ZFS I also periodically verified
| file hashes with a cheapo Perl script.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| If all you have on your Nas is pirated movies, then yes
|
| > when they do happen they aren't likely to be a big
| deal.
|
| But with more sensitive data it might matter to you. Ram
| can go bad like hdds can, and without ecc you have no
| chance of telling. Zfs won't help you here if the bit
| flip happens in the page cache. The file will corrupt in
| ram and Zfs will happily calculate a checksum for that
| corrupted data and store that alongside the file.
| jnovek wrote:
| > so make sure to have backups
|
| Can you (or someone) suggest a backup scheme? I have a 28TB
| NAS. Almost everything I've looked into is expensive or
| intended more for enterprise tier.
|
| Are there options for backup in the "hobbyist" price range?
| Dxtros wrote:
| if your talking cloud backup Wasabi (which uses S3) is the
| cheapest i could find it's pay as you go and they don't
| charge for upload/download. The pay as you go is $6.99 per TB
| which would be pretty pricey at 28 TB, but it's super cheap
| for my 4tb NAS.
| vunderba wrote:
| I have a NAS that has 18 TB effective storage, 36 TB
| mirrored. It all gets backed up to a B2 back blaze which is
| about six dollars per terabyte - but I'm currently only using
| about 8 TB at the moment so it's only about 50 bucks a month.
|
| So this might be on the higher end of the price range if
| you're using up all 28 TB uncompressed since that's about
| $168 per month though...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| AWS, GCP, and Azure all offer cold storage for about $1 per
| TB per month. If you want any cheaper you need to build a
| second NAS.
|
| You could also take the awkward route and add one or two
| large drives to your desktop, mirror there, and back that up
| to backblaze (not B2).
|
| The other suggestions you got for hot storage strike me as
| the wrong way to handle this, if you're considering $80 per
| year per TB for _backups_ then just make another NAS.
| vunderba wrote:
| For the OP - be careful with AWS, the closest pricing to
| one dollar per terabyte is S3 Glacier Deep Archive and
| you'd be surprised how expensive a full restore can be in
| the event that you need to do so in terms of restore
| pricing, egress cost, etc.
|
| Another NAS isn't really a good solution (unless you can
| place it in a different house) - the goal of a cloud back
| up is that it's offsite.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| While true that it is something to be wary of, if you
| restore the entire backup at full cost every two years
| it's still cheaper than B2.
|
| The egress is only super high when you compare to how
| cheap $1 per month is.
|
| And I bet you can find somewhere offsite for a NAS for
| free or a tiny fraction of $150/month.
| barnabee wrote:
| I use Glacier alongside RAID with 4 drives so that I can
| recover from any single drive failure (which _will_
| happen) just by swapping in a new drive.
|
| Had this setup ~10 years and have had to replace a drive
| on two occasions but never needed to restore from
| Glacier.
|
| At this point even if I do need to do a Glacier restore
| one day it's still going to work out to be pretty
| economical.
| criddell wrote:
| The low-tech and not super resilient method is to buy a
| second 28TB NAS, put it in a different location and sync them
| periodically when you know your primary is in good shape.
|
| Back in the days of DVDs, I used to backup my 20GB drive onto
| DVDs. I wonder if you could do something similar today but
| instead of a bunch of 4GB optical disks, you would use 4 x
| 8TB drives?
| jjrh wrote:
| There is 'amanda'. It will split your data up if and you
| can rotate a bunch of disks.
|
| Used it years ago, we rotated disks every week or something
| and periodically would take one out of commission and get a
| new one.
|
| I believe you can mix and match storage mediums - like have
| your monthly snapshot write to tape.
| frutiger wrote:
| `zfs send --raw` of encrypted datasets to
| https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html.
| ahofmann wrote:
| That would cost at least 336 EUR per month.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| Yeah, rsync.net is pricey, but in reliable.
|
| I been using Interserver[1] + borg[2] for the last 3
| years. With the 10TB plan comes out to $25/mo, but if you
| prepay a year there's discounts.
|
| For the OPs use case, they have a 40TB plan for $84/mo.
| Still pricey, but, cheap compared to most other cloud
| storages. If you have data you care about, off-site
| backups are required.
|
| [1] https://www.interserver.net/storage/
|
| [2] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
| ssl-3 wrote:
| A cheap backup scheme:
|
| Buy the hardware to make a lightweight backup server. Make
| backups work with it. Take it to your friend's place along
| with a bottle of scotch, plug it in, and then: Use it.
|
| Disaster recovery is easy: Just drive over there.
|
| Redundancy is easy: Build two, and leave them in different
| places.
|
| None of this needs to happen on rented hardware in The Clown.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| https://www.interserver.net/storage/
| toast0 wrote:
| You pretty much need a second, similar system, hopefully not
| physically nearby. Tape doesn't scale down to home use, and
| optical is too small.
|
| My home NAS has several roles, so I don't have to backup the
| full capacity. The family shared drive definitely needs to be
| backed up. The windows desktop backups probably don't,
| although if I had a better plan for offsite backups, I would
| probably include desktop backups in that. TV recordings and
| ripped optical discs don't need to be backed up for me, I
| could re-rip them and they're typically commercially
| available if I had a total loss; not worth the expense to
| host a copy of that offsite, too; IMHO.
|
| You might do something like mirrored disks on the NAS and
| single copy on the backup as a cost saver, but that comes
| with risks too.
| yair99dd wrote:
| Check Storj distributed storage. Fraction of aws Storage*
|
| $0.004 Per GB/month
| ssl-3 wrote:
| For 28TB, that's $1,146.88 per month.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's a tenth of that.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Hetzner gives you 20TB for around $50/month. Isn't really
| redundant, but it's certainly offsite backup.
| hitsurume wrote:
| I know ECC is a special type of ram, but how does it help a
| NAS/Raid setup?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Data that's about to be written to disk often resides in ram
| for some period of time - bit flips in non-ECC ram can
| silently corrupt the data before writing it out. ZFS doesn't
| prevent this though it might detect it with checksumming.
|
| https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-
| kill-y...
| eric__cartman wrote:
| If you're unlucky enough to experience memory errors in one
| of the intermediate buffers files go through while being
| copied from one computer to another an incorrect copy of the
| file might get written to disk.
|
| When running software RAID, memory errors could also cause
| data to be replicated erroneously and raise an error the next
| time it's read. That said if the memory is flaky enough that
| these errors are common it's highly likely that the operating
| system will crash very frequently and the user will know
| something is seriously wrong.
|
| If you want to make sure that files have been copied
| correctly you can flush all kernel buffers and run diff -r
| between the source and destination directory to make sure
| that everything is the same.
|
| It's probably way more likely to experience data loss due to
| human error or external factors such as a power surge than
| bad ram. I personally thoroughly test the memory before a
| computer gets put into service and assume it's okay until
| something fails or it gets replaced. The only machine I've
| ever seen that would corrupt random data on a disk was
| heavily and carelessly overclocked (teenage me cared about
| getting moar fps in games, and not having a reliable
| workstation lol)
| barnabee wrote:
| I wonder whether something like Syncthing would notice a
| hash difference with data corruption caused by such a
| memory error? And whether it'd correct it or propagate the
| issue...
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I've had non-ECC NAS systems for over 20 years and I've had
| exactly zero cases where memory corruption was an issue.
|
| It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for
| personal setups.
| jjav wrote:
| > It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for
| personal setups.
|
| My personal files are ultimately a lot more important to me
| and much more irreplaceable than any files at work.
|
| I'd never run a NAS without ZFS and ECC.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I don't think I've ever had ECC, and have never had any
| issues. What kind of problems would you expect to see?
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Non shielded RAM is subject to bit flipping. Non-ECC
| always carries this risk in general computing, but the
| problem is compounded when you run a filesystem like ZFS
| which uses memory as a significant storage element for
| write cache.
|
| If it would hugely impact your life if a bit were flipped
| from a 0 to 1 in your stored data - say you make videos
| or store your bitcoin wallet key on your NAS - you are
| running a risk not using ECC.
|
| You may not have had issues or ever have issues with non-
| ECC. Your car may never be stolen if you leave the keys
| in either, but it's not a good risk proposition for most
| people.
| toast0 wrote:
| Well part of it is you likely won't see the problem until
| a long time after it happens. But on servers with ECC and
| reporting I saw several different patterns:
|
| a) 99%+ (or something) of the servers had zero reported
| errors for their lifetime. Memory usually works, no
| problems experienced.
|
| b) Some of the servers reported one error, one time, and
| then all was well for the rest of their life. If this
| happens without ECC, and you're lucky, it's in some
| memory that doesn't really matter and it's no big deal.
| Or maybe it crashes your kernel because it's in the right
| spot (flip a bit in a pointer/return address and it's
| easy to crash). Or maybe it managed to flip a bit in a
| pending write and your file is stored wrong and the zfs
| checksum is calculated on the wrong data. If you're
| really unlucky, you could probably write bad metadata and
| have a real hard time mounting the filesystem later?
|
| c) some servers reported the same address with a
| correctable error once a day; probably one bit stuck, any
| time data transits that address, that bit is still stuck,
| and that will likely cause trouble. If it's used for
| kernel memory, you'll probably end up crashing sooner or
| later.
|
| d) some servers had a lot more ram errors; sometimes a
| slow ramp to a hundred a day, once or twice a rapid ramp
| to so many that the system spent most of its time
| handling machine check exceptions, but did manage to stay
| online but developed a queue it could never process. Once
| you're at these levels, you'll probably get crashes, but
| you might write some bad data first.
|
| Ram testing helps on systems without ECC, but you won't
| really know if/when the ram has gone from working 100% to
| working almost 100%. I have a desktop that was running
| fine for a while, tests fine, but crashes in ways that
| have to be bad ram, and removing one stick seems to have
| fixed it.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The "personal files" I really want to keep safe amount to
| around 500MB of truly important data (pdfs, scanned
| documents, text files etc) and ~200GB of images and videos.
|
| Both of which are 3-2-1 backed up.
|
| Adding an ECC motherboard to my NAS would cost more than a
| quarter century of cloud storage for that amount of data.
|
| The rest of my terabytes of data would be inconvenient to
| lose, but not fatal. In the worst case I'd need to track
| down a few rare DVDs and re-rip them.
| jjav wrote:
| > Both of which are 3-2-1 backed up.
|
| Keep in mind that backups are a solution to a different
| problem than ECC.
|
| If a file is silently corrupted you could be backing up
| the corrupt file for years and by the time you discover
| the problem, it has spread to every available backup.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| As for my anecdote, I had a computer with 3 HDDs in a raid5,
| it had some of my very early programming projects and other
| various things which I wish I still had. But, I don't have
| any longer because something, I'm assuming memory, was
| silently failing and over 40% of the files were turned into
| jibberish and random binary bytes.
|
| I now use ECC EVERYWHERE now. My laptop, my desktop, my
| little home server. All ECC. Because, ECC is cheap and
| provides a lot of protection for very little effort on my
| part.
| transpute wrote:
| Which laptops support ECC?
| mmh0000 wrote:
| If you just want to buy something that'll "just work",
| The Lenovo P16[1], is ECC capable from the factory.
| Basically anything AMD "should" support ECC, it may need
| to be turned on in the bios. The problem with "should" is
| the trail-and-error you'll have to do to find a working
| combination, though, I personally I've never had many
| issues getting ECC working.
|
| [1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/think
| padp/th...
| ndiddy wrote:
| Note that AMD APUs prior to the 5000 series only
| supported ECC on the "PRO" models. For example, the Ryzen
| 3 PRO 3200G supports ECC, but the Ryzen 3 3200G doesn't.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| You might have been leaving fire pits to burn out for 20
| years when you go to bed, but it only takes 1 errant spark
| for the "overkill" of wetting the ashes isn't overkill.
|
| There are various trade offs you can make depending on your
| filesystem, OS tooling and hardware which can mitigate risks
| in different ways. However non-ECC invites a lot of risk. How
| often are you checksumming your backups to validate
| integrity? It seeks unlikely you've had 0 memory corruption
| over 20 years, more likely you didn't notice it or your run a
| filesystem with tooling that handles it.
| singron wrote:
| This is only 1 disk, so you are way more likely to lose all
| your data due to an ordinary single disk failure than to some
| ram errors.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| ECC for nerds is like gear heads arguing about motor oil.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Only if one set of gear heads was arguing that you don't
| really need it.
| Lammy wrote:
| Hate to see this downvoted because I have personally lost files
| to ZFS on failing non-ECC memory. It was all my most-used stuff
| too because those were the files I was actually accessing, then
| it would compare checksum in memory to checksum on disk and
| decide disk was the one that was wrong. I noticed via audible
| blips appearing in my FLACs and verified with `flac -t
| <bad_flac>`.
| jstanley wrote:
| When 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 wrote:
| Mostly CIFS, I use tailscale to put my laptop inside of my home
| network wherever I go.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Depends 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 wrote:
| Regarding the connectivity: tailscale... So far I am happy with
| them and the free plan hasn't been kneecapped afterwards (so
| far).
| stavros wrote:
| Even if it is, you can run Headscale on a server somewhere
| (or just pay).
| BXlnt2EachOther wrote:
| IIRC 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
| nomius10 wrote:
| An easy solution for the VPN part would be Zerotier /
| Tailscale. IIRC Zerotier uses chacha20 for encryption which is
| faster than AES, especially for a power-strapped SBC.
| jnovek wrote:
| I tried to build a setup like this with OpenVPN years ago and
| OMG.
|
| Tailscale/Wireguard has been such a big leap forward.
| Vrondi wrote:
| I usually just use SMB shares within my LAN. It serves my
| modest needs. I have used WebDAV or FTP in the past. Depends on
| the specific use. Away from home, VPN is essential. Too risky
| to just forward ports these days.
| jnovek wrote:
| Answering your questions in order: - On mine I
| use NFS and SMB which covers most possible clients.
| - I use an ssh bastion that I expose via Tailscale to connect
| to mine remotely. So a VPN but it's wireguard based so it's
| not too intrusive. I have a gig up, though, YMMV. -
| My NAS has 28TB of space. I'm still working on backup
| strategy. So far it just has my Dropbox and some ephemera I
| don't care about losing on it. - Regarding other
| services: I use Dropbox pretty extensively but these days 2TB
| just isn't very much. Plus it gets cranky because I have more
| than 500,000 files in it.
|
| This is my personal setup but I think it's a bit different for
| everyone.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Wow! What kind of data are you generating that 2TB 'just
| isn't very much'? (Video editing?) All my personal files take
| up around 10GB in my Google Drive.
| Koffiepoeder wrote:
| One example: If you take picture with a decent camera in
| raw format, your storage gets filled ridiculously fast. A
| short travel with a mere 200 pictures can easily be like
| 25M*200=5G. Another example: if you're doing any kind of AI
| training (especially picture based), the training materials
| can easily amount to many terrabytes.
| galkk wrote:
| Google takeout of my personal pictures from Google photos
| takes 600gb+ alone. And I'm not avid picture taker (that's
| the archive since 2000s, I did upload a lot of my old dslr
| photos to google photos when it was unlimited). I guess if
| people make more personal videos, they will use more space
| easily
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| I think we probably have different definitions of 'not an
| avid picture taker' :D
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| I'd say so. I take over 500GB of personal photos/videos
| per year, and I'm not a huge phone user.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Even a router can do that these days, GLiNet routers have USB
| ports and SSH, you can setup such basic stuff
|
| Most mid range routers allow SSH, and have decent CPU
| generalizations wrote:
| Depends on what you need. I have a NAS with syncthing, and it's
| a combination.
|
| - I use a lot of different folders within syncthing, and
| different machines have different combinations to save space
| where they aren't needed; the NAS has all of them.
|
| - on the LAN, sshfs is a resilient-but-slower alternative to
| NFS. If I reboot my NAS, sshfs doesn't care & reconnects
| without complaint...last time I tried to use it, NFS locked up
| the entire client.
|
| - zerotier + sshfs is workable-but-slow in remote scenarios
|
| Note I'm mostly trying to write code remotely. If you're trying
| to watch videos....uh, good luck.
| sockaddr wrote:
| > And how are you accessing it when away from home?
|
| I usually just use zerotier for this, it's extremely
| lightweight
| aborsy wrote:
| I use Tailscale, but I'm amazed that the size of the ZeroTier
| app is 2.6 MB versus 23MB for Tailscale.
|
| How come ZeroTier is 10X smaller?
| avtar wrote:
| Tailscale uses Go https://tailscale.com/security#tailscale-
| is-written-in-go which might explain the larger sizes.
|
| A cursory look through
| https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne shows more C++ and
| some Rust. Not sure how much static linking is involved
| here.
| system2 wrote:
| NFS + SMB.
|
| Also I use SonicWall VPN to connect to my house to be in the
| network so it covers most of it. I also use Synology
| QuickConnect if I need to use the browser without VPN which
| also covers most urgent needs. Haven't failed me over a decade
| and my NAS also syncs with Synology C2 cloud which is also
| another peace of mind. I know it might sound unsafe a little
| having files stored on the cloud but it is what it is.
|
| I won't play with half-baked library dependent homebrew
| solutions which cost way more time and cause headache more than
| commercial solutions. I won't open ports and forget them later
| either.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Synology does all that. I run two one at home one at the
| office, my only complaint is that it's a bit "idiot proof"...
| both other times the web based GUIi is great. Also has free
| software that punches through NAT and dynamic IPs works great
| (quickconnect.to) I use sftp, media server, primarily
| tgv wrote:
| Synology can even serve as a macOS Time Machine.
| jll29 wrote:
| I second that wholeheartedly, and I also run two 19" Synology
| NAS units, one at home and one at the office. All smooth
| sailing so far.
|
| A colleague uses a QNAP instead, which he claims is better
| price/storage ratio at the expense of lesser software
| usability, and I'm okay paying a bit more of my own money (at
| home) as well as taxpayers' money (at work) on better
| usability, because it will likely pay off by saving time in
| the long run, as I currently don't have a dedicated sysadmin
| in my team.
|
| The only question mark to date was when installing with non-
| Synology (enterprise SSD) drives I got a warning that mine
| were not "vendor sourced" devices, and decided not to take
| any risk and replace all drives with "original" Synology ones
| just because I can. This may be just disinformation from
| Synology to make their own customers nervous, and it reminds
| me of the "only HP toner in HP laser printers" discussion,
| but it would have been a distraction to investigate further,
| and my time is more valuable than simply replacing all
| drives.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/zhwif2/my_new_na
| s...
| Aeolun wrote:
| It seems a bit weird they'd disable the SMART fields just
| because the drive is not on their list. Those fields
| should work perfectly fine...?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Beefier models (I have a DS923+ with the RAM bumped up to
| 32GB) can run Docker containers, too. I have all kinds of
| things running on mine.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Is ram upgradeable on these machines?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Mine is. It ships with a 4GB DIMM and I swapped in 2 16GB
| DIMMs. Not all models are.
| pmontra wrote:
| SFTP for my other Linux devices, SMB by Samba for the rest of
| the world (mainly Android.)
| joeyrobert wrote:
| Seafile + Samba + OpenVPN is my stack. I use Seafile for a
| dropbox style file sync on my devices, and Samba for direct
| access. OpenVPN for remote access on all devices. Works quite
| well.
| ein0p wrote:
| I'd replace OpenVPN with WireGuard at this point - WireGuard
| is a lot faster and the client software is pretty good. All
| of my Apple devices are set up to use VPN 100% of the time
| automatically if I'm not on home WiFi.
| josh64 wrote:
| Could you please share how you went about configuring your
| Apple devices to automatically switch to VPN?
|
| Thanks!
| ein0p wrote:
| When you install WireGuard client, there's "On Demand"
| option there that you can enable. That option has two
| additional settings - it can turn WireGuard only for a
| particular list of SSIDs, or it can _not_ turn it on for
| a particular list of SSIDs. So you just add the SSID of
| your home WiFi to the list for which WireGuard will not
| be turned on. On macOS client there is an identical
| option. This works really well.
| accrual wrote:
| Has anyone compared Seafile with Syncthing? I'm quite happy
| with Syncthing but always interested in trying out new
| setups.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Tailscale works perfectly for remote access, I do "backups"
| with rsync over VPN nightly to an offsite location.
|
| Syncthing over Tailscale is running smoothly too, it doesn't
| matter where my machines move, they find each other using the
| same internal address every time.
| loeg wrote:
| I just use NFS on the LAN. No remote access.
| rcarmo wrote:
| SMB + Tailscale and SyncThing for me. Both combos just work,
| although admittedly SMB over mobile connections _and_ a VPN can
| be iffy.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I use Syncthing to synchronize my smaller datasets between my
| laptop, my phone, and my NAS. This covers all of my productive
| and creative scenarios.
|
| On the LAN, I just use SMB. It is adequate for my needs.
|
| For remotely accessing my collection of Linux ISOs, I use Plex.
| accrual wrote:
| This is pretty much my setup as well!
|
| Syncthing for a small collection of files I want available
| from all my machines - commonly used documents, photos, stuff
| I want quickly backed up or synced automatically.
|
| Samba for my long term mostly-read rarely-write storage with
| larger files, ISOs, etc.
| xiwenc wrote:
| Same here. I have wireguard vpn for the few times i need it
| to tunnel my traffic through home or need to access larger
| files not sync'ed with syncthing.
|
| My nas is a Synology. Vpn is also used so that i can continue
| sending timemachine backups back home when i'm traveling.
| lizknope wrote:
| I use sshfs. If you can login via ssh then you can mount the
| remote server through ssh as a local drive.
|
| https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs
|
| For added security I limit my home ssh access to a handful of
| trusted IPs including my cloud VM. Then I set up an ssh tunnel
| from my hotel through the cloud VM to home. The cloud VM never
| sees my password / key
| matrss wrote:
| Its worth keeping this (from their readme) in mind though:
|
| > However, at present SSHFS does not have any active, regular
| contributors, and there are a number of known issues (see the
| bugtracker).
|
| Not that it is unusable or anything, it is still in
| widespread use, but I'd guess many assume it to be part of
| openssh and maintained with it, when it isn't.
|
| An interesting alternative might be https://rclone.org/,
| which can speak SFTP and can mount all (of the many)
| protocols it speaks.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I used samba, it's supported everywhere. I also served files
| with HTTP server which might be convenient way for some use-
| cases. I also generated simple HTML-s with <video> which
| allowed me to easily view movies on my TV without all that
| nonsense.
|
| My router has public IP so I didn't have any problems reaching
| it from the outside, so any VPN could work. Another approach is
| to rent some cheap VPS and use it as a bastion VPN server,
| connecting both home network and roadwarrior laptop.
|
| No idea about any "integrated" solutions, I prefer simple
| solutions, so I just used ordinary RHEL with ordinary apache,
| etc.
| efxhoy wrote:
| Samba and tailscale.
| turtlebits wrote:
| SMB and Tailscale.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I use NFS over WireGuard. That way I can mount my resources
| wherever I go and it's encrypted whether I'm at home or out.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| Depending on the make and model - I've got a Synology NAS box
| and can't recommend them enough.
|
| RAID support, NFS/SFTP/Samba support, a nice Web UI to set up
| access and configure sharing, and even the ability to enable
| sharing outside your own NAT.
| tallanvor wrote:
| I have a (completely overkill) Ubiquiti Dream Wall that lets me
| VPN in using WireGuard. I do have a Raspberry Pi that runs
| (among other stuff) a script to ping a service on hosted server
| that keeps a dns entry updated in case my IP address changes,
| although that's rare.
|
| I built the service to keep the dns entry updated myself, so
| I'm sure it's not as secure as it could be, but it only accepts
| pings via https and it only works if the body of the POST
| contains a guid that is mapped to the dns entry I want it to
| update.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Is 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.
| loeg wrote:
| Windows Storage Spaces kinda works like this.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If 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.
| pwg wrote:
| Mergerfs plus SnapRAID comes close to your ask:
|
| https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/mergerfs/
| kcb wrote:
| Unraid is probably the closest to that.
| woleium wrote:
| The 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!
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yeah, reading through the linked
| 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 wrote:
| Too bad TALOS II is a $5K motherboard. It actually is open
| down to the brass firmware tacks!
| efxhoy wrote:
| Impossible, they even put "libre" in the name!
| superkuh wrote:
| Yet another reason to avoid the cargo-culting that is "NAS" for
| home use cases. Just put the disks in your computers.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| My secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in
| Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of
| businesses use them and upgrade on a regular schedule.
|
| If you care about power consumption like I do, you can Google
| "$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...
|
| 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 wrote:
| Parkytowers 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
| jtwaleson wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Some Lenovo Tiny models,
| https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-
| thi...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Old business laptops work well
| fransje26 wrote:
| There was this article on lobste.rs yesterday:
|
| https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2024-07-02-ryzen-7-mini-.
| ..
|
| Perhaps it can be configured to meet your requirement for
| "affordable"?
| adrian_b wrote:
| The cheapest computers with Alder Lake N CPUs, like ODROID H4
| and many others, have only a single SODIMM socket and they
| are limited to 48 GB (which works, despite Ark advertising a
| limit of only 16 GB).
|
| However there are many NUC-like small computers made by
| various Chinese companies, with AMD Ryzen CPUs and with 2
| SODIMM sockets, in which you can use 64 GB of DRAM.
|
| Those using older Ryzen models, like the 5000 series, may be
| found at prices between $220 and $350. Those using newer
| Ryzen models, up to Zen 4 based 7000 or 8000 series, are more
| expensive, i.e. between $400 and $600.
|
| While there are dozens of very cheap computer models made by
| Chinese firms, the similar models made by ASUS or the like
| are significantly more expensive. After the Intel NUC line
| has been bought by ASUS, they have raised its prices a lot.
|
| Even so, if a non-Chinese computer is desired and 64 GB is
| the only requirement, then Intel NUCs from older generations
| like NUC 13 or NUC 12, with Core i3 CPUs, can still be found
| at prices between $350 and $400 (the traditional prices of
| barebone Intel NUCs were $350 for Core i3, $500 for Core i5
| and $650 for Core i7, but they have been raised a lot for the
| latest models).
|
| EDIT: Looking now at Newegg, I see various variants of ASUS
| NUC 14 Pro with the Intel Core 3 100U CPU, which are under
| $400 (barebone).
|
| It should be noted that this CPU is a Raptor Lake Refresh and
| not a Meteor Lake CPU, like in the more expensive models of
| NUC 14 Pro.
|
| This is a small computer designed to work reliably for many
| years on a 24/7 schedule, so if reliability would be
| important, especially when using it as a server, I would
| choose this. It supports up to 96 GB of DRAM (with two 48 GB
| SODIMMs). If performance per dollar would be more important,
| then there are cheaper and faster computers with Ryzen CPUs,
| made by Chinese companies like Minisforum or Beelink.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| I have a nuc but how do I connect 6 hdds to it?
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Add a disk shelf :). Basically supplies power and data
| cabling for just a rack of drives. Those get interfaced with
| the NUC via a host based adapter.
| justin_murray wrote:
| Can you elaborate? What's the economic way to do this?
| inhumantsar wrote:
| Used PCIe HBA cards pulled from retired servers can be
| found on eBay for ~$50. They have external facing ports
| and/or internal facing ports. External is the way to go
| if you're using a small form factor PC like a business
| class Lenovo. These are almost all low profile cards, so
| they will fit in any SFF PC with a PCIe slot. There are
| special cables which will connect one port on the card to
| four SATA- or SAS-based disks.
|
| The PC's PSU will need SATA power on its cables or else
| you'll need to scavenge a separate PSU and use the paper
| clip trick (or better yet, a purpose built connector) to
| get it to power things on without a motherboard
| connected.
|
| Once you have all of that, then it's just a matter of
| housing the disks. People have done this with everything
| from threaded rod and plastidip to 3D printed disk racks
| to used enterprise JBOD enclosures (Just a Bunch Of
| Disks, no joke).
|
| Total cost for this setup, excluding the disks, can
| easily be done for less than $200 if you're patient and
| look for local deals, like a Craiglist post for a bunch
| of old server hardware that says "free, just come haul it
| away".
|
| Check or r/DataHoarder on reddit or ServeTheHome's blog
| gosub100 wrote:
| they make external HDD chassis that connect via USB. I
| don't have any experience with them so I can't comment on
| their reliability, but search for "ORICO 5 Bay USB to
| SATA Hard Drive Enclosure".
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| FWIW, I wouldn't recommend Orico. I don't live in the US
| so my options are somewhat limited but I found a local
| retailer that carries Orico. I've had five of them in the
| past five years and four died within 12-18 months.
|
| If it was just one, I'd put it down to random bad luck.
| But with that many failures I assume they are doing
| something stupid/cheap.
|
| Usually they would simply fail to power on but sometimes
| individual slots seemed to die (which RAID just
| loooooves).
|
| And having an entire enclosure fail and waiting
| days/weeks for a replacement sucks as you lose access to
| all your data.
|
| I eventually bought a Jonsbo N3 off of Aliexpress and PCI
| SATA card (to support more than the 2-4 drives most
| motherboards support) and that has been working well for
| months.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I've never tried Orico, that was just the first brand
| that came up when I searched. I suspect these things are
| fundamentally unreliable, especially because they are
| powered by external AC adaptors, meaning there is no real
| ground between the two switching power sources (one in
| your PC, the other in the HDD caddy). It's either due to
| that, or due to the very sensitive signaling along the
| line, that eventually you get USB disconnects (if you try
| to run it as an appliance) that wreaks havoc on
| filesystems, particularly RAID.
|
| The Jonsbo N3 is not comparable. I own one as well (how
| quiet is yours? I upgraded the rear fan but my CPU fan is
| noisy), but it's a complete PC case, not an external HDD
| array.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Highpoint has some decent-ish toaster-style drive docks.
| I have an a couple of the older model with dual drives
| dual usb-a ports - 5422A - but the Highpoint RocketStor
| 3112D seems available for $70 with a single 10Gbit usb-c
| port and dual drives.
|
| There is one deeply troubling flaw to them though, they
| don't turn back on of the power goes out, until you
| physically hit the button again. I think this is alas all
| to common for many of these enclosures!
| transpute wrote:
| Thunderbolt/USB4 -> NVME enclosure -> M.2-to-SATA OR M.2-to
| PCIe to HBA-to-SATA.
| sangnoir wrote:
| You can buy a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) enclosure[1],
| some even support RAID. If your Nuc is multipurpose, you
| could then run a virtualized TrueNAS guest (BSD or linux) in
| QEMU and give it control of the DAS block device for ZFS
| pools. Being able to run a virtual NAS that actually gets
| security updates on demand is pretty neat - TrueNAS has an
| excellent API you can use to start/stop services (SMB, SSH,
| iSCSI, etc) as well as shutdown the vm cleanly.
|
| 1. Newer DAS devices connect using USB-C, but USB
| type-A/e-SATA ones can be found.
|
| Edit: figuring out how to run TrueNAS as a guest OS was a
| nightmare, the first 5+ page of results will be about TrueNAS
| as a _host._
| dns_snek wrote:
| Isn't running a NAS on top of USB storage _very strongly_
| discouraged? TrueNAS cautions against it.
|
| I also want to set up a NAS on a mini-PC with some sort of
| attached external storage, but I haven't been able to get
| past this blocker. USB is the only external interface these
| mini PCs typically support.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| You aren't wrong. USB is not a good way to do this.
| jofla_net wrote:
| There are issues with USB from a compatibility
| standpoint. I think its mainly a factor of the ubiquity
| of it, there are SO many poor controller chips out there,
| even when you buy seemingly reputable hubs/drive cases.
| Its hard to find a good one sometimes. I did, however,
| stumble upon a gem early on, it was a 3.5" usb drive case
| from BestBuy which has since been discontinued(because it
| was good). Never in 15 years has any of the half dozen
| ones i got dropped from thier system. This is more than i
| could say about alot of pricey stuff on amazon sadly. Its
| typically manifested as a random loss in connectivity to
| the system.
|
| Similarly, heres a very low power writeup I did for using
| 2.5" drives with a dedicated power hub/splitter.
| http://www.jofla.net/?p=00000106#00000106 This will still
| have issues if the mains lines sag (a pole goes down
| somewhere), but you can fix it with a reboot remotely.
| Other than that it works great.
|
| This was/is definitely a labor of love, primarily as I've
| come from a time when all you could get for a server were
| huge boxes idling at 50 watts, so i felt guilty of all
| the power I used to consume.
| stragies wrote:
| I was under the impression, that for most (popular) chip
| families, like RockChip, Allwinner, Amlogic, some assorted
| Broadcoms, .. the Mainline linux kernel support has mostly been
| sorted for, and it's only the stragglers like Hisilicon,
| Huawei, Most Broadcom, Qualmcomm where mainline support is not
| on their priority list?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Maybe, but regular distros on x86/x64 thin clients are even
| more sorted out. GPIOs are better handled through an Arduino
| clone over USB than with scripts running on inherently laggy
| desktop OS.
| stragies wrote:
| After configuring the vendor uBoot to chainload into a
| newer uBoot-compile with JustEnoughUEFI compiled in, you
| can just launch the standard Debian Arm64/UEFI install iso
| on many/most(?) popular SOCs.
|
| W.r.t. GPIOs, I agree, that delegating that to an e.g.
| Arduino connected via USB/UART or one of the available
| internal(often RTC), or external(HDMI/VGA) I2C connections
| as an I2C slave is the preferred solution.
| shadowpho wrote:
| Depends what you mean by "kernel support". In general it does
| not really include decent idle power optimizations even on
| say raspberry pi.
| stragies wrote:
| IDLE power optimizations are pretty low on my list when I
| look for an SBS/SOC, I must admit.
|
| Do you have a list of remaining, large deficits in Linux
| power management, because I'm not finding many urgent open
| issues in that area?
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Does Raspberry Pi fit your definition/mental model of a
| straggler? It doesn't have mainline support either!
| ahepp wrote:
| https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/li
| n...
| idatum wrote:
| If the application fits, choosing one of the BSDs with the
| more popular chip families can work well. In other words, if
| the BSD crowd likes an SoC, you'll get a good, stable system
| running with good kernel support. In my case it's the
| RockChip family, specifically from PINE64.
|
| Examples:
|
| - PINE64 Rock64 running FreeBSD 14.1 replaced an aging RPi3.
| I use this for SDR applications. It's a small, low power
| device with PoE that I can deploy close to my outdoor
| antennas (e.g. 1090mhz for dump1090-fa ADS-B). It's been
| really solid with its eMMC, and FreeBSD has good USB support
| for RTL-SDR devices.
|
| - PINE64 RockPro64 running NetBSD 10. I have a PCIe card with
| a 500gb SSD M.2 slot. NetBSD has ZFS support and it has been
| stable. This lets me take snapshots on the SSD zpool. I
| generate time-lapse videos using the faster cores.
|
| You don't get 100% HW support (e.g. no camera support for
| RockPro64) but I don't need it. The compromise is worth it in
| my case because I get a stable and consistent system that I'm
| familiar with: BSD.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| I've also heard the same advice with Dell/HP SFF PC's. BTW,
| your link requires a username/password login.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| That's... Odd. I didn't click my own link yesterday after
| posting, but that was straight from Google and it did load
| just fine. Now I get the login too. But for completeness
| sake, another example: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/
| wp_ESPRIMO_P758_E94.pd...
| fransje26 wrote:
| HN possibly sent too much traffic their way, and someone,
| somewhere decided to require credentials for access
| perhaps? :-)
| numpad0 wrote:
| That happens. I've once foolishly linked brochure page
| for a trash-found HSM on social media, supposedly that
| logged too many referrers server side, and the URL was
| mis-configured into something else less than a day later.
| It wasn't even a 404.
| gh02t wrote:
| Have had great success with this myself. Oddly resellers on
| Amazon seem to be the best source I have found, just search
| for something like "HP ProDesk" or one of the generic
| corporate-focused lines from other manufacturers and find one
| that fits your budget. Maybe filter to 100-300 dollars to get
| rid of the new stuff. There's also a surprisingly vast
| selection of recycled commodity servers and similar on there,
| too.
| mech422 wrote:
| ODroid H-series SBC's are standard Intel CPUs with (at least
| for the H2+) Linux supported hardware for pretty much
| everything (haven't tried running X on them though :-P )
|
| they are my favorite 'home server' currently...cheap, standard,
| and expandable - oh! And SILENT! :-)
| oynqr wrote:
| They also have this magic feature where they can use ECC with
| non-ECC RAM, at the cost of some capacity.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| Where can I read more about this?
| taneliv wrote:
| From Unraid forum thread[1] there's links to another
| forum[2] and a wiki page[3]. Not yet sure myself what all
| of this means, but it looks interesting.
|
| [1] https://forums.unraid.net/topic/167669-odroid-h4-inte
| l-n97-2...
|
| [2]
| https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?p=384823#p384823
|
| [3] https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h4/hardware/h4_bios_up
| date#bi...
| adrian_b wrote:
| In general some of the Intel Atom CPUs intended for
| embedded applications support the so-called In-Band ECC,
| where a part of the memory is reserved for storing ECC
| codes.
|
| Two of the three ODROID H4 variants use the "Intel
| Processor N97" CPU, which is intended for embedded
| applications and it appears to support In-Band ECC, even
| if this is not clearly advertised on Intel Ark (i.e. at
| other CPUs of the Alder Lake N family, like i3-N305, at
| ECC Support it says "No", but at N97 it says neither
| "Yes" nor "No", but it is mentioned that it is intended
| for embedded applications, not for consumer applications,
| and the embedded models normally support In-Band ECC).
|
| The ODROID H4 BIOS allows to enable In-Band ECC on ODROID
| H4 or ODROID H4+ (the latter is slightly more expensive
| at $139, but it has more I/O, including two 2.5 Gb/s
| Ethernet ports and four SATA ports; to the bare board you
| must add between $10 and $20 for the case, depending on
| its size, and a few other $ for SATA cables, RTC battery
| and optionally a cooling fan; you must also buy one 16 GB
| or 32 GB DDR5-4800 SODIMM, so after adding shipping and
| taxes a NAS would cost a little more than $200, besides
| the SSDs or HDDs).
|
| You can see test results with ECC enabled at:
|
| https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-
| revie...
| aborsy wrote:
| Which ones support ECC?
| adrian_b wrote:
| Those with "Intel Processor N97", i.e. ODROID H4 and
| ODROID H4+.
| green-salt wrote:
| My local electronics resale shop had the Dell versions of
| these, they make great hypervisors!
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Years ago there were auction houses specialising in selling off
| business recycled PCs and bankrupt stock - it was great fun to
| go and mooch around and see if there was a real bargain not
| spotted, but they seemed to vanish under the onslaught of eBay
| and frankly for second hand tag I struggle to trust ebay
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| I've had good luck recently (sample size: 2) buying small
| form factor PCs off of ebay. Way more powerful than even a
| new raspberry pi, and a 4 core/16G RAM/256 ssd machine can be
| had for less than $60 if you are patient.
| firecall wrote:
| Here in Australia there are thousands of ex-Lease Dell 7060 SFF
| and 7060 Micros PCs on aucation sites every week.
|
| The Dell's coming off lease now have modern features including
| Intel 8th Gen CPUs with TPM and USB-C etc...
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| in my experience those come from mining and other FIFO
| operations that are shutting down. source: used to de-com
| those, wipe em, and get them ready for bulk sale to a
| different group.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| These boxes are also great for running a k8s cluster if you
| want to experiment.
| beAbU wrote:
| Don't share this information too far and wide, you might drive
| up the price for these in the second hand market, which will
| hurt us dirt-cheap-pc-gluts.
|
| I cannot say no to cheap compute for some reason.
| danparsonson wrote:
| > I cannot say no to cheap compute for some reason.
|
| I sympathise - for me I think it comes from growing up with
| early generation PCs that were expensive, hard to get, and
| not very performant; now you can buy something that's a
| supercomputer by comparison for almost nothing. Who can
| resist that?! I'll think of something to do with them all
| eventually...
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Correct. I have a 5 node Fujitsu esprimo D756/D757 cluster that
| has i5-6500 CPU's and 96GB RAM and 5x NVMe + 5x HDD that
| usually sits around 80W total. Removing HDD and reducing RAM
| would drop the power usage but in my case it's not important to
| go after the last Watt.
|
| I bought them them for 50 euro a piece without RAM and disks.
| hnarn wrote:
| I bought one of those thin Lenovo clients for about $200 and
| use it as a home server with Debian, it works great for pretty
| much everything and is a lot more bang for your buck than
| raspberry pi or a brand new mini-pc.
|
| The only downside is that it doesn't have space for multiple
| 2,5/3,5 disks, but that is just personal preference anyway.
| loeg wrote:
| The _cheapest_ NAS is usually just taking some old desktop PC and
| repurposing it headless. :-)
| rasz wrote:
| or even better - old laptop
| criddell wrote:
| Or a Raspberry Pi you have kicking around:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l30sADfDiM8
| askvictor wrote:
| Yep, optimised for power consumption, and comes with a built
| in UPS
| danparsonson wrote:
| Just be careful leaving an old battery permanently on
| charge:
|
| https://youtu.be/2Z9190ruyIM
| derekdahmer wrote:
| Assuming power is free. Even small wattage differences add up
| quickly for a server running 24/7 and those older CPUs can be
| very inefficient.
| loeg wrote:
| 5 year old CPUs today (i.e., 2019 era chips) are generally
| pretty efficient.
| rasz wrote:
| >total 43
|
| So the price of used Sandy Bridge or newer laptop (optionally
| cracked screen) with 1Gbit ethernet, USB3, couple SATA, couple
| PCIE lanes (ExpressCard and mpcie slots) and build-in UPS.
| haunter wrote:
| Personally I like the Dell/HP/Lenovo Micro PCs. For ~200EUR you
| can get one with an i5-10500T, 16GB DDR4, and 256GB NVMe SSD and
| it can be upgraded to 64GB RAM with lot of storage (1x NVMe + 1x
| 2,5")
| cchance wrote:
| I mean you can get one for 50$ on ebay with similar ram and hd,
| just with a 6700 or 8700 which is more than enough for a NAS
| lol
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| I 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/
| cchance wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| A 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.
| transpute wrote:
| Among many features, ZFS offers storage snapshots,
| deduplication and file integrity.
| ac29 wrote:
| Desktop 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.
| superkuh wrote:
| Yes, people do think that. And then they end up with an
| octopus of fragile external drives prone to problems and
| breakage. It's a sad state of affairs for the non-tech
| inclined. Like everyone is buying mopeds and pulling
| around trailers rather than just buying a small car.
| ranger207 wrote:
| Eh, I'm much more likely to accidentally reformat all my
| drives on my desktop than a NAS. Sure I can just restore
| from backup but it's just a security blanket to not have to
| worry about it
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Good idea to put your backup on the same machine! /s
| superkuh wrote:
| Or just put drives in all your computers and back-up between
| instead of buying a limited (potentially proprietary) NAS
| computer just for the purpose and having it being one central
| point of failure.
|
| I just don't understand the reluctance of people to put
| storage in their actual computer(s).
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| HN readers' computers are typically macbooks with extremely
| expensive and non-upgradable drives.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Because one of the reasons I got my NAS so I don't need to
| tinker.
| senkora wrote:
| A NAS is nice for serving local media files to a smart TV.
| That's my main use case.
| ajkshfkjsh wrote:
| The thing I don't get is, why do I need to drop $1000 on a
| Synology machine just to do this? Let's say I want to create
| a setup with 8x18TB drives or something, do I really need to
| spend $1000 just to make this accessible to a couple clients
| at once (say a smart TV + another machine in the house)?
|
| Right now I have Plex running on a raspberry pi hooked up to
| an 8tb external HDD. Works fine, but I want to scale up to
| the 100-200TB range of storage, and it feels like the market
| is pushing me towards spending an inordinate amount of money
| on this. Don't understand why it's so expensive.
| kstrauser wrote:
| This is my rationale for my specific circumstances:
|
| With my NAS, I pay for the box, install the drives, and it
| Just Works with basically no maintenance other than me
| clicking the upgrade button every few months when it emails
| me that an OS update is ready.
|
| I could build a similar system myself, but the hardware
| isn't _that_ much cheaper. Cases, PSUs, hot swappable drive
| mounts, and all that add up quickly. And when I 'm done, I
| have to install the OS, read the docs to see how the
| recommended configuration has changed since last time I did
| this, and periodically log in to look at it because it
| doesn't have nearly as much monitoring set up out-of-the-
| box.
|
| Given the choice between the small amount of money I'd save
| vs the amount of time I'd have to invest in it, I'd rather
| pay the money and outsource the hassle to the NAS maker.
|
| As to why I don't just hang a bunch of drives off the
| computer I'm already using:
|
| - Backups. If my Mac dies, I can restore it from the Time
| Machine on my NAS.
|
| - Noise. The NAS has busier fans than my Mac. It's in a
| different room from where I spend most of my time.
|
| - I run Docker stuff on it. I don't want those things
| running 24/7 on my desktop.
|
| - Availability. I want to reboot my desktop occasionally
| without worrying if it'd interrupt my wife watching
| something on Plex.
| ac29 wrote:
| 2 bay Synology NAS' are less than $200, 4 bay are less than
| $400. Yes, if you need 144TB of storage the NAS unit is
| going to be more expensive, but the drives themselves are
| the majority of the cost.
| whartung wrote:
| My "NAS" is my late model Intel iMac. I have, like, 5 USB
| drives hanging off it.
|
| I SyncThing my wife's laptop to it. I serve a bunch of videos
| off of it to our AppleTV. All our photos are there.
|
| I have a Time Machine backup of the main system drive (my wife
| uses TM as well). The whole thing is backed up to BackBlaze,
| which works great, but I have not had to recover anything yet.
|
| I would like to run ZFS mostly to detect bit rot, but each time
| I've tried it, it pretty much immediately crushed my machine to
| the point of unresponsiveness, so I've given up on that. That
| was doing trivial stuff, have ZFS manage a single volume. Just
| terrible.
|
| So now it's just an ad hoc collection of mismatched USB drives
| with cables not well organized. My next TODO is to replace the
| two spinning drives with SSD. Not so much for raw performance,
| but simply that when those drives spin up, it hangs up the
| computer. So I'd like SSD for "instant" startup.
|
| Not enough to just jettison the drives, but if opportunity
| knocks, I'll swap them out.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The majority of users have laptops, not desktops.
| test6554 wrote:
| Everyone 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.
| rovr138 wrote:
| These 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 wrote:
| Synology 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 wrote:
| Totally. 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.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Redundancy and backup are not the same thing. RAID gets
| you redundancy but if you get pwnd, you get redundantly
| pwnd!
|
| So you backup to elsewhere. Now you have two copies of
| your data. Cool. Now you probably can recover from a
| silly mistake from up to a week ago or whatever your
| retention period is. However, if you don't monitor your
| backups, you'll never notice certain snags such as
| ransomware. OK, that might be low risk for your home
| backups.
|
| It's quite hard to get the balance right but I think that
| you might not be quite as protected as you think you are.
| Why not buy a cheap hard disk and clone all your data to
| it every three or six months and stash it somewhere?
|
| I have a similar argument with a colleague of mine, to
| the point that I will probably buy a LTO multi head unit
| myself and some tapes.
|
| RAID is not a backup, its a data integrity thing. It
| ensures that what you save now stays saved correctly into
| the future. It protects now. Backups protect the past.
|
| Think long and hard about what might go wrong and take
| suitable steps. For you I think a simple, regular off
| line back up will work out quite well with minimal cost,
| for disaster recovery.
| MobileVet wrote:
| Good points.
|
| I didn't actually specify it out, but my third backup is
| an offline SSD that I plug in every once in a while and
| store at my office. I only mentioned the RAID for local
| redundancy reasons.
|
| You are right about the data being corrupted, either
| maliciously or bitrot. The NAS is not accessible outside
| my home network, so I think I am ok there.
|
| Bitrot would require snapshots and full backups stored
| over time, which I could do fairly easily but I am
| currently not.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| +1 for Synology. bought it off an old gig when they were
| moving from NAS to SAN, and it's still solid. probably
| uses more power than I need though.
|
| got a rsync script that pushes backups to Dropbox, though
| just "can't lose" docs and other things I want in the
| cloud.
| starbugs wrote:
| > Just buy it and be done with it
|
| Or buy a QNAP and watch it brick itself when you most need
| it.
| maxgashkov wrote:
| I had a (dis)pleasure of running multiple Synology units in
| a business setting. They do die out on you like everything
| else if not more frequent, the QC is generally non-
| existent.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Synology's biggest reliability issue was when they used
| the Intel Atom C2000 CPUs. Designs with those CPUs have a
| 100% failure rate on the longer term (not just Synology,
| everything with it, Cisco was hit hard too). There's a
| workaround by soldering on some resistors to pull up some
| marginal line that will fix dead units.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >DIY it yourself
|
| Look, I'm sorry, but you literally asked for this:
|
| Hello, I'm from the Department of Redundancy Department
| with a citation for a "Do It Yourself it yourself". Please
| pay the fine in internet chuckles, thank you.
| projektfu wrote:
| if the I or the Y stop working or get corrupted, the
| redundancy allows you to recover them properly from the
| spelled out words.
| slowmotiony wrote:
| He did not literally ask for this, actually.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I'm not so sure anymore. My synology is now on its third
| backup application, so doing recovery means you have to
| hunt down the old client first.
|
| The last one seems to be in Javascript. It's slower than
| the previous one, eats more RAM and has a few strange bugs.
| Backing up my smartphone photos is not always reliable.
|
| I used to be happy about them, but since my update to 7, I
| don't feel I trust my backups anymore. Maybe I have to byte
| the bullet and do some rsync based scripting instead.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I don't like that symbology provides ridiculously small
| amount of ram - I had one 7 years ago and it had 512 mb of
| ram, and was chugging. Looking at their website, they still
| sell a version with 512 mb. That's a total joke in this day
| and age.
|
| That being said, there are plenty of companies providing
| NAS drives at lower price points, with various levels of
| quality. Generally, they are not worse than a random AMR
| SBC with a closed source kernel, just like the author here
| assebled.
|
| I appreciate not everyone wants a mini pc they have to
| manage, I had a nice setup but now it has died and I can't
| find time to deal with it
| sandworm101 wrote:
| ++1 for synology. I've been running their 5-bay model for a
| few years without any issues. It just works. I have it
| paired with a synology router which also just works. They
| both do their jobs transparently enough that I can
| basically forget they exist.
| russdill wrote:
| Kids today have no idea just how often drives failed back in
| the day.
| earleybird wrote:
| IBM deathstar[0] drives in a collection of RS6000's is still
| too fresh in my memory :-)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Lost the first five years of my source code thanks to a
| Deathstar. Still miffed about it, would have enjoyed
| looking back at it from time to time.
|
| Learned a valuable lesson in backups though...
| MenhirMike wrote:
| Same, that was also my lesson that RAID is an
| availability mechanism, not a data safety/backup one. (Of
| course, Ransomware would also hammer that point home for
| many later on)
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| My first 5mb winchester failed every day. So the day began
| with reformatting it and restoring from last night's floppy
| disks backup.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| "you could actually hear it die! the 'click of death' "
|
| "sure, grandpa, drives make noise [rolls eyes]"
| brnt wrote:
| I sync a few single external drives every week or two over good
| old USB. In house sneaker net. Tools like Freefilesync make
| this easy and fast (and give me a manual check so accidental
| deletes are visible too).
|
| Very cheap, has served me for more than a decade now. Highly
| recommended. I dealt with dataloss through drive failing, user
| error and unintentional software bugs/errors. No problem.
| szundi wrote:
| Do 2x cheap then, you need backup anyway.
| p1necone wrote:
| I think this depends on what you're storing though.
|
| Business documents, accounting records, family photos - sure
| you probably want to keep them safe.
|
| But if my NAS is just 20TB of pirated movies and TV shows (not
| that I'm saying it is...) then I'm much more comfortable buying
| the cheapest drives I can find and seeing how it goes.
| zamadatix wrote:
| For me it's the opposite in a way: I need a proper remote
| backup of things like business documents and photos because
| they have to survive an issue with the NAS or my house not
| just a drive so local copies can go on "whatever" and
| something like cloud backup makes more sense to meet the
| reliability mark. Generally it's not tons and tons of
| terabytes which is great because the backup needs to actually
| be usable within a reasonable amount of time when I need to
| pull it.
|
| On the other hand terabytes and terabytes of pirated content
| is a lot of work but not necessarily worth paying to try and
| to backup over the internet. I can redownload it if I need
| but I'd rather not do that because some crap drive or NAS I
| saved 20 bucks on died and now I need to spend a week
| rebuilding my entire collection. It doesn't need to be Fort
| Knox but I'll spring for a proper NAS, drives, and pool
| redundancy for this content.
| ww520 wrote:
| Yes. When it comes to data, don't cheap out.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I'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?
| rullopat wrote:
| Ignorant person question here: "why they make NAS servers without
| ECC memory?"
| dylan604 wrote:
| non-ECC is cheaper. i can't think of any other possible reason.
| anything else would be a lie to cover up being cheap
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Because 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 wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Absolutely. 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 wrote:
| Consider 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 wrote:
| In 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| There'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 wrote:
| Can you tell us HOW to setup a NAS so that it doesn't
| need ECC RAM?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Possible, 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 wrote:
| Storing 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)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| So I am a network dummy, but why would 100M vs 1000M have a
| difference in latency unless the pipe was saturated?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Even 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 wrote:
| It's ironic they call themselves Libre Computer, but don't
| release the tools to allow users to create their own images
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Performancewise this looks similar to
| 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-efficiency (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...
| lannisterstark wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Odroid HC-4 is only $73... and lightyears ahead
| https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Home 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 wrote:
| Tailscale 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")
| hajimuz wrote:
| 100MB LAN port is unqualified for a NAS...
| markhahn wrote:
| cost 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...
| sandreas wrote:
| I 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...)
|
| - FriendlyElec Nas Kit (< 150, ~5W,
| 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 wrote:
| You are comparing apple and oranges: the SBC used by the author
| has a consumption of 0.75W idle and 4W Full load
| sandreas wrote:
| No 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-
| 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 wrote:
| Although 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 wrote:
| Cloud storage isn't a backup any more than RAID 1 is.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Of course it is. PC explodes -> download the cloud copy.
|
| Not to be relied on by itself, but it absolutely qualifies as
| a backup.
| remram wrote:
| Backup 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.
| beAbU wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| I'd rather have 2 devices with a single drive, each having its
| own copy of the data than one with a RAID 1.
| meowmeow20 wrote:
| My "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.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Same reason I'm not buying another raspberry pi, I'd rather have
| solar panels and an old reliable pc running somewhere
| INTPenis wrote:
| Personally 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(tm)
| banish-m4 wrote:
| Cheap, 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 wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| A filesystem designed to survive sudden power loss? Which is
| most modern ones right?
| Snoddas wrote:
| The common solution is having an UPS and a NAS that supports
| graceful shutdown when the UPS detects powerloss
| badgersnake wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Interesting 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Old PC or terramaster enclosure from aliexpress
| vermaden wrote:
| Its very hard to beat _Dell Wyse 3030 LT_ with USB attached
| disks.
|
| - 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.
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