[HN Gopher] DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
___________________________________________________________________
DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
Author : sashk
Score : 375 points
Date : 2025-11-27 02:54 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.briancmoses.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.briancmoses.com)
| speff wrote:
| Q - assuming the NAS was strictly used as NAS and not as a server
| with VMs, is there a point in having a large amount of RAM?
| (large as in >8GB)
|
| I'm not sure what the benefit would be since all it's doing is
| moving information from the drives over to the network.
| PikachuEXE wrote:
| If you use ZFS you might need more RAM for performance?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Caching files in ram means they can be moved to the network
| faster - right?
| speff wrote:
| Makes sense. I didn't know if the FS used RAM for this
| purpose without some specialized software. PikachuEXE and
| Mewse mentioned ZFS. Looks like it has native support for
| caching frequent reads [0]. Good to know
|
| [0]: https://www.truenas.com/docs/references/l2arc/
| ac29 wrote:
| Depends on the network speed. At 1Gbps a single HDD can
| easily saturate the network with sequential reads. A pair of
| HDD could do the same at 2.5Gbps. At 10Gbps or more, you
| would definitely see the benefits of caching in memory.
| butvacuum wrote:
| Not as much as expected. I have several toy ZFS pools out
| of ancient 3tb wd reds, and anything remotely home-grade
| (stripped mirrors, 4,6,8 wide raidz1/2) saturates the disks
| before 10gig networking. As long as it's sequential, 8gb or
| 128gb doesn't matter.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| ZFS uses a large amount of ram, i think the old rule of thumb
| was 1GB ram per 1TB of storage
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Huh. More than just the normal page cache on other
| filesystems?
| tekla wrote:
| ZFS will eat up as much RAM as you give it as it caches
| files in memory as accessed.
| ac29 wrote:
| All filesystems do this (at least all modern ones, on
| linux)
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Yes. Parent's comment matches everything I've heard. 32GB
| is a common recommendation for home lab setups. I run 32 in
| my TrueNAS builds (36TB and 60TB).
| magicalhippo wrote:
| You can run it with much less. I don't recall the bare
| minimum but with a bit of tweaking 2GB should be
| plenty[1].
|
| I recall reading some running it on a 512MB system, but
| that was a while ago so not sure if you can still go that
| low.
|
| Performance can suffer though, for example low memory
| will limit the size of the transaction groups. So for
| decent performance you will want 8GB or more depending on
| workloads.
|
| [1]: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-
| docs/Project%20and%20Commu...
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| That's only for deduplication.
|
| https://superuser.com/a/993019
| Lammy wrote:
| I do like to deduplicate my BitTorrent downloads/seeding
| directory with my media directories so I can edit metadata
| to my heart's content while still seeding forever without
| having to incur 2x storage usage. I tune the `recordsize`
| to 1MiB so it has vastly fewer blocks to keep track of
| compared to the default 128K, at the cost of any
| modification wasting very slightly more space. Really not a
| big deal though when talking about multi-gibibyte media
| containers, multi-megapixel art embeds, etc.
| yegle wrote:
| cross-seed | cross-seed https://www.cross-seed.org/
| bscphil wrote:
| I believe they are saying they literally edit the media
| files to add / change metadata. Cross-seeding is only
| possible if the files are kept the same.
| zenoprax wrote:
| Have you considered "reflinks"? Supported as of [OpenZFS
| 2.2](https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/13392).
|
| Haven't used them yet myself but seems like a nice use
| case for things like minor metadata changes to media
| files. The bulk of the file is shared and only the delta
| between the two are saved.
| Lammy wrote:
| Neat; will look into this. My setup is several years
| older than this, predating even FreeBSD's move to
| OpenZFS, and I just haven't touched the config of it
| since then since it works flawlessly (and since I already
| bought the RAM lol)
| ekropotin wrote:
| ZFS also uses RAM for read through cache aka ARC. However,
| I'm not sure how noticeable the effect from increased RAM
| would be - I assume it mostly benefit for read patterns
| with high data reuse, which is not that common.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| As the other said already if you have more RAM you can have
| more cache.
|
| Honestly it's not _that_ needed but if you would really use the
| 10Gbit+ networking then 1 second is ~125M _bytes_. So depending
| on your usage you can never even more than 15% utilization or
| have it almost all if you constantly running something on it ie
| torrents or using it a SAN /NAS for VM on some other machine.
|
| But for a rare occasional home usage nor 32Gb nor this
| monstrosity and complexity doesn't make sense - just buy some
| 1-2 bay Synology and forget about it.
| ekropotin wrote:
| I won't be able to sleep having my data just on 1 disk
| kalleboo wrote:
| No matter what you should have an off-site backup as well
| in case of lightning, flood, fire, virus, etc.
| firecall wrote:
| I am not at all an expert, I can only share my anecdotal
| unscientific observations!
|
| I'm running a TrueNAS box with 3x cheap shucked Seagate
| drives.*
|
| The TrueNAS box has 48GB RAM, is using ZFS and is sharing the
| drives as a Time Machine destination to a couple of Macs in my
| office.
|
| I can un-confidently say that it feels like the fastest TM
| device I've ever used!
|
| TrueNAS with ZFS feels faster than Open Media Vault(OMV) did on
| the same hardware.
|
| I originally setup OMV on this old gaming PC, as OMV is easy.
| OMV was reliable, but felt slow compared to how I remembered
| TrueNAS and ZFS feeling the last time I setup a NAS.
|
| So I scrubbed OMV and installed TrueNAS, and purely based on
| seat-of-pants metrics, ZFS felt faster.
|
| And I can confirm that it soaks up most of the 48GB of RAM!
|
| TrueNAS reports ZFS Cache currently at 36.4 GiB.
|
| I dont know why or how it works, and it's only a Time Machine
| destination, but there we are those are my metrics and that's
| what I know LOL
|
| * I don't recommend this. They seem unreliable and report
| errors all the time. But it's just what I had sitting around
| :-) I'd hoped by now to be able to afford to stick 3x 4TB/8TB
| SSDs of some sort in the case, but prices are tracking up on
| SSDs...
| thefz wrote:
| ZFS cache.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| People get carried away with their home lab setups. There's a
| distinct type of person that thinks they need 100tb of storage
| in their own house.
|
| If you're running a NAS for a company that has many users and
| multi disc access at the same time, sure. But then you're
| probably then not buying hdds to shuck and cheap components off
| ebay.
| some-guy wrote:
| My NAS:
|
| 1) A refurbished Dell Wyse 5070 (8GB of RAM) with a cheap
| 64GB SSD from 2013 2) An 8-bay USB-C hard drive enclosure 3)
| 4 used 12TB hard drives from eBay, 4 3TB drives from 2010
| that still somehow haven't died. 4) A headless Debian with
| various Linux ISO trackers / downloaders in Docker / Plex
| (the CPU, though slow, has decent hardware encoding) 5) No
| RAID, but an rsync script for important Linux ISOs and
| important data that runs weekly across different drives. I
| also have cold storage backup by purchasing "Lot of X number"
| 500GB hard drives on eBay from time to time which store
| things like photos, music, etc over two drives each.
|
| The whole setup didn't cost me much, and is more than enough
| for what I need it to do.
| Aurornis wrote:
| It depends on your file workload. The RAM can be used as a read
| cache.
|
| I have some workloads where I have to go through a lot of files
| multiple times and the extra RAM cache makes a huge difference.
| You can tell when the NAS is pulling from cache or when it has
| a cache miss.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I have built 2 NAS that borrow ideas from his blogs. One uses the
| Silverstone CS382 case (6x 6TB SAS) and the other uses a Topton
| N5105 Mini-ITX board (6x 10TB SATA). I'm quite happy with both.
|
| ref: https://blog.briancmoses.com/2024/07/migrating-my-diy-nas-
| in...
| dllu wrote:
| Very sad that HDDs, SSDs, and RAM are all increasing in price
| now, but I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool with Seagate Barracudas
| on sale at $10 / TB [1]. This seems like a pretty decent price
| even though the Barracudas are rated for 2400 hours per year [2]
| but this is the same spec that the refurbished Exos drives are
| rated for.
|
| By the way, interesting to see that OP has no qualms about buying
| cheap Chinese motherboards, but splurged for an expensive Noctua
| fan when the cheaper Thermalright TL-B12 perform just as well for
| a lot cheaper (although the Thermalright could be slightly louder
| and perhaps be a slightly more annoying spectrum).
|
| Also, it is mildly sad that there aren't many cheap low power (<
| 500 W) power supplies for SFX form factor. The SilverStone
| Technology SX500-G 500W SFX that was mentioned retails for the
| same price as 750 W and 850 W SFX PSUs on Amazon! I heard good
| things about getting Delta flex 400 W PSUs from Chinese websites
| --- some companies (e.g. YTC) mod them to be fully modular, and
| they are supposedly quite efficient (80 Plus Gold/Platinum) and
| quiet, but I haven't tested them out yet. On Taobao, those are
| like $30.
|
| [1] https://www.newegg.com/seagate-barracuda-
| st24000dm001-24tb-f...
|
| [2] https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/en/content-
| fragm...
| ghthor wrote:
| Not surprised by the fan, once I went noctua I didn't go back.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > $10 / TB
|
| That's a remarkably good price. If I had $1.5k handy I'd be
| sorely tempted (even tho it's Seagate).
| rubatuga wrote:
| I've recently shucked some Seagate HAMR 26Tb drives hopefully
| they last
| mindslight wrote:
| I won that lottery with 3x 26TB Exos shipped. I decided to
| try and get two more but they ended up being HAMR
| (returned). Then I managed to find two more earlier
| manufacturing dates in store stock at a somewhat-far Best
| Buy that I was driving past anyway.
|
| It felt like an unnecessary purchase at the time (I'm still
| waiting to CAD a CPU cooler mounting solution for the build
| in a new case that has room for the drives). But it seems
| like that deal is going to be the high water mark for a few
| years, at least.
| dddgghhbbfblk wrote:
| It's a good price but the Barracuda line isn't intended for
| NAS use so it's unclear how reliable they are. But it's still
| tempting to roll the dice given how expensive drive prices
| are right now.
| execution wrote:
| I was tempted by 4 x 28TB (Recertified Seagate ST28000NM000C)
| but could not work out what I would use it for.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool
|
| How much RAM did you install? Did you follow the 1GB per 1TB
| recommendation for ZFS? (i.e. 96GB of RAM)
| execution wrote:
| I think you should be fine with 64GB (4x16GB ECC), I have
| 8x10TB RAID-Z2 and it uses around 34GB.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I believe the default is that ZFS uses 50% of your RAM for
| caching
| zfs-myths wrote:
| Some myths never die, I guess..
| wtallis wrote:
| That was _never_ a myth, was it? It was just sound advice
| that was repeated without the information about which
| specific use cases it applied to.
| dwood_dev wrote:
| That's only for ZFS deduplication which you should never
| enable unless you have very, very specific use cases.
|
| For normal use, 2GB of RAM for that setup would be fine. But
| more RAM is more readily available cache, so more is better.
| It is certainly not even close to a requirement.
|
| There is a lot of old, often repeated ZFS lore which has a
| kernel of truth but misleads people into thinking it's a
| requirement.
|
| ECC is better, but not required. More RAM is better, not a
| requirement. L2ARC is better, not required.
| AlanYx wrote:
| There are a couple recent developments in ZFS dedup that
| help to partially mitigate the memory issue: fast dedup and
| the ability to use a special vdev to hold the dedup table
| if it spills out of RAM.
|
| But yes, there's almost no instance where home users should
| enable it. Even the traditional 5gb/1tb rule can fall over
| completely on systems with a lot of small files.
| dwood_dev wrote:
| Nice. I was hoping a vdev for the dedup table would come
| along. I've wanted to use optane for the dedup table and
| see how it performs.
| archagon wrote:
| I think the asterisk there is that the special vdev
| requires redundancy and becomes a mandatory part of your
| pool.
|
| Some ZFS discussions suggest that an L2ARC vdev can cache
| the DDT. Do you know if this is correct?
| AlanYx wrote:
| Yes, that's the reason why a dedup vdev that has lower
| redundancy than your main pool will fail with "mismatched
| replication level" unless you use the -f (force) flag.
|
| I'm not sure about whether an L2ARC vdev can offload the
| DDT, but my guess is no given the built-in logic warning
| against mismatched replication levels.
| archagon wrote:
| Well, the warning makes sense with respect to the dedup
| vdev since the DDT would actually be stored there. On the
| other hand, the L2ARC would simply serve as a read cache,
| similar to the DDT residing in RAM.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| Are you running this in Raid-Z2?
|
| I'm way to bothered by how long it would take to resilver the
| disks that size.
| joshvm wrote:
| This is Black Friday pricing at least, if you're willing to
| shuck. Seagate drives are still sub-$10/TB which... a single
| 24-26TB is enough for all my photos (ever), media _and_ some
| dataset backup for work. I 'm planning to backup photos and
| other "glacier"-tier media like YouTube channels to BluRay (a
| disk or two per year). It's at the point where I'd rather just
| pay the money and forget about it for 5-10 years.
|
| I built the case from Makerbeam and printed panels, an old
| Corsair SF600 and a 4 year old ITX system with one of
| Silverstone's backplanes. They make up to 5 drives in a 3x5-1/4
| bay form factor. It's a little overpowered (a 5950X), but I
| also use it as a generic server at home and run a shared ZFS
| pool with 2x mirrored vdevs. Even with inefficient space it's
| more than I need. I put in a 1080ti for transcoding or odd jobs
| that need a little CUDA (like photo tagging). Runs
| ResNet50-class models easily enough. I also wondered about
| treating it as a single-node SLURM server.
| dbalatero wrote:
| I researched a bunch of cases recently and the Jonsbo, while it
| looked good, came up as having a ton of issues with airflow to
| cool the drives. Because of this, I ended up buying the Fractal
| Node 804 case, which seemed to have a better overall quality
| level and didn't require digging around AliExpress for a vendor.
| no_time wrote:
| lol same. All my parts arrived except the 804. The supply chain
| for these cases appears to be imploding where I live (Hungary).
| The day after I ordered it either went out of stock or went up
| by +50% in all webshops that are reputable here.
|
| I'm still a bit torn on whether I made the good call of getting
| 804 or the 304 wouldve been a enough for a significantly
| smaller footprint and -2 bays. Hard to tell without seeing them
| in person lol.
|
| Are you satisfied with it? Any issues that came up since
| building?
| nicolaslem wrote:
| I have been running my NAS on the 304 for 5 years. It fits
| natively 6 HDDs but I think it is possible to cram two more
| with a bit of ingenuity. It is tucked away in an Ikea cabinet
| that I have drilled the back of for airflow.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| Built a NAS last winter using the same case. Temps for HDDs used
| to be in mid-50s C with no fan and about 40 with the stock fan.
| The case-native backplane thingamajig does not provide any sort
| of pwm control if the fan is plugged in, so it's either full
| blast or nothing. I swapped the fan for a Thermalright TL-B12 and
| the HDDs are now happily chugging along at about 37 with the fan
| barely perceptible. Hddfancontrol ramps it up based on the output
| of smartctl.
|
| Case can actually fit a low-profile discrete GPU, there's about
| half height worth of space.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > any sort of pwm control if the fan is plugged in, so it's
| either full blast or nothing
|
| Got a new network switch that runs somewhat hot (TP-Link) and
| it's behaving the same way, built-in fan runs either not at
| all, or at 100% (and noisy at that). Installed OpenWRT on it
| briefly, before discovering 10Gbe NIC didn't work with OpenWRT,
| and it had much better fan control. Why is it so hard to just
| place a basic curve on the fan control based on the hardware
| temperature? All the sensors and controllers are there
| apparently, just a software thing...
| citrin_ru wrote:
| I have an impression that both noise level and power
| consumption are not a priority for home network equipment
| manufactures. After moving to a new house and connecting to
| another ISP I've got an ISP modem-router which: 1. has a fan
| and while it's quiet it's not silent 2. consumes around 20
| Wt, not much but working 24x7 it would cost around PS45/year
| at current electricity rates.
|
| I think it's technically possible to make a modem which will
| consume less power and use passive coiling but I don't think
| they (ISP and device manufacturer) care.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| Are there any NAS solutions for 3.5" drives, homebrew or
| purchased, that are slim enough to stash away in a wall
| enclosure? (This sort of thing: https://www.legrand.us/audio-
| visual/racks-and-enclosures/in-... , though not that particular
| model or height.) I'd like to _really_ stash something away and
| forget about it. Height is the major constraint, you can only be
| ~3.5 " tall. And before anyone says anything about 19" rack
| stuff, don't bother. It's close but just doesn't go, especially
| if it's not the only thing in the enclosure.
| butvacuum wrote:
| 1 liter PC's (tiny/mini/micro), or some N100 type build +
| external bay is likely your best bet. If it's really that
| small, you might have heat issues.
| jmb99 wrote:
| > And before anyone says anything about 19" rack stuff, don't
| bother. It's close but just doesn't go, especially if it's not
| the only thing in the enclosure.
|
| Do you have to use that particular wall enclosure thing? A 1U
| chassis at 1.7" of height fits 4 drives (and a 2U at ~3.45"
| fits 12), and something like a QNAP is low-enough power to not
| need to worry about cooling too much. If you're willing to DIY
| it would not be hard at all to rig up a mounting mechanism to a
| stud, and then it's just a matter of designing some kind of
| nice-looking cover panel (wood? glass in a laser-cut metal
| door? lots of possibilities).
|
| I guess my main question is, what/who is this for? I can't
| picture any environment that you have literally 0 available
| space to put a NAS other than inside a wall. A 2-bay
| synology/qnap/etc is small enough to sit underneath a router/AP
| combo for instance.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| > Do you have to use that particular wall enclosure thing?
|
| It's already there in the wall. All the Cat5e cabling in the
| house terminates there, so all the network equipment lives in
| there, which makes me kind of want to also put the NAS in
| there.
| cyberax wrote:
| Check if your enclosure has an extension bracket, like this
| one: https://www.legrand.us/audio-visual/structured-wiring-
| enclos...
|
| It adds enough depth to fit plenty of regular-sized components.
| disambiguation wrote:
| I too was in the market recently for a NAS, downgrading from a 12
| bay server because of yagni - it's far too big, too loud, runs
| hot, and uses way too much energy. I was also tempted by the
| jonsbo (it's a very nice case) but prices being what they are it
| was actually better to get a premade 4 bay model for under $500
| (batteries included, hdds are not). It's small, quiet, power
| efficient, and didnt break the bank in the process. Historically
| DIY has always been cheaper, but that's no longer the case (no
| pun intended)
| zdw wrote:
| The Jonsbo N3 case which is 8x 3.5" drives has a smaller
| footprint than this, which might be better for most folks. Needs
| a SFX PSU though, which is kind of annoying.
|
| If you get an enterprise grade ITX board that has a 16x PCIe slot
| which can be bifurcated into 4 M.2 form factor PCIx4 connections,
| it really opens up options for storage:
|
| * A 6x SATA card in M.2 form factor from Asmedia or others will
| let you fill all the drive slots even if the logic board only has
| 2/4/6 ports on it.
|
| * The other ports can be used for conventional M.2 nVME drives.
| ehnto wrote:
| That's what I built! It's a great case, the only components I
| didn't already have lying around were the motherboard and PSU.
|
| It's very well made, not as tight on space as I expected
| either.
|
| The only issue is as you noted, you have to be really careful
| with your motherboard choice if you want to use all 8 bays for
| a storage array.
|
| Another gotchas was making sure to get a CPU with integrated
| graphics, otherwise you will have to waste your pcie slot on a
| graphics card and have no space for the extra SATA ports.
| p1mrx wrote:
| I recently got a used QNAP TS-131P for cheap, that holds one 3.5"
| drive for offsite backup at a friend's house. It's compact and
| runs off a common 12V 3A power supply.
|
| There is no third-party firmware available, but at least it runs
| Linux, so I wrote an autorun.sh script that kills 99% of the
| processes and phones home using ssh+rsync instead of depending on
| QNAP's cloud: https://github.com/pmarks-net/qnap-minlin
| jaimex2 wrote:
| What's the plan if your house burns down?
| ekropotin wrote:
| The loss of your vacation photos will be less of your worries
| scblock wrote:
| Honestly for many people that is probably not true as long as
| everyone is safe. Most things are replaceable, but those
| photographs probably are not.
| aurea wrote:
| Ideally: off-site backup and archive-tier object storage in the
| cloud.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I wonder how many consumer level HDDs in RAID5 will take to
| saturate a 10Gbps connection. My napkin math says that from 1,250
| MB/s we can achieve around 1,150 MB/s due to network overhead so
| it means about 5 Red Pro/ Ironwolf Pro (reading at about 250-260
| MB/s each) in RAID5 to saturate the connection.
| ekropotin wrote:
| I though raid5 is highly discouraged
| Mashimo wrote:
| I can't remember the details, but was that not specifically
| for hardware raid controllers? 2000s style.
|
| I think for home use with MDADM or raid z2 on zfs it's just
| gucci. It's cost effective.
| Maakuth wrote:
| Z2 means you'll have two parity disks, like in RAID-6. That
| should be okay. The trouble with RAID-5 are the rebuild
| times that rise to multiple days with modern disk sizes.
| The duration of time you run effectively without redundancy
| grows uncomfortably large. Especially if you don't have a
| hot or even cold spare around.
| Mashimo wrote:
| Ah yes, I mixed up raid5 and 6.
|
| I think it's still fine for casual home setups. Depending
| on data and backup strategy.
| mvkel wrote:
| Wait. You build a new one every -year-?! How does one establish
| the reliability of the hardware (particularly the aliexpress
| motherboard), not to mention data retention, if its maximum life
| expectancy is 365 days?
| p1necone wrote:
| Looks like they built a new NAS, but kept using the same
| drives. Which given the number of drive bays in the NAS
| probably make up a large majority of the overall cost in
| something like this.
|
| Edit: reading comprehension fail - they bought drives earlier,
| at an unspecified price, but they weren't from the old NAS - I
| agree, when lifetimes of drives are measures in decades and
| huge amounts of tbw it seems pretty silly to buy new ones every
| time.
| adastra22 wrote:
| MB and other elements are more concerning than the drives.
| zdragnar wrote:
| For system failure, yes, but not if data retention and
| recovery is your primary concern.
|
| When building a device primarily used for storing personal
| things, I'd much prefer to save money on the motherboard
| and risk that failing than skimping on the drives
| themselves
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Eh, cheap motherboards aren't a panacea that can't hurt
| the rest of the hardware, I personally don't skimp on
| motherboards, and would much rather skimp on the drives
| themselves as I have redundancy and 1-2 drives failing
| wouldn't hurt too much. And data retention is my top
| priority.
|
| Motherboards have fried connected hardware before, poor
| grounding/ESD protections, firmware bugs together with
| aggressive power management, wiring weirdness and power
| related faults have broken people's drives before.
|
| What I've never heard about is a drive breaking something
| else in a system, but broken motherboards have taken
| friends with them more than once.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Not sure why you are being downvoted. The MB is a single
| point of failure in this system, the drives are not.
|
| I've experienced many drive failures over the years, but
| never lost data due to RAID. Failing MB or PSU on the
| other hand has wiped out my entire system.
| aynyc wrote:
| You actually want reliable MB & RAM to ensure data
| doesn't get corrupted in memory first. Since you have
| various ways of writing data to disks that offer you
| resiliency.
| bostik wrote:
| Don't skimp on the power supply either. A dodgy PSU can
| torch all devices attached to it.
|
| How do I know? I've had two drives and one MB fail in
| quick succession thanks to a silently failing power
| supply.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This is the funniest edit have read in while.
| mvkel wrote:
| Waiting for the edit to the edit
| p1necone wrote:
| In my defense - the paragraph under the 'Storage' header
| reads like what I said to me, whereas the 'Bulk Storage
| Hard Disk Drives' header says something kind of
| contradictory to that. ('Collection of brand new parts'
| vs 'my own decommissioned hard drives')
| SirFatty wrote:
| How else is one to get the clicks?
| cube00 wrote:
| Plus the commission from the undisclosed Amazon affiliate
| links in the post.
|
| They're tagged for the post and year so must be worth it to
| go to that trouble rather then using generic tag for the
| whole blog.
|
| tag=diyans2024-20, tag=diynas2025-20,tag=diynas2026-20
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| On a more rhetorical side, should they be disclosed?
|
| Isn't that assumed nowadays that every link to a
| marketplace is an affiliate link?
| toast0 wrote:
| Social enforcement is probably all we can get, but yes,
| they should be disclosed. I'ma a fan of using 'affiliate
| link' as the anchor text, but it might offend one's html
| sensibilities. A brief one sentance blurb about
| commisions before the affiliate links start is
| sufficient.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> should they be disclosed?_
|
| Yes.
|
| _> Isn 't that assumed nowadays that every link to a
| marketplace is an affiliate link?_
|
| Other people doing something wrong is seldom a good
| reason to do it wrong yourself.
|
| My own personal pettiness: If an article declares the
| existence of affiliate links, I'll use those links more
| often than not. If they don't, I'll make an effort to
| revisit the links without the affiliate IDs. If an
| article presents both affiliate and non-affiliated links,
| I will generally use the former, and I'll trust the
| writers opinions a little more than otherwise. I actually
| keep a separate browser for buying things once they have
| been researched, to slightly inconvenience the tracking
| of me generally, so I won't be linked by "last affiliate"
| tracking unless fairly decent profiling is in action
| (which it won't be: sellers won't make that much effort
| just to pay money out to affiliates), only if I copy over
| the affiliate-id decorated link (or the original source
| article and click the link in that environment).
| hamdingers wrote:
| I don't understand why this is a problem for some people.
|
| It doesn't increase the price or impact your buyer
| experience in any way, so why do you care? If this blog
| post introduced you to a product you wanted to buy, why
| should you have a problem with the author getting a finders
| fee _from the seller_? Just seems mean-spirited.
| Strom wrote:
| It impacts the buyer experience.
|
| These two statements have a very different impact:
|
| 1. I love product X and I won't get paid if you buy it
| too.
|
| 2. I love product X and I will get paid if you buy it
| too.
|
| Money motivates people to claim they love a product or
| that a product is good, even if not true. It's a problem
| that has plagued the internet for decades.
| mvkel wrote:
| I don't think it's this binary.
|
| Influence and power are far more intoxicating currencies
| than affiliate revenue.
|
| And if someone complained "you're just publishing this
| helpful thing to become more influential in [community],"
| well, at some point we need to acknowledge incentives
| drive all behavior in one way or another.
|
| Refusing the incentive doesn't make one per se virtuous.
| briancmoses wrote:
| Somebody else shared this, but I'm the blog's author. I think
| you're asking good questions, but they're not from the point-
| of-view of the people who actually benefit from these blogs.
|
| I've answered the "You build one every year?" question quite a
| few times over the years.
|
| These blogs have a shelf life. After about a year, newer
| hardware is available that's a better a better value. And after
| 2-3 years, it starts to get difficult to even find the many of
| the parts.
|
| I don't replace my NAS every year, but every now and then I do
| keep my yearly NAS for my own purposes, but 2026 won't be one
| of those years.
|
| > How does one establish the reliability of the hardware...?
|
| One guy on the Internet is--and always will be--an anecdote, I
| could use this NAS until its hardware was obsolete and I'd
| still be unable to establish any kind of actual reliability for
| the hardware. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or money
| required to elevate beyond being a piece of anecdotal data.
|
| However, there's a sizable audience out there who have realized
| that they need some kind of storage beyond what they already
| have, but haven't implemented a solution yet. I think if you
| put yourself in their shoes, you'll realize that _anything_ is
| better than nothing in regards to their important data. My hope
| is that these blogs move that audience along towards finding
| that solution.
| mvkel wrote:
| > One guy on the Internet is--and always will be--an anecdote
|
| It seems like you have a specific person in mind as the
| audience member (yourself?), but the piece could benefit from
| a wider view. Given your hardware choices, reliability seems
| to not be a factor at all, but near-term cost (at the expense
| of long-term cost).
|
| I'm not expecting you to personally test your hardware
| choices, but make choices based on the aggregate accounts of
| others, like the rest of us.
|
| I would imagine the mean audience member would want to buy
| something they can set and forget, which would necessitate
| the reliable choice. That is wholly different than a person
| who is excited about tinkering with a brand new NAS each year
| briancmoses wrote:
| You should give me the benefit of the doubt when it comes
| to understanding the audience! I've got at least fourteen
| years of writing these blogs and then interacting with the
| people who engage with them. I think I have a decent
| understanding with what resonates with the audience. I've
| found that audience to be large enough that I'd rather
| focus my efforts on creating content this audience
| continues to find useful. An engaged audience is far more
| interesting to create content for than a wider audience.
|
| The audience does want something that they can set and
| forget, which they've been doing for about as long as I've
| been writing these blogs. The few recipients of these
| actual DIY NAS builds (via raffles, giveaways, auctions,
| etc) have used them for years. For years, people have been
| telling me about how they used one of my previous DIY NAS
| buids as inspiration years ago and have told me how they
| have worked for them over the years. I expect in the not-
| to-distant future, someone will be telling me the same
| about this particular NAS. Despite disbelief and insistence
| otherwise, I'm insanely confident that this DIY NAS will be
| reliable for years to come.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| > One guy on the Internet is--and always will be--an anecdote
|
| That's true of course. The problem, in my view, is that this
| is how everyone on the internet acts especially the
| "reviewers" or "builders" or "DIYers". It's not just you, so
| don't take this as a personal attack.
|
| Almost all articles and videos about tech (and other things
| now too) do the equivalent of "unboxing review". When it's
| not strictly an unboxing, it's usually like "I've had this
| phone/laptop/GPU/backpack/sprinkling system/etc for a month,
| and here is my review"
|
| I stopped putting much weight on online reviews and guides
| because of that. Almost everyone who does them uses whatever
| they are advertising for _maybe_ a month and moves on to the
| next thing. Even if I'm looking for an older thing all
| reviews are from the month (or even day) it was released and
| there is very little to non a year or 2 after because
| understandably they don't get views/clicks. Even when there
| are later reviews, they are in the bucket of "This thing is 3
| years old now. Is it still worth it in 2025? I bought a new
| one to review and used it for a month"
|
| Not to mention that when reviewers DO face a problem, they
| contact the company, get a replacement and just carry on.
| Assuming everyone will be in the same position. From their
| prospective, it's understandable. They can't make a review
| saying "Welp, we got a defective one. nothing to see here".
| On the other hand, if half the reviewer faced problems, and
| documented it, then maybe the pattern will be clearer.
|
| Yes, every reviewer is a "one guy on the internet" and "is--
| and always will be-- an anecdote". No one is asking every
| reviewer to be come Consumer Reports and test hundreds of
| models and collect user feedback to establish reliability
| scores. But at the same time if each did something similar it
| would be a lot more useful than what they do.
|
| I'll give you a concrete example off the top of my mind --a
| Thermapen from ThermoWorks.
|
| When I was looking for "the best kitchen thermometer" the
| Thermapen was the top result/review everywhere. Its accuracy,
| speed and build quality were all things every review
| outlined. It was a couple of years old by then and all the
| reviews were from 2 years ago. I got one and 6-8 months
| later, it started developing cracks all over the body. A
| search online then showed that this is actually a very common
| issue with Thermapens. You can contact them and they might
| send you another one of the older models if they still have
| them (they didn't in my case) but it'll also crack again.
| Maybe you can buy the new one?
|
| May sound petty to put that one example on the spotlight, but
| very similar thing happened to me with a Pixel 4, a Thinkpad
| P2, a Sony wireless headphones, a Bose speaker, and many more
| that I'm forgetting. All had stellar "3 week use reviews".
| After 6 months to a year and they all broke down in various
| ways. Then it becomes very easy to know what to search for
| and the problems are "yeah, that just always happens with
| this thing"
| briancmoses wrote:
| You're entirely right about this kind of content and the
| people who create it festers cynicism. But in the end, I am
| powerless to do anything to counter said cynics.
| Unfortunately anything that I write otherwise will just
| invoke more cynicism and I'm sure in the eyes of the
| cynics, it's justified.
|
| These DIY NAS build blogs have a bit of formula: Here's my
| criteria, here are the parts that I chose to meet that
| criteria, and here's what I think after I've built and
| tested it to the best of my ability.
|
| If I had my choice, my blog would inspire people to
| understand their own criteria and give them the confidence
| to go build something unique that meets that same criteria.
| This absolutely happens, but it's the exception rather than
| the rule. The rule is that people choose to replicate these
| DIY NAS builds part-for-part.
|
| I'm as confident in this DIY NAS as I've been for the ones
| I created in the past. The times there were issues with
| these builds (eg: the defective C255X/C275X CPUs from
| Intel), I've updated those blogs with all the details I can
| muster about those issues.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Wait. You build a new one every -year-?!_
|
| For some people, building a NAS, or a fuller home-lab, is a
| hobby in itself. Posts like this are generally written by one
| of those people for an audience of those sorts of people.
| Nothing wrong with that. I was someone like that myself, some
| time ago.
|
| On a more cynical note: if the blog is popular enough, those
| affiliate links might be worth more than a few pennies and a
| post about previous years builds with links to those years
| choice of tech, will not see anything like the same traction.
| It wouldn't get attention on HN for a start (at least not until
| a few more years time, when it might be part of an interesting
| then-and-now comparison).
| mzhaase wrote:
| I would like to point people to the Odroid H4 series of boards.
| N97 or N355, 2*2.5GbE, 4*SATA, 2 W in idle. Also has extension
| boards to turn it into a router for example.
|
| The developer hardkernel also publishes all relevant info such as
| board schematics.
| kajika91 wrote:
| I also have an older Odroid HC4, it's been years it is running
| smoothly and not only I cannot use 1000$ for a NAS as the
| current post implied but the power consumption seems crazy to
| me for a mere disk-over-network usage (using a 500W power
| supply).
|
| I like the extensive benchmark from hardkernel, the only issue
| is that any ARM-based product is very tricky to boot and the
| only savior is armbian.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > the power consumption seems crazy to me for a mere disk-
| over-network usage (using a 500W power supply).
|
| The rated power supply spec is the maximum it can provide,
| not the actual consumption of the device.
| antonkochubey wrote:
| And the best feature is they have in-band ECC, which can
| correct one-bit and detect two-bit errors. No other Alder
| Lake-N or Twin Lake SBC exposes this feature in UEFI.
| ceving wrote:
| Can you give a reference for ECC? I can not find anything
| about ECC support on the Odroid site.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The version using the 4-core CPU Intel N97, which is
| specified by Intel as an embedded CPU, certainly has in-
| band ECC, which was tested by some reviewers of this SBC.
|
| I do not know whether the 8-core version (H4 Ultra) also
| enables in-band ECC, as for that CPU Intel does not specify
| embedded uses, so they may disable the ECC support in the
| factory.
|
| See e.g.:
|
| https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-
| revie...
|
| However, looking right now at:
|
| https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=171&t=48377
|
| I see that someone has enabled successfully in-band ECC on
| the 8-core ODROID H4 Ultra and has run benchmarks with ECC
| disabled/enabled. Therefore it appears that in-band ECC
| support exists on all models.
|
| The results of benchmarks with in-band ECC disabled/enabled
| may be not representative for real workloads. In-band ECC
| relies on caching the ECC bits in a dedicated ECC cache, in
| order to avoid excessive memory accesses. The effectiveness
| of the ECC cache can be very different for the benchmark
| and for the real workload, leading to misleading results.
| Usually for the real workload it is likely that the cache
| hit-rate will be higher, so the performance drop with in-
| band ECC enabled will be less conspicuous.
| samhclark wrote:
| I can confirm that the Odroid H4 Plus also supports in-
| band ECC. If I remember right, Memtest86 showed different
| stats when I ran it with in-band ECC enabled/disabled
| though I didn't have a good way to test that an error was
| actually corrected.
| toast0 wrote:
| Some systems allow forcing an ECC error, but assuming
| that's not available, if you can adjust memory voltages
| or timings, you can usually encourage errors that way and
| confirm memtest detects ECC corrections.
| adrian_b wrote:
| All CPUs with ECC support allow the forcing of ECC
| errors, but unfortunately in recent years the CPU vendors
| usually do not document how.
|
| Only when they expose this feature in Linux EDAC drivers
| it becomes possible to do this. In the past Intel had
| maintained well its Linux EDAC drivers, but AMD had
| frequently great delays between the launch of a CPU and
| the update of the drivers. After the many lay-offs at
| Intel, it is unknown whether in the future their Linux
| support will remain as good as in the past.
| adrian_b wrote:
| There is the ASUS NUC 13 Rugged, which also exposes the in-
| band ECC, but it is both much more expensive and much slower
| (it uses either a 2-core or a 4-core Atom CPU, while ODROID
| uses either a 4-core or an 8-core CPU of the same Gracemont-
| based series).
| squishykid wrote:
| I am building a NAS using the Odroid H4+ and a 3d printable
| case design. I selected the Odroid board for the in-band ECC
| and low power consumption:
| https://www.printables.com/model/1257966-odroid-h4-nas
| andruby wrote:
| I've had an H3 for a few years and it runs amazing. Very low
| power usage, small footprint and great stability. I run it with
| an M.2 ssd for power considerations.
|
| Before that I had a full size NAS with an efficient Fujitsi
| motherboard, pico-psu, 12V adaptor and spinning HDD's. That
| required so much extra work for so little power efficiency
| gains vs the Odroid.
| ilkhan4 wrote:
| Yep, I've had mine running for over a year now without issue.
| It idles at 34w with all 4 drives running. I ended up making a
| custom "case" for it: https://github.com/cbsmith402/storage-
| loaf
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Obligatory comment every time one of these threads comes up that
| Synology, sure, the hardware is a bit dated but... as far as set
| and forget goes:
|
| I've run multiple Synology NAS at home, business, etc. and you
| can literally forget that it's not someone else's cloud. It auto
| updates on Sundays, always comes online again, and you can go for
| years (in one case, nearly a decade) without even logging into
| the admin and it just hums along and works.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Until you get the blue flashing light of dead. Luckily I was
| able to source an identical old model of eBay to transfer the
| disks to.
| imiric wrote:
| What makes you think that Synology hardware is special in that
| sense?
|
| Most quality hardware will easily last decades. I have servers
| in my homelab from 2012 that are still humming along just fine.
| Some might need a change of fans, but every other component is
| built to last.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| It's the software and stability of the software (between
| updates for example) that's impressive.
| _rwo wrote:
| I love synology; bought one around 2018, runs nicely until this
| day; received last DSM 7.3 update so will be supported until
| 2028 but I will probably keep it running until it dies as I
| don't expose it to The Evil Internet anyway
|
| does everything and more I need it to (backups, photos,
| storage, jellyfin, various media servers, torrents etc.)
| archagon wrote:
| Synology also has a bit of a software moat with its BTRFS-
| backed SHR implementation. You can throw in drives of arbitrary
| size and it'll automatically maximize the available free space.
| ZFS can't do that, though AnyRaid should make it possible in
| the future: https://docs.hexos.com/blog/2025-05-22.html
|
| Plus, DSM has a spectacular web interface.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| I would have chosen the i3-n305 version of that motherboard
| because it has In-Band ECC (IBECC) support - great for ZFS. IBECC
| is very underrated feature that doesn't get talked about enough.
| It may be available for the N150/N355, but I have never seen a
| confirmation.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| what is the impact on performance, does it require special ram?
| just heard about this here
| gforce_de wrote:
| sorry for the german comment - ECC is mandatory!
|
| Obligatorische Pastete: "16GB Ram sind Flischt, ohne wenn und
| aber. ECC ist nicht Flischt aber ZFS ist dafur ausgelegt.
| Wenn in Strandnahe Daten gelesen werden und es kommt
| irgendwie was in den Arbeitsspeicher, konnte eine eigentlich
| intakte Datei auf der Festplatte mit einem Fehler
| "korrigiert" werden. Also ECC ja. Das Problem bei ECC ist
| nicht der ECC-Speicher an sich, der nur wenig mehr als
| konventioneller Speicher kostet, es sind die Mutterbretter,
| die ECC unterstutzen. Aufpassen bei AMD: Oft steht dabei,
| dass ECC unterstutzt wird. Gemeint ist aber, dass ECC-
| Speicher lauft, aber die ECC-Funktion nicht genutzt wird.
| LOL. Die meisten MBs mit ECC sind Serverboards. Wer nichts
| gegen gebrauchte Hardware hat, kann z.B. mit einem alten
| Sockel 1155-Xeon mit Asus-Brett ein Schnappchen machen.
| Ansonsten ist die Asrock Rack-Reihe zu empfehlen. Teuer, aber
| stromsparend. Generell Nachteil bei Serverboards: Die
| Bootzeit dauert eine Ewigkeit. Von Consumerboards wird man
| mit kurzen Bootzeiten verwohnt, Server brauchen da oft mal 2
| Minuten, bis der eigentliche Bootvorgang beginnt. Bernds
| Server besteht also aus einem alten Xeon, einem Asus Brett,
| 16GB 1333Mhz ECC-Ram und 6x 2TB-Platten in einem RaidZ2
| (Raid6).6TB sind Netto nutzbar. Ich mag alte Hardware
| irgendwie. Ich reize Hardware gerne bis zum Gehtnichtmehr
| aus. Die Platten sind auch schon 5 Jahre alt, machen aber
| keine Mucken. Geschwindigkeit ist super, 80-100MB/s uber
| Samba und FTP. Ich lasse den Server ubrigens nicht laufen,
| sondern schalte ihn aus, wenn ich ihn nicht brauche. Was
| noch? Komression ist super. Obwohl ich haupsachlich nicht
| weiter komprimierbare Daten speichere (Musik, Videos), hat
| mir die interne Kompression 1% Speicherplatz beschert. Bei
| 4TB sind das ca. 40GB Platz gespart. Der Xeon langweilt sich
| trotzdem ein bisschen. Testweise habe ich
| gzip-9-Komprimierung getestet, da kam er dann schon ins
| Schwitzen."
| kurlberg wrote:
| This has been discussed on HN some times before. User
| xornot looked at the zfs source code and debunked "faulty
| ram corrupts more and more on scrub", for more details see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14207520
| zenoprax wrote:
| Can you explain why ECC is great for ZFS in particular as
| opposed to any other filesystem? And if the data leaves the NAS
| to be modified by a regular desktop computer then you lose the
| ECC assurance anyway, don't you?
| adastra22 wrote:
| The oversimplified answer is that ZFS' in-memory structures
| are not designed to minimize bitflip risk, as some file
| systems are. Content is hashed when written to memory cache,
| but it can be a long time before it then gets to disk. Very
| little validation is done at that point to protect against
| writing bad data.
| supermatt wrote:
| ZFS is about end-to-end integrity, not just redundancy. It
| stores checksums of data when writing, checks them when
| reading, and can perform automatic restores from mirror
| members if mismatches occur. During writes, ZFS generates
| checksums from blocks in RAM. If a bit flips in memory before
| the block is written, ZFS will store a checksum matching the
| corrupted data, breaking the integrity guarantee. That's why
| ECC RAM is particularly important for ZFS - without it you
| risk undermining the filesystem's end-to-end integrity. Other
| filesystems usually lack such guarantees.
| starky wrote:
| I think the worry about power consumption is a bit overblown in
| the article. My NAS has an i5-12600 + Quadro P4000 and uses maybe
| 50% more power than the one in this article under normal
| conditions. That works out to maybe $4/month more cost. Given the
| relatively small delta, I'd encourage picking hardware based on
| what services you want to run.
| silversmith wrote:
| Less power, less heat. Less heat, less cooling required. At
| some point that allows you to go fanless, and that's very
| beneficial if you have to share a room with the device.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Since this is about NAS, you very likely have a bunch of HDDs
| connected to it. And if you do, I feel like they'll "out-
| noise" a lot of cooling solutions as long as the fans are not
| spinning at max by default.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| It depends how much electricity costs where you live. I'm quite
| pleased mine idles at ~15W.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| I'm with you, but my "NAS" is also really just a server,
| running tons of other services, so that justifies the power
| consumption (it's my old 2700X gaming rig, sans GPU).
|
| But i do have to acknowledge that the US has relatively low
| power costs, and my state in particular has lower costs than
| that even, so the equation is necessarily different for other
| people.
| execution wrote:
| Indeed, I always compare it with what I get if I ran it via
| cloud services and the electricity cost pales in comparison.
|
| My NAS is around 100W (6-year old parts: i3 9100 and C246M)
| which comes to $25/PS18 per month (electricity is expensive),
| but I can justify it as I use many services on the machine and
| it has been super reliable (running 24/7 for nearly 6 years).
|
| I will try to see if I can build a more performant/efficient
| NAS from a mix of spare parts and new parts this coming month
| (still only Zen 3: 5950X and X570), but it is more of a fun
| project than a replacement.
| rr808 wrote:
| $4/mo is more than I expected. I always compare to cloud
| storage and $50/yr is significant.
| starky wrote:
| This is why I stated that the important part is sizing the
| machine for your use case. I use my NAS as far more than just
| a storage server, it also runs a couple VMs and about 20
| docker containers all the time. Plus I've also got my Windows
| VM that I boot up for the few programs I use that don't have
| a Linux equivalent (which is also the only time the P4000 is
| working). That is much more different than comparing to just
| cloud storage.
| fmajid wrote:
| I upgraded my home backup server a couple of months ago to a
| Minisforum N5 Pro, and am very happy with it. It only has 4 3.5"
| drive slots, but I only use two with 2x20TB drives mirrored, and
| two 14TB external drives for offsite backups. The AMD AI 370 CPU
| is plenty fast so I also run Immich on it, and it has ECC RAM and
| 10G Ethernet.
| archagon wrote:
| The N5 Pro is a good machine, but I have to recommend the
| Aoostar WTR Max over it, having used both. It's a few hundred
| bucks cheaper ($680 post-tax for a quality SFF case + mobo +
| CPU + power + fans!!) and has an extra drive bay and a couple
| of additional NVMe slots (three Gen4 2x and two 1x), despite
| being only ~13% larger. Also, the drive caddies on the N5 Pro
| were driving me crazy: the plastic clips holding the disk in
| place require quite a bit of force to dislodge and feel like
| they could snap at any moment. (And once they inevitably do,
| there's no screwholes to use as a backup.)
|
| Either way, it's a great time for home NAS.
| pSYoniK wrote:
| TL;DR - please stop wasting tons of resources putting together
| new servers every year and turning this into yet another outlet
| for "I have more money than sense and hopefully I can buy myself
| into happiness". Just get old random hardware and play around
| with it and you'll learn so much that you will be able to truly
| appreciate the difference between consumer and enterprise
| hardware.
|
| This seems awfully wasteful. One of the main reasons for which
| I've built my own homeserver was to reduce resource usage - one
| could probably argue that the carbon footprint of keeping your
| photos in the cloud and running services is lower than building
| your own little datacentre copy locally and where would we be if
| everyone builds their own server, then what? Well, I think that
| paying Google/Apple/Oracle/etc whoever money so that they
| continue their activities has a bigger carbon footprint than me
| picking up old used parts and running them on a solar/wind only
| electricity plan. I also think I'm going a bit overboard with
| this and I'm not suggesting to vote with your wallet because that
| doesn't work. If you want real change this needs to come from the
| government. You not buying a motherboard won't stop a corporation
| from making another 10 million.
|
| Anyway, except for the hard drives, all components were picked up
| used. I like to joke it's my little Frankenstein's monster,
| pieced together from discarded parts no one wanted or had any use
| for. I've also gone down the rabbit hole to build the "perfect"
| machine, but I guess I was thinking too highly of myself and the
| actual use case. The reason I'm posting this is to help someone
| who might not build a new machine because they don't have ECC and
| without ECC ZFS is useless and you need Enterprise drives and you
| want 128 GB of RAM in the machine and you could also pick up used
| enterprise hardware and you could etc...
|
| If you wish to play around with this, the best way is to just get
| into it. The same way Google started with consumer level hardware
| so can you. Pick up a used motherboard, pick up some used ram, a
| used CPU, throw them into a case and let it rip. Initially you'll
| learn so much and that alone is worth every penny. When I built
| my first machine, I wasn't finding any decently used former
| desktop form hp/lenovo/dell so I found a used i5 8500t for about
| 20$, 8 gb of ram for about 5$, a used motherboard for 40$, case
| was 20$ and PSU was $30. All in all the system was 115$ and for
| storage I used an old 2.5inch ssd for boot drive and 2 new NAS
| hard drives (which I still have btw!). This was amazing. Not
| having ECC, not having a server motherboard/system, not worrying
| about all that stuff allowed me to get started. The entry bar is
| even lower now, so just get started, don't worry. People talk
| about flipped bits as if it happens all day every day. If you are
| THAT worried, then yeah, look for a used server barebone or even
| a used server with support for ecc and do use ZFS, but I want to
| ask, how comfortable are you making the switch 100% now over
| night without having ever spent any time configuring even the
| most basic server that NEEDS to run for days/weeks/months?
| Old/used hardware can bridge this gap and when you're ready it's
| not like you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You
| now have another node in a proxmox cluster. Congrats! The old
| machine can run LXCs, VMs, it could be a firewall it could do
| anything and when it fails, no biggie.
|
| Current setup for those interested:
|
| i7 9700t
|
| 64 GB DDR4 (2x32)
|
| 8, 10, 12, 12, 14 TB HDDs (snapraid setup and 14 TB HDD is
| holding parity info)
|
| X550 T2 10Gbps network card
|
| Fractal Design Node 804
|
| Seasonic Gold 550watts
|
| LSI 9305 16i
| imiric wrote:
| It's a bit patronizing to tell people what to do with their
| money. If you care more about the environment than enjoying
| technology, then go ahead and do what you suggest. If you want
| to be _really_ green, how about giving up technology
| altogether? Go full vegan, abandon all possessions, and all
| that? Or if you really want to help the planet, have you
| considered suicide?
|
| There's always more you can do. I'd rather enjoy my life, and
| not tell others how to enjoy theirs, unless it's impacting
| mine. Especially considering that the impact of a single
| middle-class individual pales in comparison to the impact of
| corporations and absurdly wealthy individuals. Your rant would
| be better served to representatives in government than tech
| nerds.
| gjvc wrote:
| _It 's a bit patronizing to tell people what to do_
|
| on this website?!
|
| _with their money_
|
| in this economy?!
| pSYoniK wrote:
| It is however very patronising to tell people to "Go full
| vegan, abandon all possessions, and all that".
|
| It also isn't useful to reduce the conversation and assume
| that critique directed at the idea of necesarily going out
| and buying new hardware is a critique against technology or
| ownership, but, myself included, we do seem to read what we
| want. You also missed the point I made when I did clearly say
| voting with your wallet doesn't work. You didnt address the
| other, more salient point I was getting across, but obviously
| failed to do so - when starting out, don't worry too much,
| just get whatever and start learning. Questions will be
| easier answered when you already have some hardware.
|
| Anyway, enjoy your day
| hexbin010 wrote:
| > have you considered suicide
|
| How uncouth, even just as rhetoric.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| The author is not suggesting anyone should rebuild their NAS
| every year. Instead he is investigating which options make
| sense in year X. I remember reading his recommendations back
| when I built my NAS in 2021 but that doesn't mean I bought new
| hardware since then.
| cm2187 wrote:
| HDD have to be bought new, as well as anything mechanical (eg
| fans). But for motherboards, CPU, RAM and SSD, there is great
| value in buying used enterprise hardware on ebay. It is generally
| durable hardware that spent a quiet life in a temperature
| controlled datacentre, server motherboards from 5 years ago are
| absolute aircraft carriers in term of PCIe lanes and
| functionalities. Used enterprise SSDs are probably more durable
| than a new retail SSD, plus power loss protection and better
| performance.
|
| The only downside is slightly higher power consumption. But just
| bought a 32 core 3rd gen Xeon CPU + motherboard, 128GB RAM, it
| idles at 75w without disks which isn't terrible. And you can
| build a more powerful NAS for a third of the price of a high end
| Synology. Unlikely that the additional 20-30w idle power
| consumption will cost you more than that.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I wouldn't say that being new is an absolute requirement. I
| recently upgraded my ZFS pool from SATA to SAS HDDs. Since SAS
| HDDs have much better firmware for early error detection and
| monitoring, I decided to buy 50% refurbished. Even if I lost
| half of them, I would still be safe. I also have offsite
| backups. This setup worked really well for me, and I feel
| completely confident that my data is safe while not wasting
| unnecessary resources. Whether to use new or used equipment
| therefore depends on the setup.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Agree, but that's taking a risk with your data (whereas if a
| MB fails, you likely just need to replace it but your data is
| fine), and HDD kind of have a finite number of hours in them.
| Where buying them used I think makes sense is for a backup
| server, that you leave off except the few hours in a week
| where you do an incremental backup. Then it doesn't really
| matter that the drives have already been running for 3 or 4
| years.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| With the redundancy in a raidz2 or mirror, the driver can
| and will fail. I count on this. But it can happen in a
| controlled manner.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| So you buy used enterprise disks because their error
| detection is 'better'?
|
| Do you have any source for this claim? Why would be the
| firmware so different? Software is cheap i don't think they
| would be that different.
|
| I mean a used enterprise disk gets sold after it was running
| on heavy load for a long time. Any consumer hdd will have a
| lot less runtime than enterprise disks.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| The protocol is better (SAS). Once I put them in, I
| immediately noticed transmission issues in a counter going
| up for several of my HDDs where the SATA showed no errors
| at all. It was a faulty backplane that introduced these
| transmission issues that went unnoticed by my SATA drives
| for several years.
| some-guy wrote:
| I have purchased many refurbished drives and have yet to have
| any failures from them. (Anecdotal obviously)
| nicolaslem wrote:
| 75W idle is 650kWh a year, that's quite significant in the
| context of a home.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| 260 Euros in Germany. And this heat also has to be moved out
| ls612 wrote:
| Well that's on you for living in the failed state of
| Germany, where power is 3-4x as expensive as it is in
| sensible countries like the US.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| It's frustrating when a comment is both needlessly
| belligerent flamebait AND wrong about electricity prices
| in the US. I guess that's what makes effective flamebait
| ls612 wrote:
| German electricity prices are around EUR0.38/kwh based on
| my quick googling which is roughly $0.44/kwh. I pay
| $0.12-0.13/kwh in the US so I'm at least right factually
| up to rounding.
| else42 wrote:
| Wrong. I pay EUR0,23/kWh, so do your homework.
|
| What exactly is failing in Germany, and why is it
| important in this context?
| ls612 wrote:
| They have failed to have a sensible industrial and energy
| policy, leading to around net 0 GDP growth since 2019.
| I'm sure for the degrowth elites though this is not a
| failure it is working as intended.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Well, a Synology NAS would probably consume like 30-40w, so
| we are talking about an excess of $70-100 a year where I
| live. Depends on one's budget of course, but not really a big
| deal for me. And certainly less than what I am saving on the
| upfront cost.
| pmontra wrote:
| Maybe 75 W without disk is not terrible but it's not good. My
| unoptimized ARM servers idle at about 3 or 4 W and add another
| 1 or 10 W when their SSDs or HDDs are switched on.
|
| 75 W probably need active cooling. 4 W do not.
|
| Anyway you can probably do many more things with that 75 W
| server.
| cm2187 wrote:
| A raspberry pi will go even lower. But as you say, not really
| comparable in term of functionality. I am comparing this to
| high end consumer NAS, which will idle at 30-40w minimum.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| Enterprise hardware is very seldom a good idea.
|
| The hardware has different form factors (19"), two power
| supplies, very loud, very power hungry.
|
| There are so many good combinations of old and still functional
| hardware for consumers.
|
| My main pc 6 years ago had a powerful cpu and idle load of 15
| watts due to the combination of mainboard and amount of
| components i had in it (one ram block instead of 2 or so).
|
| And often enough, if you can buy enterpsire hardware, the
| hardware is so outdated that a current consumer system would
| beat it without looking at it.
|
| If you then need to replace something, its hard to find or its
| differennt like the power supply.
| gorbachev wrote:
| The datahoarder community frequently utilizes used hard drives.
|
| That's perfectly fine, if your NAS has redundancy and you can
| recover from 1 - 2 disk failures, and you're buying the drives
| from a reputable reseller.
| t-3 wrote:
| I usually buy used hard drives, but prices are strange for
| all electronics right now. It's a bad time to buy anything
| computer-related, but especially used goods which aren't
| discounted as much as normal are priced higher due to massive
| inflation (to the point that refurbished drives I bought 5
| years ago have a better dollar/GB ratio than refurbs I can
| buy today).
| esskay wrote:
| > HDD have to be bought new
|
| In A DC environment sure. In a home NAS not so much. I'm on
| Unraid and just throw WD recertified drives of varying sizes at
| it (plus some shucked external drives when I find them on offer),
| that's one of its strengths and makes it much cheaper to run.
| StrLght wrote:
| I did something similar last year. Market for mITX NAS boards is
| pretty bad. I went for ASRock N100DC-ITX - it has 2x SATA ports,
| but there's also PCIe 3 x4.
|
| The main benefits of this board were:
|
| * it's not from an obscure Chinese company
|
| * integrated power supply - just plug in DC jack, and you're good
| to go
|
| * passive cooling
|
| Really hope they make an Intel N150 version.
| enchanted-gian wrote:
| Question,whats the problem with a motherboard being from an
| obscure Chinese company?Is it because its harder to find
| replacements or some other reason. i ask because i recently
| built my own homelab like 4 months ago and source all my parts
| from Aliexpress which as way cheaper than any name brand on
| amazon an they're all relatively obscure. My homelab is running
| perfectly though so why the apprehension?
| StrLght wrote:
| I am more worried about them in the long-term. Reviews are
| usually not as detailed as I'd like them to be (shout out to
| ServeTheHome - they're doing a great job in terms of that),
| or they're nearly impossible to find.
|
| For me personally, there are two things I am concerned about:
|
| 1. Issues that can only be resolved via BIOS update. Almost
| all obscure Chinese SBCs won't get any updates, so you're
| stuck with whatever issues you encounter.
|
| 2. In case of hardware failures, there's a 0% chance for RMA.
| You are not getting a replacement or your money back.
| gorbachev wrote:
| The motherboard seems quite expensive.
| kotaKat wrote:
| While not DIY, I would like to also call out an interesting
| discovery lately.
|
| https://www.ugreen.com/blogs/news/ugreen-makes-strategic-ent...
|
| UGREEN has apparently inked deals to drop their DXP2800s into
| (some) Walmarts, which also included bringing in some 10/12TB
| Toshiba N300 Pro drives as well to go with them on the shelves.
| Being a super-rural American, I was a bit surprised to see this
| on my local shelf as a nearly turnkey solution in an area where
| there's nothing remotely close to a Best Buy, even.
|
| Even more surprisingly: they've been sold by Walmart below
| minimum advertised prices at UGREEN a few times normally...
| AlanYx wrote:
| One thing to be aware of is that many (all?) current UGREEN
| boxes can't support ECC RAM. For anyone looking to use ZFS like
| the article linked here, that may be an issue, depending on
| one's view of the debate about whether ECC is necessary with
| ZFS.
| Xiol32 wrote:
| I had one of the DXP4800 Plus NASes for about a month before
| RMAing it.
|
| The CPU would immediately hit 100C with even the slightest
| whiff of load.
|
| The entire thing was also unstable and would regularly just
| lock up without any kernel panic or other error message
| available, could even get kdump to gather anything (I'd binned
| their dodgy NAS OS and installed Debian).
|
| It also seemed to amplify the noise of the hard drives within.
| Every thunk of a drive head moving around would be audible from
| a different room. Not sure how they managed to do that, but
| it's an acoustic nightmare.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Not gonna lie I dumped their packed-in OS like shipping foam.
| Turned the watchdog off, installed TrueNAS, not looking back.
|
| I haven't paid attention to temps or noise - it's been
| suitable in my bedroom corner and it's been running for a
| month+ now like a trouper.
| mtlynch wrote:
| I appreciate Brian's posts and they've helped me learn to build
| my own NAS systems, but there's a scammy angle to his articles.
|
| All of the merchant links are affiliate links, which he
| (illegally) does not disclose.[0] He's effectively acting as a
| sales rep for these brands, but he's presenting himself as an
| unbiased consumer.
|
| The affiliate relationship incentivizes Brian to recommend more
| expensive equipment and push readers to the vendors that pay
| Brian the most rather than the vendors that are the best for
| consumers.
|
| I recognize that it's an unfortunate truth that affiliate links
| are one of the few ways to make money writing non-AI content
| about computer hardware. I'm fine with affiliate links, but the
| author should disclose the conflict of interest at the top of the
| post before getting into the recommendations.
|
| In the interest of full disclosure, I also write about NAS builds
| on my blog, so I somewhat compete with Brian's posts, but I
| stopped using affiliate links five years ago because of the
| conflict of interest.
|
| If you're not familiar with how affiliate relationships create
| dangerous incentives, I recommend reading the article, "The War
| To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] tl;dr - All
| the top mattress-in-a-box reviewers were just giving favorable
| reviews to the company that paid the best affiliate rates, even
| going so far as to retroactively update old reviews if the payout
| rates changed.
|
| [0] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-
| endorse...
|
| [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-
| blogg...
| alias_neo wrote:
| Just skimming over the article, I feel like the blue link
| coloured word "Topton" has been seared into my retinas.
|
| That aside, as someone who has been building computers for
| nearly 3 decades, and NAS's for a decade plus, I dislike almost
| everything about this build.
|
| Spending a lot on the PSU is a good move, but the motherboard
| is a bad choice for the price when a much more capable socketed
| board + CPU could be had for around the same price, and the use
| of no-name SSD and NVMe is an absolute no-no for me.
|
| The impression I got from so many linked mentions of Topton
| this and Topton that, is that this was mostly done to push that
| particular brand for a sponsorship or affiliate program.
|
| Youtube has already long gone the way of being untrustworthy
| for advice on this sort of thing due to sponsorships and
| affiliates etc, perhaps I should blog my advice and experience
| that no body pays to influence, in a more generic sense for
| those who actually need guidance on where to focus when
| building hardware like PCs and NASs.
|
| I'm not going to suggest that hardware I chose for my "NAS" as
| it would be universlly bad advice for most people, but there is
| some generic knowledge to be shared here.
|
| Sometimes it feels just like telling my kids to "learn from my
| mistakes", does anyone actually want to hear it?
| bhattisatish wrote:
| Are there any tape based solution which can be used at home? I
| don't care about time retrieval. It's more for home archival
| purpose.
|
| I have two NAS servers (both based on Synalogy). But I need
| something where I can back it up and forgot about it till I want
| to restore the stuff. I am looking at a workflow of say, weekly
| backup to tape. Update the index. Whenever I want to restore a
| directory or file, I search the index, find the tape and load the
| same for retrieval.
|
| NAS can be used for continuous backup (aka timemachine and
| timeshift). And archival at a weekly level.
| mm0lqf wrote:
| Tape drives are generally SAS so you will need a controller
| card
|
| I've got a HP StorageWorks Ultrium 3000 drive (It's LTO-5
| format) connected to one (LSI SAS SAS9300-4i), in my NAS/file
| server (HP Z420 workstation chassis). Don't go lower than LTO-5
| as you will want LTFS support.
|
| About PS150 all in for the card and drive (including SFF-8643
| to SFF-8482 cables etc..) on EBay
|
| Tapes are 1.5TB uncompressed, and about PS10/each on Ebay,
| you'll also want to pick up a cleaning cartridge.
|
| I use this and RDX (1TB cartridges are 2-4 times the price, but
| drives are a lot cheaper, and SATA/USB3, and you can use them
| like a disk) for offline backup of stuff at home.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Not OP, but similar situation, trying to figure out tape
| archiving, already using SAS.
|
| However, is there no open formats? The whole LTO ecosystem of
| course reeks of enterprise, and I'd expect by now at least
| one hardware hacker had picked together some off-the-shelf
| components to build something that is magnitude cheaper to
| acquire, maintain and upgrade.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Short answer: no
|
| Tape is really complicated and physically challenging, and
| there are no incentives for people investing insane amounts
| of time for something that has almost no fan base. See the
| blog post about why you don't want tape from some time ago.
|
| Edit: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/lto-tape-backups-for-
| linux-n...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > there are no incentives for people investing insane
| amounts of time for something that has almost no fan base
|
| Like that has stopped anyone before? :p Probably explain
| why we haven't seen anything FOSS in that ecosystem _yet_
| though.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The LTO cartridges are cheap and the programs that you need
| for using LTO tape drives are open source.
|
| The only problem is that the LTO tape drives are very
| expensive. If you want to use 18 TB LTO-9 tapes, the cost
| per TB is much lower than for HDDs, but you need to store
| at least a few hundred TB in order to recover the cost of
| the tape drive.
|
| There is no chance to see less expensive tape drives
| because there is no competition and it would be extremely
| difficult for anyone to become a competitor as it is
| difficult to become able to design and manufacture the
| mechanical parts of the drive and the reading and writing
| magnetic heads.
| progbits wrote:
| If you "back up and forget" there is a good chance you will not
| be able to restore the tapes when the time comes.
|
| At least with drives you can run regular health checks a
| corruption scans. Tape is good for large scale but you must
| have automation that keeps checking the tapes.
| adrian_b wrote:
| A tape can be checked much faster than a HDD, because its
| sequential read/write speed is several times higher than that
| of a HDD.
|
| However, there is little need to check the tapes, because the
| likelihood of them developing defects during storage is far
| less than for HDDs.
|
| Much more important than checking the tapes from time to time
| is to make multiple copies, i.e. to use at least duplicate
| tapes that are stored in different places.
|
| Periodic reading is strictly necessary only for SSDs, and it
| is useful for HDDs, because in both cases their controllers
| will relocate any corrupted blocks. For tapes it is much less
| useful. There is more risk to damage the tape during an
| unnecessary reading, e.g. if the mechanism of the tape drive
| happens to become defective at exactly that moment, than for
| the tape to become defective during storage.
|
| The LTO cartridges are quite robust and they are guaranteed
| for 30 years of storage after you write some data on them.
|
| In the past there have existed badly designed tape
| cartridges, e.g. the quarter-inch cartridges, where the tape
| itself did not become defective during storage, but certain
| parts of the cartridge, i.e. a rubber belt, which was
| necessary to move the tape, disintegrated after several years
| of storage. Those have disappeared many years ago.
| adrian_b wrote:
| You can buy a tabletop LTO tape drive, a SAS HBA card and an
| appropriate cable and you can use them with any desktop
| computer with a free big enough PCIe slot.
|
| The problem is that while the tapes are at least 3 times
| cheaper than HDDs, and you have other additional advantages,
| e.g. much higher sequential reading/writing speed and much
| longer storage lifetime of the tape, the tape drives are
| extremely expensive, at a few thousand $, usually above $3k.
|
| You can find tape drives for obsolete standards at a lower
| price, but that is not recommended, because in the future you
| may have a big tape collection and after your drive dies you
| will no longer find any other compatible drive.
|
| Because the tapes are cheap, there will be a threshold in the
| amount of data that you store where the huge initial cost of
| the tape drive will be covered by the savings from buying cheap
| tapes.
|
| That threshold is currently at a few hundred TB of stored data.
|
| I use an LTO tape drive and I have recovered its cost a long
| time ago, but I have more than 500 TB of data.
|
| However, only a third of that is actual useful data, because I
| make 2 copies of each tape, which are stored in different
| locations. I am so paranoid because it is data that I intend to
| keep forever and I have destroyed all the other supports on
| which it was stored, e.g. the books that I have scanned, for
| lack of storage space. An important purpose of the digitization
| has been to reduce the need for storage space, besides reducing
| the access time.
|
| I keep on my PC a database with the content of all tapes, i.e.
| with all the relevant metadata of all the files that are
| contained inside the archive files stored on the tapes.
|
| When I need something, I search the database which will give me
| the location of the desired files as something like "tape 47
| file 89" (where "file 89" is a big archive file, typically with
| a size of many tens of GB). I insert the appropriate tape in
| the drive and I have a script that will retrieve and expand the
| corresponding archive file. The access time to a file averages
| around 1 minute, but then the sequential copying speed is many
| times higher than with a HDD. Therefore, for something like
| retrieving a big movie, the tape may be faster overall than a
| HDD, despite its slow access time.
|
| There are programs that simulate a file system over the tape,
| allowing you to use your standard file manager to copy or move
| files between a tape and your SSD. However I do not use such
| applications, because they reduce a lot the performance that
| can be achieved by the tape drive. I handle frequently large
| amounts of data, i.e. the archive files in which I store data
| on the tapes are typically around 50 GB, so the reduced
| performance would not be acceptable.
| doe88 wrote:
| It is a shame drives are so pricy. Just out of curiosity
| (knowing nothing to this area), what would you consider the
| minimum 'viable' LTO tape drive?
| adrian_b wrote:
| I have a Quantum LTO-7 drive (6-TB tapes) bought many years
| ago for $3000.
|
| Today I would strongly recommend against buying a LTO-7
| drive, as it is obsolete and you risk to have a tape
| collection that will become unreadable in the future for
| the lack of compatible drives. A LTO drive can read 2
| previous generations of tapes, e.g. a LTO-9 drive can read
| LTO-7 and LTO-8 tapes. LTO-10 drives, when they will appear
| in a few years, will no longer be able to read LTO-7 tapes.
|
| The current standard is LTO-9 (18-TB tapes). If you write
| today LTO-9 tapes, they will remain readable by LTO-11
| drives, whenever those will appear.
|
| Unfortunately, LTO-9 is a rather new standard and the tape
| drives, at least for now, are even more expensive.
|
| For instance, looking right now on Newegg, I see a HPE
| LTO-9 tape drive for $4750.
|
| Perhaps it could be found somewhat cheaper elsewhere, but I
| doubt that it is possible to find a LTO-9 tape drive
| anywhere for less than $4500.
|
| If you need to store at least 200 TB of data, you may
| recover the cost of the tape drive from the difference in
| price between LTO-9 cartridges and HDDs.
|
| Otherwise, you may choose to use a tape drive for improved
| peace of mind, because the chances for your data that is in
| cold storage on tapes to become corrupt are far less than
| if it were stored on HDDs.
|
| I have stored data for many years on HDDs, but the only
| thing that has kept me from losing that data was that I
| have always duplicated the HDDs (and I had content hashes
| for all files, for corruption detection, as the HDD
| controller not always reported errors for the corrupted
| blocks). After many years, almost all HDDs had some
| corrupted blocks, but the corrupted blocks were not in the
| same positions on the duplicated HDDs, allowing the
| recovery of the data.
| Keyframe wrote:
| This is all fine, but price came around same-ish as UGREEN
| DXP8800, if we're considering price alone.
| Neikius wrote:
| Specs and price of this are perfect, but I want AMD. Guess too
| picky? Anyone knows of a similar product with AMD CPU?
| aynyc wrote:
| I did some shopping recently, the market is very weird right now.
| Given the pricing of hardware recently, pre-built NAS now is
| actually on par pricing wise for DIY.
| andruby wrote:
| Looking at the Power Consumption section:
|
| How can the total average Wattage be lower than any of the lines
| it consists of?
|
| Total average power is 66.49W, yet average _Idle_ power is noted
| as 66.67W.
| Mashimo wrote:
| I think the Total is not the combination of the above listed
| items. The listed items are just sub categories. See the
| "Duration" column.
|
| Out of 108h he did a 18h burn in.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| No ECC, no remote KVM. HP Microserver remains the only viable
| option.
| avhception wrote:
| Came here to remark about ECC as well.
|
| The remote KVM options from HP and Dell and whatnot are usually
| so useless they might as well not exist except from remote
| power up / down, so I don't really care about that.
| ciupicri wrote:
| I wanted to say the same thing. Having to walk to the closet
| to turn it on/off or having to move it to the living room in
| order to debug it is an inconvenience, but data corruption
| caused by lack of ECC is a catastrophe.
| conorcleary wrote:
| for thousands of dollars, plus what if you don't want remote-
| in?
| pi-rat wrote:
| Built in KVM is not that important any longer, with all the new
| options for adding an external one. gl-inet comet kvm, nanokvm
| pro, jetkvm, etc.
| ls612 wrote:
| I just bought a consumer AMD B850 board that supports ECC when
| I built my NAS in early October. I also got 32GB of ECC memory
| for $180 which is a distant memory today lol.
| anentropic wrote:
| I used to have big HDDs attached to my Thunderbolt dock.
|
| But it was always annoying having to 'eject' them before
| unplugging the laptop from the dock. Or sometimes overnight they
| would disconnect themselves and fill up my screen with dozens of
| "you forgot to eject" notifications. Yes I'm on macOS.
|
| Do NAS avoid this issue? Or you still have to mount/unmount?
|
| Why does there seem to be much more market for NAS than for
| direct attached external HDD?
|
| Eventually I got a new laptop with bigger SSD, started using
| BackBlaze for backups, and mostly stopped using the external
| HDDs.
|
| I always assumed NAS would be slower and even more cumbersome to
| use. Is that not the case?
| yabones wrote:
| A NAS will use a network file protocol (SMB/NFS/AFP/SFTP etc)
| to access data rather than direct disk access, so the types of
| failures are different. Generally you don't really have to
| "eject" but disconnecting during a large transfer can cause
| incomplete writes.
|
| The main risk with directly attached storage is that most
| kernels will do "buffered writes" where the data is written to
| memory before it's committed to disk. Yanking the drive before
| writes are synced properly will obviously cause data loss, so
| ejecting is always a good idea.
|
| Generally, NAS is a bit safer for this type of storage because
| the protocols are built with the assumption that the network
| can and will be interrupted. As a result, things are a bit
| slower since you're dealing with network overhead. So, like
| everything, there are some trade-offs to be made.
| zuhsetaqi wrote:
| You can disable this notification with
|
| defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.app
| le.DiskArbitration.diskarbitrationd.plist
| DADisableEjectNotification -bool YES
| tom_alexander wrote:
| > Why does there seem to be much more market for NAS than for
| direct attached external HDD?
|
| I can access my NAS from anywhere in the world, but you can
| only access your direct-attached drives when sitting at your
| desk.
|
| I can hide my NAS in a closet, but your direct attach drives
| are wasting valuable desk space and causing noise in your
| workspace.
|
| My NAS has a software raid (raidz2) so any two of my drives
| could die without losing a single bit of data. Technically this
| is possible with direct attached drives too, but usually people
| aren't attaching multiple external drives to their computer at
| the same time.
|
| Multiple people/computers/phones can access my NAS
| simultaneously, but your direct attach drives are only usable
| by a single computer at a time.
|
| I can use my NAS from any device/operating system without
| worrying about filesystem compatibility. With direct attach
| drives, you need to pick a filesystem that will be supported by
| the devices you want to plug in to it.
|
| The downside is a NAS is running 24/7 which will consume more
| electricity than drives you only plug in on-demand, and file
| transfers will be slower over a network than directly plugged
| in to your computer, but 99% of the time the speed difference
| does not matter to me. (It really only impacts me when doing
| full-disk backup/restore since I'd be transferring hundreds of
| gigabytes.)
| adrian_b wrote:
| You can configure a NAS to use Wake-on-LAN, so that it will
| not run 24/7, but only when you wake it up remotely. After
| you finish using it, you power it down remotely, until the
| next use.
| dewey wrote:
| Maybe I'm out of the loop but I've never heard of "Topton". As
| this brand is being mentioned 16 times in this one blog post I'm
| just assuming that's a sponsored blog post and not an objective
| overview.
| jffry wrote:
| Every time I've looked into doing a DIY NAS in the last few
| years Topton seems to come up - as far as I can tell it's
| because they make MiniITX boards with a boatload of SATA ports.
| trevithick wrote:
| Topton makes a lot of those router mini PCs. I have an N100
| with 4 2.5Gbe ports. It has a serial port too, which is nice.
| It's been running great for about a year now. Then again, it's
| from Aliexpress, so who knows if it's even really a Topton.
| jrrv wrote:
| What makes a motherboard a NAS motherboard, precisely? I've got a
| decent Mini-ITX sitting around and I've been contemplating
| setting up/getting a NAS. Would be nice if I could re-use what I
| already have and save some money.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| For me, ECC RAM, large enough number of SATA ports, ability to
| run rest of my software stack well enough (in my case FBSD and
| ZFS).
| cm2187 wrote:
| Technically any motherboard can become a NAS, but there are
| desirable features.
|
| - low idle power consumption since your NAS will be sitting
| doing nothing most of the time - pretty much any desktop MB
| will do
|
| - fast networking, 1gbe means ~100MB/s transfers, nicer to have
| 10gbe. Limited benefits beyond 10gbe in practice.
|
| - enough PCIe lanes to connect enough drives. HDD of course but
| nice to have a separate fast SSD array plus SSD caching. You
| might also want a SAS HBA if you are looking enterprise drives
| or SSDs (and even for SATA SSD you will get a better
| performance via a HBA than through the motherboard). Some
| people also want a graphic card for video transcoding
|
| - ECC memory
|
| - IPMI - once you start using it it becomes hard to give up.
| Allows you to manage the server remotely even when switched
| off, and access the BIOS via a web interface. Allows you to
| keep the server headless (i.e. not have to go plug a screen to
| understand why the server is taking so long to reboot).
|
| I'd say a good candidate for a NAS motherboard would be
| something like a supermicro X11SSH-LN4F, you can find used ones
| pretty cheap on ebay.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > My only complaint about the motherboards has been that buying
| them from one of the Chinese e-tail sites like AliExpress is
| considered problematic by some.
|
| I love some AliExpress deals for some of my hobby purchases, but
| a NAS motherboard is not one of them.
|
| The contrast between the fashionable case, boutique Noctua fans,
| and then an AliExpress motherboard doesn't inspire confidence in
| the priorities for this build. When it comes to a NAS I
| prioritize the core components from well known manufacturers and
| vendors. With everything from hobby gear to test equipment
| AliExpress has been a gamble on wherever you're getting the real
| deal or a ghost shift knockoff or QA reject for me. It's the last
| place I'd be shopping for core NAS components.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| That's a Topton board from the official Topton store on
| AliExpress. It's strictly equivalent to buying straight from
| the manufacturer and will be shipped by Topton not AliExpress.
|
| The Jonsbo case is probably both cheaper and easier to buy from
| AliExpress than Amazon too to be fair. It's also a Chinese
| brand.
| briancmoses wrote:
| I wrote this blog and I completely agree with you both!
|
| This listing _should_ be as close to a sure thing as you can
| get on AliExpress. But even then, dealing with AliExpress
| when things go sideways isn 't always all that great.
|
| I have purchased this motherboard from this link, I'd do it
| again in a heartbeat if I needed to, and I wouldn't fault
| anyone for avoiding AliExpress either.
|
| If somebody wants to buy from a different vendor, it's
| sometimes possible to find resellers on Amazon or eBay
| (myself included). The prices might be a bit more expensive,
| but some folks might think it's worth it.
|
| I talk about it in the blog, it's my understanding that
| there's shortages of the Intel CPUs which I would expect to
| drive up the pricing.
| m000 wrote:
| I've recently gone through building a NAS for home. I read
| several guides like this, but a lot of them didn't quite match
| what I had in mind. Following some takeaways from my personal
| experience:
|
| - Finding a low-wattage/high-efficiency ATX/SFX PSU is the
| hardest part. To achieve the advertised efficiency, your Gold-
| rated PSU needs at least 20% load. I.e. 100W for a 500W PSU. If
| you are building for low-power, you will need much lower wattage
| for the PSU to operate at optimal conditions/efficiency. Good
| luck finding anything under 450W these days.
|
| - Do your math before choosing RAIDX, where X != 1. E.g. the disk
| cost for 2*16TB RAID1 array is pretty close to the cost of 3*8TB
| RAID5 array of the same capacity. But future upgrades with RAID1
| are much easier and less costly, given that your NAS box will
| probably have only 4-5 slots. RAIDX make sense if you want to go
| wild (target NAS capacity >> maximum available single disk
| capacity).
|
| - If you have not jumped into the "homelab" rabbithole and you
| only want a NAS and some services, NAS operating systems like
| TrueNAS are a PITA. Your hardware will be "owned" by the NAS OS,
| and you will need to jump through hoops to get any other software
| running. Most of them encourage you to not run anything else on
| them, except from prepackaged apps from their "store". So, you
| may want to stick with something more prosaic. E.g. vanilla
| debian.
|
| - If you are thinking of ZFS/TrueNAS because of the scrubbing
| functionality, RAID1 + BTRFS also have scrubbing.
|
| - Motherboards from AliExpress save you time. If I could procure
| a motherboard with 6 SATA ports, at least 2 2.5GbE ports, and an
| N series CPU from a mainstream vendor, I probably would. But
| there aren't any such models. If you try to add these features on
| top of a standard motherboard, you need another round of
| researching components. Plus, if it is a mini-ITX mobo, you may
| run out of PCIe slots.
|
| - Motherboards from AliExpress are just fine. I'm not sure why
| people nag about "reliability" without even anecdotal evidence.
| If your mobo dies, too bad. But mobos are pretty low in the list
| of components affecting the safety of your data, with PSU, disks
| and software being more important.
| accidc wrote:
| Do you have a preferred/recommendation for a NAS OS?
| m000 wrote:
| Not really.
|
| I was not interested in maintaining an extensive homelab (so
| that I have separate storage and computing nodes), or buying
| into a new "software ecosystem" (I would consider buying e.g.
| a Synology/QNAP box if I did), so I ended up with vanilla
| Debian. Debian 13 (trixie) got released right on time, so I
| will be on the latest for a couple of years.
|
| From what I tried (TrueNAS, OpenMV, Unraid), Unraid seemed to
| be the most appealing. TrueNAS was very unfriendly towards
| even the idea of opening a shell [1] and IIRC you couldn't
| even install debian packages out of the box. OpenMV had
| problems booting on my hardware, plus it is lagging behind
| mainline debian (the Debian 12 version of OpenMV got released
| around 2 months before Debian 13).
|
| Unraid also had limitations regarding what you could run, but
| the community seemed to be the most robust. Also, it is the
| only one that stores its parity data externally. This gives
| you the most flexibility with disk configurations. Also, IIRC
| you can pull out a disk and the data on it would be readable,
| so migrating your data to something else would be relatively
| painless.
|
| So, if I had to choose a NAS OS, it would probably be Unraid.
| The downside is that you need to buy a license. But hey!
| Black Friday to the rescue!
|
| [1] https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/scaletutorials/systems
| ett...
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| > - If you are thinking of ZFS/TrueNAS because of the scrubbing
| functionality, RAID1 + BTRFS also have scrubbing.
|
| In my experience, BTRFS is to be avoided. It's the only FS that
| I've lost data to.
| m000 wrote:
| Same here, so I had to overcome this fear. But to be fair, my
| incident was >10 years back, and I was trying to be fancy
| (resizing a live FS - IIRC). Btrfs has gone a long way since
| then, and is even the standard filesystem for Synology NAS
| boxes.
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| One problem I've had running a NAS at home is dust. My usual
| installation location is my pantry, which is where the network
| enters my apartment. Unfortunately, it is also the same room as
| my heat pump, so dust can accumulate.
|
| Integrating a dust filter (not necessarily HEPA, but MERV 11) and
| the required fan upgrades would be wonderful.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _32GB of DDR5 RAM_
|
| In _this_ economy?
| QuiEgo wrote:
| I've been pretty happy with taking a Terramsater F4-425 Plus and
| putting Linux on it.
|
| I feel like the mini ITX market for motherboards is just too
| niche. If you want something small, buy an off the shelf NAS. If
| size is not an issue, buy a case that can hold a full sized
| motherboard and lots of disks.
| mkinsella wrote:
| I just purchased one of these on BF sale. How hard is it to
| install Truenas?
| Havoc wrote:
| I was looking at N class CPU builds and very quickly realized
| they're not for me. For storage only over LAN, low power
| prioritized use they're a valid play, but there are some
| tradeoffs that are not obvious at first glance.
|
| See those NVMEs he stuck in there? They're running at 1/8th their
| rated link speed. Yeah...12.5%. (PCIe 4.0 x4 vs PCIe 3.0 x1).
| This board is one of the better ones on pcie layouts [0], but 9
| gen3 lanes is thin no matter how you look at it so all those
| boards have to cut corners somewhere on that
|
| I decided I'm better off with a ebay AM4 build - way better pcie
| situation, ECC, way more powerful cpu, more sata, cheaper, 6x
| nvme all with X4 lanes, standard fan compatibility. Main
| downsides being no quicksync, power consumption and fast ECC
| UDIMMS are scarce. That was for a proxmox/nas hybrid build though
| so more emphasis on performance
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/1YJ0s_LxXgU?t=690
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Hmm good point. But to make sure I understand you completely,
| this only really matters for compute-heavy workloads, right?
| greycol wrote:
| Yes, mostly. PCIE 3.0 x1 lane gets you 500mb/s [1] not much
| point to it compared to a regular ssd on sata3 which could do
| 600mb/s. So if you want very fast storage you would also
| think about it.
|
| Realistically for your DIY stuff you're talking a different
| beast to these NASs. Bang for your buck you'd be attaching
| the mass 3.5" storage in an external second hand JBOD
| enclosure and the main device would be dealing with the
| faster storage and have an HBA to connect to it.
|
| [1] edit: as Havoc pointed out I need my coffee should be
| 2gb/s which does change the point.
| Havoc wrote:
| Not quite. A gen 3 lane is 1 GB/s link speed
|
| Better question is how the article is getting 1.2 on fio
| tests. That must be a testing artifact
| Havoc wrote:
| With NAS builds you're usually network constrained. Most of
| the numbers you see on storage side are gigabytes while
| network is gigabits. i.e. 1/8th
|
| So if you crunch the numbers you'll see storage (esp flash)
| is much faster than network, meaning NAS can cut corners on
| storage. If you're running something like a VM that accesses
| the storage directly then suddenly storage speed matters
| Gud wrote:
| My advice, skip the TrueNAS and go straight to FreeBSD. It's a
| simple operating system to maintain and it requires minimal setup
| to use as a NAS.
| chrismanning wrote:
| TrueNAS isn't even FreeBSD any more, it's Linux based now sadly
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Then migrate straight to Linux
| embedding-shape wrote:
| As someone who tried TrueNAS at first, but prefers declarative
| reproducible configuration, do give NixOS a try. Best NAS base-
| OS I've tried so far, and when it was time to migrate to new
| hardware, I just switched the disks, re-ran the config and was
| up and running in no-time.
| Gud wrote:
| Ok, sounds complicated compared to a basic FreeBSD install.
| quasigod wrote:
| I dont think its much more or less complicated, just
| depends on which one you're more familiar with.
| archagon wrote:
| I really didn't want to setup and admin my own Unix system when
| I was building my NAS, and TrueNAS made the software side
| trivial. It's basically plug-and-play and almost entirely
| configurable from the web interface. Why complicate your life
| needlessly?
| layer8 wrote:
| TrueNAS has migrated away from FreeBSD, current versions are
| now exclusively Linux-based.
| AlanYx wrote:
| This is what I recommend too, but for those who want something
| prepackaged, there's also XigmaNAS, basically a lightweight UI
| layer and basic configuration on top of FreeBSD. Some of the
| original FreeNAS developers have been working on the project
| for almost 20 years.
|
| It's great for people who just want storage and don't want the
| heavy features that came with TrueNAS' move to Linux
| (Kubernetes, etc.) or who want full control over vfs_fruit
| options for serving Macs.
| briancmoses wrote:
| I think this is a valid approach, especially for the audience
| of Hackernews.
|
| But I'd be a bit worried about the availability of drivers for
| much of the hardware found on this particular motherboard.
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| Is this rage bait?
|
| "Just skip owning a car, just buy a nice pair of Adidas,
| they're easy to clean and don't cost much."
|
| ???
| Gud wrote:
| Sorry but this is a deeply flawed analogy.
| michaelhoney wrote:
| I appreciate the use of liters as the unit of bulk
| ACV001 wrote:
| raspberry pi + 2 HDDs and a 2 slot bay (~$150).
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Holy smokes, the NAS in idle consumes more power than my UNAS Pro
| with 4x8TB HDD and 2X8TB SSD, as well as a Mac mini M1 with a 2TB
| Samsung T7 SSD, and my 4 access points and 4 protect cameras
| combined.
|
| For reference, the UNAS Pro comes with 10G networking, and will
| deliver roughly 500MB/s from a 4 HDD RAID5 array, and close to
| 1GB/s from the SSDs (which it never gets a chance to do, as I use
| them for photos/documents).
|
| My entire "network stack", including firewall, switch, everything
| POE, hue bridge, tado bridge, Homey Pro, UPS, and whatever else,
| consumes 96W in total, and does pretty much all my family and I
| need, at reasonable speeds. Our main storage is in the cloud
| though, so YMMV.
| downrightmike wrote:
| "Our main storage is in the cloud though, so YMMV." AKA you
| externalized the costs
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Not really.
|
| It's part of the 3-2-1 backup setup, but where other people
| have their "offsite backup" in the cloud, I keep my working
| copy there, and have backups at home.
|
| I outsourced operations of it though. I have self hosted for
| decades, and for the first time in 15-20 years, I'm able to
| take a vacation and not bring my laptop in case something
| breaks.
|
| As for main storage, as was probably evident from my comment,
| I don't have 30TB of cloud storage. We have our important
| stuff in the cloud, and "everything else" at home, but
| nothing at home is accessible from the internet unless you're
| on a VPN.
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