General > General Technical Chat
Replacement NAS
coppice:
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 14, 2024, 10:36:48 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on April 14, 2024, 08:10:26 pm ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 14, 2024, 03:06:22 pm ---I'd keep power consumption in mind. A pc in any form isn't particularly efficient.
--- End quote ---
You do need to be careful about power consumption, but saying all PCs are inefficient is misleading. I have have been using the same Intel i3 system as a home server for about 12 years. It idles at 12-13W from the wall, and quite a bit of that is taken by 2 3.5" hard disks. Choosing a suitable motherboard and power supply is a big factor. Some motherboards with massive overclocking potential can have a horrible idle power draw. Some power supplies seem to be designed with no regard to their efficiency outside the range laid down in the 80PLUS spec.
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Well, compared to a relatively simple ARM processor optimised for super low power, even an i3 is quite a power hog. For comparison: the Qnap NAS I have consumes little over 7Watts max. including the hard drive according to the specs. But I'm sure this number is too high as I put a low power (2.9W idle), 5400 rpm hard drive in it.
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I used to have power consumption like that with an Atom based home server, before the i3 one I have used since. I can't remember why I chose a higher consumption option for the replacement. There were still plenty of Atom options back then. Its sad they disappeared. The thing I like about these options is anything running on other Linux machines I have runs exactly the same on that server. Pushing functions beyond basic NAS to that server is trivial.
NiHaoMike:
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 14, 2024, 10:36:48 pm ---Well, compared to a relatively simple ARM processor optimised for super low power, even an i3 is quite a power hog. For comparison: the Qnap NAS I have consumes little over 7Watts max. including the hard drive according to the specs. But I'm sure this number is too high as I put a low power (2.9W idle), 5400 rpm hard drive in it.
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Then the vendor does something unfriendly to the user after the device goes out of support and all those savings are gone. Or worse, the device fails and the proprietary RAID effectively has ransomwared your data. At the least, make sure there's a decent aftermarket firmware community for it (even if you have no initial plans to use it) and that there's a way to read off the data by connecting the disks to a regular PC.
David Hess:
I repurposed my old Phenom 2 940 workstation as a NAS for testing various configurations.
TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD) worked great, but I had problems with Samba where files or directories could be created that could not be deleted. TrueNAS Scale (Linux) worked but did not support the hardware quite as well.
Since I had a Windows 10 license for it, I ended up just using Storage Spaces for now which is more flexible about modifying the array of drives. Performance was about the same either way, but getting good performance out of Storage Spaces requires learning how to configure details of the array from the command line.
vad:
--- Quote from: Halcyon on April 14, 2024, 05:05:25 am ---You've already claimed that "If the NAS crashes before it syncs pending metadata changes to disks (where metadata stands for file allocation tables of the beautiful COW file system), your entire ZFS pool will be lost with little prospect of recovery" which is demonstrably false, so I'm sorry, I don't have a lot of faith in your advice.
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I don't mean to be rude, but there's an old Russian saying: “A fool learns from his own mistakes, a wise man from the mistakes of others.”
So COW file system is a superior design compared to journaling file systems. I got it. There's another file system called Btrfs. Like ZFS, it's a superior copy-on-write file system “designed to withstand sudden power failures or incomplete writes without catastrophic data loss”. Here's a recent firsthand experience shared by a prominent figure whom I've been following for almost 30 years:
--- Quote ---Why is the Btrfs file system as implemented by Synology so fragile?
February 29, 2024 by Phil Greenspun
We had a few seconds of power loss the other day. Everything in the house, including a Windows machine using NTFS, came back to life without any issues. A Synology DS720+, however, became a useless brick, claiming to have suffered unrecoverable file system damage while the underlying two hard drives and two SSDs are in perfect condition. It’s two mirrored drives using the Btrfs file system (the Synology default, though ext4 is also available as an option). Btrfs is supposedly a journaling file system, which should make this kind of corruption impossible. Yet searching the Internet reveals that Synology suicides are commonplace. Here’s one example that pins the blame on the SSDs being enabled as read/write caches (but given that the SSDs are non-volatile why isn’t the Synology software smart enough to deal with the possibility of a power outage even when read/write caching (seems to be the default) is enabled? The Synology web page on the subject says you need two SSDs (which I have) for “fault tolerance” and doesn’t mention that the entire NAS can become a brick after losing power for a few seconds).
Given that Synology has only one job, i.e., the secure storage of data, this strikes me as a spectacular failure of corporate mission.
Readers: Have you seen this kind of failure before? NTFS was introduced by Microsoft in 1993 and I’ve never seen it completely destroyed by a power interruption.
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So, perhaps ZFS is the better COW file system compared to Btrfs, and maybe all the folks on the TrueNAS forum are mistaken about ECC memory and battery backups, along with all the TrueNAS guides being wrong. But what if they're not? What if wearing seatbelts really does save your life when you hit a pole at 40 miles per hour?
The full blog post is available here: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2024/02/29/why-is-the-btrfs-file-system-as-implemented-by-synology-so-fragile/
Halcyon:
--- Quote from: vad on April 15, 2024, 12:26:05 am ---So, perhaps ZFS is the better COW file system compared to Btrfs, and maybe all the folks on the TrueNAS forum are mistaken about ECC memory and battery backups, along with all the TrueNAS guides being wrong. But what if they're not? What if wearing seatbelts really does save your life when you hit a pole at 40 miles per hour?
The full blog post is available here: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2024/02/29/why-is-the-btrfs-file-system-as-implemented-by-synology-so-fragile/
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I have little experience with Btrfs, but what I do know is that Synology's offerings shouldn't be compared to TrueNAS. I also can't comment on how Synology implements btrfs or their RAID solution. Maybe in the past it has been a poor design? I don't know? But one thing to keep in mind is that Synology's products are aimed at the consumer and prosumer market and that includes their RackStation products (which I have used before). They are designed to be an easy to use, out-of-the-box solution for individuals and businesses that don't want to mess around with complex configurations, permissions etc... TrueNAS on the other hand is an enterprise solution, but one that can be used in the home in a scaled down version.
iXsystems have been around for a long time and along with a FreeNAS/TrueNAS have a longstanding proven track record, as does ZFS. People aren't necessarily mistaken about ECC, there are use cases for it, but unless you have money to burn, that use case isn't in the home (or even small to medium office environments). None of the TrueNAS guides are wrong either. If you have ECC, you'll get the added benefit from it, if not, it's not a deal-breaker. My advice is, don't compare one product to a entirely different product, it'll lead you to making false assumptions.
I personally use a UPS so that I don't have to login to the server after short power outages and re-input the volume encryption keys. Graceful shutdowns, whilst always recommended, are really just an afterthought for me. I sleep pretty well at night knowing my data is safe.
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