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Replacement NAS

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nctnico:

--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on April 14, 2024, 11:39:08 pm ---
--- 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.

--- End quote ---
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.

--- End quote ---
Sorry, but this remark makes zero sense. A NAS is a device you physically own and have access to. Unless the hard drive(s) fail(s) or you lose the password, there is no way you can get locked out of your data even if the vendor ceases to exist. It is not cloud storage! And in case a NAS does fail, you just buy another one and restore the data from another backup. 99% of the NAS devices runs Linux anyway so the chance you can't access the hard drive from a Linux computer is next to zero. However, the chance the hard drive fails way before the NAS itself is close to 100% anyway.

Berni:
Unraid user for almost a decade here. And would recommend using it at home.

Yes TrueNAS is the superior solution if you are after performance, but for home use it is often overkill.

While Unraid does cost money (but it is lifetime license that includes all future upgrades) it is an easy to use solution where you don't need to know what you are doing, while making it very difficult to have a catastrophic loss of data. Unlike real RAID setups this is just gluing disks together at the filesystem level while using parity drives to guard from disk failures. You can just throw random disks in there and they will join the pool of storage, no need to have same size drives, no need to restripe it over the new drives..etc. Gives the same level of protection as RAID, however if a RAID array degrades to a point where parity can no longer recover your data, then all of your data has been practically nuked. Yet here there is still hope, each drive in the array has its own filesystem and so is still individually perfectly readable in any linux machine, allowing you to recover whatever data is still left. Heck you can even mix and match filesystems, have some of the array disks be BTRFS, some XFS, some EXT4. Doesn't matter as long as linux can read it. You can even spin down the disks in the array that are not needed and only spin up the disk the file is on. You can also do VMs and Dockers and all that stuff that TrueNAS does.

If Unraid is so good why are more people not using it then? Well... performance
Because it is not actual RAID means you don't get the performance boost of RAID. So the reading performance is equal to the read speed of 1 HDD. Writing is even slower because it also has to read then write. This is a deal breaker for enterprise use where storage servers get seriously big. However for home use it is usually good enough. Modern HDDs are usually 150MB/s sequential read/write and so it is faster than a 1Gbit Ethernet connection anyway, so the speed doesn't matter (unless you are one of the rare few that have a 2.5G or 10G LAN). The write speed can also be improved by using a SSD cache. And if you want speed and have 10G networking you can still spend some extra money on making an all SSD NAS that will beat the pants off any regular HDD NAS.

M0HZH:
I prefer a tried, tested & well supported off-the-shelf NAS for my critical data (both personal and for my small business), so I run a Synology as the main NAS with scheduled backups to another local Synology & to Amazon Glacier. Haven't lost a thing in 10 years and except the initial entry cost of a Synology unit, the running costs are quite low: power-efficient, low failure rate (except a few known models), good resale value.

For replaceable / less important data OpenMediaVault running on some old / low-power hardware works, but generally there are tradeoffs: time, effort, reliability, long term power usage for lower initial cost, performance, flexibility. It's not necessarily better.

I find the more advanced / custom NAS solutions (including TrueNAS) outside the scope of a typical home/SMB user.

woofy:

--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on April 12, 2024, 06:01:35 pm ---I've got an old Drobo NAS here at home that is 15 years old. Now that Drobo is out of business and support is no longer available, I need to replace it with something more modern before it fails and takes my data with it.

Rather than buying another commercial NAS, I've been thinking about building a FreeBSD box, adding a bunch of disks, and configuring them as a ZFS pool. Has anyone done this? Is it a good idea?

--- End quote ---

I think its worth re-quoting the op's post. This is a new build replacement home NAS. TrueNAS Core is exactly what is being requested. TrueNAS and ZFS are proven technologies and despite some posts here, I can find no evidence that ZFS is unreliable. I don't count social media opinions as evidence. My own experience of TrueNAS is overwhelmingly positive. I've been running TrueNas here at home since the pandemic in 2020, almost 4 years now, and even longer at work where we have two machines running trueNAS. We've had plenty of power failures in that time but never any TrueNAS issues.

As far as raid is concerned, I wouldn't bother. There's no performance gain of any significance, this is a home NAS. Raid may be great for commercial use where a hot swap can restore the system without down time but for a home server its pointless. In any case, you still need a separate backup.

And on power, with idle consumption in the 10w region, does it matter. My own home NAS is (for the last few weeks) an N100 mini PC with a single 2TB SSD for the data. Power consumption is around 10W. Put that in perspective, its 100 hours operation per kwh, or 87.6 kwh/yr. At 7.5p/kwh that's £6.57 year! I can't even buy a couple of pints of beer for that.

unseenninja:
If it wasn't for Intel insisting that ECC DRAM was an "enterprise feature" and making it impossible or unnecessarily costly to implement for consumer CPUs, it would be used in every PC.

A random bit flip caused by a cosmic ray is not the stuff of legends, they really do happen. As the size of each individual bit in a memory chip gets smaller and smaller, the chance that a bit flip might happen increases. Most people experience bit flips as random blue screens of death and put it down to micros~1's software quality. A bit flip which corrupts data in memory before ZFS has checksummed it and written it to disk will never be detected until you discover that the file in question is corrupted. The original authors of ZFS say you should use ECC DRAM. Those guys know what they are talking about.

My TrueNAS has ECC DRAM and I wouldn't even think of building one without it. I also based it on an AMD CPU for this generation of the hardware as I didn't want to pay Intel's premium for something which is an essential feature.

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