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Scythe posted:I want to set up a simple NAS as a music server and to handle backups from two Apple laptops (and then send those backups along to a cloud service). It does not need to be able to transcode video (or even stream it at all, probably). It seems like a simple 2-bay Synology is the best option--do I really need a DS218+ for that or will a cheaper 218, 218play, or 218j work? My WD reds are basically silent. I sit next to them all day long and don't notice it. It's mildly quieter when they turn off but it's nothing I notice through open can headphones.
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Jul 6, 2018 15:41
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H110Hawk posted:My WD reds are basically silent. I sit next to them all day long and don't notice it. It's mildly quieter when they turn off but it's nothing I notice through open can headphones. I run 4 WD Purples in an array and they, too are silent. The whole box is inaudible from more than 3 feet away.
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Jul 6, 2018 15:59
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Qnap has kind of a neat mini nas thingie that uses m.2 sata ssds: https://www.qnap.com/en/product/tbs-453a/specs/hardware Would make a decent multimedia nas, has hdmi ports and a built in ethernet switch. Shame about the case graphics though.
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Jul 6, 2018 16:48
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The j series is fine for basic file serving duties. If music library involves the nas indexing metadata, the j series will still work, but better cpu and ram will be beneficial. It's just going to depend on how much money you have to throw at going from non-embarrassing bare basics to this comfortably covers these needs.
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Jul 6, 2018 16:54
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priznat posted:Qnap has kind of a neat mini nas thingie that uses m.2 sata ssds: It's a cute form factor, but only having gigabit ethernet means it won't be able to deliver anywhere near the speed those SSDs can produce. If you made it just a little taller (eg 9x6x1.5" footprint), you could also fit 4x2.5" SATA drives in there too, which would be an interesting variation on this theme. That would let you choose between cheap 2 TB SSDs (~$250 a pop) and 2.5" HDDs ($80 a pop). 4 laptop drives is probably still better than gigabit ethernet can actually deliver. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Jul 6, 2018 |
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Jul 6, 2018 17:30
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Paul MaudDib posted:It's a cute form factor, but only having gigabit ethernet means it won't be able to deliver anywhere near the speed those SSDs can produce. That’s a good point. I wish 10GbE switches would come down in price a bit. Also there is this: https://www.qnap.com/en/product/hs-251+/specs/hardware That’d be a decent silent multimedia nas, and it takes 3.5” hdds with 2 1GbE ports..
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Jul 6, 2018 18:22
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Zorak of Michigan posted:How much capacity do you need, and what's your budget? Big SSDs get pricey. Good point, not sure why I omitted that. I could probably get away with 1TB and 2TB would definitely be more than enough. I can spend whatever on this (like $1k, which I know would be silly) if it’s worthwhile, but would prefer the cheapest thing that will be simple, quiet, and reliable. The music server duties will include indexing metadata, but I don’t anticipate that process will be needed frequently (I’ll be adding a few albums a month). HDMI out isn’t required and would probably go unused (I have no locally-stored video; the music will go out through airplay to a receiver with an ethernet hookup).
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Jul 6, 2018 18:43
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I bought a new 2TB white label 7200rpm disk from goharddrive to replace a failing WD Black from 2011. The ebay listing said it's SATA III with 64MB of cache. Well, the disk I got is SATA II and has 32MB of cache. I'm sure they'll take care of the issue but it kind of bothers me that the label on the disk also says it's 64MB of cache and SATA 6Gb/s. One of their suppliers is sitting on a bunch of Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 2TB HUA722020ALA331 2TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Enterprise 3.5" Hard Drive which they also sell but is putting fraudulent white labels on them to make them seem newer. The disk chassis is identical. GoHardDrive has 100% ebay feedback with almost 90k sales so I'm not worried that they'll get it sorted out but it sure sucks that there's some fraud with the white labeling. Then again, I wouldn't be buying white label disks if I needed this for more than light use in a short time frame.
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Jul 6, 2018 18:48
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Rexxed posted:I bought a new 2TB white label 7200rpm disk from goharddrive to replace a failing WD Black from 2011. The ebay listing said it's SATA III with 64MB of cache. Well, the disk I got is SATA II and has 32MB of cache. I'm sure they'll take care of the issue but it kind of bothers me that the label on the disk also says it's 64MB of cache and SATA 6Gb/s. One of their suppliers is sitting on a bunch of Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 2TB HUA722020ALA331 2TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Enterprise 3.5" Hard Drive which they also sell but is putting fraudulent white labels on them to make them seem newer. The disk chassis is identical. I once bought a few cases of white label disks. Once.
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Jul 6, 2018 19:59
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H110Hawk posted:I once bought a few cases of white label disks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad9mlvyA84E Did you use an 88 Magnum to destroy the disks?
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Jul 6, 2018 21:17
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GoHardDrive offered either a partial $20 refund and I keep the disk or they can issue me a return label. Considering the light duty I have in mind for it I may just take the $20. It just really bothers me that there's a label on the disk with fake information.
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Jul 6, 2018 22:44
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Rexxed posted:GoHardDrive offered either a partial $20 refund and I keep the disk or they can issue me a return label. Considering the light duty I have in mind for it I may just take the $20. It just really bothers me that there's a label on the disk with fake information. What else did they lie about? Any raid array worth its salt will disable the write cache regardless.
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Jul 7, 2018 00:14
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For my own file server I did get the chance to test out Snapraid's effectiveness at restoring. One of my drives had some issues where windows decided to drop it so that it required initialization which wiped the data on the drive. The drive itself still appears fine. I did use a file recovery tool to see what it could see for data, and it of course was able to see it all since no sectors were overwritten. This part is my favorite for Snapraid because if this had been the case where for whatever reason more than 2 drives failed (since I have 2 drive parity) I still would have been able to recover my data since it doesn't stripe it across drives. Since using the file recovery tool would require me to offload to a different drive I just went ahead with letting Snapraid restore it. About 12 hours later and it was all rebuilt (for ~4TB of data). The downside of course was that the drive's data was unavailable during this process. It is my understanding that with FreeNAS that the data would still be available, just potentially not as fast since it would need to create the file on the fly from parity information; is that understanding correct? Paul MaudDib posted:It's a cute form factor, but only having gigabit ethernet means it won't be able to deliver anywhere near the speed those SSDs can produce. It seems like for this application the SSDs are being considered more because they are completely silent versus the need for speed. For the stated application gigabit won't even really be a bottleneck except to initially load up the drives; and even that is a bit of a stretch (to load up 2TB would take a bit over 5 hours at gigabit speeds). And you're absolutely correct that even shittier platter drives would be able to push the connection to its limit. Scythe posted:Good point, not sure why I omitted that. I could probably get away with 1TB and 2TB would definitely be more than enough. I can spend whatever on this (like $1k, which I know would be silly) if it’s worthwhile, but would prefer the cheapest thing that will be simple, quiet, and reliable. If you're honestly ok with spending $1,000 then you can easily build a box with minimal/no active cooling (I believe Intel NUCs fit this bill) and throw a 1-2TB SSD and not hit your budget cap. If you really rather not spend that then look into 5400rpm laptop drives as those will generally be the quietest platter available. Once enclosed properly they should have minimal noise. Since you aren't planning to run the stereo from the computer you could also consider a better location for it away from where its noise would impact its usefulness.
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Jul 7, 2018 00:15
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H110Hawk posted:What else did they lie about? I'm not sure they lied about anything else because there's not much on the label aside from incorrect info and the size, which is correct. In their email they suggest it was mislabeled at the factory. Here's the listing: https://www.ebay.com/itm/New-2TB-64MB-Cache-7200RPM-Enterprise-SATA-6Gb-s-3-5-Hard-Drive-FREE-SHIPPING/150629646450 I noticed that in the details they've changed 6Gb/s to 3Gb/s despite the title of the auction. Here's the disk I got:    It only had one power on when I got it, which I assume was their test before they shipped it. I think I'm going to return it since that UltraDMA CRC Error wasn't there yesterday. I posted the controller side as well because the disk looks exactly like this one: https://www.goharddrive.com/Hitachi-Ultrastar-2TB-SATA-3-0Gb-s-Hard-Drive-p/g01-0770.htm
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Jul 7, 2018 00:38
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Yeah, I doubt it was a lie. A mislabel or even lies from their provider seems much more likely given goharddrives good reputation.
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Jul 7, 2018 01:13
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Managed to bargain-hunt a decent LTO-5 setup for ~$300. Got a Quantum LTO-5 drive for $185 from r/homelabsales, ordered 2 tapes from Amazon for $40 and got sent two boxes of 5 tapes each, and today I picked up 10 Turtle storage cases (20 tapes each) for $35 total. I have a SAS card that I think will work for it, was using it as a SATA controller in my server but I got a spare miniPCIe SATA card to replace it, for ~$30. So I'm about $300 into it. My two use-cases are: backing up the tars that I ingest from my seedbox, and doing backups of stuff (eg /home) off my server (ZFS). Is there any real reason not to do LTFS if I am just going to fill the tape full of tars and eject it? Also, is there any sensible way to leverage ZFS for the backups, to help make incremental backups better, or should I just run through something like Bacula? Haven't been able to find all that much documentation, tape is pretty dead for the end-user, and I assume enterprise people know what they're doing. This is what I've dug up so far: http://www.tandbergdata.com/default/assets/File/PDFs/LTFS_For_Linux_and_Mac_User_Guide_March_2014.pdf https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-tape-backup-with-mt-and-tar-command-howto/ https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/lto-tape-drive-linux-experience-4175620090/ I am aware of the physical and environmental storage requirements of tape (cool, clean, dry but not too dry, stored on edge). Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Jul 7, 2018 |
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Jul 7, 2018 09:45
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I just picked up an old HP Microserver Gen8 (Xeon 1265L v2, 16GB RAM) on eBay, since it was going fairly cheap for the hardware and I have limited space. This is going to augment my existing Synology DS415+, which I no longer trust due to the whole Atom C2000 self-destruction bug that will eventually kill it any month now. I currently host all my internal home services under Docker, and want to continue to do so. Ideally, I'd like to run a bare-metal OS on the server to provide storage (not sure yet, probably ZFS once I buy disks) and then have a VM for the containers. That will give me the best foundation for expansion down the track, since I would be able to spin up additional VMs for other stuff down the track. What's the best base OS these days for this sort of thing? I was thinking Ubuntu server given it has ZFS built-in and then use KVM somehow to host the VMs, but I'm newish at this. Am I missing out vs say something like Unraid or FreeNAS?
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Jul 8, 2018 10:22
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I use CentOS with ZFS but whatever you're most comfortable with is probably the correct answer.
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Jul 8, 2018 12:13
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Sheep posted:I use CentOS with ZFS but whatever you're most comfortable with is probably the correct answer. Did you mount a SSD in as a boot drive? I'm planning on running this thing diskless to start with and have it offload all the containers from my NAS, and then populate the drives later on. Having the OS running from a USB drive, or (worse) a SD card doesn't sit well with me, given how much logging and crap is done on each boot.
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Jul 8, 2018 12:26
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Nowadays you can grab a random 128GB SSD/NVME drive for 50 bucks literally any day of the week by checking Slickdeals so there's very few reasons to boot off USB/SD unless you lack port space internally or you have a USB slot on the mainboard (my ProLiant N54L has this, and is still booting from the same USB stick ~a decade later without problems). If you want to boot off of write-limited media like USB/SD cards just turn off the heavy hitters like atime/diratime and consider how much logging you even need - if my machine dies or doesn't boot or whatever I'm just going to pull the array and reassemble it elsewhere, so do I even need local logging? Consider logging to a remote source if you feel you really need it. Sheep fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Jul 8, 2018 |
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Jul 8, 2018 13:11
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EpicCodeMonkey posted:I just picked up an old HP Microserver Gen8 (Xeon 1265L v2, 16GB RAM) on eBay, since it was going fairly cheap for the hardware and I have limited space. This is going to augment my existing Synology DS415+, which I no longer trust due to the whole Atom C2000 self-destruction bug that will eventually kill it any month now. How do the new microservers hold up? I've got a gen2 I need to replace fairly soon, and I'd like something the same form factor. I've not heard great things 
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Jul 8, 2018 14:10
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Less Fat Luke posted:Anyone have luck shucking these things? Yep. Mine were all Barracuda Compute (ST8000DM004) drives. The serial numbers do show that they were built inside an enclosure though, so if you have to RMA one you'll likely need to retain the packaging and enclosure. H2SO4 fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Jul 9, 2018 |
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Jul 9, 2018 16:15
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Wow so I'm a dumbass and managed to ATA password lock my hard drives and I do t know what password I used and the master pw isn't working. That's the last time is secure erase a hard drive instead of dbanning it.
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Jul 9, 2018 22:19
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My understanding is that secure erase is great on SSDs because instead of writing data to every sector the controller instead just zaps all of the cells simultaneously. I've not used it on a regular HD though.
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Jul 9, 2018 22:31
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H2SO4 posted:My understanding is that secure erase is great on SSDs because instead of writing data to every sector the controller instead just zaps all of the cells simultaneously. I've not used it on a regular HD though. Yeah learn from my mistakes, don't do it on spinners.
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Jul 9, 2018 22:34
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H2SO4 posted:My understanding is that secure erase is great on SSDs because instead of writing data to every sector the controller instead just zaps all of the cells simultaneously. I've not used it on a regular HD though. A lot of drives are actually storing the data encrypted by default, and the "secure erase" command just zaps the encryption key. Boom, the data is now random noise.
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Jul 9, 2018 22:41
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Few things are more fun than loading up an SA120 enclosure full of drives and DBANing em all. Lights that bad boy up like a christmas tree.
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Jul 9, 2018 23:10
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H2SO4 posted:Few things are more fun than loading up an SA120 enclosure full of drives and DBANing em all. Lights that bad boy up like a christmas tree. DBAN takes too long now a days. Helpdesk guy takes a rock to drives outside.
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Jul 10, 2018 00:53
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I'm guessing he's using it for burn in, not destruction.
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Jul 10, 2018 06:25
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Paul MaudDib posted:A lot of drives are actually storing the data encrypted by default, and the "secure erase" command just zaps the encryption key. Boom, the data is now random noise. Yeah, I heard this on a podcast recently (the Ask Noah one, which I'll just politely say isn't my favourite Jupiter Broadcasting podcast. Some of the dumbass questions are toe curling). Anyway, I wonder how they manage to secure the encryption key, if it's erasable? Is it stored on some part of specifically immutable non-volatile RAM unless a specific instruction is given? Is it backed up in two separate chips and compared when the drive powers on or something?
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Jul 10, 2018 06:41
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Moey posted:DBAN takes too long now a days. Helpdesk guy takes a rock to drives outside. A rock? That's so primitive. At least run over them with a steamroller or something.
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Jul 10, 2018 06:51
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apropos man posted:Yeah, I heard this on a podcast recently (the Ask Noah one, which I'll just politely say isn't my favourite Jupiter Broadcasting podcast. Some of the dumbass questions are toe curling). Two chips!? That's a great idea, get product development on the horn! (I would assume it's a relatively secure enclave on the SOC, with non-volatile RAM. This is the kind of thing TrustZone was invented for.) Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Jul 10, 2018 |
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Jul 10, 2018 08:45
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apropos man posted:Yeah, I heard this on a podcast recently (the Ask Noah one, which I'll just politely say isn't my favourite Jupiter Broadcasting podcast. Some of the dumbass questions are toe curling). FDE typically works like this: The media encryption key (which I'll refer to as MEK henceforth) is generated by a true random number generator. It is stored either in nonvolatile memory, or a small reserved media block. When written to nonvolatile memory, it is never stored in the clear. Instead, it is encrypted with a different key, the Key Encryption Key or KEK. The KEK is never stored in nonvolatile memory: it's generated from a user-created passphrase by a key derivation hash function. So. When you enter your passphrase, that doesn't directly decrypt media. Instead it's hashed to recover the KEK, the KEK is used to decrypt the MEK into volatile memory, and the MEK is subsequently used to decrypt and encrypt media blocks. When power goes away, the KEK and MEK both disappear from volatile memory, returning the disk to a secure state. Alternatively, the host can issue a command to secure the drive, upon which it will scrub all keys from its volatile memory. When you perform an ATA Secure Erase, the disk doesn't need to overwrite or even erase every block to irrevocably destroy all data. It can just scrub keys from volatile memory and erase all nonvolatile blocks used to store the encrypted copy of the MEK. Furthermore, most -- or maybe all -- modern SSDs encrypt everything all the time. The only difference between FDE mode and non-FDE mode is whether the MEK copy stored in nonvolatile memory is encrypted by a KEK. Even when configured in the non-FDE mode, it's still perfectly valid for such drives to implement Secure Erase by destroying all copies of the MEK. (Re: backed up in two separate chips etc., that's going to be vendor specific, but it's pretty likely that most disks use a few reserved media blocks which aren't made visible as user-addressable sectors via the ATA interface. Well designed implementations should store redundant encrypted MEK copies with strong multi-bit ECC, since it's not great to lose the entire disk's contents just because a single media block went bad.)
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Jul 10, 2018 09:34
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Thanks for the detailed explanation. I do use LUKS on Linux and I have done for a long time, so I guess that all this time the data on my 850EVO's has actually been double-encrypted. I guess that it's not that much different to accidentally destroying your LUKS header (and therefore rendering the data on your drive useless), except that if the vendor provides a substandard solution for storing the MEK then they are liable for losing their customer's data. The main difference, I expect/assume, is that because the MEK is stored in a specific area that's only being written once in a blue moon then it's reasonably safe to assume that a MEK will outlive the MTBF of any NAND that's being used for daily I/O.
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Jul 10, 2018 12:00
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For more information lookup OPAL and TPM. The TPM will be told "generate a key" - this becomes the MEK. The method to authenticate to the TPM will vary by implementation, but generally you tell it "this is my password" and it will run it through a secure one way hashing function like SHA2 or scrypt and store the result. Other methods are for it to gather a hardware inventory and refuse to unlock unless it matches. In its default mode the TPM isn't authenticated. With a TPM the MEK should never leave the TPM. If a standalone KEK is used then it is done using a PBKDF function to convert your password into a key.
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Jul 10, 2018 14:44
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apropos man posted:Thanks for the detailed explanation. One thing I didn't mention is that the reason SSDs typically always encrypt is that it actually makes the drive more reliable. Modern NAND flash has better read error rate if it's storing a roughly 50% distribution of ones and zeroes without long runs of either 1 or 0. The output of an ideal encryption algorithm looks indistinguishable from random noise, even if what you originally wrote was the opposite of random noise. So, since you've got all this hardware in the SSD controller to do FDE with very low power and no performance overhead, you might as well use it all the time. One trick that can be done in SSDs which have the right kind of NAND flash is to store the MEK in blocks configured to operate in SLC mode instead of MLC or TLC. It's pretty likely that this is done in the 850EVO and other Samsung drives, since Samsung EVO is known to use this trick to operate a few gigabytes of media as a very fast write cache. They can just run the MEK storage area as SLC too, not for performance but for reliability.
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Jul 10, 2018 18:51
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Hmm. That is pretty ingenious stuff. I understand that if you fill a fully encrypted drive with the output of /dev/zero you get what looks like a load of random noise on there (which is then read back through the symmetric key in reverse mode as a load of zeroes, of course). But I hadn't considered that this would actually have a secondary, beneficial effect, apart from disguising where the actual data was stored. Thanks for the interesting reply.
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Jul 10, 2018 19:44
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Just a heads up, I was getting terrible performance with video streaming from my Unraid box over to my Pi3 running Kodi via SMB. Rather than moving to NFS, I mounted the SMB shares to /mnt using fstab. For whatever reason SMB support is something that is inside Kodi instead of using whatever the OS can provide. Anything that touches the network shares is now massively improved.
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Jul 13, 2018 20:51
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Yeah, Kodi uses a private (in the library-sense) version of libsmb which is not only out-dated (in that it only supports SMB1 the way it's used in Kodi), but also completely abandoned by its author.
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Jul 14, 2018 10:25
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With Amazon Prime Day coming up, I'm thinking it may be a good time to upgrade my storage solutions if any deals come up. I think I'm leaning towards either the Synology DS1817+ or the Drobo B810n. My main criteria:
But I am leaning a little towards the Synology because:
Any suggestions? I've seen a few tutorials on the 1817+ setup and it doesn't look super complicated since it looks like a wizard that walks you through it. I just don't want to fiddle with the command line to setup an OS and configuring a bunch of stuff. Maybe I'm making the setup/maintenance to be more complicated than it is. Is the RAM upgrade worth it? I can get the 8GB unit, or get the the 2GB unit and then buy aftermarket RAM to put it at 16GB.
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Jul 14, 2018 23:35
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