NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Anyone have experience with Seagate Exos?

I want to stick a pair of drivers in to my Linux box as some network storage/online backups. I have a Dell mff running as my 24/7 NAS, this desktop will be only be on when doing stuff. I intend to use zfs for what it's worth, with the drives mirrored.

At the moment in the UK I can get 18TB exos at a �/tb of about 75% of the most cost effective Ironwolf/Ironwolf Pro drives.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2023 20:13

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 10:34

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Having looked a bit more, noise of the drives looks like one of the bigger downsides to the Exos line.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2023 21:07

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Drives being refurbished seems to me to be a big risk factor than the specific OEM!

# ¿ Jan 26, 2023 22:16

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Well 'Manufacturer Recertified', so it's been in the hands of Seagate.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2023 23:15

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

This ArsTechnica article was pretty scathing about btrfs
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/examining-btrfs-linuxs-perpetually-half-finished-filesystem/

# ¿ Feb 10, 2023 23:08

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Ihmemies posted:

How do I backup Windows disks as disk images to a network drive? I looked at Veeam, but a backup software's download taking TEN GIGABYTES is way too loving much. Why it takes so loving much space for a simple backup software? Even Windows takes half the size of that, and it's a whole complete OS with bells and whistles!

Any alternatives?

Is this for a sporadic backup you can do manually, or something you're looking to have as a regular scheduled background task without interrupting using windows? If it's the former, you could boot in to Clonezilla live usb.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2023 10:52

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

I guess regular scheduled backup that work transparently in the background without input are best because, honestly, we all know we should backup often but I'll do that boring poo poo tomorrow.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2023 11:25

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Startech do just about every combination of single/dual/quad, SATA/IDE you could possible need.
https://www.startech.com/en-gb/hdd/docking

Less convenient to use but more convenient to find room in the cupboard are the cable style adapters rather than docks. Depends how much it's going to be used.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2023 00:32

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Historically NFS has had weak security functionality. It obviously supported user level privileges but the low level stuff was pretty laissez-faire. It was only intended for use locally within a network where it was protected by the secure perimeter. NFSv4 introduced a ton ofbetter security; host verification, encryption, better authentication support, etc.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2023 15:12

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

U2 is dead, Enterprise server SSDs are now all about E1

# ¿ May 15, 2023 20:54

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Computer viking posted:

Oh those look nice.
I'm not an enterprise, though; my needs are for blinging out a few pets, not a herd of cattle.

I mostly care about U.2 because I needed a way to get at least 8TB of mirrored SSD storage into a repurposed workstation, and 2.5" Kioxia U.2 drives plus a tri-mode controller was the only thing that really fit my criteria while also being available in-country. I haven't actually received all the parts yet, so it may have been a complete waste of money, but so far I'm carefully optimistic. Besides, it's a rounding error to the department paying for them.

The problem is going to be the long term supply of U2 form factor SSDs, if enterprise goes E1/E3.

# ¿ May 15, 2023 21:25

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Bought a pair of 18TB Toshiba N300 drives (HDWG51JUZSVA) as the �/TB was just too tempting, which I'll use to enter the world of ZFS. Four 8TB probably would faster but until I move beyond 1GBe I won't worry about that. I couldn't find good benchmarking of NAS-focused drives on the net, so here's the results from gnome-disks.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2023 20:13

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

For years I kept ending up buying Toshiba X300 series hard drives as they always seem to be best price/TB, but these are my first N300. Honestly, it's never my internal drives that give me problems; it's the USB drives that seem to keep dying on me. In theory 18TB of usable space should keep me going for a while but by the time I use it to backup my windows PC (raw photos and some video), then consolidated the years of detritus spread around various Linux drives, it'll be half gone...

# ¿ Jun 16, 2023 22:27

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Surprised how easily i managed to get my 2x18TB setup as network-shared ZFS; install FreeBSD inside KVM, pass through the sata controller as a PCIE device, run a single command to add the two drives as a mirrored vdev, install and setup samba. Still need to setup an NFS for better access on linux devices.

Is there a good open source file syncing program people recommend? There's a few directories (Documents, Music, etc) that I want to keep synced between the new ZFS storage and my windows machine.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2023 13:28

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

That Works posted:

Any current wisdom on HDD vendors / types for NAS in 2023? This would be for an unraid NAS for home media storage and some work project data but it would be a 2nd redundancy for those. I've always tried to just stick to WD drives but wanted to see if anything else was decent out there. I'm looking at a couple drives in the 8-10-12 tb range.

Honestly I looked at the Backblaze stats and couldn't help but feel the differences were in the noise, especially as a consumer with only a handful of drives. So I just went for good $/TB and made sure it was cmr.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2023 12:54

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

New to zfs so I might be wrong:

If it's the same number of disks � I think you can replace & rebuild one disk at a time, then once all the disks are at the larger capacity, have it expand to the larger size.

For a different number of disks - I believe there is a newish (circa 2021) ability to increase the disks in raidz but nothing to reduce the number. Thus it is required to build fresh. If you have enough slots to run all the new and old disks at the same time, you could build the new pool then do zfs replication to move the data.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2023 15:53

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Use lots of directories and err on the side of verbosity? Documents/Books/Non-Fiction/Hartley, J.R./Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley.epub should be findable down the road.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2023 14:01

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Always 'Surname, Firstname' when cataloguing. 'Firstname Surname' is for heatens...

# ¿ Jun 20, 2023 16:04

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

https://www.servethehome.com/buyers-guides/top-hardware-components-for-truenas-freenas-nas-servers/top-picks-truenas-freenas-hbas/

# ¿ Jun 29, 2023 22:33

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Chilled Milk posted:

Just to double check, a PCIe-2.0 8x HBA card would be just great in a PCIe-3.0 4x lanes/8x slot? Especially if most of the drives are mechanical anyway.

PCIe 2.0 has 0.5GB/s per lane, so the card at x8 offers 4GB/s. In a 4x lane slot, it'll be limited to 2GB/s. I think achievable write throughput will be lower depending on redundancy (software RAID-10 or ZFS miror has to send the info twice on write, although I stand to be corrected). Whether that sounds like a bottleneck depends on your situation/desires.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2023 21:47

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

TACD posted:

So following my earlier post my company went ahead and bought a Synology DiskStation. I�ve been trying to set it up and have discovered that none of the network ports in our office are actually connected; every single machine is networked over WiFi and the only physical network ports are the ones connecting the switch and WiFi hardware.

Going to have to do some ratchet bridged network poo poo on a desktop machine to use this thing, lmao

Can you not locate it so it's next to the physical switch? Or get a physical port connected? Bodging a solution over wifi is just asking for a lifetime of problems and/or bad performance, just to save a bit of work now.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2023 14:29

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

The real win of PCIe5 isn't going to be jumbo pipelines for GPU or single drives, it's going to be making x1 slots useful.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2023 20:32

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Shrimp or Shrimps posted:

E: As a bit of an aside and more general question in terms of NAS practices, what are the main reasons not to have the NAS as part of your personal computer, instead keeping it a dedicated box? For example, I see no reason why I couldn't achieve what I'm looking to do using DrivePool and SnapRAID on my Windows 11 computer and just shoving the 6 disks into my case.

My large zfs storage pool is served from my linux desktop. A big factor is I don't want it running 24/7 so it's not always on for access from other PCs. I have a dell micro form factor that is running all the time for other stuff and which ends up being the one I use for adhoc moving files between machines/phones/laptops/tableys/etc. Plus if I'm doing other stuff on the box I have to be mindful not to impact storage jobs going on in the background (so if I've started a job to backup from my windows PC, don't upgrade & reboot the linux one, or fill up every core with a video encode job, etc).

# ¿ Nov 11, 2023 17:10

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

The cs382 seems a bit unnecessarily short � any fans for extraction at the top conflict with using pcie slots. It would seem to rule out a NAS build where you need a GPU + HBA for the drives + 10GBe card. Would a few extract centimetres for clearance have really hurt the design?

# ¿ Nov 12, 2023 14:19

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

PirateBob posted:

What are pcie slots even used for these days? Apart from the obvious one(s) taken up by the gpu.

Everyday desktop PCs; mostly they're not.

But overall: cards for more/different storage (HBA or raid), faster network cards (10G, fibre etc), HPC/AI accelerator (eg AMD M200), video encoder cards (eg Alveo MA35D), Video capture (see Blackmagic cards), probably a world of obscure capture devices used in industry/science/tech etc, sound related cards used in profession audio settings, etc

# ¿ Nov 19, 2023 21:05

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

QNAP is gathering a history of terrible security in it's products.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2024 15:09

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Does it give the performance of the single mirror vdev, or does it end up being even worse?

# ¿ Mar 28, 2024 21:26

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

I see ugreen is trying to break in to the NAS with a kickstarter
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/urgreen/ugreen-nasync-next-level-storage-limitless-possibilities

I've a few of their peripherals (usb cables, monitor adapters) and they've all been well built. I can image the hardware will be value for money. But security wise I'm not sure I will want to trust an early generation from an upstart peripherals (plus one subject to the whims of the China government).

# ¿ Apr 6, 2024 21:40

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

Sounds pretty rough around the edges, and other OSes don't work (they seem undecided as a company) so it would be a definite no from me for now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXhrmtNzZAI

# ¿ Apr 6, 2024 21:51

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 10:34

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

As I understand it: you can added mirrored vdevs ad hoc and it'll work. In a datacentre environment, wildly different sizes/performance/free-space can cause performance issues, but single user home use it should be fine.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 17:12

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of