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

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Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Prefect Six posted:

Except crashplan won't back up off a NAS.

Can you not just map a share on the NAS to a PC, then back it up?

# ¿ Apr 21, 2012 01:13

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 12:06

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

bob arctor posted:

I ask from time to time about this. I'm looking at picking an 859 or 879 as an iSCSI device to store backups of VM's to however I have't actually talked to anyone who has used one with ESXi. My plan is to run the actual machines on DAS on the servers (SAS drives on Dell R610s) but figure out a good backup system that I can dump a nightly copy of the critical servers to the NAS and that way be able to recover pretty quickly if need be.

I don't really know how much better the x79 is than the x59 is in terms of features and performance, but that low end virtualization thing is a pain to navigate.

Come post in the VM megathread. I have a pretty small environment (6 hosts in 2 clusters) and have 4 QNAP 809 and one 1079 with 10gbe (I am just currently setting up the 1079).

# ¿ May 2, 2012 21:59

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

IT Guy posted:

But I imagine that NIC cost a pretty penny?

Normally like $400ish. I was able to get a free one from work though. Currently have it in my mini ESXi host that I am building.

# ¿ May 3, 2012 20:00

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

I've found QNAP to have the best offerings at the moment if you want proper enterprise stuff.

Seconding this for cheap "enterprise" gear. We now have 5 qnap boxes at my work. Set them up right and they work well.

# ¿ May 9, 2012 21:10

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

bob arctor posted:

Have you used a lot of them, I'm tied between and 859 and and 879, technically I don't really have enough budgeted for an 879, but I could make it work if it's really worth it. It's going to be a backup target for ghetto VCB copies of 4 servers and a couple other machines from a couple of essentials hosts. It's not really enterprise, but i've POC'd the whole thing on a synology, and combined with backup exec to cover the SQL and exchange it makes me relatively confident of our disaster recovery options for critical systems.

Any specific questions?

I am currently re-configuring two of our TS-809u-RP units to be the new backup targets for our Veeam backups.

We also have a TS-1079 with 10gb fiber that is populated with 10x3tb drives. No real plans for that thing yet, probably going to keep copies of every backup of every thing I can think of (Nth copies of Veeam backups, switch dumps, firewall dumps, maybe some syslog stuff?).

# ¿ May 11, 2012 06:52

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

bob arctor posted:

is performance such that it's actually worth using 10 gig on it? What RAID level do you use? I'm thinking 8 1tb drives in raid 6.

Right now it is Raid 5 + hot spare. If we ever did loose a drive, I think the rebuild time would be 1 week+. This was a call my boss made, but I am not too worried, as it is going to be used for backups of backups.

Once I get a chance to (this weekend or early next week) I will fire up some IOmeter tests over the 10gig and let you know what it can do. Any specific test types you want me to run?

# ¿ May 11, 2012 19:15

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

adorai posted:

voila, data juggling at it's finest.

How do you sleep at night? :v:

# ¿ May 22, 2012 02:16

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

G-Prime posted:

It's not something that comes up often. I work for an ISP and we had sent a switch out to a site, the tech connected it, and left. The next day, we realized nobody had tested to see if we had management to its IP. Then we realized that the engineer who had configured it forgotten to write down which IP he used out of a /24. Options came down to installing NMAP, blindly guessing, or ping/arp. We went with the easy one. It's just little tricks like this that make working in a networking field worth while.

You learn something new everyday! Had to bust out NMAP the other day as I couldn't find the ip of a remote switch.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2012 04:07

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Telex posted:

Sure wish they'd have compared them to the WD EARS/EARX series instead of some of those drives that I'd never put in a home NAS anyway.

I would assume the WD30EZRX probably performs pretty similar as the EARS/EARX (note: I didn't look up any specs, basic assumption).

# ¿ Jul 24, 2012 20:42

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Bea Nanner posted:

RAID stuff...

How was the array originally built? Within the bios or within Windows?

# ¿ Sep 1, 2012 00:05

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Bea Nanner posted:

I used AMD's RaidXpert tool within Windows.

Never used that before.

Google shows me that you can use the tool to rebuild the array.

When you open that back up, does it see your drives? Does it remember there was an array?

# ¿ Sep 1, 2012 00:23

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Bea Nanner posted:

It sees the drives. It has the logs and such from the previous array. But there is no active logical drive.

So if I rebuild it the same, it should just magic my data back? Do you have a link? I'm scared.

I've also told that some of the better controller cards can 'detect' an existing array. Is this a true statement? How would I know if a card could do this?

Here is the link to the user guide for the software. Not sure if it the same version you are using.

https://www2.ati.com/relnotes/AMD_RAIDXpert_User_v2.1.pdf

I have never tried rebuilding a software raid with a hardware raid controller so I can't comment on that.

Note: Remember I have never used this software either.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2012 00:37

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Bea Nanner posted:

I've heard that but only after the fact. Any particular reason why?

But now I've lost faith in the system. So I can attempt to recreate it, but in the end I want something I don't lose sleep over. Is there a way to migrate a RAID to another controller without me having to have another 9TB laying around to mirror the data?

The WD Green drives have an issue with aggressive head parking (they go to "sleep" to save power). Some arrays will show this as the drive dropping out of the array and then attempt to rebuild over and over.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2012 00:40

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Bea Nanner posted:

Well, it recreated just fine, but Windows still saw the space as unallocated. I restarted and now it's just hanging on the RAID boot ROM.

Was windows showing one large disk or individual drives?

# ¿ Sep 1, 2012 01:00

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Bea Nanner posted:

So I have assigned it a drive letter and initialized it, but I haven't formatted it. So it says RAW next to the name in Disk Management and pretty much anything I try to do, Windows says to format first. Are there any data recovery tools I could use to get this stuff back?

If I were you at this point I would be trying some free data recovery tool. I just googled that one so make sure to do your own research. It doesn't sound like any disks died, just the software decided to blow up.

http://www.freeraidrecovery.com/

You will still need space to copy the data until you build something more stable.

As for longterm, take a read of this thread. People are big fans of FreeNAS and the newer fork of it, NAS4Free. You can either pick out your own case and board, or get something like the HP NL40.

If you want to go off the shelf solution, take a look at QNAP and Thecus' offerings.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2012 01:25

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Bea Nanner posted:

What sort of drives should I get if not WD green, in the 3TB+ range?

This thread is littered with a lot of advise and other's specs if you have the time to search.

These are on sale for the weekend as well.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148844

Edit:

As mentioned above, what route are you going for enclosure/setup?

# ¿ Sep 1, 2012 02:02

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Bea Nanner posted:

It looks like I need an enclosure to get a proper setup and still keep my HTPC box.

So I guess something like one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822107082
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822102074

Though Synology seems to have the capability to buy an extra enclosure which allows you to add additional drives to your array. Is that something other companies don't offer? But I think 6 bays is probably enough room to grow.

What are your requirements for this? Uses? Performance needed?

When getting into the larger off the shelf NAS units, their prices seem to skyrocket compared to a proper roll your own solution.

Also, is everything you are storing replaceable? Or is this something where you absolutely want to have a live copy on a redundant array + a separate backup?

9+ tb is a lot of data, so keeping it properly backed up is going to add into the cost.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2012 03:13

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Jolan posted:

I'm probably going to use 5400rpm WD Greens and when I'm using two computers, at least one of them is using WiFi, so I don't think the second port will do much for me speed-wise.

Then the question remains: QNAP TS-412 Turbo or Synology DS413j? I've noticed that the TS-412 supports Raid10, which theoretically provides the same security as Raid1. How does this work in practice? If one of the four drives dies, can I just replace it and everything will correct itself or does the entire volume need to be remade on all four disks or... what? What effect does a bad sector on one disk have on the rest of the array? (I'm really new to Raid.)

Are those green drives on their compatibility list?

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 20:35

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

FISHMANPET posted:

A $100 Roku box can deal with basically every online streaming service ever. A $200 HTPC (E-350/E-450 based) will play all the content off your NAS, and be as quiet as a whisper.

My Raspberry Pi just came in the mail today. I am pretty excited to start testing these as xbmc front end units.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2012 03:48

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

mik posted:

Similarly... this came in the mail today:

Synology DS-412+ - Newegg canada had a decent sale on it.

I like how you made sure to include a shoe.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2012 18:39

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

FISHMANPET posted:

So I know Drobo sucks, but I've been saddled with one at work because everything is terrible and nothing is beautiful.

So we've got a NAS model and the management software (I think) just scans the local subnet to find it, but I'm going to have one on another network in another building for backups (holy moly this is awful) so I'm wondering if there's a way to manage it remotely, or if I have to put a computer on the same subnet to manage it?

If it has two nics setup one on the storage subnet and one on the management subnet. If not set up a static route into your storage network and acl it off to only management ips.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2012 20:06

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

FISHMANPET posted:

And LOL, storage and management subnet? It's on the "poo poo from other departments in our building" subnet. But I can use the second interface to put it on another network local to that building that I have access to and can get a server on to use the console. So will be well I guess.

Just because I speak of best practices doesn't mean my work network here has them implemented yet.

We can dream can't we?

# ¿ Nov 14, 2012 23:27

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

KS posted:

Well, after buying an N40L, I think I'm going to look for something more powerful. My ECC RAM is registered and won't work, and I think I can get something more powerful for the same money given that I'd need to re-buy the RAM.

My goal is a 32GB machine with enough power to act as an ESX server, and VT-D support to pass the storage through to a ZFS VM.

I'm looking for a case and PSU recommendation that's similar size to the N40L, quiet, and can take 4 3.5" drives and an SSD. I'm going to put a Supermicro x8SIL-F in it since the newer X9s also only take unbuffered RAM, unless someone has a better suggestion.

I'm going to try to sell the N40L on SA Mart, I guess -- when did Newegg start charging a 15% restocking fee? I don't think I'm going to shop anywhere but Amazon from now on.

You can call Newegg and they may waive the restocking fee.

I currently have a mini itx build with an i7 and 16 gb memory. It supports vt-d but I don't have the case for new drives yet.

Only downfall of mini itx is 2 memory dimms.

I picked up a Lian Li case. They have a few good mini irx towers made for lots of disks. One has a backplane built it.

I'll post some links when I am back at a computer.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2012 02:25

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

adorai posted:

Anyone know where I can get a standalone mini-itx case like this (preferably with 6 sata bays). Seems like a reasonably simple hot swap case.

How about the Lian Li PC-Q25?

Doesn't use sleds but at least has a backplane for 5 drives. It was just on sale yesterday for like $80 at Newegg.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2013 16:51

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

nickhimself posted:

I don't understand about half of those words. Please elaborate on your suggested software.

Setup a mysql server for xbmc to use and install/config sickbeard and sabnzbd to automatically search for and download ya :filez:

# ¿ Feb 22, 2013 05:32

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Gozinbulx posted:

Ok. One thing I don't seem to understand though, that RAID card has only 2 sata ports from what I can see. How would I go about installing 8 drives?

To elaborate more, it's two SAS ports for breakout cables.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2013 22:29

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

thideras posted:

I'm not sure if this is still the realm of "consumer" storage anymore, but I do use these at home. The trays and disks arrived for my Dell R710. Eight 300 GB Velociraptor 2.5". Cheaper than SAS or solid state drives.

That was the last piece I needed for this server to get it functional, but I might end up swapping out the M1015 for something else. XCP is installed and running, but this still needs a lot of work before it is ready. This set of upgrades is also not done, as I have a Dell R510 sitting above it in the rack with no RAID controller. I also have 4 Gbit fiber channel cards installed, while missing the switch and cables.

The R710 is running two E5645 (6-core 2.4 GHz) processors and 288 GB of RAM. Stress testing was a bit interesting without the drives.

Quite a beefy home setup there. Whatcha using it for?

Also PM me if you are interested in selling that M1015.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2013 01:57

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

gggiiimmmppp posted:

Is there any way to do it directly point-to-point crossover style?

Are you really exceeding 1gb bandwidth to a single client? And also only need one client hitting that data?

# ¿ Apr 11, 2013 23:19

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Don Lapre posted:

If i choose Raid-Z when setting up FreeNAS am i able to add additional discs later?

Im looking at doing a build so im playing with FreeNAS now in vmware.

You cannot expand an array, but you can build additional arrays and add them to the same pool.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2013 23:12

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Megaman posted:

For those little self contained workstations is this the one to get now over the N40L?

It has a beefier processor so can handle the load a little better than the older N40L and N36L.

# ¿ May 1, 2013 15:50

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Megaman posted:

I assume it's the same case so if I wanted to put 6 drives instead of the normal 4 I'll have to buy extra parts and tear it apart a little as usual?

Looks pretty much the same to me. For 6 drives people were just shoving 2x3.5" drives into the optical bay.

# ¿ May 1, 2013 16:09

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Megaman posted:

Oh, you can fit 2 3.5s in the optical bay? I thought you could only fit one. That's good news.

This is what has been advised by this thread in the past to accomplish that.

http://www.amazon.com/Noiseblocker-X-Swing-Adapter-Noise-Reducer/dp/B000S8B8J6

People have even gone farther and shoved a drive (or maybe 2x2.5" below the 5.25 bay).

Don't forget about picking up an IBM M1015 from ebay if you are going nuts with drives. It has 4 onboard, plus the ODD sata port that can be used at full speed with a flashed bios, plus the eSATA which some people routed back into the case for 6 sata without an add in card.

# ¿ May 1, 2013 16:36

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Master Stur posted:

We ordered like 20~ or so 3TB reds from CDW and not a single one arrived DoA or has died yet after being used daily for two months Might just be a newegg thing for this one.

I did some pesky zfs tuning today and was able to sustain deleting several 200-300mb vmdk's throughout the day and right now my nightly backup is running at a full 1Gbps in all its glory. I'll have to see how it handles deleting the biggest files tomorrow, but overall I'm pretty happy with the whole set up now.

Did you white box production storage or do you have a sweet home lab?

# ¿ May 16, 2013 01:09

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

This is pretty common.

Get an IBM M1015 and connect your disks to it. Boot ESXi from a thumbdrive. Pass that M1015 to a FreeNAS/NAS4Free/WhateverZFS VM. Profit.

I have a similar setup but am waiting to load up on 3tb disks. My only downfall was going Mini-ITX, so I am capped at 16gb memory on my motherboard. Great box for "home production" stuff along with spinning up VMs for labs and study poo poo.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2013 16:31

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Crackbone posted:

M1015 passthrough to the ZFS vm (so VT-d is required), then present that vm storage through iscsi to other vms?

That might work, but yeah, my immediate concern would be ram usage as I was hoping to do an ITX build myself. As I understand it the ram requirements for any of those solutions is pretty heavy.

If I could go back in time, I would go with Micro-ATX. Currently running an I7-3770 in a Lian-Li PC-Q08. Change out the case to some similar. Size will be slightly bigger, but then I could use 32gb memory and have two PCI-e slots (extra NICs and M1015).

# ¿ Jun 11, 2013 16:56

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

joe944 posted:

I'd be curious to see how well freenas runs on esxi along with all your other VM's. My home set up consists of 2 servers, one esxi box and 1 freenas box. I like the idea of being able to work on them separately, and wouldn't want any additional risk that could affect my storage.

My whole thing is consolidation. The real questions is what kind of performance do you need from your storage, and what permanent (not lab) workloads are you running that need resources. I currently have a 256gb SSD installed locally for my VMs to run from, then will have the pass though array for media storage.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2013 17:29

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

FISHMANPET posted:

Don't host the datastore on a machine running as a VM. Get an SSD and use that for the datastore.

You don't want to be like Mysoginist when he accidently Vmotioned his NAS VM onto the datastore hosted off his NAS VM.

This. I have a 256gb SSD for running all my VM OS.

Edit: I went with an i7-3770 for my CPU since it supports VT-D. Avoid the 'K' (unlocked) intel chips.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2013 15:35

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Bob Morales posted:

It's been almost 24 hours and it's at 97%, 10648GB used, 336GB available.

That is faster than I would have expected.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2013 23:12

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Devian666 posted:

I've been dreading this but I'm getting close to needing a storage server at home. I need a bit of specific feedback.

The N54L looks like a good choice with a 2.2 GHz dual core Neo cpu and enough room for hard drives and safe enough to put 8 gigs of ram in it. I would like to use it to replace my current VM server at home which just runs a few low cpu applications and a minecraft server. Would it be completely horrible trying to run freenas or nas4free as a VM on the server? Is there a way I could achieve the same or similar result without putting my data at risk?

If you want to run VMs, might as well pick up a micro-atx case/board/cpu and 32gb memory. Boot ESXi off a thumbdrive. Install an IBM M1015 and pass that through to your FreeNAS/NAS4Free/whatever storage VM.

I went with Mini-ITX for the smaller case and am kicking myself in the rear end now due to 16gb memory capacity. Planning to rebuild/sell my current stuff around black friday.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2013 23:14

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 12:06

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Vanilla posted:

Thanks for all the info, i'll find some reviews and work out what people used

I am using something like this in my home ESXi box. I have the cable removed from the bracket, then ran through a cable management hole so it is out of sight. I wouldn't really worry about brand and just go for cheapest.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815196044

Thumbdrive really doesn't matter either, just got for something 2gb or larger. I am using some 8gb stick because it is all I had laying around.

Once ESXi boots, it all runs from memory. The thumbdrive can actually be pulled and you wouldn't notice a thing until the next reboot.

I make sure to re-direct my logs to a datastore so they don't thrash the thumbdrive (limited reads/writes on flash).

Let me know if you have any questions. I am very happy with my home box so far.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2013 18:04

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

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