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

School of How: Jul 6, 2013; quite frankly I don't believe this talk about the market

I think it's time to built a NAS. To start with, I'm just going to buy two 8TB drives, and then install them onto my Ubuntu system using RAID1 (redundancy). Eventually, I'm going to expand it out to more drives and it's own enclosure, but I'll deal with that when the time comes. It'll take me a while to fill up 8TB.

When that day comes, will I be able to move two RAID1 drives from one system and place them onto another system and have all the data remain intact? The drive I'm probably going get are these: https://www.newegg.com/seagate-barracuda-st8000dm004-8tb/p/N82E16822183793?quicklink=true

Also, what filesystem should I use for these? I assume EXT3? Would NTFS be better? I already have Samba installed, I'm just going to symlink the mountpoint of the RAID array into my Samba share folder.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2022 03:05

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 4, 2024 15:37

School of How: Jul 6, 2013; quite frankly I don't believe this talk about the market

Klyith posted:

are you going to mirror them in the OS, or with RAID on the system motherboard? The better option is via the OS.

I had planned on using motherboard RAID. Is it really that bad? My motherboard is a B550 motherboard that I bought in 2020, so the tech on it should be pretty recent. How do I go about setting up OS RAID on ubuntu?

edit: just found a guide: https://kifarunix.com/setup-software-raid-on-ubuntu-20-04/, holy crap that looks like too much work, and will likely break at some point in the future.

School of How fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Feb 11, 2022

# ¿ Feb 10, 2022 23:04

School of How: Jul 6, 2013; quite frankly I don't believe this talk about the market

The more I think about it, I think what I shoiuld go with is one of these: https://www.newegg.com/asustor-as1104t/p/N82E16822225067

I'd rather not have to always be loving with the command line to get my files working,. I'd rather just have a device I put drives into. and it just sits there and work with little hassle on my part. Does anybody know of a model/brand NAS enclosure that stands out as the best? I already have a nVidia Sheid, so I don't need video streaming capabilities. I just need something that will just serve files. It would be nice if there was a sleep feature, since I'm only going to be using the server a few hours a day. I'd prefer it to spin off the drives when they are not in use, so it isn't burning electricity when it's not in use.

School of How fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Feb 11, 2022

# ¿ Feb 11, 2022 02:42

School of How: Jul 6, 2013; quite frankly I don't believe this talk about the market

My NAS just died. It was a prebuilt thing by a company called Asustor. When I turn it on, the lights on the front come on at first, but then they just turn off. Yet the disks still spin (I can hear them) but the web interface never comes up.

The old crappy NAS had two 16TB drives in RAID mirror mode.

So I took out the two drives from that crappy NAS and added them to an old gaming PC that I don't use anymore. I then wiped windows and then installed TrueNAS on the old gaming PC. My intent was to import the data on those drives into TrueNAS and then just use the old gaming PC as a NAS.

The problem is that when I got to the final step of creating a new pool, it told me I had to wipe the data on my drives to continue.

I then did some research and apparently it's not possible to import data into TrueNAS unless the data is already on a drive that is formatted to ZFS. I'm pretty sure my drives are not ZFS.

I used a USB stick to boot into a live installation of Ubuntu, and was able to see the drives. Under "partition type" it just says "Linux RAID", and it is not able to be mounted and browsed. How can I mount this disk to my system so I can see the contents of it? I assume I have to convert it from "Linux RAID" to something else?

Then the plan is to wipe one of the disks, add it to TrueNAS. And then manually copy over the contents from the other disk. Then wipe the other drive and then add it to TrueNAS.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2024 19:47

School of How: Jul 6, 2013; quite frankly I don't believe this talk about the market

Eletriarnation posted:

I assume "Linux RAID" is mdadm. I haven't had much experience doing recovery on that, but if it's a mirror and the data is uncorrupted, then it might not have any problem just picking everything off one drive. Do you get anything from "cat /proc/mdstat"?

I figured out how to get my RAID to show up, by running this command: `mdadm --assemble --scan`

code:

$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1] 
md1 : active raid1 sda4[0] sdb4[1]
      15621289984 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      
md126 : active raid1 sda3[0] sdb3[1]
      2094080 blocks super 1.2 [4/2] [UU__]
      
md0 : active raid1 sda2[0] sdb2[1]
      2094080 blocks super 1.2 [4/2] [UU__]
      
unused devices: <none>

The next step I think is to run `mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sda4 /dev/sdb4`

But I'm contemplating whether I should quit while I'm ahead, or risk messing up things further. I could just ditch TrueNAS and install ubuntu while using the RAID I just imported.

Is my understanding correct that TrueNAS can not use this RAID at all in it's current form? Do I absolutely have to convert these drives to ZFS in order for TrueNAS to work with it?

# ¿ Apr 12, 2024 23:20

School of How: Jul 6, 2013; quite frankly I don't believe this talk about the market

Eletriarnation posted:

I'm pretty sure TrueNAS (SCALE, at least) has mdadm and should be able to do the same thing, then just mount the md device to a temporary mount point and copy all its contents to the intended ZFS target.

I don't think though that there is any way to convert the drives and leave the data in place - you're going to need to copy that data off, convert the disks to ZFS, and copy it back. I guess if you don't have another way to store that much data and they're currently mirrored then you could wipe one, turn it into a ZFS mirror (with only one drive), copy the data from the md drive to the ZFS drive, and then wipe the md drive and add it to the ZFS mirror. Seems kind of risky though.

TrueNAS will complain if you try to create a mirror with only one drive, but you can tell it that you understand the risks and force it to proceed.

Yeah, I don't have another 16GB drive to copy to.

Its either buy a new hard drive, or figure out how to make this work withing buying any extra hardware.

If there was an "import from mdadm raide" option in TrueNAS, I'd be more comfortable doing it. But manually, I'm going to procrastinate.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2024 04:49

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 4, 2024 15:37

School of How: Jul 6, 2013; quite frankly I don't believe this talk about the market

So I just got TrueNAS set up. And wow this thing sucks. I am really disappointed. I like the idea of a NAS-specific operating system based on linux, but TrueNAS just isn't doing it for me. Is there a better alternative?

What I'm trying to do with my NAS is pretty much what everybody else wants to do with a NAS. I'm not trying to do anything super wacky. I just want a storage device I can connect my laptop and desktop to and send files to through the network. I also want Plex Media server running on it so I can watch videos on my NAS on my big screen. I also want to use it as a seed box.

As much as I want to rag on Asustor for my old NAS dying, I have to give it to Asustor. When I first got that thing, it was very easy to set up. It just sat there in my apartment, working exactly as intended for about 2 years. I was messing with TrueNAS for about an hour last night and wasn't able to get a single thing working. A principle of good software is that simple things should be easy to set up.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 17:12

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