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Takes No Damage
Nov 20, 2004

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.




Grimey Drawer

EVIL Gibson posted:

For my server I did go with a USB stick initially but sticks has a serious problem of wear. Much limited write compared to SSD.

Caching on the stick was a major concern enough I went to SSD but I hope it was just my paranoia and not real.

Based on my research it sounded like the 'right' way to back up your FreeNas OS was to just take regular backups of the config file, then if a USB stick breaks down you can just flash a new one, apply your backup file, and carry on with the new USB. Have I horribly misunderstood something there? Wouldn't be the first time

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT


As long as you are not dumping logs or trying to use it for any kind of cache, USB/SD boot is fine. I run dozens of production servers that way at work.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





I would avoid the literal cheapest garbage USB sticks but otherwise it's fine as long as the server is configured for it.

realbez
Mar 23, 2005



Fun Shoe

Takes No Damage posted:

So finally got my NAS up and running, 3 4TB WD Reds with FreeNAS on an internal USB stick. So far I've created SMB shares and added them as network drives to some PCs and have a UNIX share mounted to my Lubuntu box that I seem to have full access to, just need to add it to my fstab next time I'm there.

Now I need to start actually using the thing. It looks like building an Rsync script and cron'ing it to run every night would be sufficient for Linux, but what are some good programs to backup/mirror directories from Windows? Like some set-and-forget stuff suitable for Mom's PC. All the 'Top 10 Backup Program' lists I'm finding are 10 years old.

I love https://bvckup2.com

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

Takes No Damage posted:

Based on my research it sounded like the 'right' way to back up your FreeNas OS was to just take regular backups of the config file, then if a USB stick breaks down you can just flash a new one, apply your backup file, and carry on with the new USB. Have I horribly misunderstood something there? Wouldn't be the first time

No, you've got it correct.

Which is also why you shouldn't install jails on the USB drive if you can at all avoid it, because those don't get backed up with the .config file normally.

D. Ebdrup
Mar 13, 2009



DrDork posted:

No, you've got it correct.

Which is also why you shouldn't install jails on the USB drive if you can at all avoid it, because those don't get backed up with the .config file normally.
With any appliance OS (FreeNAS, pfSense, et cetera ad nauseum), you don't ever wanna write anything but the config file to the USB flash disk once the image has been written, not even collectd data or logs.
That's why ESXi and other bare-metal hypervisors tend to live on SLC SATADOM SSDs, as they typically need more writes.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

Absolutely agree. I just know there were some threads in the FreeNAS forums about people trying to shove jails on the USB stick "so it would survive if the pool died" or whatever. The error of their ways was quickly explained, but it does demonstrate that new users sometimes approach things from a different angle.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast


D. Ebdrup posted:

That's why ESXi and other bare-metal hypervisors tend to live on SLC SATADOM SSDs, as they typically need more writes.

... or regular SD cards, usually mirrored, as I've seen pretty much everywhere.

ESXi will keep on running even if it loses the connection to its boot drive. I've also seen that happen. Several times.

Grog
Mar 31, 2007



e: Never mind, I just went to the local shop and got the cheapest/best value option of a price matched 8 TB WD My Book and a 4 TB WD Blue to put in my other enclosure. Aside from those two drives and my internal drives, my actually important data is small enough to fit on my thumb drives, so I'll have several backups of that in case anything goes wrong with either the external or internal drives, and instead of dealing with RMAs I get to just take the drive back to the store and get a new replacement pretty much immediately if either fails in the next few years. Works for me.

Grog fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Jul 31, 2018

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT


HalloKitty posted:

... or regular SD cards, usually mirrored, as I've seen pretty much everywhere.

ESXi will keep on running even if it loses the connection to its boot drive. I've also seen that happen. Several times.

This. Logs go to a a syslog server.

My older hosts would boot off a single internal SD/USB. If they failed, the hosts would chug along. Couldn't mount the VMware tools iso to guest VMs.

All my new boxes are mirrored internal micro SD cards.

KillaZilla
Jan 30, 2003


Hadlock posted:

Ended up buying a Synology DS418 about two months ago, holy hell, I just turned on my old i5 file server that lives in a 4U case, it is like night and day having this tiny little toaster box next to this hulking behemoth of yesteryear. And the noise comparison, wow. What a polished product, I wish I'd bought one of these four years ago instead of building a giant fucking server that's a hassle to maintain.

I feel much the same these days. I've spent enough years around noisy hot power sucking servers in my professional life, I really don't want to come home and do the same anymore. Even my big Unraid box which has/is a really good setup just feels so unnecessary when I can put a handful of 10TB drives into a comparatively small Synology and use docker for the most part.

I currently need to upgrade the amount of storage I have on hand and doing an 80TB+ Synology/QNAP build is looking better each day. Any heavy lifting can be handled by a VM on my ESXi server which has already been through the consolidation and downsizing process. The real list of cons for an off the shelf NAS vs self built is pretty damn small.

Heners_UK
Jun 1, 2002


insularis posted:

My last bill for 3TB stored was $2.82/mo.

Am I seriously miscalculating B2's cost? $0.005 * 3000 GB = $15.00/mo. Their pricing calculator gives the same, and a somewhat alarming ~$218/yr total cost

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.



Fun Shoe

A review of QNAPs 3 bay nas.
https://www.servethehome.com/qnap-t...-5-capable-nas/

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

Bless You Ants, Blants



Fun Shoe

RAID5

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT



Why would anyone get that instead of the TS-431p which is the same price?

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.



Fun Shoe

Moey posted:

Why would anyone get that instead of the TS-431p which is the same price?

Much like anything they are just filling potential gaps in the market. The article does make a financial case for it. Yet it's not going to keep someone happy if you want hot swap bays or the benefit of 4 bay raid 5.


Well there's not much choice with only 3 bays. Well except for raid 1 + SSD cache but I don't see the point in that for a 1 Gbs connection.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

Bless You Ants, Blants



Fun Shoe

I'd rather move away from strict RAID definitions at that point and onto something more flexible along the lines of Storage Spaces.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.



Fun Shoe

Thanks Ants posted:

I'd rather move away from strict RAID definitions at that point and onto something more flexible along the lines of Storage Spaces.

Unraid etc are good for that. You're not really looking at consumer storage at that point.

priznat
Jul 7, 2009

Let's get drunk and kiss each other all night.

I was looking at the AMD V1000 SoC, it would be nice if a vendor made a good motherboard for NAS applications. Only 2 SATA ports from the SoC but up to 16 pcie gen3 lanes to a controller chip would be pretty cool.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

"Tell me of your home world, Usul"


priznat posted:

I was looking at the AMD V1000 SoC, it would be nice if a vendor made a good motherboard for NAS applications. Only 2 SATA ports from the SoC but up to 16 pcie gen3 lanes to a controller chip would be pretty cool.

AMD motherboards have always been weirdly deficient despite the chips' obvious charms as NAS appliances/servers/etc. There are literally no mobos configured for NAS applications and shit, I think most AMD mITX and mATX mobos max out at like 2-4 SATAs, while you can get a random Supermicro or Asrack for whatever Intel niche you want.

Best hope is that someone like PC Engines takes up the charge. I don't need a router/microcell board but their APU/APU2 series are fucking legit for that niche.

Kabini/Jaguar/etc were pretty great for their time/power budget and supported ECC at least on paper. An Athlon 5350 is my current always-on server and while it's not amazing it's more than sufficient for SABnzbd and Sonarr and seedbox pulldowns and shit (no transcoding). It's going to get pushed to a friend or something when I get around to building that damn server out. A J5005-ITX board is literally less than twice as fast and would cost 2-3x as much as I paid for the 5350+mobo almost 4 years ago, the 5350 was a fucking bargain by literally any definition. You could get a board+CPU from Newegg for $50 out the door. It was a stupid value even compared to E350 boards and shit.

Why did nobody make a NAS board out of this? Fuck you that's why. And that problem continues to this day. You literally cannot buy an AM4/embedded-Ryzen/embedded-Epyc mITX or mATX that is suitable for NAS shit (without adding a controller card that doubles the build price).

Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Aug 1, 2018

priznat
Jul 7, 2009

Let's get drunk and kiss each other all night.

Yeah I’d like to get an AMD setup just for a change but outside of gaming pc stuff it’s pretty lacking.

A pretty badass motherboard I am buying at work for general purpose dev stuff are the skylake-sp with x11spm-tf motherboards.. IPMI, 40 PCIe gen3 lanes and *12* sata ports and it’s mATX!

https://www.supermicro.com/products...0/X11SPM-TF.cfm

The lowest power skylake-sp is like 70W TDP which isn’t that bad, but probably not what you’d want for a NAS

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

"Tell me of your home world, Usul"


priznat posted:

Yeah I’d like to get an AMD setup just for a change but outside of gaming pc stuff it’s pretty lacking.

A pretty badass motherboard I am buying at work for general purpose dev stuff are the skylake-sp with x11spm-tf motherboards.. IPMI, 40 PCIe gen3 lanes and *12* sata ports and it’s mATX!

https://www.supermicro.com/products...0/X11SPM-TF.cfm

The lowest power skylake-sp is like 70W TDP which isn’t that bad, but probably not what you’d want for a NAS

Check out Denverton too (read the whole damn thing - we're talking quad 10GbE and 12xSATA and 4xRDIMM support in a mITX form factor)

https://www.servethehome.com/superm...-h-tp4f-review/

(for comparison in the benchmark, the e3-1220v6 is a Xeon version of the i5 7400)

Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Aug 1, 2018

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

The frustrating thing about those boards is always the price. $450+ for a NAS board only makes sense if you need to jam it into a tiny enclosure; but if you need support for 12+ SATA drives, you probably also have the space for something larger than a mATX board, at which point you can do a more traditional motherboard + expansion card(s) for quite a bit cheaper.

Don't get me wrong, they're sexy as hell, but they seem really expensive for what they are.

derk
Sep 24, 2004


DrDork posted:

The frustrating thing about those boards is always the price. $450+ for a NAS board only makes sense if you need to jam it into a tiny enclosure; but if you need support for 12+ SATA drives, you probably also have the space for something larger than a mATX board, at which point you can do a more traditional motherboard + expansion card(s) for quite a bit cheaper.

Don't get me wrong, they're sexy as hell, but they seem really expensive for what they are.

Goddamn that is a little pricey, but goddamn that is one hell of a low power power house of networking NAS/virtualization beauty.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006


Heners_UK posted:

Am I seriously miscalculating B2's cost? $0.005 * 3000 GB = $15.00/mo. Their pricing calculator gives the same, and a somewhat alarming ~$218/yr total cost

insularis posted:

My last bill for 3TB stored was $2.82/mo.

Was that a full month at 3TB? I paid ~$15 last month for ~4TB stored in B2.

MonkeyFit
May 13, 2009


Fry's has 4TB 7200rpm HGST DeskstarNAS drives for $100. Are those reliable enough drives to pick up a few? Or should I just pass on those?

Sheep
Jul 24, 2003


If you don't want to wait for the next clockwork-like WD Red deal then yeah HGST stuff is solid if you need something right this moment.

Edit: Newegg has this deal going on on Toshiba N300 4TB High Reliability 7200RPM drives for 10 bucks more.

Sheep fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Aug 2, 2018

MonkeyFit
May 13, 2009


Why do the reds go down in price like clockwork?

Sheep
Jul 24, 2003


Dunno but generally every 4 months or so someone (generally Best Buy?) has them on sale for 160-170.

Edit: 5/22, 4/24, 3/20, 12/27, 11/17, 9/30 were the last deals on 8TB Reds.

Sheep fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Aug 2, 2018

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002
I LOVE THE WHITE STRIPES!

MonkeyFit posted:

Fry's has 4TB 7200rpm HGST DeskstarNAS drives for $100. Are those reliable enough drives to pick up a few? Or should I just pass on those?

Barring deals on Reds, these drives are rock solid. Pretty much as good as it gets.

MonkeyFit
May 13, 2009


Are those typically the 7200 or 5400 rpm drives? Does that even really matter if I'm just streaming media and making backups? Or doing transcoding with Plex?

Sheep
Jul 24, 2003


Guess what's on sale at Best Buy right now. Not the lowest price ever but still saves you 20 bucks on 8TB of space vs the 4TBs above.

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002
I LOVE THE WHITE STRIPES!

MonkeyFit posted:

Are those typically the 7200 or 5400 rpm drives? Does that even really matter if I'm just streaming media and making backups? Or doing transcoding with Plex?

7200rpm. (I mean the HGST drives) I dunno about reds.

redeyes fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Aug 2, 2018

NapalmWeasel
Aug 10, 2012


Looking for advice:

Got an email from NewEgg Flash that the Terramaster F4-220 (4-bay, dual-core Celeron, 2Gb RAM, single GbE) NAS system is on sale. It doesn't appear to be a refurbished item. Most reviews online say it's solid hardware, but the software is a little quirky. I didn't find anything on the SA forums about the brand or model.

I am pretty much looking for a basic NAS with Plex capability for personal use; I'm in IT, but don't want to build and maintain a NAS system.

At this reduced price, is it worth picking up?

Link: https://flash.newegg.com/Product/9S...d=WP_0_08022018

Mr. Crow
May 22, 2008

Snap City mayor for life


Had my first disk failure since swapping to snapraid + mergerfs, after jumping through unrelated hoops to get reconnected to Windows server (because fucking windows), I got the disk swapped out and back up and running with 5 minutes of actual work and an hour or so of rebuilding the new disk. Worked flawlessly and could still use the rest of the array (e.g. watch Plex) at the same time the one disk was trash.

Completely different drive and sizes.

Satisfied customer.

Thermopyle
Jul 1, 2003

...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell



The easystore 8tb is down to $150 at best buy again.

D. Ebdrup
Mar 13, 2009



So, if any of you are SpiderOak users, you might like to know that SpiderOak went down shortly and then up shortly before their canary was updated to mention that they'll no longer be using a canary. So if you want to guess that they have received an NSL instructing them to drop the canary, and suddenly feel a strong desire to go put your money elsewhere, maybe this is the time.
Completely unrelated, I think I'll be scraping together some money and switching to Tarsnap - at least Colin provides the source code (SpiderOak, unlike other providers, provided a binary that worked on Solaris LX-branded Zones and FreeBSD Linuxulator Jails) that's buildable on basically any system, and whose source code has been audited by many people to work like he says it works.

Harik
Sep 9, 2001

From the hard streets of Moscow
First dog to touch the stars




Plaster Town Cop

Quick followup - in trying to get the X8SI6-F running I hit a snag. The on-board SATA does not work in BIOS, at all. I had to turn on the BIOS option for the SAS and put my boot media on there in order to even boot.

It must have worked at some point, as it came with one of those 16gb high-endurance SATA-socket SSDs installed in it, but that wasn't recognized at boot either.

It's booted, but it takes forever to start running the SAS 2008 ROM, I'd prefer to disable that and let it come up as the server starts.

(Also, I'm out 6 SATA ports if I can't figure this out)

At least updating the IPMI and cross-flashing the SAS to IT mode went smoothly.

H2SO4
Sep 11, 2001

put your money in a log cabin




Buglord

Harik posted:

Quick followup - in trying to get the X8SI6-F running I hit a snag. The on-board SATA does not work in BIOS, at all. I had to turn on the BIOS option for the SAS and put my boot media on there in order to even boot.

It must have worked at some point, as it came with one of those 16gb high-endurance SATA-socket SSDs installed in it, but that wasn't recognized at boot either.

It's booted, but it takes forever to start running the SAS 2008 ROM, I'd prefer to disable that and let it come up as the server starts.

(Also, I'm out 6 SATA ports if I can't figure this out)

At least updating the IPMI and cross-flashing the SAS to IT mode went smoothly.

Have you tried booting with that SATADOM unplugged? I've had misbehaving drives make an HBA unhappy at boot before.

Eletriarnation
Apr 6, 2005

People don't appreciate the substance of things...
objects in space.



Oven Wrangler

I don't have any ideas to add, but I feel like that should work - I have an X8SIL-F which is the same chipset and its SATA ports work fine for boot disks. I also wonder if there's some screwed-up BIOS setting or something plugged in that's messing with it.

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