What are you doing for home NAS?

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

On 2013-12-30 09:41, John Abreau wrote:
> After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the consumer-level drives
> such the MyBook Live as serious options.

I think this stance is a little overly cautious; there is  data showing 
that consumer drives don't fail at rates significantly different than 
"server-grade" drives -- e.g., 
http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/12/04/enterprise-drive-reliability/ 
(though I also remember studies done on significantly larger datasets a 
couple years ago, but they aren't leaping at me from Google).  What I 
*have* found to be troublesome is that some RAID solutions don't handle 
drives that spin down very well.  For this reason, I tend to either go 
with "server-grade" drives, or really do my homework, and find drives 
that work with the solution (e.g., 3Ware has -- or, at least, had -- an 
approved hardware list that I find useful).  But I think that, with a 
suitable amount of caution, there's money to be saved here without loss 
of functionality or increased risk of data loss.

$.02,

-Ken

P.S.  One thing I should add here, just from a hoo-boy-did-I-stub-my-toe 
perspective: as a rule, I usually have my arrays use just a leeeeetle 
bit less than the whole disk.  I had a large RAID-5 array once, and one 
of the drives failed.  I got it RMA'd *with the same model number* from 
the manufacturer... and it was one sector smaller.  THAT was annoying.


> On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Mark Komarinski
> <mkomarinski at wayga.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 12/30/2013 1:00 AM, John Abreau wrote:
>>> I tried a couple cheaper options such as the WD MyBook Live
>> network
>>> drive, but I wasn't really satisfied with them, They were slow to
>>> access, slow to spin up when inactive, and had serious
>> performance
>>> issues when more than one process was accessing them over NFS,
>> which
>>> was the only filesharing option I used. They contained just a
>> single
>>> drive, which means no raid-1 safety net when the disk starts to
>> go bad.
>>> 
>> After getting burned by non-NAS drives in a RAID 5 array, I'm going
>> RAID
>> 1 for home use from now on.
>> 
>>> Then I picked up an HP N40L mini cube server and installed FreeNAS
>> on
>>> it, on a usb thumb drive that I plugged into the internal USB
>> port on
>>> the motherboard. It was the first NAS I've tried at home that I
>> was
>>> happy with.Performance is much better, even with multiple
>> processes
>>> accessing the unit, and large file copies both to and from the
>> unit
>>> seem to complete more quickly.
>> Ooh.  I forgot about that little guy.  Replacement for is seems
>> to be
>> the N54L.  Fits 4 drives, might just get 2x4TB and leave the other
>> two
>> for future expansion.
>> 
>>> I'm currently using two of the four drive slots with a pair of 2gb
>>> drives, configured with ZFS as a raid-1 mirror set. To properly
>>> support ZFS, I followed the recommendations in the HOWTO I found
>>> online and maxed out the RAM at 8 GB.
>>> 
>>> It's been a couple years since I set it up, so I imagine there's
>> a
>>> newer model available by now that will accept larger drives and
>> more RAM.
>>> 
>>> After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the
>>> 
>> Err, you cut off there...
>> 
>> -Mark
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> 
> --
> 
> John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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