What are you doing for home NAS?

[Tom Buskey]

I 1st started running a home file server > 12 years ago.  Being a sysadmin,
I've built my own.  Everything here is for the home user.  I can kick my
family off the server and deal with a week's downtime.  I probably can't do
that at a business,

I've used a Netgear ReadyNAS and a Buffalo TerraStation at work.  They
couldn't keep up with gigabit ethernet to deliver > 40 MB/s because of the
ARM.  I've heard good things about Synology.

I used to use RAID5, but I've switched to RAID1 because I only need to
replace 2 drives for more capacity.  Also, fewer spindles means lower power
use.  I don't use hardware RAID.  CPUs are fast enough now that the speed
isn't that much of an advantage.  Dealing with drivers make it harder to
repair from bare metal.  I've done SCSI, IDE and SATA.

I'm at home so I don't care about hotswap.  I can power down for a fix.

I've used Solaris with disksuite, Linux with mdadm + LVM + ext[234],
Solaris with ZFS, OpenSolaris with ZFS and now Linux with ZFS.  I'd
considered FreeBSD + ZFS.

- I run RAID1 for the OS drives.  It's saved me a few times.
- Put a UPS on it.  When it detects a power outage, do an automatic
graceful shutdown ASAP.
- Have your data on another set of drives.  That way an OS upgrade doesn't
affect it.
- chunk up your data into separate areas.
    photos
    books/manuals
    downloads
    music
    wife's home
    kid's home

I've used LVM to set a size for the chunks.  Now I use ZFS.  LVM requires a
umount to change size.  zfs is zfs set quota=newsize pool/chunk.  I use ZFS
on Linux.

I run NFS, Samba and http for access via Unixen, Windows, MacOSX and
Android.  I've run Appletalk for old Macs I play with. I also run
mediaservers for DLNA, DAAP, TiVo.  Solaris wasn't good at this.  FreeBSD
probably isn't as good as Linux.  I know Synology will do this kind of
thing.

Once, I had a dual Pentium II w/ 1 GB RAM.  It wasn't enough speed for me
(I want > 40 MB/s on gigabit).  I was happy with a dual core 1.8 GHz system
with 3 GB RAM.  LVM/Ext3 would be ok with less RAM and ZFS wants more.  You
don't want an old P4 system because it uses too much power.

If you need more disks then can fit in the chassis, you can use a 4 port
SATA card ($20-$40), long cables and an old PC chassis with a power
supply.  I ran 8 500 GB drives that way until I replaced them with 2 4TB
drives using half the watts.  Paid for the upgrade in months.







On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 3:09 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) <
greg at freephile.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Mark Komarinski <mkomarinski at wayga.org>wrote:
>
>>
>> Anyway, I ordered the HP N54L, 8GB of RAM, and two 4TB drives.  This
>> leaves me with two expansion bays and the ability to use FreeNAS with
>> ZFS.  I looked at OMV but it seems to not be as mature as FreeNAS.  If
>> anyone's interested I can do another post once it's built and in use.
>>
>> -Mark
>>
>
> /me waving hand
>
> I'm interested.  Finally getting around to (re-)organizing my LAN-wide
> backups and storage.
>
> Greg Rundlett
>
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