What are you doing for home NAS?

Thu Jan 2 14:12:51 EST 2014

This is still going strong eh? Guess I'll throw in my cheapo anecdote.

I run an atom d510mo board w/ a picoPSU powered with an old monitor DC
adapter, 4g of ddr2 I had lying around, and two 3tb drives in raid1.

It's running FreeNAS off usb flash at the moment. I'm not a huge fan of the
web interface, but once all setup it does what it needs to. Everything I
read up on ZFS said I'd need more ram, but I'm getting ~40MB/s.

The motherboard I picked up for like $30 off a recycler so I think my total
cost was around $220. The DC adapter is only rated for 50w, but I think
with staggered spin ups it should be fine. Not exactly enterprise grade
though ^_^
On Jan 2, 2014 2:00 PM, "Chris Linstid" <clinstid at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been doing something similar to Tom for almost as long (around 10
> years). I started with a Linux server (Debian) with a pile of drives
> running ext2/3. I distributed my files by category across the drives
> (picture, movies, docs, source code, etc.). However, I got really tired of
> that a few years ago when ZFS started getting popular and I put together an
> OpenSolaris box with ZFS and pooled all of my drives together.
>
> The Solaris box was all sorts of fun because I originally did that with a
> PCI PATA software RAID card (specifically purchased because it had a driver
> for Solaris x86) and mismatched disks (250GB, a few 320GB, a few 160GB) but
> they will went together in the pool and actually worked reasonably well. I
> would have been ok with that, but just like Tom, I was trying to use this
> system as more than just a file server. It was a media server, an IRC
> client, a VNC host, and a bunch of other things. Solaris's package
> management and software availability was not that great. So, I moved over
> to FreeBSD and struggled with the ports system (keeping it updated,
> resolving conflicts, etc.) for a year or so until I finally gave up on it.
>
> By then I had upgraded to 5x400GB SATA drives. I threw them all in a RAID5
> under Ubuntu Server and called it a day until the motherboard on that
> server died. At that point, I just cycled my main desktop down and made
> that the server with two 2TB USB drives plugged in. One hosts everything
> and the other is a backup. All backups are done via an hourly rsync (plus I
> backup my home directories on the server to the backup drive). Some day
> I'll get back to ZFS, especially now that it's in a stable state on Linux
> so I can have the best of both worlds.
>
>      - Chris
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
>>> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
>>> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
>> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
>> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/private/gnhlug-discuss/attachments/20140102/fec7d4ae/attachment-0001.html 