School Me on DIY NAS

I'm impressed with your trial-by-fire here doing this NAS. You've speed run learning this, really well done!
I also know nothing about it, probably less than you did when you started, but I really need to set something up eventually.

I'm flat broke so it won't be for a while, that said, it should time in with getting a hold of Ritalin, by the looks of it, that should be very helpful!

 

Thanks man. Happy to report TrueNAS is just plodding along dong all I ask of it. It's been a damn good Linux introduction, and I don't even begrudge the mucky implementation timeline - I learned a damn lot about Linux.

Two standouts:

- The permission structure is usually my Achilles' heel in everything I try to set up; and
- Nano is an exceptional bit of kit - such a great idea.

It's a pity you weren't a bit closer, I could ferry you a bit of hardware for a play.

Good luck on the meds mate, they've made a huge different for our young fella. It was the hardest parenting decision we've had to make yet - risk our little boy's character being deleted by a medication, or give him a fighting chance at keeping focused until one thing is finally complete. I still struggle with it at times, but I'd make the same decision again. The team we worked with had everything considered - dosages, medications, likely effects and changes. And we've still got our little man, he's just able to see some things through to completion without veering off-course.

I said to the wife as we were going through the onboarding surveys and stuff (because we both ticked a lot of the boxes) - if I'd have been able to direct my attention properly through school, I'd have been dangerous

 

I think I'll chat with you when I cross that bridge because you're obviously trying to keep it as simple and user friendly as possible, you've done well in a short amount of time!
I haven't touched any real networking stuff since yr11.

As for the rest, I hear you, after seeing my loud-type siblings get diagnosed and treated as kids and the life it's allowed them to live, it's the right choice, it's a leg up to a happier adulthood and achieving goals. Still a hard decision and takes time to get right. Best of luck to you too!

 

Yeah mate, more than happy to help if I can. It's novice knowledge, but there were little 'ah-ha' moments along the way which might help!

 

Just wanted to circle back around and report in.

TrueNAS has been faultless. Updates work, OneDrive works, permissions I've refined a bit after doing some research, all working fine.
I'm thoroughly impressed with performance - easily saturates the LAN for copies/installs, and on-device copies seem to be routed through the SSD, which makes them trivial. I only found this out because I had to move my media to a new share, and it was in the Gigabytes/sec for the transfers!

Overall, very happy. I couldn't get the OneDrive stuff working outside the vdisk in Unraid, despite a bit more knowledge, so I relegated the key to the drawer and put TrueNAS on ye olde Datto, which now serves as my sandbox for playing around.

 

Well done for persisting with it and getting over the hump.

 

Hopefully someone can save themselves a bit of trouble mate, cheers.

I'd like to one day revisit OneDrive on Unraid, but that can come later

 

Last night I received my Jonsbo N3 case and CWWK N150, 10G ethernet, 8 Sata port mobo. If anybody is interested, I might do a build log or something. The board came with zero documentation, so there was a little bit of head scratching going on when I started to put it together.

 

Always keen on build posts, love to see what other people cobble together!

 

Heres a couple pics of my recent server cleaning. I can advise that after about 15yrs of running ZFS NAS distributions based on FreeBSD and recently moving to Linux TrueNAS. You want to stick with ZFS at all costs… it has been the most trustworthy filesystem I have ever used, I have had many many drive failures, cable failures etc and it has survived everything, even preemptively kicking drives out of arrays due to hardware faults. I run an Vmware ESXi base these days with all virtual machines and VT-D hardware passthrough for my PCIe devices like my LSI HBA and quad network card.

This current build has been in service for about 5 years, runs about 2 years uptime on average between maintenance.

 

Yep. I swear you can go at it with an axe and it would still keep serving files.

 

Yup I call it the cockroach of filesystems haha, I remember when I wiped all the drives in an array and it could still see the pool

Best I had was when a sata cable was flakey and ZFS wasn’t having it and just kicked the drive out of the array rather than writing corrupted data

 

An interesting read, I'm looking at what to replace the current setup. I'm currently running Proxmox on an 8th gen Intel i5-8500 for a few VMs and an 11 year old QNAP with a 3770S for 22TB storage (which is very low) and Plex duties.

A new QNAP would be simple but would likely still need a proxmox machine running, a custom build might be fun and potentially consolidates things. Still researching how it all fits together.

 

Building your own has been great for me and my experiences with QNAP have not been good to be honest but they may have improved in recent years…

I don’t transcode anymore since moving exclusively to Apple TVs around the house as there’s absolutely nothing they cannot play natively…

 

I like QNAP hardware packages a lot but after using Unraid and TrueNAS, the flexibility of containers for apps leaves the relatively enclosed QPKG setup for dead.

Finding config files on the QNAP was always a chore due to the way they hide the working folders for the OS and make it very tricky to navigate there to make changes - I found on a lot of apps if the settings weren't exposed in the app somewhere, and you weren't happy with how QNAP decided you should have it - tough. Great for set-and-forget stuff, but if you like to tinker it was maddening.
Add to that that if you wanted to run some of the cooler third-party stuff you got stuck paying for an Apache QPKG before any of it would work, bit bleh. Kudos to the package mantainer for at least bringing the functionality to the platform.

I can't fault the TerraMaster hardware so far - it's ample, quiet and takes care of things nicely. The OS was immature, but with TrueNAS I'm pleasantly surprised at how easy and stable it's been. Local support was great when I needed them initially, so they get the nod from me - and you won't find a Synology or QNAP configuration around the same spec at anywhere near the price.

That said, you'll easily find an ITX setup, case and PSU that'll provide more processing power easily - if you don't mind the higher TDP.

 

The only things left on my QNAP are Plex, SAB and QVR (QNAPs NVR/IP Camera Recording app), the VM's are long gone as are all the other services it used to manage for me which now run on my Proxmox box.

QNAP has been good to me, largely set and forget for over a decade and more than powerful enough for what I wanted. The QNAP with the level of power I think I would like is a little more than anticipated.... The QNAP TVS-h874-i5-32G is north of $4k before you add disks!

Building that same sort of spec myself looks like this:

SilverStone RM400 Black 4U Rackmount Case, No PSU
SilverStone Decathlon DA650 650W Power Supply
Team T-Create Expert Grey 32GB (2x16GB) 3200MHz DDR4
MSI SPATIUM M470 PRO 1TB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD
Intel Core i5 12400 Desktop Processor
MSI PRO B760M-A WIFI DDR4 MB

This comes in just over a grand but still needs more SATA ports to be up there.

I'd be looking at starting with 4 x 16TB in RAID 5 of some sort which should about double my current storage capacity. An ability to expand that later (even if it's adding another 4 drive array) would be nice.

What I really need is someone to tell me that what I really need is a much lower powered (and hopefully cheaper) set of components and use them purely as storage with a 2.5Gbe network link.
(also some recommendations fo what I should be looking at would be appreciated).

Beyond that I'm starting to think that the Intel Core i5 8500 Proxmox box can/should be able to happily step up for Plex and SAB. Frigate might be a bit of an ask, but I don't need or want any AI detection, just straight recording if that's possible. I do have a very beaten up (and taped together) 8th Gen Intel laptop or an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7730U laptop (with a busted screen) both with 16GB RAM, thse could be put into service for one or more of these tasks if I needed them. While I'm trying to avoid it, I could always pick up a dedicated NVR if push came to shove.

Oh... and I still can't quite get my head around containers where they have to read/write to network storage. I suspect it's just that I need to spend a little more time to understand better.

 

Yeah, you're where I was right before I started this thread

We like to think we need big, beefy boxes to 'serve' stuff, but the reality is the modern home services are far more efficient and trim than they used to be. They fit into nothing and can be served, generally, from a Pi.

There was a beautiful 6-bay TVS on eBay with an 8th gen i5 and 16GB of RAM for about $1,300. I was all over it, had minsterial approval already, just about to pull the trigger. Then I sat back and actually wrote down what I used the NAS for, and what I wanted to use it for in future. It was fuck all, and the little J1900 in the current QNAP had never struggled with my workload - until I put QVR to work (and quickly pissed it off for an NVR which does the job much easier and cheaper). So it really wasn't justified, and would have sat idling its whole life.
Stumbled across an unbeatable deal on a Terra unit, arrived dead. Originally I wanted the 424 Max with the 12th gen i5 in it (around $1,500 at the time from AliExpress). But I settled for an i3 N305 and 16GB and, even with hardware transcoding and a bit more gateway DNS stuff now, it still idles its whole life.

My motivators are probably a bit different to a lot here though, and I acknowledge that. I want to do everything in the smallest possible budget, both dollars and energy. An old rig idling at 200W for gateway/storage won't fly in my house - the total power budget for my entire home network is that, cameras and all!
If I was running more services - home automation, AI model, game streaming, whatever - I can see the logic behind needing the power. If I also got a horn over a huge metal rack whirring in my house, I can see the logic there too

Ask yourself what you need. Spend a bit of time putting HWInfo or something similar on the current rig, and trend the usage. Put actual numbers on your duty, your idles, your periods of high activity, get a background read on the baseline you'll need, the memory, and the width of the pipe (can you live with 110MB/s? ).

Then work out hardware, and keep your eye peeled for deals as you go

As far as Terra - hardware's good (if working), software's functional but limited and a bit clunky. I ended up on an F4-424 Pro but was originally eyeing the F6-424 Max. There's newer ones - they absolutely trounce QNAP and Synology on price/spec, but there's the QC aspect there I ran into also.

The F4-424-Pro has an i3 N305 (just 8 E-cores), 16GB RAM, 4 3.5 bays and two M.2 slots, one of which runs an old 960 EVO for the TrueNAS volume, and one has a 1TB SSD in there for cache. 4 x 16TB drives in a RAIDZ1 pool - so as close to a RAID5 as I could get. Two 2.5G ports, couple of USB ports, plugpack PSU - no more Flex stuff like the QNAPs. There's 425 models now, too.

I've got beef with Synology's shade so fuck them, but QNAP still has a place in my heart due to many years of service - if you can stomach the price (much harder after surveying the field to compare) or find a good deal

 

My rack uses about 250W constant with the current QNAP, Proxmox, switch (with POE running cameras), adding up to nearly 6kWh / day. The QNAP is about half of that but I recently upgraded my solar to a larger system with battery so power consumption is much less of a concern (I used to try and justify the upgrade as a power savings ).

The real correct answer is to keep the current unit since it works just fine, it's really just space I'm running out of. On power, I think I still have the less powerful Intel i3-3220, but it's 55W vs 65W so not really worth the effort (since it idles most of the time anyway).

You're also correct that 2.5Gbe vs 1Gbe (or even 10Gbe) probably won't make much difference most of the time anyway for my use case. Although I could hunt up the appropriate add in card, this one looks like it's on the approved/compatible list.

Then there are a few things to ponder.

The current setup is 7 x 4TB in RAID 5 for about 24TB of space (less when counted in different numbers) + 1 x 8TB scratch disk.

Plan A, and the somewhat sane answer in the short term.
Buy 1 x 16TB* drive and swap out that 1 8TB drive and use it for non critical storage of media for ~$600
8TB+ of free space would likely see me going for at least a few years.
The added benefit here is that it take minimal effort, minimal copying of existing data (although still some).
Officially, it only lists 12TB drives on the compatibility list... but it's old and I've read reports of people using larger drives in similar age models.... so fingers crossed?
Plan A.2 might be the same drive over USB?

Plan B - New Drives into the old NAS
This complicates things.
As above, the official list only goes up to 12TB drives where I would have been looking at building a 4 x 16TB RAID 5 for 48TB. This doubles my capacity while reducing spindles which is nice enough. Also means I could either keep a second 4 x 4TB array or just have some empty slots of something later. - $2,400
Alternatively, I could do 5 x 12TB for the same 48TB if I wanted to play it a little safer, this is also fractionally cheaper. - $2,250

But of course, all these options leave me with the problem of how to trasnfer data? I need 20 ish TB of free space. I could probably shuffle things by scrounging up maybe 8TB of spare space on other computers in the house or external drives I have around, but I'm still about 12TB short.

One option is a single 24TB Seagate Barracuda desktop drive is under $600 (if you can find one) which I could use then try and onsell after all is said and done (or just leave it in the NAS (which it's not designed or warranted for) and hope for the best? Seems like an expensive task for a one off move of data.

Plan C - I like to live dangerously...
Want to do something totally crazy? Since all the data I actually care about is safely backed up I do have one other insane option...

Slowly swap out all 7 drives in the existing array for 12TB drives, allowing the array to rebuild itself after each swap, the end goal being that when it's finished I should be able to expand the array to its full 72TB RAID 5 potential... - $3,200
It would probably take a few weeks and runs the risk of data corruption ... seven times. But damn that's a lot of space to place with.


Which then leads us all the way back to:

Plan D - Just build a box
At about a grand to build a new server box, I remove alot of the complication of data transfer and its much more flexible.

Or

Plan D2 - Terramaster F6-424 Max - $1,499
https://www.msy.com.au/product/terr...-high-performance-hybrid-nas-f6-424-max-81812
This feels like a new version of my existing QNAP device with an ecosystem that looks like it would do the handful of things I want out of the box.
It also has 10Gbe ports.


Writing all this out helps ground some of the thinking. Full replacement isn't strictly needed, but an upgrade once every decade is hardly unreasonable for something that is actually used every day for a number of functions. That said, I think I'll go with the do nothing option for a little bit longer, I've cleared out some things to give me a little more breathing room and pluged in an extra 4TB of USB storage in the interim.

I'm torn. Build it myself is attractive because I really do like tinkering, but then I'm reminded that I used to run Windows Servers and tinker with them constantly vs the joy at basically never having to manage the QNAP once it was up and running. Honestly, I really do want more of an appliance in this space and while I know TrueNAS or similar might be mostly self sufficient once it's up, that Terramaster is pretty attractive.

 

I don't want to seem like I'm trying to sway you or shill for Terra too hard - each option has its merit but some of those prices ahead are bonkers if your data's truly non-critical and well-archived elsewhere.

The Terra with Unraid tested my patience, I got caught out trying to get OneDrive to pull down to one of my share paths and couldn't make it work, but everything else I use was perfect and the VM experience was absolutely faultless. OneDrive is no doubt a skill issue, but I sank enough time and sanity into it that it left me very salty. Don't let my inexperience and subsequent bias sway you - if you're not doing that, Unraid works well. It has a superior AdGuard container to TrueNAS, Plex was far easier to set up and generally, the permissions are organised in Unraid far more kindly than with TrueNAS - for a rookie.

The Terra with TrueNAS just runs. A couple of starting niggles - mostly permissions-based (ACL stuff) and naming conventions/learning RAIDZ for me as I am very raw at it but also a bit of grief getting DNS to work properly which resulted in a PiHole detour for a bit (which was fine, but I missed my granular parental controls). The big apps are all there, the selection is a bit thinner than Unraid but the catalog ticks all my boxes, and you can roll your own. Handling of VMs was a bit bogus - again, a skill issue and no fault of the software, but it took longer to get XP up than it should've.
I'm currently having a play with Immich to see if I can replace OneDrive and cancel my Microsoft sub after their shitty games last month - it's going quite well. Very polished UI.

Go where you'll get the value. If building it yourself will have you smiling and a bit proud inside every time you look at it - there's value in that. If not having to manage the setup as much this time around appeals more, then go the appliance route.

I took a bit of the pain out by having your Plan B in place first - the QNAP was on 4x4TB, I bought 4x16TB a few years back and stuck them in one-by-one to rebuild the existing array, then bought a 16TB archive drive and took all the critical stuff across to that. Then, I just blew away all the non-critical stuff on the old array, shoved the drives into the Terra, let it cook a new array, and away it went.

 

So I just ordered the Terramaster F6-424 Max for $1350 from Amazon on special. Seemed like the best I can find and it what I was looking at...

So drives, larger drives are a little hard to come by and I've got a few options.

I'm looking at using TRAID for it's awesome-looking flexibility.
I was thinking 4 drives in RAID 5 or in TRIAD in any case would likely give me LOTS of runway with 4 x 16TB = 48TB or double what I currently have.
Cheaping out (with TRAID) I could go for 3 x 16TB, get 32TB and add in the fourth drive later, although from what I understand this then creates a 40% chance a rebuild would fail if a single drive fails (at least with RAID 5). I might just have to suck it up and buy four drives anyway and call it a day.

This would leave two more bays for other disks I have lying about or the ability to further expand down the track if/when I ever need to. Again, DOUBLE my current storage space.

Next up in the drives themselves. My go to would be Ironwolf NAS drives, but these are somewhat hard(er) to get. Luckily the limit is 4 and they seem to be in stock at a nearby Scorptec for $609.
Centrecom is somewhat closer to me and my usual place, but they don't have them, nor do MSY. No different, in the slightly more expensive Ironwolf Pro.

Another interesting option is the Synology Plus Series 16TB. Similar performance metrics, warranty etc. Although I do note that the Ironwolf has a higher operating temp 65C vs 60C.
(The Ironwolf Pro NAS has a longer warranty and MTBF, but also costs more).

And $609 for the Seagate vs $568 for the Synology branded drive. $41 / drive isn't nothing.

From all I read, they are Toshiba drives, designed for NAS use and should work just fine in any machine... so why not save a couple of bucks?

https://www.centrecom.com.au/synology-plus-16tb-7200rpm-internal-35-sata-hdd
https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/hard-drives-&-ssds/hdd-3.5-drives/77609-st16000vn001