[ale] NAS recommendations

[DJ-Pfulio]

On 06/15/2017 09:29 AM, Ken Cochran wrote:
> Any ALEr Words of Wisdom wrt desktop NAS?
> Looking for something appropriate for, but not limited to, photography.
> Some years ago Drobo demoed at (I think) AUUG.  (Might've been ALE.)
> Was kinda nifty for the time but I'm sure things have improved since.
> Synology?  QNAP?
> Build something myself?  JBOD?
> Looks like they all running Linux inside these days.
> Rackmount ones look lots more expensive.
> Ideas?  What to look for?  Stay away from?  Thanks, Ken

Every time I look at the pre-built NAS devices, I think - that's $400
too much and not very flexible. These devices are certified with
specific models of HDDs. Can you live with a specific list of supported
HDDs and limited, specific, software?

Typical trade off - time/convenience vs money.  At least initially.
Nothing you don't already know.

My NAS is a $100 x86 box built from parts.  Bought a new $50 intel G3258
CPU and $50 MB. Reused stuff left over from prior systems for everything
else, at least initially.
Reused:
* 8G of DDR3 RAM
* Case
* PSU
* 4TB HDD
* assorted cabled to connect to a KVM and network.  That was 3 yrs ago.

Most of the RAM is used for disk buffering.

That box has 4 internal HDDs and 4 external in a cheap $99 array
connected via USB3. Internal is primary, external is the rsync mirror
for media files.

It runs Plex MS, Calibre, and 5 other services. The CPU is powerful
enough to transcode 2 HiDef streams for players that need it concurrently.
All the primary storage is LVM managed. I don't span HDDs for LVs.
Backups are not LVM'd and a simple rsync is used for media files.  OS
application and non-media content gets backed up with 60 versions using
rdiff-backup to a different server over the network.

That original 4TB disk failed a few weeks ago. It was a minor
inconvenience.  Just sayin'.

If I were starting over, the only thing I'd do different would be to
more strongly consider ZFS. Don't know that I'd use it, but it would be
considered for more than 15 minutes for the non-OS storage.  Bitrot is
real, IMHO.

I use RAID elsewhere on the network, but not for this box.  It is just a
media server (mainly), so HA just isn't needed.

At SELF last weekend, there was a talk about using RAID5/6 on HDDs over
2TB in size by a guy in the storage biz.  The short answer was - don't.

The rebuild time after a failure in their testing was measured in
months. They were using quality servers, disks and HBAs for the test. A
5x8TB RAID5 rebuild was predicted to finish in over 6 months under load.

There was also discussions about whether using RAID with SSDs was smart
or not.  RAID10 was considered fine. RAID0 if you needed performance,
but not for long term. The failure rate on enterprise SSDs is so low to
make it a huge waste of time except for the most critical applications.
They also suggested avoiding SAS and SATA interfaces on those SSDs to
avoid the limited performance.

Didn't mean to write a book. Sorry.