AraiBob

I see a lot of 'almost' flaming here. I thought such things had become out of 'flavor' and considered rude, too.
 
If I did like most PC builders, I would be building with all new parts. case, motherboard, drives, etc. And if I expected that I would NEVER upgrade any component, etc, then limiting the power supply, and other parts to 'just enough' would make sense. But as an old-timer mainframe programmer of 37 years, I don't do things like that. I buy quality [expensive] components I expect will last me years. Far longer than a single build. This means the actual cost per build is comparable. And I mistyped my case, a FT02 Silverstone case... As usual, your mileage will vary. and for anyone to tell someone else they made a mistake is what I consider 'rude'.
Besides, how do you learn? By making mistakes. And a lot of mistakes can be skipped by asking someone a bit more 'expert' than you and then considering what they said against your purposes.

I see a lot of 'almost' flaming here. I thought such things had become out of 'flavor' and considered rude, too.
 
If I did like most PC builders, I would be building with all new parts. case, motherboard, drives, etc. And if I expected that I would NEVER upgrade any component, etc, then limiting the power supply, and other parts to 'just enough' would make sense. But as an old-timer mainframe programmer of 37 years, I don't do things like that. I buy quality [expensive] components I expect will last me years. Far longer than a single build. This means the actual cost per build is comparable. And I mistyped my case, a FT02 Silverstone case... As usual, your mileage will vary. and for anyone to tell someone else they made a mistake is what I consider 'rude'.
Besides, how do you learn? By making mistakes. And a lot of mistakes can be skipped by asking someone a bit more 'expert' than you and then considering what they said against your purposes.

Hi, Each person is 'allowed' to choose their components and this includes the power supply. In my case, I buy parts I expect to use in more than one build. E.g., Motherboards change faster than cases and power supplies. Why? Features that I 'need' that are not on the current motherboard. Or perhaps the motherboard has developed problems, even though it has not failed completely.

Currently, I am on my 3rd build in my Silverstone FT04. My 2nd build on my P C Power and Cooling 1200 watt power supply. The Power supply comes with a 7 year warrantee, and I am about 4 years into that. From one combination of motherboard and CPU to the next, I cannot be certain what kind of power I will need. But I do know I will need power to deal with 2 SSDs and 4 large hard drives.

I don't need the latest video card, as I don't do video games. I do videos, whose requirements are not as extreme.

Yes, it is fairly certain I don't need 1200 watts. But this particular PSU has some smarts. The fan won't turn on until I hit over 600 watts of draw. Which has happened seldom. So, the hint is I might get by with 750 watts. For the current configuration. What about the next configuration?

I do believe the power draw of PCs has hit a relatively calm point. And I do expect CPUs to get 'smaller' in size and power draw. But I cannot be certain, and I like having 'reserve' capability. And I live in a nation with notorious power issues. 240 volts? Naw... It comes from the pole at 260+ volts, which my PC's power supply handles easily. Same with my UPS. Both have to deal with high voltages that can dip. So each person has to decide what will be worth the expense.

Hi,
 
I live in one of the most malware and virus living on PCs places in the World - the Philippines.
 
Once I switched to Ubuntu Linux, no problems, ever. I don't have a virus checker or a malware 'thing' installed on my pc. Don't need it.
 
Windows allows bad behavior, which Linux and Unix both lock down.
 
There are software for those things in Linux, but as long as you remember you have to give permission for the bad thing to run. Unlike Windows which will allow almost anything to run.
 
I used to have a house full of Windows PCs. However, the family kept getting malware, virus, and trojan horse software. Partly because they don't know what to do, and they install a lot of bad things. Once I switched all of them to Ubuntu Linux, no more work for me. It used to be at least one Windows 'rebuild' per month, and since I switched, NOT a single rebuild.
 
AraiBob

Hi, I am a retired programmer, analyst, project designer / architect / manager. 37 years in the business. and in that time I used over 3 dozen languages on the job.
 
First was basic, fortran, and assembly. Next 'CASH', whose form I did not see again, until I saw Turbo Pascal. RPG and RPGII. Cobol, too, where i spent most of my time.
 
I came up with general rules,
 
First, get the basic form of the system working. If you have a lot of options, and they are to be on the first page, get that working first, then fill in the details later. Some might call this the GUI part.
Second, when the whole switching / gui process is working, look for problem areas. Not fast enough, or error prone, and deal with them.
third, fill in the details. This is the major part of the coding effort.
 
4th and 5th - test the hell out of it.
 
I worked on 32 bit memory systems, and 36 memory systems. Real time OS vs batch OS. Network DB, Hierarchical DB, and 3 different Relational systems
 
none of which matters today. I don't code, that is what retirement is for.
 
As good as a programmer and analyst I was, it turned out my real talent was in project architecture / design and management. I got paid a lot more that that one.
 
I enjoyed the changing world of computers that happened in that time. My first 'mainframe' had 32 kilobytes of memory. 10 years later I had a DataBoss watch that had 64 kilobytes memory- he he...
 
The first hard drive I saw was so large, I can't describe it today. (think the size of a small refrigerator, holding a 'cake' about 9 inches tall, and 12 inches radius) It had 5 megabytes of storage. Today, on my pc I have four 4TB WD black drive.
 
Programming was fun, and seldom a chore. If I had an issue, I learned DO NOT stay up all night trying to fix. Instead, GO TO SLEEP, and you will wake up with ideas to try. When I learned that one, programming problems became much easier to deal with.
 
Because my projects worked, I was handed 'leading edge' work. I found ways to succeed in work that was supposed to fail. Mr Lucky was one of the terms that came my way.
 
I won't be able to tell you specific tricks to do in the languages of today, so don't ask. But architecture and project planning, I could help.

On RAID cards and ZFS you can set the rebuild/resilver priority. ZFS has even better controls and limits on this process than hardware RAID does.
 
* Prioritize resilvering by setting the delay set zfs:zfs_resilver_delay   * Prioritize scrubs by setting the delay set zfs:zfs_scrub_delay   * set maximum number of in flight IOs to a reasonable value - this number will vary for your environment (not a rebuild property but useful to know about) set zfs:zfs_top_maxinflight   * resilver for milliseconds per TXG set zfs:zfs_resilver_min_time_ms   All these settings can be altered to insure as fast/demanding or slow/gentle as you wish. There is always a trade off between the rebuild speed to restore back to a healthy state versus stress induced on the system to do so. Knowing what these settings do is extremely important, even if one does not intend to change them.   This is definitely a case of find good articles on performance tuning ZFS systems and read the manual. This particular question about resilvering has been asked many times and although answered it generally isn't in a very good digestible way or written in the form of an educational editorial for others to learn from. There are way too many getting started guides or install guides online for FreeNAS but no real good authoritative source for all the things you need to know and understand before going in to a FreeNAS build. All the information is available and can be found but takes time.   Most of the long time storage experts don't need this kind of material and also generally cannot be bothered to write it as they have no use for it themselves.   I think the general issue that I see some people have with your original post and premise coming in to it is that ZFS etc is flawed and cannot be fixed. If the topic had posed the question "These are the issues I have identified, does anyone know of anything that can fix or mitigate the issue right now or know of anything coming in the near future" then this topic would have become much more constructive and educational much sooner rather than the current ideological battle between two differing view points which can both be correct and also incorrect. It is a debate that is doomed to circle continuously with no resolution.   "Keep it simple" "It will always fail" "If you think something is not possible, it probably is"   These three mantras apply to almost everything in life and also in IT.

PH politics and 'economics' are based on the old Spanish Conquistador ideas. If it has to be imported, and you want to buy it, tax it - a lot... I don't really know why, but after buying a few things and shipping them the 'normal' way, and getting a tax that matched the original purchase price.
 
This also applies to used cars. No matter the age of the car, if you bring it into the PH, the tax is the original purchase price. I have heard of other such craziness.
 
The 'ordinary' Filipino is unlikely to order such things. So the tax is on rich Filipinos and foreigners. And rich Filipinos will have some way to avoid the tax.
 
Annoying

I have purchases a bunch of hard drives from Amazon in the US over the last 5 years, and air shipped them to me in the Philippines, and all of them worked without issues. Amazon, plus the shipping charge is less than buying from the local places. PH has a tax on normal imported electronics of 100 percent. The cost of Amazon plus shipping avoids that tax, and is cheaper...

Best advice I can give is to simply try it out before putting important data on it, if you already have the required hardware or enough for decent testing. Simulate failures, adding more disks, wiping the OS and importing the disk pool etc. FreeBSD, Ubuntu etc will work fine with pure ZFS and samba etc, FreeNAS just makes the whole process simpler and an easy to use interface which is actually extremely valuable as command line and config file gets tiresome especially when your in a lazy mood and just want stuff to work. 
 
Just make sure the disks you intend for real use have TLER/NAS rated, this is important for both RAID and ZFS. If a disk without TLER encounters a bad sector it will continuously try and re-read the sector and all I/O will freeze, the disk may also get flagged as failed too when it actually isn't. A disk with TLER generally isn't good to use as a standalone disk as after the 7 second timeout it will stop trying the bad sector and in this situation that is actual data loss.
 
Try before you buy basically Experience is often the only way to gain true understanding of something. Also I am no FreeNAS expert but there are plenty on this forum, I'm a Windows person myself and only use unix type systems when I have to as part of work or that type of OS is clearly better for the intended purpose. 

Hmmm,
 
I think one of the 'issues' is one of attitude. Some people 'expect' things will always work. I am of the other school. I know things fail, and I wonder what will fail with it. And how long to recover.
 
I appreciate hearing the success stories. Has there been a satisfaction survey of NAS systems? If so, point me to it.
 
As for RMA, in the Philippines, they give a very short warrantee period, and if you actually try to use it, they simply refuse. Western Digital, as managed by those in Manila, have refused to replace two drives for me. So that is not a viable way for me to go. I need them to work and work and work. I need as conservative a process and set of tools as i can devise or find.

All,
 
I should have said that I like a lot of the specs for ZFS. It can handle large data sets, as it was designed to do so. And COW seems like the way to do things. I sounds pretty good. However, as i thought about it, the notion of drives being driven to failure became clear.
 
Unless you can restrict the numbers of copy for the COW process, you could end up with hundreds of copies of a single file, of which only the latest two are necessary.
 
And, in the lectures and articles I read on ZFS, they mention the sad situation in which a second drive fails, during the rebuild (re-silver) process. This is exactly the moment you need to have a system that will NOT fail. So, they have some work to do in this arena.
 
Best regards, AraiBob

I am not the only one to point out the hard drive failures with any drive system, but especially the ones using the ZFS systems. look into :
Reducing Single Points of Failure (SPoF) in Redundant Storage Where the issue of drive failures are noted. I worked 37 years in IT [with many out of the box solutions], and drive issues were 'managed' to help the enterprise. But in the home or small business, drive failures can be fatal. And ZFS compounds those failures because of the way they use and abuse hard drives.
 
I have heard and looked into others, including UnRaid. Using HBA seems to make the situation better, but as long as 'load leveling' [aka defragging] happens the drives get beat to death. We need a better design and hardware to support backups without over working hard drives. I am still using USB JBOD for my backups. No excess writing or work on the drives. I have parts for a full PC, to be put into my Antec 1100 which is idle since I got a better case.
 
One issue I have is that too many systems, like ZFS require all the drives to be the same. In my case, as my drives get 'old', I switch them out, and make them my backup drives, where they should work for years, as they are only used a couple times a month.
 
If you can advise a system I have not evaluated yet, please do so. My systems solutions work because I factored many different issues into a seamless solution. In this arena, I don't [yet] see a good solution.

Good luck with your move to put the SSD in your laptop.
 
I have done that exact thing two times. In each case I put a 256GB drive in it. The OS only uses about 4GB (Ubuntu Linux), so that leaves a lot of room for other things. And it boots in about 14 seconds. actually the faster cpu one boots in 14 seconds. The slower cpu takes about 18 seconds.
 
If you have a clear idea of what you need to put on the drive, and it seems you do, then the 500GB drive seems to be the one. e.g. if you are currently using 300GB, then 500GB SSD makes sense. BUt if you are using 120GB, then a 256GB ssd makes sense.
 
I did these changes two years ago, using Samsung 830 ssds. No issues in that time.
 
My main pc, uses the Samsung 840 Pro (done two years ago). I can do a reboot (cycle down and back up) in about 25 seconds. Using Ubuntu Linux. Works great.
 
Best regards, AraiBob

Hmmm,
 
Tires are tires... rocks are rocks... square metal on one box looks like square metal on another box...
 
The problem with this logic is that ThermalTake misunderstood their buying customers / public. Normal people don't buy empty cases, they buy already built PCs, and these days are more likely to buy a laptop or a tablet. Those left who will pay bucks for an empty case, are those who believe in 'craft' and take pride in their work.
 
ThermalTake forgot that and decided to 'emulate' other companies products. The point of competition in this market is to get diverse designs and approaches. If I see a ThermalTake is like a Case Labs, which am I likely to purchase? the knockoff or the original? Answer, the original.
 
This tells me that ThermalTake is in financial trouble and decided to imitate good designs elsewhere. Perhaps they are too close to closing, and this is an attempt to keep the doors open longer. Seems a desperate effort. There was a time when ThermalTake did contribute some good ideas. It looks like that time is past. It has been years since I purchased anything made by ThermalTake. They are not on my radar, when it comes to pc parts, anymore.
 
Take the hint in that.

Let me add one more thing. Being busy is an indicator of being successful. An old saying in the IT industry. "If you have more than a three year backlog of work, hire somebody. If you have less than a year of work backlog, put out your resume."

In the computer career, such things as overtime, self-learning, bad bosses, etc are 'par for the course'. On those occasions when you have a good to great manager at a good to great company, overtime is what you do because the project is interesting (not an order). Self-Learning is a fun thing, not a punishment. and so on. It can take years to understand how things should work, as opposed to what you encounter on your first few jobs. Be prepared to leave a 'shitty' job at a moments notice. No need to be loud as you go out the door. Who knows, in 10 years you might be back at that company, and now you get to call the shots when it comes to how things are done, and how to manage.

There's been a fundamental change in the thought process of this generations programmers. I've noticed it especially on Reddit.
Years ago you would go online with a project and say "Hey guys I'm doing X with Y just to see if I can" and you would get several replies that would help working out the difficulties of said project.
 
These days if you go anywhere and state that you're attempting to say, "Make a chat client in PHP using a custom written socket of some sort" you'll get hundreds of replies saying "You're dumb, you should be doing (Best Practice X) and using (Best Language for that job Y). No one seems to care to do things for the challenge of doing them or do things just to see if it's possible.
 
We've lost that adventurous nature. If a newbie asks how to start working in PHP, Python, blah blah blah, the very first suggestions are 9 times out of 10 "USE X FRAMEWORK, LEARN THIS MVC STYLE". It drives people away and people feel less inclined to share a project they are working on because it doesn't use all the latest trends or pre-written library. When was the last time you saw a brand new, truly innovative Javascript doodad that didn't use jQuery?
 
Back in the day I saw people write NES emulators just to see if they could, you don't see that kind of thing anymore.

Isolation: As far as hobbies go, programming is, at its core, a solo activity. It's very difficult to carry on a conversation and program, unlike, say...jogging, or playing golf, or trying out craft beers. So the first problem is you are isolated from others while programming, and any interactions you have during programming will probably be minimal/theoretical. Social Reliability: The people who make the best programmers think like a computer, or at least understand how a computer thinks. Invariably these people love computers because computers don't have moods, or bad days. Computers don't say one thing and mean another. Computers are never late, or early, or forgetful. Humans are all of these things, and the more 'into' computers one gets, the less tolerant of human inefficiencies that person typically becomes. Education sucks: Despite having many programmers, most good programmers are not good teachers, and most good teachers can't understand programming. There's a shocking lack of fusion between understanding enough programming/computer architecture to explain the core ideas behind programming and why those ideas work. Case in point: It took me until I was a junior in college, that is to say, 6 semesters of classes, before they finally taught us how a CPU actually executes the instructions I programmed. It wasn't until my second semester at college that they taught us C ('Java is easier!'...please) and in doing so explained how computer virtual memory worked, what a stack and heap were, what a pointer was, etc.
To teach programming, you need to start with the components of a computer: "Here's the CPU, here's the stack, here's the heap ('the heap is made of virtual memory, which is RAM and Swap combined'), and here is, in MIPS assembly, how 'Hello World' executes based on this C code." That simple explanation would take a day, but you'd visit each subject in depth over a school semester and explain more of the subtlety behind each topic. So few teachers even think to explain the trunk of the tree before they talk about the leaves and branches that most people get turned off because they don't understand it. You have to start with the interface everyone knows: mouse, keyboard, case, and go from there.
Pay sucks: I've never actually worked at a company that treated its programmers well. "Oh, you've got 15 years of experience? Here's $50K/year and we expect you to work 60 hour weeks standard, and weekends whenever your manager commits to an unrealistic timeline." Part of that is having the balls to say 'no, I'm good at what I do, I'll work 40 and take the $50K, and my weekends are my own.', but you have to actually be really good to be able to do that. There *are* high paying programming jobs, but the vast majority pay like crap and work you to the bone. $50K sounds like a lot, and it is a good living in the midwest or other unpopulated areas. But near Chicago, Boston, most places in Cali...all the places you're likely to find programming jobs...$50K is a crap wage that means you're renting college-student level apartments. Either that, or you end up living in debt and hoping you don't get fired, which leads to the aforementioned 'having the balls...' problem where you work 60 hour weeks because your employer knows your mortgage won't allow you to leave for another company/job market.
Lack of pride: By and large, industry 'programming' is better described as 'throw shit at a wall until it sticks, wrap the wall in duct tape and ship it!' Places like NASA, where the code needs to be perfect rather than meet a deadline, are rare. Thus anyone with a personality that gets joy from doing something well get poo-ed upon because they will never have the time to do something the right way, they will only ever have the time to write some shoestring spaghetti code to make it work before it's thrown out the door and they are onto the next project. Those are just off the top of my head. Some personalities will love the pressures that come with programming for enterprise/corporate environments, but a lot of these things turn vast swaths of people off to it. I'd say education and pay are probably the two biggest problems. The social issues are a problem, but come after education and pay because...normally the person was ok with being alone years before they decided to try programming.
 
Another 'problem' is that employers badly want to believe 'a programmer is a programmer' for pay reasons, but don't want to accept that...writing applications in Java for Websphere is one type of programming, and writing the OS for a cellphone, or a video game, or anything which basically needs some C code to function, is a very different type of programming. The vast majority of the jobs for programming are 'web development' where you are writing programs for the backends of websites, or writing code that runs on the page itself. When people think about programming jobs they typically envision programming computer games, or software for mainframes/servers. The fact of the matter is...very few jobs in the latter category exist. Programming has changed, and it's very, very disheartening to people who want to program close to the hardware.

Why bother though? You will never saturate the connection with your storage hardware so it'd be a waste of money. And if you are having both in the same case I don't see why you wouldn't just build a single powerful machine.
If you want to keep things separate run virtual machines.
You could save yourself a lot of money and hassle.

I'd love to see a home nas that isn't stupidly overkill or all SSD based that can saturate a 10gb connection. IE a functional one with a realistic setup, not 40 drives in raid 0. 

If you are using and IDE, like Eclipse, you are fully supported in Linux, Ubuntu.