Completed 62 TB FlexRAID Media Server

[jde3]

@Mikensan

 

I made a couple posts about that ECC "requirement" recently.

 

Also suggested NAS4Free in there and... you know you *can* freely extend ZFS.. You can do stripe to backup model.. where you can just chuck new disks at it. I also took a look at the ZFS reflow feature status. FreeBSD foundation says "This project is in progress with a target completion date for the Fall of 2018." - so.. maybe FreeBSD 12 or 12.1'ish (or 13 head).. they know how it's going to work and the design is done.. just not the code.

[AshleyAshes]

10 hours ago, jde3 said:

@Mikensan

 

I made a couple posts about that ECC "requirement" recently.

 

Also suggested NAS4Free in there and... you know you *can* freely extend ZFS.. You can do stripe to backup model.. where you can just chuck new disks at it. I also took a look at the ZFS reflow feature status. FreeBSD foundation says "This project is in progress with a target completion date for the Fall of 2018." - so.. maybe FreeBSD 12 or 12.1'ish (or 13 head).. they know how it's going to work and the design is done.. just not the code.

Yeah, also I really do think that a lot of people go overboard with MEDIA storage.  In most home situations you're media is PAINFULLY idle except when being initially written or occasionally read.  My media files have for sure been ready for the purposes of updating or rebuilding parity than for actual playback and that's just kinda the nature of FlexRAID.  For other solutions your data really is super stagnant so EEC considerations don't need to be a priority.

 

What fascinates me is how people scream about ECC memory even for home storage servers but MOST people's 'home storage' is being done on their boring old desktop or laptop which has no ECC.  Working on your doctoral thesis for university? You're lucky if half the people doing that are just doing proper backups in case they lose their laptop on the train before they finished it, they sure aren't using ECC.

[dalekphalm]

19 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Yeah, also I really do think that a lot of people go overboard with MEDIA storage.  In most home situations you're media is PAINFULLY idle except when being initially written or occasionally read.  My media files have for sure been ready for the purposes of updating or rebuilding parity than for actual playback and that's just kinda the nature of FlexRAID.  For other solutions your data really is super stagnant so EEC considerations don't need to be a priority.

 

What fascinates me is how people scream about ECC memory even for home storage servers but MOST people's 'home storage' is being done on their boring old desktop or laptop which has no ECC.  Working on your doctoral thesis for university? You're lucky if half the people doing that are just doing proper backups in case they lose their laptop on the train before they finished it, they sure aren't using ECC.

Yeah - for a business where data integrity is more valuable then your multi-tens of thousands of dollars servers, yeah - ECC is a no brainer with your production servers.

 

But at home? If you can afford it? Yeah go for it. If you can't? Not that big of a deal. Odds are your data will be fine. Memory errors are very rare these days.

[dalekphalm]

13 hours ago, jde3 said:

@Mikensan

 

I made a couple posts about that ECC "requirement" recently.

 

Also suggested NAS4Free in there and... you know you *can* freely extend ZFS.. You can do stripe to backup model.. where you can just chuck new disks at it. I also took a look at the ZFS reflow feature status. FreeBSD foundation says "This project is in progress with a target completion date for the Fall of 2018." - so.. maybe FreeBSD 12 or 12.1'ish (or 13 head).. they know how it's going to work and the design is done.. just not the code.

Hey do you have a source I can read up on for ZFS getting expandability in "Fall of 2018"? I'd like to check it out.

[tikker]

This FlexRAID thing looks very interesting for my needs. So it just runs on any existing OS (e.g. Ubuntu)? If so, is it a problem if I let the server go to sleep (WoL enabled) when not in use? It's not used that often.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

I just found this gem. Took me a while to realize I was reading almost 2-year old posts, but I'm glad the updates resurfaced it. This is the kind of stuff I come to a PC forum for  

[jde3]

2 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Hey do you have a source I can read up on for ZFS getting expandability in "Fall of 2018"? I'd like to check it out.

Matt was one of the co-creators of it at Sun. He's kinda become the head figure for OpenZFS. As Jeff (who's kinda a rockstar) has gone off to work on super secret projects.

 

https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/project/development-of-the-raid-z-expansion-feature-for-zfs/

[AshleyAshes]

5 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

I just found this gem. Took me a while to realize I was reading almost 2-year old posts, but I'm glad the updates resurfaced it. This is the kind of stuff I come to a PC forum for  

Yeah though it's been a dull thread for a while but I post updates.  It'll probs be more interesting when I have to use the 5..25" bays and what solution I use to most efficently use 3.5" drives in 5.25" bays.  I'm hoping to fit 4 drives across the 3x5.25"bay area but that will be yet to seen.  I have one more standard 3.5" bay to use first.  Obviously while I've done SOME ugprades there is a long term goal to make a server that can run years and years without a huge overall.  The seperate OS/Download/Temp drive is the biggest change it'll see in some time.