Replacing my Rasberry Pi 4 Cloud setup

[ihasamoose]

Hey guys,

 

I've been running NextCloud off of my Pi, but it's running on a USB3 to SSD connector and it fails sometimes.. not good for data. So, I picked up an old PC, 4690k, 16g ram, I have a 2TB WD black HDD and a 256GB 850 EVO SSD, with a 780ti in there (but I think I mine as well take it out if I use it if I'm just remoting in?)

 

I'm looking to transfer my cloud network of my household off the Nextcloud environment onto this PC. Doesn't have to remain Nextcloud.

 

Is FreeNAS the best option for me here?

Perhaps I should try Linux again for this?

 

This is for documents/cloud syncing services only. Maybe some temporary storage for media, but no encoding or anything like that.

 

I was also wondering about SSD caching. Would a hybrid LVMcache be ideal in this scenario?

 

I've used Linux somewhat over the years, no means fluent but I can google everything and find out what I need once I have my foot aimed in the right direction.

 

All advice appreciated.

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, ihasamoose said:

 

I was also wondering about SSD caching. Would a hybrid LVMcache be ideal in this scenario?

Your on 1gbe right? I wouldn't bother.

 

How about proxmox? Then you can easily make containers and vms.

[ihasamoose]

11 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Your on 1gbe right? I wouldn't bother.

 

How about proxmox? Then you can easily make containers and vms.

I am indeed 1gbe.

 

Just reading up on them. Mentions you can't have the OS and storage on the same disk, so I guess I'd need to buy a small SSD if I wanted to use the remaining 240...gb of my SSD as storage vs. my HDD (It's in my bedroom, so I want it quiet.)

 

For this kind of setup I'm thinking I may want to do a RAID1 setup with the SSD/HDD, is this something advisable to minimize risk of data loss?

 

My understanding is that Proxmox is a host, I can host a Linux container with my previous NextCloud installation in that container, and a VM for all other long-term storage that isn't so volatile?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, ihasamoose said:

Just reading up on them. Mentions you can't have the OS and storage on the same disk,

Yes you can in proxmox, where does it say that.

 

1 minute ago, ihasamoose said:

For this kind of setup I'm thinking I may want to do a RAID1 setup with the SSD/HDD, is this something advisable to minimize risk of data loss?

have backups, raid won't help you here.

 

1 minute ago, ihasamoose said:

My understanding is that Proxmox is a host, I can host a Linux container with my previous NextCloud installation in that container, and a VM for all other long-term storage that isn't so volatile?

Yep you can do that.

[Kisai]

21 minutes ago, ihasamoose said:

Hey guys,

 

I've been running NextCloud off of my Pi, but it's running on a USB3 to SSD connector and it fails sometimes.. not good for data. So, I picked up an old PC, 4690k, 16g ram, I have a 2TB WD black HDD and a 256GB 850 EVO SSD, with a 780ti in there (but I think I mine as well take it out if I use it if I'm just remoting in?)

 

I'm looking to transfer my cloud network of my household off the Nextcloud environment onto this PC. Doesn't have to remain Nextcloud.

 

Is FreeNAS the best option for me here?

Perhaps I should try Linux again for this?

 

 

USB3 to SSD, oh nothing good is going to come out of that. I have a SATA SSD inside a USB3 chassis at the office and the old one randomly stops working (the USB connector is flexing the board), the newer one, which has a bumper on it has randomly disappeared from Windows if it read transferred too fast (yeah, strange) leading me to believe that the USB3-SATA devices are all rubbish for SSD use.

 

Anyway, FreeNAS is probably what you want if you want a NAS and nothing locked down. However it's primarily a FreeBSD-based OS tuned for NAS work, thus it's typically better to install onto Xeon-class hardware if you intend to use it as a NAS. 

 

The Nextcloud Home/SME server, is probably the logical thing to migrate to if you'd rather stick with NextCloud. It's an Ubuntu system and runs NextCloud as a VM if I'm reading the spec page right. It however is not a Xeon system it's a Intel NUC i3 8109U, so it's less of a NAS since you can't really store much on it, and less reliable than the FreeNAS.

 

Now here's the BUT.

 

Both systems are effectively off-the-shelf hardware, and if you really wanted to you can install freeNAS or Ubuntu on any commodity Intel-based CPU system, so if you have something hanging around you can just straight up try both, or run both on the same system (eg FreeNAS installed, but NextCloud VM in a VM), I'm not sure if that's something that people would actually need, but that's an option. Most of FreeNAS's reliability comes from the native ZFS, which is something Linux does not have and does not support.

 

[ihasamoose]

15 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yes you can in proxmox, where does it say that.

 

have backups, raid won't help you here.

 

Yep you can do that.

I was looking at a dated post. My apologies.

9 minutes ago, Kisai said:

USB3 to SSD, oh nothing good is going to come out of that. I have a SATA SSD inside a USB3 chassis at the office and the old one randomly stops working (the USB connector is flexing the board), the newer one, which has a bumper on it has randomly disappeared from Windows if it read transferred too fast (yeah, strange) leading me to believe that the USB3-SATA devices are all rubbish for SSD use.

 

Anyway, FreeNAS is probably what you want if you want a NAS and nothing locked down. However it's primarily a FreeBSD-based OS tuned for NAS work, thus it's typically better to install onto Xeon-class hardware if you intend to use it as a NAS. 

 

The Nextcloud Home/SME server, is probably the logical thing to migrate to if you'd rather stick with NextCloud. It's an Ubuntu system and runs NextCloud as a VM if I'm reading the spec page right. It however is not a Xeon system it's a Intel NUC i3 8109U, so it's less of a NAS since you can't really store much on it, and less reliable than the FreeNAS.

 

Now here's the BUT.

 

Both systems are effectively off-the-shelf hardware, and if you really wanted to you can install freeNAS or Ubuntu on any commodity Intel-based CPU system, so if you have something hanging around you can just straight up try both, or run both on the same system (eg FreeNAS installed, but NextCloud VM in a VM), I'm not sure if that's something that people would actually need, but that's an option. Most of FreeNAS's reliability comes from the native ZFS, which is something Linux does not have and does not support.

 

That's interesting with the VM instances of nextcloud, but they're preconfigured volumes, I think I'd rather do it myself and gain a little more tech knowledge anyways to test out.

 

I'll try FreeNAS out too just to see how it works, I guess, experimenting will be the best solution. Thanks!

[Dutch_Master]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

(...) Most of FreeNAS's reliability comes from the native ZFS, which is something Linux does not have and does not support.

I beg to differ here. ZFS on Linux is fairly mature and usually reliable. As ZFS originates from the Unix world (Solaris, later also incorporated into various BSD's) I agree it's not native to Linux. Should one have reservations on using ZFS on Linux, there's always BTRFS, which is a native Linux equivalent. Perhaps not (yet!) as feature-rich as ZFS, but for most use cases quite usable anyway. I haven't used either FS myself, so can't tell you about performance, Google is your friend here.

 

On the system the OP mentioned: there's something to be said for physically separating the OS and stored data on separate disks to minimise impact of OS disk failure. I do so on my systems as well, for years in fact. In this particular case, re-use the 256GB Samsung SSD as your OS disk, but obtain 2 (or more) server-grade spinning-disk drives (WD Red, Iron Wolf or Toshiba X300 series are good candidates as these are designed for 24/7 use) for storage in a RAID1 or, when you have more then 2 disks, a RAID5 or even RAID6. As alluded to before, RAID does not equate to backup, so perhaps re-use the USB-to-SATA link for a backup solution. This doesn't need to be powered on all the time, only when you actually perform a backup to another large HDD. That drive doesn't need to be server-grade, which saves considerably on cost. For running VM's, investigate Docker too.