Hard drive management, super cheap nas?

[The Torrent]

What i have at hand: loads of random 1tb, 360gb, 250gb, etc. etc (all 2.5inch) hard drives and random old laptops.

 

What i currently do for seeding; have a big stack of hard drives on top of my computer which my liquid cooler is directly blowing warm air and and im suprised they aren't dead. I also have to shut down my entire pc every time i wanna unplug one as for some reason eject drive doesn't work for me.

 

What i wanna do - be able to download torrents from my computer, but them to get stored on hard drives located elsewhere, maybe a nas or seperate pc located in the garage or something? Does this seem possible? Or do i have to move the torrent over and manually do it over there. Now that i think about it am i discribing a seedbox which is network attached?

 

I also want some sort of more 'legit' setup which allows me to quickly hotswap hard drives,

 

and would it be possible to attach all this storage to the network extremely cheaply? Like these are 20 quid, 10 quid, 30 quid etc etc cheap drives, so i dont wanna spend a few hundred on a nas, but i do have a lot of drives in total (no specific number, lets say at least 5).

 

kinda a mess of words i apologize i basically want these hard drives gone off my pc and im wondering if i can remove the need for me moving hard drives all together by attaching them to the network.

[shoutingsteve]

The biggest hurdle here is that all the drives are different sizes.  I would recommend FreeNas, but I think that it would create a data pool capped at the size of (# of drives) x  (capacity of smallest drive).  But it is a great way to re-purpose old hardware.

 

Item 3 of the FAQ:

https://www.freenas.org/faq/

 

[The Torrent]

3 minutes ago, shoutingsteve said:

The biggest hurdle here is that all the drives are different sizes.  I would recommend FreeNas, but I think that it would create a data pool capped at the size of (# of drives) x  (capacity of smallest drive).  But it is a great way to re-purpose old hardware.

if my smallest drive is 250gb and i have lets say 5 drives, and my biggest drive is 1tb is that fine?

[Maticks]

What you require given you have a lot of different size drives is Unraid.

FreeNas is great but you need all the same size drives.

 

With Unraid you want to take your biggest drive and make it the Parity Drive if you want redundancy.

The rest of the Drives can be Data Drives of different sizes.

If you want 1 Drive Failure tolerance then add 1 Parity Drive, if you want 2 then add 2 Parity Drive the Parity Drives must be as big or bigger than the Data Drives.

 

You can now add in 28 Data Drives to this system, to get there cheaply add in LSI 9211-8i or LSI 9210-8i SATA Controllers they give you 8 additional SATA Plugs when you are out of ports on your motherboard.

You want to make sure you either buy those LSI cards as IT Mode or you will have to flash them to IT Mode, buying them that way is hassle free.

 

thats the "cheapest" way to run a NAS.

[Maticks]

I have a few disks now

[Sir Asvald]

10 hours ago, Maticks said:

I have a few disks now

 

Nice UI. Are you paying for Unraid?

[The Torrent]

11 hours ago, Maticks said:

I have a few disks now

what os is that it looks nice?

Oh its called unraid. damn thats expensive

[Maticks]

wow its gone up in price.. yeah i bought it when it was $59 for unlimited. $129 now.

 

With the trial you can run it on a system and reboot it as much as you want for 30 days. the license key only checks when its starting the array.

After the license expires if you reboot the system you can extend the license one last time for 30 days and reboot it.

 

I did have unraid on a testing server for 6 months on a trial key. when i rebooted it due to a power outage i could extend it one last time.

Should be more than long enough to test out what you want. but what i love about unraid is the fact the data is stored as standard xfs.

So if i took a data disk out or all my data disks out and plugged them into a linux box i could mount them.

 

You still get the parity protection as well, you don't get the speed of a raid5 or 10 system but you do get the fact if you do something stupid and lost more than 2 disks you don't loose all your data.

[The Torrent]

1 hour ago, Maticks said:

wow its gone up in price.. yeah i bought it when it was $59 for unlimited. $129 now.

 

With the trial you can run it on a system and reboot it as much as you want for 30 days. the license key only checks when its starting the array.

After the license expires if you reboot the system you can extend the license one last time for 30 days and reboot it.

 

I did have unraid on a testing server for 6 months on a trial key. when i rebooted it due to a power outage i could extend it one last time.

Should be more than long enough to test out what you want. but what i love about unraid is the fact the data is stored as standard xfs.

So if i took a data disk out or all my data disks out and plugged them into a linux box i could mount them.

 

You still get the parity protection as well, you don't get the speed of a raid5 or 10 system but you do get the fact if you do something stupid and lost more than 2 disks you don't loose all your data.

i dont know what u mean by reboot - i can do this forever or only once?

 

Also i joined homelab discord and seems speaking of unraid is banned there...... they all seem to reaaly hate it.

[Maticks]

while the license is in trial you can reboot it as much as you want. when the trail expires you cannot reboot the system without getting a message saying trial expired and it won't let you start the array.

you can click an extend trial button get an additional 30 days and then the trial expires again. but that being said if you never reboot the box the trial keeps kicking along.

 

At some point if you reboot you will need to buy a key for your USB. But the license is tied to the USB not the system it's running on.

[The Torrent]

Just now, Maticks said:

while the license is in trial you can reboot it as much as you want. when the trail expires you cannot reboot the system without getting a message saying trial expired and it won't let you start the array.

you can click an extend trial button get an additional 30 days and then the trial expires again. but that being said if you never reboot the box the trial keeps kicking along.

 

At some point if you reboot you will need to buy a key for your USB. But the license is tied to the USB not the system it's running on.

oh your saying you can extend the trail for just 30 days so its 60 days but not longer than that?

or are you saying if you dont turn off the box the trail will go on forever once you extend the trial?

 

Also just wondering, i was thinking of making a virtual machine just to test out how i would run my server, if i wanted to mount it in a virtual machine is that possible to do? And what would the implications of the trial be if i did this.

 

i might give it a try on the trial, but unraid is heavily hated by everyone in homelab discord so i dont think i would get much help with it.

[Maticks]

here is my dev system. 382days up and still going.

[Maverickfftytwo]

On 2/1/2021 at 8:17 AM, The Torrent said:

what os is that it looks nice?

Oh its called unraid. damn thats expensive

Is it expensive? Even if you bought the $130 top tier OS it's going to pale in comparison to the cost of the hardware. When I'm done populating my basic desktop based unraid server with drives it will have cost me about $2600 total, and that is with using some "free" hardware left over after upgrading my gaming rig. I don't need a ton of cores or RAM to run VM's or dockers, I just need storage space. It would easily be over $3000 if I needed new hardware with lots of cores and RAM.

 

And realistically, if I wanted to bite the bullet and buy all of my drives right now I would be in the perfect situation to one of the free solutions as all of my drives would be the same size. In your case, with such a variety of drive sizes, unraids ability to "mix and match" drives should be quite the value as it would prevent a lot of hassle for you and it seems you've already saved quite a bit by being able to repurpose those drives instead of buying all new matching drives.

[The Torrent]

On 2/3/2021 at 6:21 PM, Maverickfftytwo said:

Is it expensive? Even if you bought the $130 top tier OS it's going to pale in comparison to the cost of the hardware. When I'm done populating my basic desktop based unraid server with drives it will have cost me about $2600 total, and that is with using some "free" hardware left over after upgrading my gaming rig. I don't need a ton of cores or RAM to run VM's or dockers, I just need storage space. It would easily be over $3000 if I needed new hardware with lots of cores and RAM.

 

And realistically, if I wanted to bite the bullet and buy all of my drives right now I would be in the perfect situation to one of the free solutions as all of my drives would be the same size. In your case, with such a variety of drive sizes, unraids ability to "mix and match" drives should be quite the value as it would prevent a lot of hassle for you and it seems you've already saved quite a bit by being able to repurpose those drives instead of buying all new matching drives.

your spending 2600 on an unraid server? everyone apparently really really hates unraid so ive been told to avoid it.

[Maverickfftytwo]

On 2/4/2021 at 12:55 PM, The Torrent said:

your spending 2600 on an unraid server? everyone apparently really really hates unraid so ive been told to avoid it.

The primary cost is in drives.

 

I repurposed a AsRock H77 PRO4/MVP motherboard, i5-3570, and 16GB of G.Skill DDR3 1600Mhz from a rig that I replaced. Picked up a Antec P101 Silent for $90, bought a new PSU for $127, picked up a LSI 9207-8i HBA for $60, got two breakout cables for the HBA for $26, bought a Sandisk Cruzer Fit thumbdrive for $9. So $312 for the hardware. If I build a second one as a backup I'll use one of those AsRock motherboards with the Celeron CPU built in. Those are $70-80 plus another $20-30 for DDR4 RAM (which I actually have some spare...) so even if I didn't have a motherboard/CPU/RAM combo sitting around it would only be like $400-450ish. Remember, I'm not running VM's or dockers so I don't need beefy hardware. The case has eight 3.5" bays, and I've started populating those by buying 10TB hard drives which are about $250 a piece (if you can catch a sale) so after I get all eight that will be $2000 for the drives. I want to add two SSD's as a cache drives as well, so that will push it towards $2200ish. Unraid license is $59 to $129.

 

Now in your case you have drives already, so it really boils down to if you also already have hardware or if you want to try and acquire hardware cheap. For reference, you could buy a Mediasonic ProBox 8 Bay 3.5" SATA External Hard Drive Enclosure for around $270 and that would be a DAS, or for the same kind of capacity you could pick up a 8 bay Synology NAS for around $800 but with your drives being all different sized you're going to lose capacity even with Synology Hybrid Raid. This is why I went with Unraid and PC based hardware. Price wise it's comparable, the hardware is replaceable and upgradeable, it doesn't need to be directly connected to my workstation taking up desk space like a DAS, and most importantly I can "add drives as needed" without any issues. I can literally set it up out of the way, let it run, and just keep shoving data onto it until I need more space. Then I just order another HDD, put it in, and keep going. The HDD doesn't even have to be any particular size because if I buy a bigger drive than my parity drive I can just make the new drive a parity drive and then convert the old parity drive to a data drive. IIRC, those full size Dell Optiplex's had a decent amount of drive bays. You can get those pretty cheap, add in a Unraid license, and boom you'll have your issue solved likely for less than the cost of that DAS.

[Jarsky]

On 2/5/2021 at 7:55 AM, The Torrent said:

your spending 2600 on an unraid server? everyone apparently really really hates unraid so ive been told to avoid it.

Not sure who 'everyone' is, but for the most part UnRAID is pretty decent. Can see mine in my signature. 

I think people just get a bit sore over how "simple" it is for most people to use, because you don't have to be a tech wizard to manage it via shell/ssh. 

It does have some shortfalls but overall it works pretty well.