nas need some directions with my first NAS

[Parsivan]

Hello everyone

This is my first time building a homeserver.

I'm building a server with i9900k and Asus z390-f motherboard(bought them second hand for 250$).corsaircx600 600w 80+ bronze PSU.

 

This Nas is mainly for family use. We already have 1TB of memories(picture and videos). And I want stability and redundancy more than speed.

Have decided to go with TrueNas scale as I want to run Minecraft server(also I'm more used to Debian). And maybe some apps in docker.

My problems are:

1. I don't know which HDDs to buy.(was gonna go with 2 ironwolf 8TB) but it doesn't sound right.

2. Should I go for a second hand case for this? And what should I be looking for.

3. Also just want to make sure if going TrueNas scale is a good choice?

 

 

Also is there anything I should keep in mind building the server?

 

I would appreciate getting some advice...

 

 

 

 

[mMontana]

2 minutes ago, Parsivan said:

Also is there anything I should keep in mind building the server?

Buy efficient and long-warranty PSU.

[Parsivan]

5 hours ago, mMontana said:

Buy efficient and long-warranty PSU.

I have recieved a corsair cx600 which is 600w 80+ bronze. I don't have the budget for a new psu so i will upgrade it the moment i have the money. In the moment i will try to under volt the cpu and try to minimize the power us. Also how much does it actually matter for the efficieny of the PSU?

[MG2R]

Hard drives: only thing that really matters is that you do not buy shingled drives (SMR technology).
 

They have subpar write performance. 
 

case: whatever suits your fancy. 
 

Other hardware: your components are overpowered for simple NAS use so no worries there.

 

I’d indeed prefer TrueNAS Scale over Core, mostly because I’m more comfortable with Linux over BSD. The underlying technologies of Scale are more in line with general-purpose server software you might see in a datacenter. For BSD, that’s typically less so.

 

for a simple NAS you can always go Windows as well, assuming you know that already. 

[Parsivan]

5 hours ago, MG2R said:

Hard drives: only thing that really matters is that you do not buy shingled drives (SMR technology).
 

 

Thanks for your long response It is reassuring

For the HDDs is there a better or worse setup for redundancy/size ; like would there be a difference in going for 2*8TB or if I go for 3*4TB or other combinations?

[MG2R]

I had a huge post typed up on my phone detailing all considerations you should make when looking at drive layout. Ready to press send. Somehow triggered a back action causing me to lose the entire post. That’s half an hour of my life I’ll never get back. 
 

Bottom line was: I think I would personally go for a 3 drive RAIDZ1 vdev (assuming ZFS) in a zpool. Gives you the option to expand to a second three drive vdev in the future with the sata ports on your board.

 

@LIGISTX might have good ideas about this as well.  

[LIGISTX]

8 hours ago, MG2R said:

I had a huge post typed up on my phone detailing all considerations you should make when looking at drive layout. Ready to press send. Somehow triggered a back action causing me to lose the entire post. That’s half an hour of my life I’ll never get back. 
 

Bottom line was: I think I would personally go for a 3 drive RAIDZ1 vdev (assuming ZFS) in a zpool. Gives you the option to expand to a second three drive vdev in the future with the sata ports on your board.

 

@LIGISTX might have good ideas about this as well.  

Oof, thats really shitty.

 

OP, it really depends on what file system you intend to use, and how much space you think you need...

 

Look into the pros and cons of ZFS. Its amazing, but its hard (costly) to add more drives since each vdev you add needs its own redundancy. This is why I built a 10x4TB array back in 2015.... its still only 53% full. You can add storage either by adding new vdevs, or by swapping each drive out 1 at a time with larger ones until they are all the larger size, at which point you will gain the new size as usable.

 

Truenas is great, and ZFS is the reason why, but it has drawbacks.

 

That said, in the next... hopefully 16-18 months, you WILL be able to add single drives to existing RAID Z vdevs. This is currently in beta, but itll be mainlined into ZFS hopefully in the next year, and then ~6- months after it would likely show up in truenas SCALE. That said, don't build a system 100% counting on this, as its not a current feature. But if you build a Z2 array for instance, its possible in the next 2 years-ish, you would be able to add more drives to it one at a time and let it rebuild the redundancy accordingly. 

[Parsivan]

15 hours ago, MG2R said:

Ready to press send. Somehow triggered a back action causing me to lose the entire post. That’s half an hour of my life I’ll never get back.

it's unbelievable but the the same happened to me trying to reply to this post 2 times now. i will not mentally recover from this.

 

15 hours ago, MG2R said:

Bottom line was: I think I would personally go for a 3 drive RAIDZ1 vdev (assuming ZFS) in a zpool. Gives you the option to expand to a second three drive vdev in the future with the sata ports on your board.

I don't really think i would need that much space so it doesn't seem cost effective to me to add 3 drives at the same time. 

I will most likely go  RAIDZ2 as well for higher redundancy.

6 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

10x4TB array back in 2015.... its still only 53% full.

my budget doesn't allow me to get that many drives. but that sounds awsome.

 

6 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

hopefully 16-18 months, you WILL be able to add single drives to existing RAID Z vdevs.

Yes, i have heard that it has been in development for a very very long time.

 

6 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

But if you build a Z2 array for instance, its possible in the next 2 years-ish, you would be able to add more drives to it one at a time and let it rebuild the redundancy accordingly. 

I will probably go with 3*8TB drives in RAIDZ2 (8tb should be enough space for 2 years) ...Then i just wait for this to get added to TrueNas scale stable in 2~3 years.

 

15 hours ago, MG2R said:

Gives you the option to expand to a second three drive vdev in the future with the Sata ports on your board.

I'm not going to be using that much space and i also want to buy high-capacity drives like 8TB (12 and 16 is also too expensive)

I have only 6 Sata ports and don't want to buy PCIe cards for more Sata atm.

so, adding more vdevs is not cost effective for me.

6 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

or by swapping each drive out 1 at a time with larger ones until they are all the larger size, at which point you will gain the new size as usable.

That does sound nice but i just want to get this over with. buy, setup and forget kind of thing.

 

I think this should do the job...I've been thinking day and night about the setup I'll double check as well.

now the only thing i need is to get 120GB m.2 SSD for the OS. I will not leave my fate to the hands of a USB stick. might buy 2 for mirror.

 

Do you guys approve?!let me hear your ideas so i can mark it as resolved 

Thank you very much for putting time to reply to this post  

[LIGISTX]

6 hours ago, Parsivan said:

it's unbelievable but the the same happened to me trying to reply to this post 2 times now. i will not mentally recover from this.

 

I don't really think i would need that much space so it doesn't seem cost effective to me to add 3 drives at the same time. 

I will most likely go  RAIDZ2 as well for higher redundancy.

my budget doesn't allow me to get that many drives. but that sounds awsome.

 

Yes, i have heard that it has been in development for a very very long time.

 

I will probably go with 3*8TB drives in RAIDZ2 (8tb should be enough space for 2 years) ...Then i just wait for this to get added to TrueNas scale stable in 2~3 years.

 

I'm not going to be using that much space and i also want to buy high-capacity drives like 8TB (12 and 16 is also too expensive)

I have only 6 Sata ports and don't want to buy PCIe cards for more Sata atm.

so, adding more vdevs is not cost effective for me.

That does sound nice but i just want to get this over with. buy, setup and forget kind of thing.

 

I think this should do the job...I've been thinking day and night about the setup I'll double check as well.

now the only thing i need is to get 120GB m.2 SSD for the OS. I will not leave my fate to the hands of a USB stick. might buy 2 for mirror.

 

Do you guys approve?!let me hear your ideas so i can mark it as resolved 

Thank you very much for putting time to reply to this post  

You probably don’t need Z2 for only 3 drives. Most arrays operate with between 20 and 50% redundancy… not 200% redundancy. A 2 drive mirror would be fine, but… I don’t think the new adding of drives feature would be brought to mirrored arrays, only RAIDZ arrays.

 

So if you want to take a gamble that the feature will actually come to ZFS, Z2 is a good bet. But, that feature may never come to exist, so just know that going in. 

[Parsivan]

2 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

You probably don’t need Z2 for only 3 drives. Most arrays operate with between 20 and 50% redundancy… not 200% redundancy. A 2 drive mirror would be fine, but… I don’t think the new adding of drives feature would be brought to mirrored arrays, only RAIDZ arrays.

 

So if you want to take a gamble that the feature will actually come to ZFS, Z2 is a good bet. But, that feature may never come to exist, so just know that going in. 

sorry if i'm dragging this too far...

To be honest after watching some videos about zfs, I'm still not sure how it works! so i don't understand how that would be too much redundancy XD. is that setup inefficient because i have a few drives?

would you say it's better if i just go with RAIDZ 1 and then if for some reason needed that feature i should make a new pool with RAIDZ2 and just transfer the data?

 

Maybe I'm overthinking this

[LIGISTX]

4 minutes ago, Parsivan said:

sorry if i'm dragging this too far...

To be honest after watching some videos about zfs, I'm still not sure how it works! so i don't understand how that would be too much redundancy XD. is that setup inefficient because i have a few drives?

would you say it's better if i just go with RAIDZ 1 and then if for some reason needed that feature i should make a new pool with RAIDZ2 and just transfer the data?

 

Maybe I'm overthinking this

There is no such thing as to much redundancy, I am simply suggesting you would have to have a really unfortunate situation where a mirrored array failed (as in, just two drives, each a mirror or each other).

 

RAIDZ2 with only 3 drives is very expensive per GB of usable capacity, since you’re paying 3x the cost of each usable GB. My array being 10 drives with 2 drives of redundancy means I paid 1.2x the price. There is nothing inherently wrong with your plan, it’s just very expensive for not much usable space. Think about it this way, if you spend 150 per drive, you will get 8TB for the price of 450 bucks. If you spend 600 bucks, you will literally double your capacity to 16TB… or if you spend “just” 300 more (which is only 66% more money), you would 3x your capacity. 
 

But, if you want to buy just three drives now, set up Z2, and hope the new ZFS feature to add drives does actually happen, then it’s not a bad idea. But, if that never happens, then it was probably a pretty bad idea. 
 

It’s a bit of a gamble you are taking, but buying more drives now is a better long term financially good option, since you can spend 66% more money and get 300% the space for instance. 

[Parsivan]

20 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

There is no such thing as to much redundancy, I am simply suggesting you would have to have a really unfortunate situation where a mirrored array failed (as in, just two drives, each a mirror or each other).

 

RAIDZ2 with only 3 drives is very expensive per GB of usable capacity, since you’re paying 3x the cost of each usable GB. My array being 10 drives with 2 drives of redundancy means I paid 1.2x the price. There is nothing inherently wrong with your plan, it’s just very expensive for not much usable space. Think about it this way, if you spend 150 per drive, you will get 8TB for the price of 450 bucks. If you spend 600 bucks, you will literally double your capacity to 16TB… or if you spend “just” 300 more (which is only 66% more money), you would 3x your capacity. 
 

But, if you want to buy just three drives now, set up Z2, and hope the new ZFS feature to add drives does actually happen, then it’s not a bad idea. But, if that never happens, then it was probably a pretty bad idea. 
 

It’s a bit of a gamble you are taking, but buying more drives now is a better long term financially good option, since you can spend 66% more money and get 300% the space for instance. 

Basiclly the cost per GB drops with more drives i buy initially... i understand now. thank you for your time sir.

I will mark this as resolved.  will decide the rest on my own.

 

People in this forum are so nice great guidance

[sky99]

On 8/23/2023 at 6:27 PM, Parsivan said:

sorry if i'm dragging this too far...

To be honest after watching some videos about zfs, I'm still not sure how it works! so i don't understand how that would be too much redundancy XD. is that setup inefficient because i have a few drives?

would you say it's better if i just go with RAIDZ 1 and then if for some reason needed that feature i should make a new pool with RAIDZ2 and just transfer the data?

 

Maybe I'm overthinking this

If you don't want to make things complicated, my advice would be to just go with mirroring. It will copy your data to both drives. So if one dies, the other is still there.

ZFS is awesome and super powerful. Also trueNAS is top notch, super stable, and i'd say the best reliability you can get for a home nas.

 

If you make a raidZ-1 for instance, with 3 drives, 2 will be used to store your stuff, and the third for parity. If any of the 3 die, you can pop a new drive, and reconstruct the missing data.

 

RaidZ-2 is the same, but you set 2 drives aside for parity. It is better if you have 5-6 drives.

 

So if you have only ONE drive, you can still use ZFS. But if your drive dies, data is dead.

if you have 2 drives, you can use mirroring, and have a full backup if any of the 2 drives die.

 

if you have 3-4 drives, raidZ1 is good.

 

Then from 5-6 drives onwards it is recommended to use raidZ2.

 

If i recall correctly there is also raidZ3, but it is not very used because it is often recommended to build a second array if you have too many disks, and raidZ3 uses 3 disks for parity. If you need raidZ3, you probably have the funds for it.

 

 

A few notes:

-Your data will be in a ZFS array. That means that you can't just pop the drive out and put it in a USB case to read it from your laptop.

Even with a simple drive, it probably won't be as straightforward.

-if you need to be able to do this, you can try openMediaVault and ext4 filesystem. It will work on any linux distro if you need to read your data if the server died, but not the drives.

-raid is not a backup. The best practice for backups is to have 3 copies of the data that really matters to you, one of witch is offsite. If you can't offsite, you can have one offline on an external drive that you sync from times to times. It protects against a power surge, lightning hitting the house, ransomware, but not house fire.

-you can have another truenas machine somewhere replicating the data from your main nas. It does not need to be powerful. A mini itx machine with whatever onboard CPU, a stick of ram, a basic ssd/hdd for system and a large disk for storage will suffice. I have such a backup node that runs on less than 15W.

you can get the hardware to make such a NAS for cheap too.

-if your data isn't critical (like movies you share in the house, and can get if lost), you can relax your data protection policies. Like if you just store a plex library that you don't care too much about, you can just buy one big HDD, and have it running. When, down the road you get some income that you can spend on this, buy a second one, and have data redundency if you feel the need.

-if going for price, big drives are often superior to small ones. For instance, i can most often get a quality 16TB drive for less than the price of 2 8TB of similar quality.

Small drives (<10TB) are becoming less and less interesting in price per TB.

-You can buy quality hard drives for not that much, look for ultrastar disks for instance, they are very well rated by the homelab community (pay attention to buy a sata version, rather than a SAS one)

-depending on your data volume, SSDs are an option too. More expensive than HDD, but getting there. You can source 4TB SSDs (NVME or SATA) for 170$. (crucial P1 on amazon as an example). SSDs will be orders of magnitude faster in some tasks, and considerably faster in all tasks. Also if the server falls, the SSD won't die, whereas a HDD will likely die.

-if on a very tight budget, you can use open media vault on a raspbery pi with repurposed laptop hard drives (i have a pile of them, seeing how i replace all the drives with ssds)

-you could even use the pi box to backup some of your most important files, like family photos, or whatever.

-A NAS can also run containers/apps, with truenas you will be able to add servers to your house in a few clicks, so beware, you are entering in the homelab realm, and in 3 years, you'll want to set a virtualization cluster with CEPHS and all the cool stuff

 

Cheers!

 

[Parsivan]

On 8/26/2023 at 8:28 AM, sky99 said:

So if you have only ONE drive, you can still use ZFS. But if your drive dies, data is dead.

if you have 2 drives, you can use mirroring, and have a full backup if any of the 2 drives die.

 

if you have 3-4 drives, raidZ1 is good.

 

Then from 5-6 drives onwards it is recommended to use raidZ2.

firstly, thank you for the long response.

i know the theory of HDD configuration. But i want the redundancy of the raidz2. So i can't decide if what i am doing is right or wrong?!

 

 

[LIGISTX]

10 minutes ago, Parsivan said:

firstly, thank you for the long response.

i know the theory of HDD configuration. But i want the redundancy of the raidz2. So i can't decide if what i am doing is right or wrong?!

 

 

There is no right or wrong. It’s all just statistics.

 

The more drives you have, the more chance one will fail. The more chance one will fail, the more chance one will fail exactly when you really need it to not fail (during a resilver of the array). 
 

Also, the larger the drive, the longer resilvers take, putting you at an increased length of time being vulnerable to data loss during a resilver. So it really all comes down to statistics and personal need for uptime. 
 

Remember, RAID is not a backup, it’s a high availability mechanism. Something like a power surge, flood, fire, PSU failure, etc can take your entire sever out, and the amount of redundancy won’t matter at all. This is why you need to have backups not physically close to your server, preferably a cloud provider where data is distributed all over the world. If your data is as critical to you as you make it seem, the money would be better spent in a monthly backblaze subscription then a 3 drive array in Z2. Backblaze B2 is what you would need to use for a NAS to backup to, it’s not super cheap, I think I pay 22 bucks a month for the ~4TB of data I have stored there, but it’s one of the most affordable options of its kind. 

[Parsivan]

On 8/29/2023 at 4:29 PM, LIGISTX said:

There is no right or wrong. It’s all just statistics.

At this point, I will go with what I think I need and learn along the way. I will be buying four 4TB drives when I get my salary and a 500GB NVMe SSD for the server.

 

I can't wait until I set up an OpenVPN for my family in Iran

I actually tried to get more help from other forums... No one replied

 

Mad respect sir

 

 

 

[MG2R]

On 8/30/2023 at 11:04 PM, Parsivan said:

OpenVPN

Do yourself a favour and set up wireguard. Dead simple to set up while also being very high performance. It’s built into the Linux kernel and there’s user land implementations on basically any platform. 

[Parsivan]

6 hours ago, MG2R said:

Do yourself a favour and set up wireguard. Dead simple to set up while also being very high performance. It’s built into the Linux kernel and there’s user land implementations on basically any platform. 

OK thanks, I will definitely have a look at it. I had OpenVPN in mind because of easy of use for the user. Not all my family members are good with tech.

[LIGISTX]

6 minutes ago, Parsivan said:

OK thanks, I will definitely have a look at it. I had OpenVPN in mind because of easy of use for the user. Not all my family members are good with tech.

Wire guard is way easier for everyone. It’s fantastic.