4-bay USB4 enclosure is $60. It’ll do fine.
Comment on I want to build a Mini ITX PC for my home server, where do I start?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week agoMain issue is drives. If your data is modest, multiple NVMe drives could be affordable, but if you have lots of data, you’ll want HDDs, and those won’t fit. Make sure you actually want a miniPC down the line before buying.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 week ago
cmeu@lemmy.world 1 week ago
This all day. USB3 has plenty of bandwidth to keep those spinners busy, and a cheap pc can be bought for under $200 that would handle all the services op described, plus more.
I bought an n150 with 12gb RAM, dual 2.5gb nic, built in name and USB 3.2. it uses like 15w of power, is basically silent, and with a 5 bay HDD attached I’ve got enough storage for whatever.
Building a home lab server from components is only a good idea if you have some really specific use case not covered by cheap imports…
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
How reliable are those though? The ones I’ve looked at have really crappy controllers.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They don’t have controllers. They present as JBOD. Great for software RAID, btrfs, ZFS…etc.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Surely it has a USB controller that translates SATA to USB, no? I’ve heard many of these JBOB enclosures have problems with drives falling off the bus or something in 24/7 operation.
Here’s a video from Level1Techs about USB enclosures, and at the 12 min mark or so, he talks about the USB controllers on these enclosures typically being trash. The one he recommends was $130 ($150 currently) and still has that issue with getting locked up if the connection is bad (e.g. cable gets bumped).
He does mention the USB-C controllers are getting better, so maybe those cheap emclosures are fine.
sxan@midwest.social 1 week ago
How much is “limited?” I’ve got one of those AMD Ryzen mobile CPU jobs that I bought new, from Amazon, for $300. I added a 2TB M.2 drive for another $100. For a bit over $200 ($230?) you can get a 4TB M.2 NVMe.
And that’s for fast storage. There’s USB3 A and C ports, so nearly unlimited external - slower, but still faster than your WiFi - drives.
When bcachefs is reliable, it’s got staged multi-device caching for the stuff you’re actually using, and background writing to your slower drives. I’m really looking forward to that, but TBH I have all of our media on a USB3 SSD it’s plenty fast enough to stream videos and music from.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Yeah, I really don’t know what constraints OP is working under. Here are mine:
If I was building today, I’d probably still go HDD because few mobos have >2 NVMe slots, and NVMe gets expensive at higher capacities, especially if RAID is on the table.
If my NAS was 100% backed up, I wouldn’t need RAID and I would probably use NVMe to save on space and complexity.
Why tho? Just use btrfs or zfs, they’re proven in production, and have a lot of good documentation.
sxan@midwest.social 1 week ago
Shit, that’s a lot of storage. K.
I’ve lived on btrfs for years. I love the filesystem. However, RAID had been unreliable for a decade now, with no indication that it will ever be fixed; but most importantly, neither btrfs not zfs have prioritized multi-device support, and bcachefs does.
You can configure a filesystem built from an SSD, a hard drive, and a USB drive, and configure it so that writes and reads go to the SSD first, and are eventually replicated to the hard drive, and eventually eventually to the USB drive. All behind the scenes, so you’re working at SSD speeds for R/W, even if the USB hasn’t yet gotten all of the changes. With btrfs and zfs, you’re working at the speed of the slowest device in your multi-device FS; with bcachefs, you work at the speed of the fastest.
There’s a lot in there I don’t know about yet, like: can it be configured s.t. the fastest is an LRU? But from what I read, it’s designed very similar to L1/L2 cache and main memory.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
RAID is production ready on btrfs, the only issue is the write hole on RAID 5/6. If you don’t need RAID 5/6, you’re fine. I use RAID 1, which is 100% production ready.
Ah, I’ve never considered that use case. My HDD RAID 1 array is plenty fast for what I need.
But isn’t that basically what a cache drive does? It mostly caches reads, but I think it can cache writes too.
Good to know if that’s your use case, but it sounds pretty niche to me.