You might be able to help me also, I have a heap of old 500gb drives - is there a way to create a single server out of them as a trial home server? I can only find Synology etc. bays and people telling me I can’t daisy chain drives
Comment on NAS decision paralysis
Cyber@feddit.uk 1 day ago
First up… backups…
You’ve got all your data on a single 8TB external drive?
If you get lots of hardware, or stay the same, you’ll still want need to get your data off that system and preferably out of the house for the 3 F’s: fire / flood / feft (😉)
At this point it might just be simpler to get online storage and upload it all… or a 2nd drive and just clone it.
Now, you can breath as you change your system and oops, accidentally wipe the wrong drive… it’s all offline elsewhere
Next up, to help with decision paralisis; the software and hardware you choose are going to be related… TrueNAS is going to want a new mobo with loads of RAM for the ZFS on the drives… OpenMediaVault will work on small hardware (as well as bigger too…), so decide with your wallet on hardware first.
Everything (worth considering) supports RAID - you’ll want RAID1 if you only have 2 drives, RAID5 or 6 for many drives. If you use ZFS they modify the naming convention, but learn standard terminology first.
I’ve tried it all, over the years, so expect to try something for a while, then ditch it for something else - another reason to have your data offline somewhere.
I came back to a simple Arch linux box with 4 drives running btrfs 🙂
Squizzy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Cyber@feddit.uk 23 hours ago
Are these external USB drives? You can certainly plug those in all over the place, but it’s not a scable, long term solution.
Shuck the drives if they’re external and just use them as normal drives
And you can’t daisy chain modern drives in the same sense that old SCSI / PATA drives used to be connected, but you could get a drive bay to fit an existing PC - I had one that put 4x 3.5" drives into a 3 bay 5.25" space… wasn’t great but did the job.
But, you’ll want to get the drives into some kinda array - could be a JBOD initially, but you will NEED good backups as any drive failure = total loss of it’s files.
Perhaps backup each drive to… somewhere… create an array and then restore all your data into that new array.
Total available storage of RAID is less than the total space in all the drives due to checksums, duplication, etc.
Squizzy@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Yeah it’s like 20 500gb bare drives ripped from equipment. Not sure how they are formatted, I need to get a software that lets me see if there is anything on them and then format then, just changed to Linux and it isn’t always seeing them.
I just want to get a bit of use and centralise all mynfiles while I move pc
Cyber@feddit.uk 21 hours ago
Linux should see most formats… you might need to install something to read NTFS… but if they’re FAT32, most distros have thst installed by default.
If you can’t read them, and there’s nothing on there that you need to recover, then just zero them and check them with a full SMART scan, then you’ll know if they’re reliable before wasting time with a RAID array that keeps chewing up drives.
But, I don’t know of any mobos that’ll connect that many drives…
yyprum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I said truenas as it was the first to come to mind but it is probably overtly complex for my needs and openmediavault might be better, as far as I can use an open source software on whatever hardware I end up with I’m happy.
Yeah I want an external drive out of the house, but I feel like that is independent of my decision on how to store data at home. Am I wrong? Should I take that into consideration for choosing a nas at home?
Indeed, RAID1 is what I’d probably choose to have a safety net in case of hard drive failure. Something simple to start with.
So after all you just have a normal PC using arch with a handful of disks? So is some of the disks holding copies of the others? I’ll check btrfs, to see what kinda use it can provide.
eightys3v3n@lemmy.ca 6 hours ago
HexOS is not cheap, but it’s a nice wrapper around TrueNAS. It supports a simple interface for just enough to cover most simple use cases. Then you can drop into TrueNAS if you want something more advanced.
Cyber@feddit.uk 23 hours ago
Yeah I want an external drive out of the house, but I feel like that is independent of my decision on how to store data at home. Am I wrong?
Yes 🙂
You’ll want offsite storage no matter what you build. This protects you from wiping your RAID array (RAID is not a backup), syncing the wrong data and losing files, etc.
And… imagine your NAS is gone. Make sure you know how to get your (encrypted) data back.
The first thing I did was backup a small chunk of files and then see that I could restore them to a different laptop.
Yep, I have Arch with a btrfs RAID array because - for me - ZFS was too needy. I can use standard tools to maintain btrfs.
It has SMB and NFS shares, powers up & down (when idle) automatically, and syncs our phones and laptops via syncthing (sync is also not a backup)
Everything is backed up to an online storage provider AND a HDD connected to a RasPi in a family members home (and I reciprocate some of their backups)
I do have Immich running natively on the NAS (no containers) because all our photos are there, so it made more sense to put it there, but all other functions (Home Assistant, etc) are on a separate device.
MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
This. RAID IS NOT A BACKUP !!! Sorry for shouting, but it’s that important. It’s a main storage tolerant of disk failure, you still need backups or you’re one bad ‘rm -rf’ away from losing data.
First get that second 8Tb, or better yet a 16+Tb (see serverpartdeals.com or your local equivalent for good prices on manufacturer recertified drives) so you have room to grow. Now copy that 8Tb onto it and disconnect it from your computer. Congratulations, you have a cold backup and are pretty well protected from data loss, much better than a RAID.
You can now think about a NAS with confidence, but preferably before that get another drive copy your data again and take it to a friend / relative / safety deposit box (even bury it in the back yard in something waterproof). Now you have a 3-2-1 backup strategy and you’re pretty damn well insulated against data loss.
TLDR: Backup first, NAS later.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 21 hours ago
I disagree with cold backup drives.
In my experience, cold drives fail more often than warm drives. This is why all my data replication is always watm.
All backup solutions should be regulator tested, otherwise you don’t know if you have a backup.
yyprum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
OK, that’s actually a nice point to clarify, and to be sincere I kinda saw it as a backup. But thinking it more thoroughly, it is the kind of “backup” I am looking for. I worry mainly about the hard drive crapping out on me. Then after that yeah, I would have an external HD with the most important stuff backed up and then something out of the house.
To be perfectly clear, I agree entirely with your comment. What you say is extremely important, but the NAS is the actual aspect I need for the house at the moment :)