Comment on NAS decision paralysis
talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
A NAS is any computer with space/connectors for drives and an ethernet port… besides the drives, it doesn’t need to be powerful or state-of-the-art, and there’s really no reason it should be expensive.
Of course companies will be more than happy to sell you an outdated J4125-based computer with 4 disk bays for over 500EUR, but that doesn’t mean you have to bite.
As for RAID, if you want to use it, just setup mirrored drives (ZFS, BTRFS or even LVM) and be done with it: you’ll need backups anyway so don’t overthink it. Unless you want to avoid downtime (which isn’t probably a big issue for most of your data?), you can do without RAID and just restore from backup if a drive happens to break.
If you don’t want to build your own PC, I’ve heard good things about these: aoostar.com/collections/nas-series (beware: I didn’t try any of them - my N3150-based NAS is not old enough to need replacement yet)
Yeah it is just that, but I want to make sure I have the set up correct for the proper data transfer, and data copying/syncing.
But this is where I lack experience, is a mirrored drive any simpler to maintain than a Raid 1? Wouldn’t a raid 1 help with access speed of data?
In layman’s speech (my speech) raid 1 and mirroring are essentially the same thing.
Technically, IIUC RAID is only used for hardware raid controllers, ZFS calls their equivalent RAIDZ1 (and I think it stores data in one disk and parity in another?) and both LVM and btrfs call theirs mirroring (each with its nuances). Whichever you pick, it’s a mode where you use two disks at 50% efficiency and your data survives the loss of one disk.
There are configurations that use more disks with higher efficiency than 50%, but I would avoid them in a homelab because the more disks you have, the higher the power drain and the higher the chance that at least one of them will fail, and in a homelab scenario you really want to minimize the change of needing to perform maintenance (replacing a drive in a RAID and restoring from a backup are both a hassle).
In your shoes (and in mine, whenever I’ll need to redo my RAID1 NAS), I’d skip RAID altogether and use the extra disk for extra backups of the data I care about.
Most of my NAS is filled with movies I’ve ripped, and I honestly wouldn’t really care much if I were to lose them: the movies I may want to re-watch are really few and I can just rip them again (or even buy them again) if the need arises.
Backups are enormously more important than RAID (will RAID do anything for you if you accidentally delete your family photos? what if the NAS floods or gets dropped on the floor?): you should really direct your time/resources/effort towards setting up automatic and monitored backups before worrying about RAID.
trilobite@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I second drive mirroring with ZFS. Truenas Scale has been a quantum leap for me. I have two very old Dell T110 with 32GB ram each. One, the main one, has 4x 4GB Western Digital Gold drives, which cost me a fortune at the time. I think they are in raid5 but cant remember. The other t110 has cheaper WD reds. I turn on the slave machine on saturdays to complete replication tasks. I dont have a robust backup model yet besides replicating to an external HD on a 3rd machine but will need to work on that.