Comment by Teknoman117 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Teknoman117 | Hacker News Reader

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Wow, I actually just got done building a home NAS for myself. As far as storage controllers, I managed to find myself a working SAS 9201-16i for $50 on eBay (16 port SAS card, only supports IT/HBA mode). Also got some cheap used 10 GbE cards off eBay as well for the link between my workstation and the NAS. Got a 4 port card for the NAS to turn it into a cheapo 10 GbE switch (OCe14104-U-TE with four SFP+ fiber optic transceivers for $190 USD).

I actually bumped into rclone and use Amazon Drive for backups myself. I was worried they'd freak out if I stored multiple terabytes of data there, but if you haven't got any emails about nearly 50 TB of data, I guess i shouldn't be so concerned.

A silly toy project i've been working on is to be able to use Amazon Drive as a block device via something like nbd (linux) or geom (freebsd). Would let me use existing drive encryption mechanisms (no personal data scraping for advertising purposes Amazon) and have the ACD storage be a zfs pool in its own right. Basically, a virtual 'SSD' backed by a collection of chunks (1 to 8 MiB, still benchmarking...) and where TRIM deletes remotely stored chunks.

The main issue with used server hardware that is a couple generations old is that they use a lot of power. E.g. it's no problem to buy dual or quad port Intel server adapters for like 20 Euros, but these draw 6 / 10 W, while newer ones (e.g. those based on the i210-series) draw much less than 1 W/port.

Similarly older storage controllers require more power even when idle, older CPUs and mainboards draw more power when idle. Fan control in server boards has improved somewhat, and these can draw a lot of power (....just ask any Sun Fire server....) as well.

Wow 50TB for $60 per month...

Amazon Drive sounds like an insanely great deal for me if it works the way I think it does, but the reason I haven't tried it yet is I honestly don't see them being able to keep storage space unlimited for very long, if it in fact competes in the same real-time sync'd storage space as the likes of Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.

Every such service that I've ever heard of that offered unlimited storage at one point have had to backtrack on their unlimited storage claims after enough users really took them up on their offer. Note I'm talking about services like Bitcasa and OneDrive, that offer real-time sync/access, not backup & archival services like BackBlaze and Crashplan that don't have the same egress bandwidth requirements.

For those who use Amazon Drive and understand it better, does it do real-time sync like Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox? Or is it just another unidirectional backup service?

*$60/year :)

If you like Google Drive, their Google Apps plan will give you unlimited storage for a slightly more expensive plan.

One limitation I've met with Amazon Cloud Drive is a 50GB file size limit. Both of these support rclone which is what I use for backups anyways.

50GB size limit kills it for me :(

It's not real-time sync afaik, at least not when I used it in 2016, might have changed since though. You'd have to manually grab files you wanted to open/change and then manually update.

I might get that new consumer-grade switch with 10GbE copper, but that's down the road a bit.

I wonder when we will see 10GbE ports on laptops though!

Promise sells a ThunderBolt to 10GbE adapter

https://www.promise.com/Products/SANLink/SANLink2

What would be the consumer for that kind of flow? It makes sense on switches, but for a single device, it would be hard to find a reason. We can do 4kUHD way under 1Gbps. We don't get over 1Gbps internet at home. We can't write that fast to any permanent medium. Even RAM will slowly start being a problem if the DDR4 bandwidth is only 6 time higher than 10GbE.

Consumers do buy Synology & Others NAS. Right now 1Gbps is the bottleneck for accessing a NAS.

This depends on the storage configuration & use case..

It can be a bottleneck for a NAS-

That said, depending on use case, the extra expense of 10GbE still might not be worth the expense..

There are very few disks you can stick in a NAS that won't yield 100MB/s, particularly in RAID.

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