Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459 | Hacker News Reader

Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459

humaidq.ae

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RAID drive fails, "I regretted installing ClamAV".

Don't regret it! It allowed you to find a drive failure before a second drive failed, and allowed you to recover your data while it was still recoverable! This is a good thing!

Archival data is a tricky problem. If you don't regularly read it, you may find that when you do need to read it, that the sector has suffered some bit rot. What's one of the most likely cases where you have to read archived data? When a hard drive fails and RAID is doing a rebuild...

So, by all means, run a ClamAV scan! Or better yet, run a ZFS scrub monthly or so. I've been a huge fan of ZFS for my archive data, mostly historic photos and Google takeout data now, because it can detect silent corruption and can do scrubs to verify and repair any hard drives sectors that have problems.

Thank you for the advice. Will keep it mind when setting it up with the new drives!

Oh, my other advice is: Avoid Seagate drives. Historically, I've found Hitachi to be the most reliable, and the BackBlaze hard drive stats seem to confirm that, though they tend to have small numbers of Hitachi drives. This is because they optimize for price not reliability. I've had good luck with other brands, but I've pretty much had universally bad luck with Seagate. Last year I replaced the last of our Stagate 15K drives with SSDs because, largely, I was tired of doing warranty returns every month or two.

I used to always buy Hitachi as well, but when I decided a few weeks ago to replace all my old 4TB HDDs with 8TB HDDs I found out that they're quite expensive (did they use to be that expensive?).

Well, in any case now I bought 8 Toshiba N300 8TB (4 HDDs for a server and another 4 for a NAS, both used by a RaidZ1) and so far they worked (and they're not loud and don't vibrate like hell when the disk is spinning, unlike the WD Gold).

It's the first time that I buy Toshiba HDDs - I'm quite sure that if they would have been Seagate then at least 1 would have already failed.

Hitachi have always been a little more expensive than the others, from my memory. The Deskstar consumer line could be around 10-20% more than competition and the Ultrastar enterprise 25-50% more than Deskstar. Going from memory.

I've had good luck with the few Toshiba drives I've had. That's what my storage system is running right now because it was the only thing I could find in 1TB laptop form factor when I bought them 6-7 years ago.

Not to second-guess your purchase, but was there a reason you didn't diversify across the brands to prevent a situation where they might all fail at once?

I'm reminded of those HP drives that would brick themselves after a certain number of operating hours. People had every drive in their RAID array fail at once.

Ooook, ok, I got it - not a great idea to buy HDDs of the same brand => I'll try to remember this :)

But: in such a case, having a normal raid5/raidZ1 or even a raid6/raidZ2, etc..., you might still get scrd by just having 2/3/4 such HP-drives in such a raid (that might be composed of 8/9/10 drives), right?

> you might still get scrd by just having 2/3/4 such HP-drives in such a raid (that might be composed of 8/9/10 drives), right?

That's true. Ah well, you know what people say: RAID is for high-availability, not a replacement for proper backups.

That's true :D

To be 100% honest: I didn't even think about this kind of strategy (never did even in the past).

Thinking about it now, it might make sense.

On the other hand, nowadays there isn't a lot of choice (only 3 manufacturers? WD, Toshiba and Seagate? If yes, then it's quite sad...) and honestly for me it hasn't been easy to choose even just a single model (reading all user reviews, comparing prices, searching specs for e.g. operating temperature, mtbf, finding infos about SMR, etc...) => I felt exhausted after deciding for Toshiba/N300 and I didn't have any other good 2nd candidate... .

Let's see in another ~4 years, maybe I'll adopt this strategy. At least I ordered 2 groups of 4 HDDs from 2 different shops, so I should have at least a minimal amount of "mix" in it. And the ones used in the NAS host the backup of the ones used by the server, so I just hope that I don't have a 2+2 HDD failure in the two raidZ1 :P

Thanks for the enlightenment :)

> have small numbers of Hitachi drives

25,000+ drives according to 2020 Q1 report in case anyone is wondering

> Oh, my other advice is: Avoid Seagate drives ... I've found Hitachi to be the most reliable ... but I've pretty much had universally bad luck with Seagate.

Don't take this personally but this advice is fairly useless.

For every person like you, who has "found Hitachi to be the most reliable" and "had universally bad luck with Seagate", there's someone else who has the exact opposite advice.

Our opinions are shaped by our own experiences, of course, and (most of the tine) it's hard to change our minds or convince us otherwise.

The (unfortunate) truth is that there's no one brand of HDDs that really is "the best" -- especially for all use cases! If there were, well, we'd all be using them by now and all of the other manufacturers would have already went out of business.

Also, the bummer about the Backblaze stats is that they can't tell you about new batches of drives.

I would generally agree with you, but it comes from a decently sized sample set (not huge, a few thousand), but also because it seems to be backed up consistently by Backblaze's stats. :-)

But if you ZFS, avoid the crappy WD red SMR drives! Cf. https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-dm-smr-update-3-vendors-...

I was surprised that there are very few PC cases made for small NAS. So this solution of buying a consumer product and installing FreeNAS on it makes sense.

An HP microServer has a fairly small case.

Yes but it is a complete server, not useful for a custom build. But otherwise, yes I agree, have an old trusty n54l myself. If I found a case in similar form factor I might upgrade though.

HP microserver doesn't have drive hotswap.

The first time you find out your drive is dying, you really want it.

You're correct that it doesn't support hotswappable drives out of the box. But there is a BIOS firmware floating around for the AMD generation microservers that lets you hotswap drives. (I've been running FreeNAS on an AMD microserver for a few years now.)

Curious: why? Can't you simply shut down the NAS^wmicroserver and replace the failing drive then? (assuming the downtime is not a problem, which is probably the case with most home NAS installations)

One fear I've heard from Sys Admin friends is that you'll have another drive failure when the machine tries to boot back up (and possible data loss if you're only running RAID5). As I understand it, there's a nonzero chance the drive is fine while it's still running, but will disappear or have trouble spinning back up after a reboot, so you want to rebuild your array before rebooting.

Spot on, because the rebuilding process stresses drives that are likely as old as the one that failed

Is there any truth to the advice that this is mitigated by buying drives from different retailers and aiming for different batches and average failure time?

Having different batches reduces the risk of multiple devices failing at the same time. There's a higher chance of devices from the same batch failing simultaneously (due to the same material or fault during the manufacture) than from different batches, or even better, from different vendors.

You don't know, whether you will be able to boot and mount the degraded array. Maybe you could, or maybe you will have to start shaving the yak.

With hotswap, it is up and running, you can start repair straight away.

I've used cases/components from here in the past: https://e-itx.com/

Of course, the most recent was a 8TB server I built in 2011. So, take that as bad that I can't speak to any recent experience. But, good that it's still running with all of the original components 9 years later.

This wasn't really a case of buying the hardware with the intention of installing another OS on it, though. The author had the QNAP for 4 years, running their OS on it, and decided to install FreeNAS when rebuilding.

That said, I'm surprised that they explicitly support installing Linux -- the post links a QNAP wiki page that explicitly uses the phrase "supported hardware" when describing which machines their guide to installing Debian works for. The case itself is pretty high quality for the purpose (no surprise), but I don't think I'd buy one just to wipe the custom OS and install my own on it. If it were me, I'd probably hop on over to r/DataHoarder, search there, and maybe make a "recommend me a case" post if I didn't find anything interesting.

I'd really love to do a NAS project with a Raspberry Pi, but the lack of SATA support really does it in as a base for a NAS system, IMO. If you're just going to connect everything over USB anyway, what's even the point of the Pi? Just buy one of those dumb external enclosures that holds 4+ drives.

I used a rockpro64[0] with an off the shelf PCIe SATA card for my home NAS (4x4TB disks). So far I'm extremely happy with it (using it for almost 8 months). The rockpro is running debian/ZFS.

[0]: https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/

Cool!

Does it require a custom kernel?

it has had mainline support for a while now, there are even now daily official debian builds available as well: https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm64/daily/netboot/SD-c...

Interesting! I've been thinking of building a NAS and hadn't considered the rockpro64. Have you found that 4GB RAM has been sufficient for ZFS? I'm currently running a small ZFS array with 12GB RAM and the box never seems to use anything close to that amount, but ZFS has a reputation as something of a RAM hog.

I'm not using de-duplication, so that might affect if you only have 4GB RAM. Right now the box has 2GB free, and I'm always running a few extra things in it. Overall, for my use case it works just fine. The SATA card is plenty fast as well. I had a similar setup with an rpi3 and a USB<>SATA to host 2x1TB disks and doing a scrub in that pool took over 4 hours. The scrub in my current pool (4x4TB) took 22 min.

These things are great for small NAS.

https://buy.hpe.com/us/en/servers/proliant-microserver/proli...

Seems rather interesting. I've been thinking of buying a Synology DS918+, since I want a NAS and a Plex server, but that's like 530 euro at the very cheapest. However, I can find HPE Microservers starting at 350 euro. That's like the price of a 4 TB NAS drive saved there already.

My FreeNAS has been running for years on an older ProLiant, off a USB stick, in an Ikea desk cupboard with poor ventilation (some gaps around the front door, and a 4 inch circle drilled in the back). The only failure so far was the old USB stick, once I reinstalled and put a new stick on I could see my ZFS data again.

I should probably update the software, but I already broke it once trying that, so for now it's sitting happy as a dumping ground for files.

I built my FreeNAS build into the Fractal Design Node 304. It fits six hard drives, and the computer fits into an IKEA shelf nicely.

I’ve got this case and it works pretty great. 5 3.5 hot swap drives.

Although the drives come out the left side. So you would need to access that without moving the case for true hot swap.

Qnap actually has a new OS called Hero Edition that uses ZFS by default, coming in Q3.

https://www.qnap.com/quts-hero/en/

Why not support the company that actually supports the development of ZFS instead? I don't know anything about Qnap but FreeNAS has a wealth of robust functionality. I'd be curious as to why people would prefer Qnap?

Looking at FreeNAS's page, it's all "Get Quote" nonsense for anything rack mounted. Needs a system configuration page with prices to play around with.

Well if they actually does anything consumer like Synology and Qnap, ASUStor or TerraMaster I would have bought one immediately. But iXysystem hasn't done it for the past 10 years.

Hadn't heard of their new OS - interesting. Ive always wanted Synology to license their OS out as their hardware is all low power stuff and useless for virtualisation.

Xpenology[0] may fit your needs. I'm not sure where in the grey area it fits, but it seems to get mentioned in polite company without inviting floods of copyright issues

That Xpenology exists may explain why Synology don't license their OS.

[0]:https://xpenology.org/

At college I built a Linux cluster for a project and for the SAN/NAS I used XigmasNAS. It's so much smaller and less bloated than FreeNAS has become.

I had trouble configuring parts of the cluster but overall XigmaNAS worked well.

This is timely!

I have a QNAP TS-251 (two drive bay model) that has been collecting dust for roughly two and a half years. Somebody was able to install a ransomware program on it, I suspect using the QSnatch[1] vulnerability. I triple pass zeroed the system storage and mothballed it.

Two months ago decided I wanted to do something with this machine again, so I bought two new Seagate IronWolf drives and installed FreeNAS (it can boot to and run from the USB 3.0 port on the back).

Is it the perfect hardware for FreeNAS? Nope - barely meets the minimum 8GB RAM requirements. But it's running as a media backup and Plex server, and doing a fantastic job at it. When I outgrow this hardware I'll certainly replace it with something I can also install FreeNAS on - consider me a happy convert.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/qnap/comments/dvh7n2/qsnatch_malwar...

Interesting.

I have a TVS-471 that I run the default QNAP OS on. That said, I only use it for typical NAS workloads like:

- serving media - file storage - device backup - off-site backup

I recently started using the Hybrid Backup Station app and have been pretty impressed. I’ve got three jobs - Multimedia, Photos, and Archive backup. They all go to BackBlaze B2 on slightly different schedules.

Been really pleased with it. That said, I do find the UI a little clunky so I can see why the author chose an alternative for their use case.

I’ve got a cheap $150 NUC I use for more typical *nix server stuff that sits next to the NAS. It mostly runs an unbound DNS Forwarder for now but I plan to expand its usage further.

Rather than waste time using one of the proprietary NAS systems like QNAP and Synology, why not support a system that runs and supports unmodified Linux and publishes full schematics like the upcoming Kobol64 https://kobol.io/?

Is that typical for QNAP to allow alternative OS installs? I know with Synology you cannot.

I have Debian running on my TS-451A for quite a while now. Except the front LEDs, everything is working completely fine. It is pretty much just a plain x86_64 PC with an UEFI firmware. The TS-251A is exactly the same but with 2 instead of 4 drive bays, as far as I know.

It's very neat for its low power usage and small form factor.

Raw debian right and not the qnap vm?

How did you layout the partitions?

What's on the 512m internal?

I have one in the basement I've tried to install one too many times and I need to remotivate.

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