Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicolaslem | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com