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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

I win. The 8TB drives I used to populate my NAS scored 0.10% better than the 0.81% average. That means my NAS is better than everyone else's.

This big takeaway from these numbers is how dramatically low they are in comparison to drives 5/10/25 years ago. If you treat them reasonably, modern drives are rock stable.

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In the last 5-10 years, I've definitely retired more drives because they became too small for what I was using them for than because they failed.

Have you considered using them for RAID?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

You’d still need the slots and some raid modes are limited by the size of the smallest disk. Drives being as cheap as they are, it’s often not economically viable to retain the old drives.

If you use software-raid you can use striping.

Basically, divide up each disk into 1TB partitions, then RAID the 1TB partitions together. Synology uses this for their Hybrid RAID. Obviously care needs to be taken to not confuse partitions but this lets you use disks of differing sizes.

Unraid also offers RAID with differing sizes for disks, it has quite different failure modes though but it's been fairly reliable for me.

Affordable RAID controllers end up being more failure prone than the drives attached to them.

You don't need hardware raid controllers. (Unless your really need them for some reason) Software RAID is perfectly fine for most use cases.

Affordable disk shelves - something like the Netapp DS4243 - on the other hand tend to be reliable and give plenty of space for SAS and SATA drives. I bought a fully populated shelf (4 x powersupply (of which I'm only using 2, the rest are disconnected and meant as spares), 2 controllers and 24 15K SAS drives (mostly HGST, a few Seagate drives) for around €400. I'm currently running it with a number of those 15K drives but will eventually replace some of them with slower but bigger SAS or SATA drives, not so much to get more space but to save power. For now the thing runs fine, the error logs on the drives are mostly clean (2 drives with a few errors, mostly likely due to power glitches as they occurred a long time ago and have not recurred). If you want lots of space for drives with redundant power and cooling these shelves are a good value since there are plenty of them on the market which keeps prices down.

I'm using a combination of striping, RAID and mirroring depending on the content, using lvm and mdadm instead of ZFS for the increased flexibility. The server itself contains a HP R410i RAID card which drives 8 internal 2.5" SAS drives, the thing could be expanded for not that much money to a 16 x 2.5" array but I see no reason to do so given the higher prices for 2.5" drives and the abundance of capacity offered by the DS4243.

An mdadm is fine too.

I know what RAID is :-)

Not really, disks are cheap enough that I'd rather keep things simple. I have redundancy in various ways in addition to using Backblaze.

Ports and physical space for drives aren't free. (Though there's some trade-off available between time/money if you want to DIY.)

For my own use, I've found it isn't worthwhile expanding beyond eight drives rather than getting rid of smaller ones - adding additional ports costs money and it takes more power and space.

Tangential question: What NAS device and set up do you use? I'm thinking of buying one and would like to learn from a fellow (technically better acquainted) HN user. Thanks in advance!

Synology DS1019+

It might not be the cheapest, but 4+1 drives is more efficient than 3+1. Currently I have three 8TB drives: 1xWD Red and 2xIronwolfs (wolves?) with one running as parity (SHR). No complaints. It does everything I need it to do. The interface is simple and everything "just works" as anticipated. If/when I run out of space I plan on adding another 2x8TB drives, probably more ironwolves.

I wouldn't go bigger than 8TB as they already take DAYS to add to the array.

I have that same box. Very nice box.

Migrated from a 1512. It took probably about 3-4 days to migrate everything. The new box handled it easily. The old one was struggling a bit with rsync. As the default is ssh with it. Once I had to downgraded the encryption then it went a lot faster (from 30MB to 90MB which was close enough to the limit of the cable to not worry).

918+ here. The last two drives I put in were 16TBs, and as you say it takes time. It wasn’t helped by me messing the process first round (you need to add the smallest drives first with SHR), so it took over a week.

Thank you for the recommendation! Definitely will track its price now. :)

I've tried virtually everything over the years - unRAID, SansDigital boxes, Linux RAID, WIndows RAID, Hardware PCI card RAID...

This year I broke down and bought a Synology (918+). It's not perfect but I'm still a HAPPY happy camper --> I'm at a point in my life where RAID is a means/tool, not a goal / fun project to pour lifetime of hours upon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

First thing you need to decide is buy off the shelf NAS or make your own based on some hardware you may have lying around.

I have an old TS140 with an i3 that can take 4 HD, has ECC RAM with 4 slots. I'm currently exploring setting it up with Freenas (or Truenas after the merge) based on ZFS. So far it looks pretty good and performant.

For off the shelf NAS, Synology options look good..

Thank you. I'd rather just by an off-the-shelf. Seems like Synology is pretty solid from the comments here.

Not the OP, but I'll answer. I have the Synology DS-918 for the past 2 years, and it's been great. They have fairly decent included management software + an application library. I have it setup to automatically backup to Backblaze every night, which makes me fairly confident anything I store on it will be recoverable.

How did Backblaze compare to iDrive or other cloud backups that support NAS?

I found that for my size (~10TB external), Backblaze went from very cheap personal to very expensive business pricing :-/

I'd recommended building a custom one, if you're technically inclined. But off the shelf ones are fine, just not as cost-effective, but they are smaller though!

I previously had a HP N54L with FreeNAS, modded with extra two extra drives to get 6x4TB and that setup was very simple to do.

Now I moved over to a custom one which is a Fractal Node 804 case, i3 8100T, C246M-WU4 mobo and 32GB ECC DDR4 RAM. It has a SF450W Platinum PSU, and it pulls less than 40W in use - could get it lower with some underclocking. This runs Debian Buster with ZFS on Linux, and it's been rock stable for over half a year now - moving the drives over from my N54L was surprisingly simple. Plex transcoding works fine as well. Definitely recommend it.

Could you share roughly how much did it cost to put together that custom box?

Here's the part list: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/fcxgk6

I shopped around and waited for sales/price drops and got it all for under £500 (not including drives). I don't the pricing if your're not in the UK, so it may be cheaper elsewhere to do another combination.

As for drives wait for good deals on WD Elements/My Book Desktop External Hard Drive and shuck them. Note, only do this for +8TB drives (these are CMR drives atm) as under that size the drives are SMR which you should avoid like the plague for RAID/ZFS as they have been reported to fail if you ever need to rebuild. So then you're looking at 4x£120 which is another ~£500ish investment.

If you want to save money get a preowned box like the N54L off eBay at ~£100, and spend the money on drives, then stick FreeNas on it and if you're only file-serving the box is good enough.

I think the custom box is a bit overkill but it's got so much room for upgrades, I plan on getting 8x10TB drives in there one day, plus you can run VMs on it as the i3 processor isn't too bad.

FWIW I out together a ragtag NAS (recycling CPU and PSU from elsewhere) for around $400. Even if you start from scratch, the main cost is storage. If you're not afraid to void some warranties, you can get 8TB drives for around 30% less by shuccing WD external drives

Synology DS1815+ with 16 GB RAM, and a DX513 extension cabinet. While early versions were marred by the Intel Atom bug (I had mine replaced under warranty), it has been a solid performer. I backup to an DS1511+ (also with an extension cabinet) hosted at a friend, and host his extra box in return. The management software is very nice, and as it can run Docker, it is straightforward to augment with additional functionality.

If you dont want the hassle, there are basically only two choices on the Consumer NAS market.

Synology, and you should also look for and ONLY buy models which support Btrfs. Silent file corruption is very real.

Personally I am waiting for Qnap's Hero Edition OS, because I just love ZFS.

Other than these two, I am not aware of any other consumer NAS which support either of these file system.

Or may be someday Blackblaze decide to enter NAS market :D

Thank you very much. The tip about Btrfs is very helpful. Despite having experienced some silent file corruption before, I'd not have thought about it if I had not seen your comment. :)

I'm really happy with the synology DS418 I have. I recently attached a UPS as well, which I wish I would have done before (had a scare with losing my disk array). The system is incredibly easy to setup (once you decide on your volume strategy) and administer, and the one time I needed support it was extremely well handled.

You could have done 0.7% better :)

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