Low-power is great but running a big RAID long-term without ECC gives me the heebee jeebies! Any good solutions for a similar system but more robust over 5+ years?
Love my X9 and X11 boards.
If you want to step up to being able to serve an entire case or 4U of HDDs, you’re going to need pcie lanes though, in which case w680 with i5-12600k and a single ecc udimm and a SAS HBA in the pcie slot with integrated Ethernet is probably as low wattage as you can get. Shame w680 platform cost is so high, am4/zen2 is cheaper to the point of still being viable.
You can also get Xeon, embedded Xeon, am5, am4 (without an iGPU).
There’s nothing inherently wrong with running a raid without ecc for 5 years, people do it all the time and things go fine.
Same with TrueNas mini
You could be like “well that’s stupid, I’m going to make a balls to the wall build server that also serves storage with recent components” but the build server components will become obsolete faster then the storage components, it can lead to incidental complexity to try and run something like windows games on a NAS operating system because you tried to consolidate on one computer, being forced to use things like ECC will compromise absolute performance, you’ll want to have the computer by your desk potentially but also in a closet since it has loud storage, you’re liable to run out of pcie lanes and slots, you want to use open cooling for the high performance components and a closed case for the spinning rust, it’s all a bit awkward.
Much simpler is to just treat the NAS as an appliance that serves files, maybe runs a plex server, some surveillance, a weather station, rudimentary monitoring, and home automation. Things for which something like a v2000 is overkill. Then use breeding edge chips in things like cell phones and laptops. Then have the two computers do different jobs. Longer product cycles between processors makes things like support cheaper to maintain for long term periods of time and offer low prices.
Apparently this board supports ecc with this chip: Supermicro X13SAE W680 LGA1700 ATX Motherboard
Costs 550.
One option is building around that and having some pcie 4.0 to nvme boards hosting as many nvme drives as needed. Not cheap though but around home affordable.
And yes they start at around 500.
I did build mine 2 years ago, so the 246 motherboards are less available now, the C252 is another option which will take you up to 11th gen Intel.
The hardware is much more purpose equipped to store files long term and not the 2-3 years between consumer SSDs'
It's not to say self-hosting storage can't or shouldn't be done, its just about how many recoveries and transitions have you been through, because it's not an if, but a when.
What hardware would that be, specifically? The low end embedded platforms that don't even support ECC?
> how many recoveries and transitions have you been through
3 or 4, at this point, using the same 2 disk zfs mirror upgraded from 1TB to 3TB to 10TB.
I’m not sure where low end comes from, most people start with a Pi, old computer or something, and grow from there.
Storage like a home appliance is a good thing.
Synology supports their hardware for about 10 years since release. They are the "Apple"-like of NAS.
The tl;dr of my rant was around shortcomings in NFS permission configuration, and a failure of the iSCSI feature (the appliance crashed when you sent it data).
Further, these appliances invariably use vanilla RAM sticks, so you're exposed to gentle memory-based file corruption you probably won't notice for years.
So I'd argue the hardware is 'better equipped', and I'd also argue the software as shipped matches the marketing promises accompanying same.
Things have doubtless changed - I'm sure those bugs are long gone now - but unless you're looking at an ECC appliance, I'd say you're better off building your own white box.
[0] https://jeddi.org/b/brief-rant-on-trying-to-use-iscsi-on-a-q...
Synology actually allows ECC DRAM and even sells it and list which models would accept them.
But yeah, at the price of a full featured model with an x86 CPU and SO/DIMM RAM and 4+ drives you are in the territory of building your own, with a lot more of control and without DSM (in Synology case) shenanigans.
EDIT: actually the biggest problem here is actually finding a good case, because even ATX cases now usually don't have more than 2-3 3.5" bays by default and often don't have 5.25" at all.
Both Qnap and synology wt the least offer ECC capable nas. So much so they are getting better established in the smb and enterprise space. It’s a good thing you’ve pointed out to include ECC in your appliance search.
My preference and statement for storage as appliance includes experience of building my own boxes and working with servers in my own rack in a data centre for over a decade, out of my pocket.
The cloud is someone else’s computer, but I want my own storage and cloud and something easily recommendable to others when it comes up, even when they aren’t techies.
Besides, if we’re going that back in time we could just run a scsi raid array with a fibre channel connected to a power hungry server :)
The other feature - NFS - I'd say is one of two core features for a NAS (the other being SMB/CIFS) and it was lacking basic granularity in its ACL.
I'll note that at the time the 'app store' associated with that product has a hundred or more rinky-dinky add-ons & plugins - php admin, helpdesk product, that kind of thing. I suppose some customers found those useful.
But I'd argue those were less useful features for a NAS than being able to reliably receive & send files, or conveniently secure access to those files.
So my concern is not around ephemeral tech / feature failures, but the marketing-driven design, complexity of troubleshooting where it met the opacity of the software, and the barely-there value-add / extra-cost of a stack like that (especially for people handy with screwdrivers and a CLI).
Looking at your list, I ended up going with QNAP to be safe .. for flexibility to get anything I needed the way I wanted to. The choices at the time were a ARM based CPU or intel celeron with very low power. I went with the latter, to realize I probably would have been good as well with the Synology I was eyeing.
The bliss of set and forget, and multiple types and locations of backups happening with good reliability is thanks to one change in the NAS space.
Existing players were expensive, and to the degree that there is profit in large enterprise storage customers wanting a backup locally in each field office for example, the NAS industry has been able to provide enterprise class features down market relatively quick and affordably.
Your posts made me recall how much I had to research the enterprise features to try and find what I wanted, equivalently in a NAS, and it ended up definitely on the Prosumer/SMB models, but ultimately in the high throughput NAS' that focused on video.
I somehow ended up with 2.5 GbE so long ago. In my case I could have just bought used fibre channel scsi enclosures, but I wanted to be mindful of power needs, and in turn backup power. It wasn't an ideal time to buy then, but is much better now. In fact, I can probably buy a second or third used version on what I have and it will work together pretty OK, including ECC if I want.
I try and remember to follow a rule to spend and buy 10-15% more capacity than I need when buying, if not one level up to get true long term utility value. For example, always at least 2 more empty drive bays than you need. If you're buying a car, consider a hatchback. If your'e buying a hatchback, consider a small SUV, etc. Buy a little bigger and nicer to let your life grow into it, or buy thrice.