I am currently buying hardware for building my first NAS.
For inspiration, this is what I am building:
Case: White Jonsbo N4
CPU: Ryzen 4600G
RAM: Corsair Vengence 32GB DDR4 3600mhz
Boot drive: Crucial T500 500GB nvme drive.
Storage drives: Seagate Ironwolf Pro NT (I have not yet decided of what capacity I will use).
PSU: Corsair SF750 (overkill, I know)
A piece of advice with ZFS, get the largest drives you can afford.
Expanding ZFS is painful and it’s wayyyyy easier to just start big then to grow big.
ZFS is also a RAM hog, max out your ram cause that.
If you want to add meta data caches, do it when you first build the array.
The L2-arc cache and SLOG don’t do what you think they will. Make sure you really understand them before you throw them on. They’re easy to take off though.
Last but certainly not least, ZFS is a money sink. It was made for enterprise solutions, meaning it benefits from more money being thrown at it than say XFS. Figure out what’s good enough and live with it.
That is a fair point, earlier I considered OpenMediaVault with a softraid and an LVM on top if it, but I take a lot of photos and have already seen bitrot in them, so I’d rather have some insurance for that.
I will in general avoid expanding filesystems, and simply decide that when I need more space to start building a new NAS, copy the data to it and repurpose the old NAS with larger drives or as a test machine.
Though this depends on how financially stable I am, I tend to buy parts over time…
What I’ve done is set up an UnRAID server with an XFS pool for my media pool and a ZFS pool for my photos, family videos and documents. The biggest advantage I see with UnRAID is that it’s designed from the ground up for buying parts over time. When my media pool gets full, buy a bigger disk, slam it in, let it rebuild. When my documents (ZFS) pool is full I move it to my media array, break the ZFS pool and rebuild it bigger.
As opposed to say a TrueNAS scale deployment with pure ZFS, where I would highly suggest that you spend the money upfront and buy the system your going to want tomorrow, not today.
Sure UnRAID’s ZFS is not as mature as almost every other NAS OS out there but it’s good enough. Plus I have my pictures and stuff in a proper 3-2-1 backup so I’m not too worried about bitrot.
I switched to raid z2 from a 6 drive mirror and what an ordeal that was. It’s because I had to grow into it and buy drives over time but eventually the mirror was too inefficient.
I moved data around like 5 times all because I still didn’t have enough disks to build my new array and keep my data on the system at the same time. And expanding raidz expands parity on all disks but not the data so you have to recopy all your data so it stripes fully.
I had a backup on a DAS but USB is slow and I didn’t want to have it be the only copy.
Edit: clarifying my point. I have no regrets. ZFS is awesome. But make the important decisions up front and yes start with the right amount of drives that you need. My whole issue was growing into it and having to make changes after the fact.
Disks that can fail. I can lose 2 and be okay. That gives me time to swap in my spare or order a new one. For a home user imo 2 drive redundancy is plenty but 3 for a 6 drive mirror was too much. These things aren’t cheap!
ZFS has bit rot protection.
I am currently buying hardware for building my first NAS.
For inspiration, this is what I am building:
Case: White Jonsbo N4
CPU: Ryzen 4600G
RAM: Corsair Vengence 32GB DDR4 3600mhz
Boot drive: Crucial T500 500GB nvme drive.
Storage drives: Seagate Ironwolf Pro NT (I have not yet decided of what capacity I will use). PSU: Corsair SF750 (overkill, I know)
A piece of advice with ZFS, get the largest drives you can afford.
Expanding ZFS is painful and it’s wayyyyy easier to just start big then to grow big.
ZFS is also a RAM hog, max out your ram cause that.
If you want to add meta data caches, do it when you first build the array.
The L2-arc cache and SLOG don’t do what you think they will. Make sure you really understand them before you throw them on. They’re easy to take off though.
Last but certainly not least, ZFS is a money sink. It was made for enterprise solutions, meaning it benefits from more money being thrown at it than say XFS. Figure out what’s good enough and live with it.
That is a fair point, earlier I considered OpenMediaVault with a softraid and an LVM on top if it, but I take a lot of photos and have already seen bitrot in them, so I’d rather have some insurance for that.
I will in general avoid expanding filesystems, and simply decide that when I need more space to start building a new NAS, copy the data to it and repurpose the old NAS with larger drives or as a test machine.
Though this depends on how financially stable I am, I tend to buy parts over time…
What I’ve done is set up an UnRAID server with an XFS pool for my media pool and a ZFS pool for my photos, family videos and documents. The biggest advantage I see with UnRAID is that it’s designed from the ground up for buying parts over time. When my media pool gets full, buy a bigger disk, slam it in, let it rebuild. When my documents (ZFS) pool is full I move it to my media array, break the ZFS pool and rebuild it bigger.
As opposed to say a TrueNAS scale deployment with pure ZFS, where I would highly suggest that you spend the money upfront and buy the system your going to want tomorrow, not today.
Sure UnRAID’s ZFS is not as mature as almost every other NAS OS out there but it’s good enough. Plus I have my pictures and stuff in a proper 3-2-1 backup so I’m not too worried about bitrot.
I switched to raid z2 from a 6 drive mirror and what an ordeal that was. It’s because I had to grow into it and buy drives over time but eventually the mirror was too inefficient.
I moved data around like 5 times all because I still didn’t have enough disks to build my new array and keep my data on the system at the same time. And expanding raidz expands parity on all disks but not the data so you have to recopy all your data so it stripes fully.
I had a backup on a DAS but USB is slow and I didn’t want to have it be the only copy.
Edit: clarifying my point. I have no regrets. ZFS is awesome. But make the important decisions up front and yes start with the right amount of drives that you need. My whole issue was growing into it and having to make changes after the fact.
I plan on having a raid of 5 drives and a hot spare, with a cold spare next to the NAS.
I am considering 8/10 TB drives, I currently have less than 10 TB of data in my archive.
What are the advantages of the different raid z leves?
Disks that can fail. I can lose 2 and be okay. That gives me time to swap in my spare or order a new one. For a home user imo 2 drive redundancy is plenty but 3 for a 6 drive mirror was too much. These things aren’t cheap!
I am learning this now, especially since I will buy several of them.
This will be my most expensive computer I own by far…
But I am trying to buy reliable parts to last me 10+ years and possibly beyond…