NAS/Media server/HTPC thread

[Mashie Saldana]

I used to have HTPC's in the past. Now I just do SMB file sharing from my Linux system (5x4TB drives) and then use Nvidia Shield TV's running SPMC (Kodi).

Works very nice and 4K HDR is pretty.

Are you running RAID 5 software by any chance?

I'm not actually. Software RAID like ZFS doesn't let you grow your arrays over time which is a shame. I use mhddfs which makes multiple drives look like one without the splitting of files across the drives. This means expanding the storage is a breeze. Sure I don't have any resiliency, however I would only lose one drives worth of stuff if something went wrong. Also I don't have to have the same size disks, it just happened to be all the same at this time. I have slowly moved from 4x2TB and the next drive I add will probably be 8TB.

[Cosmin]

I just assumed there was a tiny bit of redundancy there with the number of drives.

After having a 4TB drive fail less than a year in, I'm suddenly in paranoid mode because I literally have zero redundancy for my storage and it's scaring the shit out of me. Thus I went on a backup rampage and I'm slightly less concerned but damn. Really puts stuff into perspective.


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[Mashie Saldana]

If I had been in a position to upgrade all drives at once to a level where I wouldn't need to upgrade again for a long while then I would have ended up with hardware RAID6 and 10+ large HDDs.

The only time I had a drive die was when I migrated off my old server with 5x2TB drives in hardware RAID5. At that stage the drives had been powered on permanently for 6-7 years.

My important stuff lives on Google Drive.

[Jolin]

I'll piggyback on this thread a bit. I'm trying to decide between:

QNAP TS-563-8G 5-Bay
QNAP TS-453A 4-Bay
Synology DiskStation DS1517+

Any recommendations?

[Lana Torrin]

Wasn't pissy mate. Get ECC, don't get ECC, it's your choice and I was simply providing my experience. If you get it then make sure something will tell you if it's logging errors or it's wasted money. The stuff isn't error proof, it just gives you a chance at limiting the damage.

[Hel OWeen]

Now with NAS stuffs, there is one thing that achieves stuff that's similar to enterprise integrity and security of data and that's FreeNAS with ZFS, tested and proven by many people before me. This doesn't discount regular offline/offsite backups, of course. The data I really care about more than anything isn't a lot (few terabytes), but it escalates every time I go out with my camera and then develop and edit my photos. I know I could get away with a "normal" NAS, however those have limited slots and thus scale badly. An upgrade for a "regular" home NAS means change the whole unit and add more drives, with FreeNAS and ZFS it means "throw in HDDs, reconfigure stuff, works".

This goods a bit counter to your inital statement, that said

My point for using ECC is that from experience, every time I've skimped on stuff I've been fucked by life in that exact same spot. E.g. buy good stuffs to assemble PC, pick dodgy RAM, lo and behold what do I need to RMA next. Same with HDDs.

Given that (which is a valid point, IMHO) and talking NAS, why not go for an enterprise NAS solution? The same lot of manufacturers (QNap, Synology etc.) that do the home NAS stuf also provide enterprise soultions.

[GeromeDoutrande]

Generally, I'd suggest going for the opposite of "professional" but getting two of that. Several copies of your data on independent mediocre devices are much safer than one copy on a single expensive one.

[Daneel Trevize]

Yep just get several cheap devices & drives, Btrfs for checksums over data in situ (and ability to resize arrays of drives in the pool), rsync for checksums over data in flight. Tell us how that's going to most likely fail you.

[Cosmin]

I wasn't getting pissy at all up there, probably didn't have my morning coffee.

Lots of useful advice here, will plusrep when I get home ^^

Any idea where I could get a cheap tape backup device that supports high capacity tapes? Seen some on newegg, $1700, went on eBay UK to find same device at £1900


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[Straight Hustlin]

I wasn't getting pissy at all up there, probably didn't have my morning coffee.

Lots of useful advice here, will plusrep when I get home ^^

Any idea where I could get a cheap tape backup device that supports high capacity tapes? Seen some on newegg, $1700, went on eBay UK to find same device at £1900


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No such thing as a cheap tape drive, they are very expensive for who knows what fucking reason. (yes i know there are reasons)

[Cosmin]

Probably because fucktons of moving parts, idk

[Stoffl]

I'll piggyback on this thread a bit. I'm trying to decide between:

QNAP TS-563-8G 5-Bay
QNAP TS-453A 4-Bay
Synology DiskStation DS1517+

Any recommendations?

You can never have enough bays.
You'll inevitably run out of off space and hdd data density isn't increasing as fast as content quality / size

So I'd favor the bays over oomph
(I have an ancient 4bay qnap with 22tb total and space is getting tight)

[Lana Torrin]

We will have a San going cheap soon.... Win10 can do iscsi native now.. It will probably be fast enough for one user as well...

[root]

I used to have HTPC's in the past. Now I just do SMB file sharing from my Linux system (5x4TB drives) and then use Nvidia Shield TV's running SPMC (Kodi).

Works very nice and 4K HDR is pretty.

Are you running RAID 5 software by any chance?

I'm not actually. Software RAID like ZFS doesn't let you grow your arrays over time which is a shame. I use mhddfs which makes multiple drives look like one without the splitting of files across the drives. This means expanding the storage is a breeze. Sure I don't have any resiliency, however I would only lose one drives worth of stuff if something went wrong. Also I don't have to have the same size disks, it just happened to be all the same at this time. I have slowly moved from 4x2TB and the next drive I add will probably be 8TB.

You can also add snapraid snapraid ontop of what you got.
It will add n disk of parity.

Does not matter if you mix your drives or what filesystem you use. Just the parity disk should be as large as the largest disk.

I got the same as you, but instead of mhddfs I use mergerfs.