[gentoo-user] NAS and replacing with larger drives

[Dale]

Howdy,

I've pretty much reached a limit on my backups.  I'm up to a 16TB hard
drive for one and even that won't last long.  Larger drives are much
more costly.  A must have NAS is quickly approaching.  I've been
searching around and find some things confusing.  I'm hoping someone can
clear up that confusion.  I'm also debating what path to travel down. 
I'd also like to keep costs down as well.  That said, I don't mind
paying a little more for one that would offer a much better option. 

Path one, buy a NAS, possibly used, that has no drives.  If possible, I
may even replace the OS that comes on it or upgrade if I can.  I'm not
looking for fancy, or even RAID.  Just looking for a two bay NAS that
will work.  First, what is a DAS?  Is that totally different than a
NAS?  From what I've found, a DAS is not what I'm looking for since I
want a ethernet connection and the ability to control things over the
network.  It seems DAS lacks that feature but not real sure.  I'm not
sure I can upgrade the software/OS on a DAS either. 

Next thing.  Let's say a NAS comes with two 4TB drives for a total of
8TB of capacity from the factory, using LVM or similar software I
assume.  Is that limited to that capacity or can I for example replace
one or both drives with for example 14TB drives for a total of 28TBs of
capacity?  If one does that, let's say it uses LVM, can I somehow move
data as well or is that beyond the abilities of a NAS?  Could it be done
inside my computer for example?  Does this vary by brand or even model? 

Path two, I've researched building a NAS using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB as
another option.  They come as parts, cases too, but the newer and faster
models of Raspberry Pi 4 with more ram seem to work pretty well.  The
old slower models with small amounts of ram don't fair as well.  While I
want a descent speed, I'm not looking for or expecting it to be
blazingly fast.  I just wonder, if from a upgrade and expansion point of
view, if building a NAS would be better.  I've also noticed, it seems
all Raspberry things come with a display port.  That means I could hook
up a monitor and mouse/keyboard when needed.  That could be a bonus. 
Heck, I may can even put some sort of Gentoo on that thing.  :-D

One reason I'm wanting to go this route, I'm trying to keep it small and
able to fit inside my fire safe.  I plan to buy a media type safe that
is larger but right now, it needs to fit inside my current safe.  Most
of the 2 bay NAS or a Raspberry Pi based NAS are fairly small.  They not
much bigger than the three external hard drives and a couple bare drives
that currently occupy my safe. 

One thing I'd like to have no matter what path I go down, the ability to
encrypt the data.  My current backup drives are encrypted and I'd like
to keep it that way.  If that is possible to do.  I suspect the
Raspberry option would since I'd control the OS/software placed on it. 
I could be wrong tho. 

One last thing.  Are there any NAS type boxes that I should absolutely
avoid if I go that route?  Maybe it is a model that has serious
limitations or has other problems.  I think the DAS thing may be one for
me to avoid but I'm not for sure what limits it has.  Google didn't help
a lot. It also could be as simple as, avoid any model that says this in
the description or uses some type of software that is bad or limits
options. 

Thoughts?  Info to share?  Ideas on a best path forward?  Buy already
built or build?

Thanks.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Mark Knecht]

Post by Dale
Howdy,
I've pretty much reached a limit on my backups. I'm up to a 16TB hard
drive for one and even that won't last long. Larger drives are much
more costly. A must have NAS is quickly approaching. I've been
searching around and find some things confusing. I'm hoping someone can
clear up that confusion. I'm also debating what path to travel down.
I'd also like to keep costs down as well. That said, I don't mind
paying a little more for one that would offer a much better option.
Path one, buy a NAS, possibly used, that has no drives. If possible, I
may even replace the OS that comes on it or upgrade if I can. I'm not
looking for fancy, or even RAID. Just looking for a two bay NAS that
will work. First, what is a DAS? Is that totally different than a
NAS? From what I've found, a DAS is not what I'm looking for since I
want a ethernet connection and the ability to control things over the
network. It seems DAS lacks that feature but not real sure. I'm not
sure I can upgrade the software/OS on a DAS either.
Next thing. Let's say a NAS comes with two 4TB drives for a total of
8TB of capacity from the factory, using LVM or similar software I
assume. Is that limited to that capacity or can I for example replace
one or both drives with for example 14TB drives for a total of 28TBs of
capacity? If one does that, let's say it uses LVM, can I somehow move
data as well or is that beyond the abilities of a NAS? Could it be done
inside my computer for example? Does this vary by brand or even model?
Path two, I've researched building a NAS using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB as
another option. They come as parts, cases too, but the newer and faster
models of Raspberry Pi 4 with more ram seem to work pretty well. The
old slower models with small amounts of ram don't fair as well. While I
want a descent speed, I'm not looking for or expecting it to be
blazingly fast. I just wonder, if from a upgrade and expansion point of
view, if building a NAS would be better. I've also noticed, it seems
all Raspberry things come with a display port. That means I could hook
up a monitor and mouse/keyboard when needed. That could be a bonus.
Heck, I may can even put some sort of Gentoo on that thing. :-D
One reason I'm wanting to go this route, I'm trying to keep it small and
able to fit inside my fire safe. I plan to buy a media type safe that
is larger but right now, it needs to fit inside my current safe. Most
of the 2 bay NAS or a Raspberry Pi based NAS are fairly small. They not
much bigger than the three external hard drives and a couple bare drives
that currently occupy my safe.
One thing I'd like to have no matter what path I go down, the ability to
encrypt the data. My current backup drives are encrypted and I'd like
to keep it that way. If that is possible to do. I suspect the
Raspberry option would since I'd control the OS/software placed on it.
I could be wrong tho.
One last thing. Are there any NAS type boxes that I should absolutely
avoid if I go that route? Maybe it is a model that has serious
limitations or has other problems. I think the DAS thing may be one for
me to avoid but I'm not for sure what limits it has. Google didn't help
a lot. It also could be as simple as, avoid any model that says this in
the description or uses some type of software that is bad or limits
options.
Thoughts? Info to share? Ideas on a best path forward? Buy already
built or build?
Thanks.
Dale
:-) :-)

DAS is direct-attached-storage. I don't think you want that.

Synology (sp?) is sort of a big name in home & small office NAS boxes. You
can buy the boxes with or without drives. I suspect you won't like the
prices.

I wonder if you might consider what data on your backups needs to be
immediately available and which doesn't. Possibly buy an 8TB USB drive,
take a bunch of the lower priority data off of your current backup thus
system freeing space and move on from there?

I built my NAS devices using old computers ala Wol's suggestion to me maybe
a year ago. They work for me but don't have the fastest network interfaces.

Raspberry Pi 4 B's are hard to get and expensive right now. Still, they are
nice little devices but you would probably be limited to USB hard drive
storage.

[Dale]

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Dale
Howdy,
I've pretty much reached a limit on my backups.  I'm up to a 16TB hard
drive for one and even that won't last long.  Larger drives are much
more costly.  A must have NAS is quickly approaching.  I've been
searching around and find some things confusing.  I'm hoping someone can
clear up that confusion.  I'm also debating what path to travel down.
I'd also like to keep costs down as well.  That said, I don't mind
paying a little more for one that would offer a much better option.
Path one, buy a NAS, possibly used, that has no drives.  If possible, I
may even replace the OS that comes on it or upgrade if I can.  I'm not
looking for fancy, or even RAID.  Just looking for a two bay NAS that
will work.  First, what is a DAS?  Is that totally different than a
NAS?  From what I've found, a DAS is not what I'm looking for since I
want a ethernet connection and the ability to control things over the
network.  It seems DAS lacks that feature but not real sure.  I'm not
sure I can upgrade the software/OS on a DAS either.
Next thing.  Let's say a NAS comes with two 4TB drives for a total of
8TB of capacity from the factory, using LVM or similar software I
assume.  Is that limited to that capacity or can I for example replace
one or both drives with for example 14TB drives for a total of 28TBs of
capacity?  If one does that, let's say it uses LVM, can I somehow move
data as well or is that beyond the abilities of a NAS?  Could it be done
inside my computer for example?  Does this vary by brand or even model?
Path two, I've researched building a NAS using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB as
another option.  They come as parts, cases too, but the newer and faster
models of Raspberry Pi 4 with more ram seem to work pretty well.  The
old slower models with small amounts of ram don't fair as well.  While I
want a descent speed, I'm not looking for or expecting it to be
blazingly fast.  I just wonder, if from a upgrade and expansion point of
view, if building a NAS would be better.  I've also noticed, it seems
all Raspberry things come with a display port.  That means I could hook
up a monitor and mouse/keyboard when needed.  That could be a bonus.
Heck, I may can even put some sort of Gentoo on that thing.  :-D
One reason I'm wanting to go this route, I'm trying to keep it small and
able to fit inside my fire safe.  I plan to buy a media type safe that
is larger but right now, it needs to fit inside my current safe.  Most
of the 2 bay NAS or a Raspberry Pi based NAS are fairly small.  They not
much bigger than the three external hard drives and a couple bare drives
that currently occupy my safe.
One thing I'd like to have no matter what path I go down, the ability to
encrypt the data.  My current backup drives are encrypted and I'd like
to keep it that way.  If that is possible to do.  I suspect the
Raspberry option would since I'd control the OS/software placed on it.
I could be wrong tho.
One last thing.  Are there any NAS type boxes that I should absolutely
avoid if I go that route?  Maybe it is a model that has serious
limitations or has other problems.  I think the DAS thing may be one for
me to avoid but I'm not for sure what limits it has.  Google didn't help
a lot. It also could be as simple as, avoid any model that says this in
the description or uses some type of software that is bad or limits
options.
Thoughts?  Info to share?  Ideas on a best path forward?  Buy already
built or build?
Thanks.
Dale
:-)  :-)

DAS is direct-attached-storage. I don't think you want that.
Synology (sp?) is sort of a big name in home & small office NAS boxes.
You can buy the boxes with or without drives. I suspect you won't like
the prices.
I wonder if you might consider what data on your backups needs to be
immediately available and which doesn't. Possibly buy an 8TB USB
drive, take a bunch of the lower priority data off of your current
backup thus system freeing space and move on from there?
I built my NAS devices using old computers ala Wol's suggestion to me
maybe a year ago. They work for me but don't have the fastest network
interfaces.
Raspberry Pi 4 B's are hard to get and expensive right now. Still,
they are nice little devices but you would probably be limited to USB
hard drive storage.

I was thinking DAS was not a good option.  It seems like a feature
removed and cheaper version of NAS. 

I think I've seen a couple Synology NAS boxes but I think even used they
were a bit pricey.  Still, used could make that a option.  Maybe.  It
could fall into the category of pay a little more for a much better
option, even if it is used. 

I've considered using older systems I have for NAS but they are large. 
Way to large.  It would require a lot of effort to shrink them down if
it is even possible.  A NAS is smaller and designed for what I need as
well.  This is what I found that goes with the Raspberry Pi. 

https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/sata-hat/products/dual-sata-hat-open-frame-for-raspberry-pi-4

There is a two bay and a four bay version.  I think the case is the same
for both so I may go with four for future expansion.  Price isn't bad
for that part but as you say, Raspberry Pi board is a bit pricey.  Thing
is, given the amount of control I'd have over it, it could be a better
option long term.  I might add, I think this board is somewhat new.  I
meant to include a link to it but forget.  It could be that you are not
aware of that, or many other people either.  Also, I'd like to buy it
from a more local vendor.  I've bought things from China through Ebay
but it has a guarantee and refund option that is fairly good.  It's a
option I've had to exercise a time or two. 

Part of me wants to buy a used but well featured NAS box.  Part of me
thinks a Raspberry would be better and have upgrade options in the
future as well.  I'm pretty sure I could have encryption on a Raspberry
NAS as well.  I'm not sure if a prebuilt NAS box has encryption or not. 

Hope for some good ideas tho.  I'd like to avoid buying something that
won't come close to serving even current needs or just plain doesn't work.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Mark Knecht]

Post by Mark Knecht
DAS is direct-attached-storage. I don't think you want that.

<SNIP>

Post by Mark Knecht
I was thinking DAS was not a good option. It seems like a feature

removed and cheaper version of NAS.

I've never touched a DAS box but my limited understanding is that it's an
external box that interfaces to your computer. In your case that might
attached to your backup machine, or is Rich or someone can point
you toward an appropriate RP4 or some other single board computer
it could attach to that. The problem will be the interface. In big rack
mount servers these interfaces are often some high end version
of PCI Express with Multi-gigabyte/second interfaces. You're just
not likely to find something like that on an RP4.

If you really wanted to tinker you can always find used rack mount
servers being retired from cloud hosting services on Ebay. They
generally come with fast Ethernet interfaces and more than
enough compute power but likely not as much disk space as
you seem to want. (There's lots of used Synology boxes there
also...)

I still think that an 8TB USB drive from Amazon for around $100
would meet your needs. Off load the stuff you don't need to
access from backups immediately, through the drive in your
fire safe and you suddenly have 8TB free on your
backup machine. It's slow, but it's easy and requires no new
computers and hence to mental bandwidth.

Good luck.

[Daniel Frey]

I was thinking DAS was not a good option.  It seems like a feature
removed and cheaper version of NAS.
I think I've seen a couple Synology NAS boxes but I think even used they
were a bit pricey.  Still, used could make that a option. Maybe.  It
could fall into the category of pay a little more for a much better
option, even if it is used.
I've considered using older systems I have for NAS but they are large.
Way to large.  It would require a lot of effort to shrink them down if
it is even possible.  A NAS is smaller and designed for what I need as
well.  This is what I found that goes with the Raspberry Pi.
https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/sata-hat/products/dual-sata-hat-open-frame-for-raspberry-pi-4
There is a two bay and a four bay version.  I think the case is the same
for both so I may go with four for future expansion.  Price isn't bad
for that part but as you say, Raspberry Pi board is a bit pricey.  Thing
is, given the amount of control I'd have over it, it could be a better
option long term.  I might add, I think this board is somewhat new.  I
meant to include a link to it but forget.  It could be that you are not
aware of that, or many other people either.  Also, I'd like to buy it
from a more local vendor.  I've bought things from China through Ebay
but it has a guarantee and refund option that is fairly good.  It's a
option I've had to exercise a time or two.
Part of me wants to buy a used but well featured NAS box.  Part of me
thinks a Raspberry would be better and have upgrade options in the
future as well.  I'm pretty sure I could have encryption on a Raspberry
NAS as well.  I'm not sure if a prebuilt NAS box has encryption or not.
Hope for some good ideas tho.  I'd like to avoid buying something that
won't come close to serving even current needs or just plain doesn't work.
Dale
:-)  :-)

Dale,

DAS is direct attached storage. If your intention is to share the data
with multiple devices for backup you will need to keep in mind that you
will need a PC to share the data the DAS device is storing. In general,
most DAS require some sort of HBA (some of these HBAs can be hundreds to
thousands of dollars.) I've seen some eSata ones but they usually don't
have stellar reviews. It's also getting harder to find eSata devices.

In contrast NAS devices are designed to plug in to the network and be
shared with multiple devices on the LAN right from the get-go.

You are probably interested in a NAS, not a DAS.

I have an aging ix4-300d NAS. The display has started crashing now but
the device is still rock solid. However I'm in the same boat and have
been researching options - I think for my case I will get a small cube
case and mini-ITX board and roll my own Gentoo install. The cost may
even be slightly cheaper as 4 bay NAS here are quite expensive where I
am (with no drives installed) and building my own will be a bit cheaper
and I can choose what drives to run in it. Vulnerabilities on devices
like QNAP and Synology are very real and at least if you can roll your
own you can keep that to a minimum (like an example not running a web
browser to configure things.)

Dan

[Dale]

Post by Daniel Frey

I was thinking DAS was not a good option.  It seems like a feature
removed and cheaper version of NAS.
I think I've seen a couple Synology NAS boxes but I think even used
they were a bit pricey.  Still, used could make that a option.
Maybe.  It could fall into the category of pay a little more for a
much better option, even if it is used.
I've considered using older systems I have for NAS but they are
large.  Way to large.  It would require a lot of effort to shrink
them down if it is even possible.  A NAS is smaller and designed for
what I need as well.  This is what I found that goes with the
Raspberry Pi.
https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/sata-hat/products/dual-sata-hat-open-frame-for-raspberry-pi-4
There is a two bay and a four bay version.  I think the case is the
same for both so I may go with four for future expansion.  Price
isn't bad for that part but as you say, Raspberry Pi board is a bit
pricey.  Thing is, given the amount of control I'd have over it, it
could be a better option long term.  I might add, I think this board
is somewhat new.  I meant to include a link to it but forget.  It
could be that you are not aware of that, or many other people
either.  Also, I'd like to buy it from a more local vendor.  I've
bought things from China through Ebay but it has a guarantee and
refund option that is fairly good.  It's a option I've had to
exercise a time or two.
Part of me wants to buy a used but well featured NAS box.  Part of me
thinks a Raspberry would be better and have upgrade options in the
future as well.  I'm pretty sure I could have encryption on a
Raspberry NAS as well.  I'm not sure if a prebuilt NAS box has
encryption or not.
Hope for some good ideas tho.  I'd like to avoid buying something
that won't come close to serving even current needs or just plain
doesn't work.
Dale
:-)  :-)

Dale,
DAS is direct attached storage. If your intention is to share the data
with multiple devices for backup you will need to keep in mind that
you will need a PC to share the data the DAS device is storing. In
general, most DAS require some sort of HBA (some of these HBAs can be
hundreds to thousands of dollars.) I've seen some eSata ones but they
usually don't have stellar reviews. It's also getting harder to find
eSata devices.
In contrast NAS devices are designed to plug in to the network and be
shared with multiple devices on the LAN right from the get-go.
You are probably interested in a NAS, not a DAS.
I have an aging ix4-300d NAS. The display has started crashing now but
the device is still rock solid. However I'm in the same boat and have
been researching options - I think for my case I will get a small cube
case and mini-ITX board and roll my own Gentoo install. The cost may
even be slightly cheaper as 4 bay NAS here are quite expensive where I
am (with no drives installed) and building my own will be a bit
cheaper and I can choose what drives to run in it. Vulnerabilities on
devices like QNAP and Synology are very real and at least if you can
roll your own you can keep that to a minimum (like an example not
running a web browser to configure things.)
Dan

I was thinking DAS wouldn't fit my needs.  Just wasn't real sure what
the difference was.  Someone always coming up with something that only
half works.  :/

Right now, I have a modem/router in one that the ISP provided.  I have a
separate router that I use since I can control access with it.  The ISP
modem/router can not be accessed by me.  Supposedly, it has some
protection but without access, who knows.  Either way, I'd connect a NAS
to my router that I control and if possible, forbid internet access.  If
possible, I may restrict it to ethernet access only, no wifi connection
either.  That should lock it down.  Also, I only update backups once a
week for maybe a hour or less.  The window for a hacker would be small
anyway. 

I looked into buying/building a really small puter but with a lot of
drive bays.  Thing is, they have few SATA ports and not many ways to add
any plus they end up being to large.  I really don't like USB for my
data much.  I've had a lot of bad experiences with USB and hard drives. 
Still, if this Raspberry thing uses it and others make it work fine, I'd
give it a shot. 

Still reading posts and trying to sort things out.  Also, searching
around for NAS boxes just in case I run up on a steal of a deal.  :-D 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Paul Colquhoun]

Post by Mark Knecht
I was thinking DAS was not a good option. It seems like a feature
removed and cheaper version of NAS.

Maybe get the DAS, then connect it to the Rasberry Pi 4, to make a DIY NAS.

That way you get a propper encolsure for your drives, without needing to cobble
something together.

[Wols Lists]

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Dale
Howdy,
I've pretty much reached a limit on my backups.  I'm up to a 16TB hard
drive for one and even that won't last long.  Larger drives are much
more costly.  A must have NAS is quickly approaching.  I've been
searching around and find some things confusing.  I'm hoping someone can
clear up that confusion.  I'm also debating what path to travel down.
I'd also like to keep costs down as well.  That said, I don't mind
paying a little more for one that would offer a much better option.
Path one, buy a NAS, possibly used, that has no drives.  If possible, I
may even replace the OS that comes on it or upgrade if I can.  I'm not
looking for fancy, or even RAID.  Just looking for a two bay NAS that
will work.  First, what is a DAS?  Is that totally different than a
NAS?  From what I've found, a DAS is not what I'm looking for since I
want a ethernet connection and the ability to control things over the
network.  It seems DAS lacks that feature but not real sure.  I'm not
sure I can upgrade the software/OS on a DAS either.
Next thing.  Let's say a NAS comes with two 4TB drives for a total of
8TB of capacity from the factory, using LVM or similar software I
assume.  Is that limited to that capacity or can I for example replace
one or both drives with for example 14TB drives for a total of 28TBs of
capacity?  If one does that, let's say it uses LVM, can I somehow move
data as well or is that beyond the abilities of a NAS?  Could it be done
inside my computer for example?  Does this vary by brand or even model?
Path two, I've researched building a NAS using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB as
another option.  They come as parts, cases too, but the newer and faster
models of Raspberry Pi 4 with more ram seem to work pretty well.  The
old slower models with small amounts of ram don't fair as well.  While I
want a descent speed, I'm not looking for or expecting it to be
blazingly fast.  I just wonder, if from a upgrade and expansion point of
view, if building a NAS would be better.  I've also noticed, it seems
all Raspberry things come with a display port.  That means I could hook
up a monitor and mouse/keyboard when needed.  That could be a bonus.
Heck, I may can even put some sort of Gentoo on that thing.  :-D
One reason I'm wanting to go this route, I'm trying to keep it small and
able to fit inside my fire safe.  I plan to buy a media type safe that
is larger but right now, it needs to fit inside my current safe.  Most
of the 2 bay NAS or a Raspberry Pi based NAS are fairly small.  They not
much bigger than the three external hard drives and a couple bare drives
that currently occupy my safe.
One thing I'd like to have no matter what path I go down, the ability to
encrypt the data.  My current backup drives are encrypted and I'd like
to keep it that way.  If that is possible to do.  I suspect the
Raspberry option would since I'd control the OS/software placed on it.
I could be wrong tho.
One last thing.  Are there any NAS type boxes that I should absolutely
avoid if I go that route?  Maybe it is a model that has serious
limitations or has other problems.  I think the DAS thing may be one for
me to avoid but I'm not for sure what limits it has.  Google didn't help
a lot. It also could be as simple as, avoid any model that says this in
the description or uses some type of software that is bad or limits
options.
Thoughts?  Info to share?  Ideas on a best path forward?  Buy already
built or build?
Thanks.
Dale
:-)  :-)

DAS is direct-attached-storage. I don't think you want that.

Depends. If it fits in the safe, and can be connected using one of these
eSATA thingy connectors, it might be a very good choice.

Post by Mark Knecht
Synology (sp?) is sort of a big name in home & small office NAS boxes.
You can buy the boxes with or without drives. I suspect you won't like
the prices.

I've been looking :-) I think the empty box costs more than the drives
you're going to put in it ...

Post by Mark Knecht
I wonder if you might consider what data on your backups needs to be
immediately available and which doesn't. Possibly buy an 8TB USB drive,
take a bunch of the lower priority data off of your current backup thus
system freeing space and move on from there?
I built my NAS devices using old computers ala Wol's suggestion to me
maybe a year ago. They work for me but don't have the fastest network
interfaces.

I get the impression Dale isn't actually PLANNING his disk storage. It's
just a case of "help I'm downloading all this stuff where do I put it!!!"

How much storage do you have in your actual computer? How much space do
you need IN ONE PARTITION? Can you get an external disk caddy that you
just slot bare drives in?

I've no doubt you have good reason for wanting all this storage. I just
fail to see why you need huge drives for it if most of the time you're
not doing anything with it.

Get yourself a basic 4-way DAS/JBOD setup, PLAN where you're putting all
this stuff, and plug in and remove drives as required. You don't need
all these huge drives if you think about what you're going to do with it
all. (And while it takes time and hammers the system, I regularly record
off the TV getting a 2GB .ts file, convert it to mp4 - same resolution -
and reduce the size by an order of magnitude - maybe more.

If you've got two hot-swap JBOD enclosures, that's brilliant. You can
stream from your media centre to a drive, swap it out, and use a second
system to then organise your collection.

Oh - and if you are worried about disks going walkabout, just LUKS the
whole disk, and without the key nobody can read it ... build your
partitions or whatever over it.

Cheers,
Wol

[Mark Knecht]

Post by Mark Knecht
<SNIP>

Post by Mark Knecht
DAS is direct-attached-storage. I don't think you want that.

Depends. If it fits in the safe, and can be connected using one of these
eSATA thingy connectors, it might be a very good choice.

First, I Agree about 300% with everything you posted in this response.
However
Rich and I have mentioned RPi 4 type solutions and I don't personally know
of any that have eSATA outputs, but it's possible. There are some RPi case
that can hold M.2 and SSD devices but the ones I looked at get there through
a USB port.

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Mark Knecht
Synology (sp?) is sort of a big name in home & small office NAS boxes.
You can buy the boxes with or without drives. I suspect you won't like
the prices.

I've been looking :-) I think the empty box costs more than the drives
you're going to put in it ...

Certainly more than I would want to spend. However with Dale talking
about 14TB, 16TB, 20TB possibly not. I just cannot imagine Dale
spending that much money on hardware! ;-)

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Mark Knecht
I wonder if you might consider what data on your backups needs to be
immediately available and which doesn't. Possibly buy an 8TB USB drive,
take a bunch of the lower priority data off of your current backup thus
system freeing space and move on from there?
I built my NAS devices using old computers ala Wol's suggestion to me
maybe a year ago. They work for me but don't have the fastest network
interfaces.

I get the impression Dale isn't actually PLANNING his disk storage. It's
just a case of "help I'm downloading all this stuff where do I put it!!!"
How much storage do you have in your actual computer? How much space do
you need IN ONE PARTITION? Can you get an external disk caddy that you
just slot bare drives in?

This is a good point. With planning he could have multiple 4TB type
drives with 2 or 3 slots and you plug in the drive you want to use
that day. It would take some minor planning but it's not a huge deal
and as larger drives become less expensive over time he could swap
out a 4TB for 8TB or higher, etc, as he needed to.

If it has the performance he needs he could start with drives he
already has and then upgrade over time moving data around
after he does his planning. ;-)

- Mark

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Wols Lists

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Dale
I've pretty much reached a limit on my backups.  I'm up to a 16TB hard
drive for one and even that won't last long.  Larger drives are much
more costly.  A must have NAS is quickly approaching.  I've been
searching around and find some things confusing.  I'm hoping someone can
clear up that confusion.  I'm also debating what path to travel down.
I'd also like to keep costs down as well.  That said, I don't mind
paying a little more for one that would offer a much better option.
Path one, buy a NAS, possibly used, that has no drives.  If possible, I
may even replace the OS that comes on it or upgrade if I can.  I'm not
looking for fancy, or even RAID.  Just looking for a two bay NAS that
will work.  First, what is a DAS?  Is that totally different than a
NAS?  From what I've found, a DAS is not what I'm looking for since I
want a ethernet connection and the ability to control things over the
network.  It seems DAS lacks that feature but not real sure.  I'm not
sure I can upgrade the software/OS on a DAS either.
[
]

DAS is direct-attached-storage. I don't think you want that.

Depends. If it fits in the safe, and can be connected using one of these
eSATA thingy connectors, it might be a very good choice.
[
]
I get the impression Dale isn't actually PLANNING his disk storage. It's
just a case of "help I'm downloading all this stuff where do I put it!!!"

Haha, thanks for the laugh.

Post by Wols Lists
Get yourself a basic 4-way DAS/JBOD setup, PLAN where you're putting all
this stuff, and plug in and remove drives as required. You don't need all
these huge drives if you think about what you're going to do with it all.

That’s actually a good idea. Either use a hot swap frame for an internal 5Œ″
PC bay, a desktop dock for bare drives or a multi-bay enclosure. The market
is big, you have lots of choices. USB (with or without integrated hub),
eSATA, one or two bays, etc: https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=hddocks

Advantages:
- no separate system to maintain just for storage: save $$$, time and power
- very flexible: no chassis limitation on number of disks
- no bulky external enclosures, each using a different power brick and cable
- minimum volume to put into a safe (just get or make a bulk storage case)

Disadvantages:
- not as “fancy” as a NAS
- possibly not all disks can be used at the same time
- physical handling of naked disks takes more care
- LVM is not practical, so use each disk separately
- you gotta remember which files are where¹
- SATA connectors aren’t made for very many insertion cycles (I think the
spec says 50?), which doesn’t mean they endure much more, but still 


Post by Wols Lists
(And while it takes time and hammers the system, I regularly record off the
TV getting a 2GB .ts file, convert it to mp4 - same resolution - and reduce
the size by an order of magnitude - maybe more.

Well, ts uses mpeg2 encoding, just like old video DVDs, which is very
inefficient when compared with modern h264/h265. Modern digital TV broadcast
uses h264 by now.


Incidentally, I got myself a new HDD today: an external 2.5″ WD Passport
Ultra 5 TB with USB-C 3.0. Just because I like portable storage and also
because I need temporary space if I want to convert my NAS RAID-Z2 to Z1.


¹ I do have several external USB disks, plus the big NAS. All of which don’t
run very often. And I don’t want to turn them on just to look for a certain
file. That’s why I have another little script. ;-) It uses the `tree` command
to save the complete content listing of a directory into a text file and
names the file automatically by the name of the directory it crawls. So if I
want to find a file, I just need to grep through my text files.

[Michael]

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Wols Lists

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Dale
I've pretty much reached a limit on my backups. I'm up to a 16TB
hard
drive for one and even that won't last long. Larger drives are much
more costly. A must have NAS is quickly approaching. I've been
searching around and find some things confusing. I'm hoping someone
can
clear up that confusion. I'm also debating what path to travel down.
I'd also like to keep costs down as well. That said, I don't mind
paying a little more for one that would offer a much better option.
Path one, buy a NAS, possibly used, that has no drives. If possible,
I
may even replace the OS that comes on it or upgrade if I can. I'm
not
looking for fancy, or even RAID. Just looking for a two bay NAS that
will work. First, what is a DAS? Is that totally different than a
NAS? From what I've found, a DAS is not what I'm looking for since I
want a ethernet connection and the ability to control things over the
network. It seems DAS lacks that feature but not real sure. I'm not
sure I can upgrade the software/OS on a DAS either.
[
]

DAS is direct-attached-storage. I don't think you want that.

Depends. If it fits in the safe, and can be connected using one of these
eSATA thingy connectors, it might be a very good choice.
[
]
I get the impression Dale isn't actually PLANNING his disk storage. It's
just a case of "help I'm downloading all this stuff where do I put it!!!"

Haha, thanks for the laugh.

Actually this had me thinking what is the need to back up the ... Internet?
If all this never-ending and recently accelerated download activity by Dale
will continue and most of these video/audio files are available on some
streaming server on the Internet, WHY do they need to be backed up locally?

I appreciate some of these video files may be rare finds, or there may be a
risk some of these may be taken off the interwebs sooner or later. This
should leave a rather small subset of all downloads, which may merit a local
backup, just in case. I'd thought the availability of higher fiber download
speeds negates the need for local backups, of readily downloadable media.

Of course, with personal and private data, plus configuration files, the
backup need is clearer and the strategy simpler.

Perhaps the whole backup strategy for files downloaded from the Internet, Vs
personal files, needs some critical (re)thinking.

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Wols Lists
Get yourself a basic 4-way DAS/JBOD setup, PLAN where you're putting all
this stuff, and plug in and remove drives as required. You don't need all
these huge drives if you think about what you're going to do with it all.

That’s actually a good idea. Either use a hot swap frame for an internal 5Œ″
PC bay, a desktop dock for bare drives or a multi-bay enclosure. The market
is big, you have lots of choices. USB (with or without integrated hub),
eSATA, one or two bays, etc: https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=hddocks
- no separate system to maintain just for storage: save $$$, time and power
- very flexible: no chassis limitation on number of disks
- no bulky external enclosures, each using a different power brick and cable
- minimum volume to put into a safe (just get or make a bulk storage case)
- not as “fancy” as a NAS
- possibly not all disks can be used at the same time
- physical handling of naked disks takes more care
- LVM is not practical, so use each disk separately
- you gotta remember which files are where¹
- SATA connectors aren’t made for very many insertion cycles (I think the
spec says 50?), which doesn’t mean they endure much more, but still 


Post by Wols Lists
(And while it takes time and hammers the system, I regularly record off the
TV getting a 2GB .ts file, convert it to mp4 - same resolution - and reduce
the size by an order of magnitude - maybe more.

Well, ts uses mpeg2 encoding, just like old video DVDs, which is very
inefficient when compared with modern h264/h265. Modern digital TV broadcast
uses h264 by now.

Depending on the PVR make/model I've seen 1080p resolution recordings with
.m2ts and .ts file extensions, while the codecs inside them are the same.
Here's the ffprobe output of a .ts recording containing a h264 video I
captured recently off terrestrial TV transmission:

Input #0, mpegts, from '20221209 0147 - BBC ONE HD - Weather for the Week
Ahead.ts':
Duration: 00:13:01.44, start: 48999.919856, bitrate: 3744 kb/s
Program 17540
Stream #0:0[0x19c9]: Video: h264 (High) ([27][0][0][0] / 0x001B),
yuv420p(tv, bt709, progressive), 1920x1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 25 fps, 25 tbr,
90k tbn, 50 tbc
Stream #0:1[0x19ca](eng): Audio: aac_latm (LC) ([17][0][0][0] / 0x0011),
48000 Hz, 5.1, fltp
Stream #0:2[0x19ce](eng): Unknown: none ([17][0][0][0] / 0x0011) (visual
impaired) (descriptions) (dependent)
Stream #0:3[0x19cd](eng): Subtitle: dvb_subtitle ([6][0][0][0] / 0x0006)

The h264 codec means converting the .ts file to mp4 will not change much at
all the size of the file. If anything the mp4 file could increase in size if
the audio stream and subtitles need to be transcoded.

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
Incidentally, I got myself a new HDD today: an external 2.5″ WD Passport
Ultra 5 TB with USB-C 3.0. Just because I like portable storage and also
because I need temporary space if I want to convert my NAS RAID-Z2 to Z1.
¹ I do have several external USB disks, plus the big NAS. All of which don’t
run very often. And I don’t want to turn them on just to look for a certain
file. That’s why I have another little script. ;-) It uses the `tree`
command to save the complete content listing of a directory into a text
file and names the file automatically by the name of the directory it
crawls. So if I want to find a file, I just need to grep through my text
files.

Backup scripts utilising rsync, tar, etc. can output a log file which contains
(some) details of all the backed up files. Nothing as sophisticated as
Frank's script, but it allows for a quick search against the name of the file
or directory, before extraction.

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Michael

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Wols Lists
I get the impression Dale isn't actually PLANNING his disk storage. It's
just a case of "help I'm downloading all this stuff where do I put it!!!"

Haha, thanks for the laugh.

Actually this had me thinking what is the need to back up the ... Internet?
[
]
I appreciate some of these video files may be rare finds, or there may be a
risk some of these may be taken off the interwebs sooner or later. This
should leave a rather small subset of all downloads, which may merit a local
backup, just in case. I'd thought the availability of higher fiber download
speeds negates the need for local backups, of readily downloadable media.

Good points. I am a big fan of having stuff locally as well, because I don’t
want to be dependent on a company’s servers and a working Internet connection.
But this mostly applies to my mobile device, because I don’t have a data plan
for mobile Internet.

Post by Michael

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
Well, ts uses mpeg2 encoding, just like old video DVDs, which is very
inefficient when compared with modern h264/h265. Modern digital TV broadcast
uses h264 by now.

Depending on the PVR make/model I've seen 1080p resolution recordings with
.m2ts and .ts file extensions, while the codecs inside them are the same.

I wasn’t aware that ts could contain h264. But then again—I never really
bothered with live TV recordings in recent years. These days, if I find
something interesting, I download the show form the TV channel’s website
(called Mediathek in Germany, a word play on Bibliothek, meaning library).
Interestingly though, the picture quality is noticably worse than what I
receive via DVB-T.

Post by Michael

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
¹ I do have several external USB disks, plus the big NAS. All of which don’t
run very often. And I don’t want to turn them on just to look for a certain
file. That’s why I have another little script. ;-) It uses the `tree`
command to save the complete content listing of a directory into a text
file and names the file automatically by the name of the directory it
crawls. So if I want to find a file, I just need to grep through my text
files.

Backup scripts utilising rsync, tar, etc. can output a log file which contains
(some) details of all the backed up files. Nothing as sophisticated as
Frank's script, but it allows for a quick search against the name of the file
or directory, before extraction.

Naturally, I just discovered two bugs in the script while I was re-reading
my mail. One of them broke the creation of the symlink which points to the
most recent version of a script output. The other prevented normal operation
if only gzip was available amongst the used compressors.

[Peter Humphrey]

...I never really bothered with live TV recordings in recent years. These
days, if I find something interesting, I download the show form the TV
channel’s website (called Mediathek in Germany, a word play on Bibliothek,
meaning library). Interestingly though, the picture quality is noticably
worse than what I receive via DVB-T.

I do nearly the opposite: I record every TV programme I want to watch, then
watch it at my leisure. That way I can skip through all the adverts, which I
loathe [1]. Freesat in the UK allows recording of radio series as well, which
Sky cannot do, so it's easy to capture late-night series and listen to them at
my convenience. I have something like 600 radio programmes on my satellite
box.

1. Mind you, UK TV adverts are nowhere near as gross as the screeching
horrors I was subjected to in Minneapolis 30 years ago.

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Peter Humphrey

...I never really bothered with live TV recordings in recent years. These
days, if I find something interesting, I download the show form the TV
channel’s website (called Mediathek in Germany, a word play on Bibliothek,
meaning library). Interestingly though, the picture quality is noticably
worse than what I receive via DVB-T.

I do nearly the opposite: I record every TV programme I want to watch, then
watch it at my leisure.

This summer I bought my first TV ever since I live on my own – after about
20 years of not having one. I haven’t missed TV and still don’t (just wanted
a bigger screen for movies played from the PC and to relax on the couch in
the evening).

Post by Peter Humphrey
That way I can skip through all the adverts, which I loathe [1].

Who doesn’t? With my little antenna, I get all the public stations with good
quality and no ads, but I don’t care for the encrypted private, ad-financed
channels for which I need to pay a yearly fee these days (on top of the
mandatory public TV “tax”).

Post by Peter Humphrey
Freesat in the UK allows recording of radio series as well, which Sky
cannot do, so it's easy to capture late-night series and listen to them at
my convenience. I have something like 600 radio programmes on my satellite
box.

Ooof, I listen to podcasts and can barely keep up, time-wise. To have a
conneciton to the original topic: I still have lots of movies and series on
the NAS which I haven’t even started to watch.

Post by Peter Humphrey
1. Mind you, UK TV adverts are nowhere near as gross as the screeching
horrors I was subjected to in Minneapolis 30 years ago.

I can only imagine.

[Peter Humphrey]

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Peter Humphrey
1. Mind you, UK TV adverts are nowhere near as gross as the screeching
horrors I was subjected to in Minneapolis 30 years ago.

I can only imagine.

Actually, I doubt you can unless you've experienced something like it - in
which case I sympathise. :)

[Dale]

Good points. I am a big fan of having stuff locally as well, because I don’t
want to be dependent on a company’s servers and a working Internet connection.
But this mostly applies to my mobile device, because I don’t have a data plan
for mobile Internet.

That is my reason.  I already have some videos that are no longer
available.  Even references to the video ever existing is hard to find. 
If I lose them, I may never get them again.  So, I try to keep copies
and hang onto them.  Plus, while I've been fortunate and have a good
stable internet connection, both with DSL and fibre, I don't know what
next year or even next month will bring.  You add in all the censorship
that is going on, it gets even worse.  I have many videos that I
downloaded from youtube that have been removed because of basically, a
political position.  The people running Youtube doesn't like the content
so it was removed.  Keep in mind, those videos were instructional and
nothing about illegal activity or anything.  They just don't like the
content.  It's also why other sites came along so people could post the
exact same type of content. 

I don't always save everything but when I find a video that might be
useful, whether it is about repairing my old washing machine, repairs to
a firearm, planting trees from seeds or just a funny cat video, I save
it if it has some future value.  The bad thing, some channels that have
been removed for a small amount of videos Youtube didn't like also had
other videos removed as well.  I've noticed entire channels disappear. 
I can't trust the people running video websites to allow content even
for short term.  Post something they don't like, true or not, they can
and often do remove content and often remove entire channels. 

I don't trust my data to be on just one set of hard drives either, it's
why I make backup copies.  If one of my main drives lets the smoke out,
I've got a backup to restore from.  I wouldn't mind having two sets of
backups and one day, I just may.  I may end up with two NAS boxes, each
a independent backup copy.  May on alternate weeks or something.  If
possible, I wouldn't mind having backups where I can even go back in
time a bit.  Just in case I need a file that I deleted and then was
deleted from the backups as well. 

If this Raspberry thing works and is fairly cheap, I may end up with two
NAS boxes as backups and a NAS box as the actual storage itself. 

Since I can't trust people who run websites, I have to trust myself. 
Keep local copies, back those up just in case. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

P. S.  Seamonkey still doesn't automatically fetch emails.  It's really
annoying.  :/

[Wols Lists]

Post by Michael
Depending on the PVR make/model I've seen 1080p resolution recordings with
.m2ts and .ts file extensions, while the codecs inside them are the same.

I wasn’t aware that ts could contain h264. But then again—I never really
bothered with live TV recordings in recent years. These days, if I find
something interesting, I download the show form the TV channel’s website
(called Mediathek in Germany, a word play on Bibliothek, meaning library).
Interestingly though, the picture quality is noticably worse than what I
receive via DVB-T.

I think this is confusing CONTAINER and CODEC.

.ts is a container format, h264 is a codec. I don't understand it
myself, either, but think of ts as your directory structure and h264 as
your file structure.

Incidentally, sticking this stuff in a .tar is probably okay - that's
just another container, but sticking it in a .tar.gz is not, the gz is
your codec and will make the file BIGGER in all probability.

Cheers,
Wol

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Wols Lists

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Michael
Depending on the PVR make/model I've seen 1080p resolution recordings with
.m2ts and .ts file extensions, while the codecs inside them are the same.

-------------------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Post by Wols Lists

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
I wasn’t aware that ts could contain h264. But then again—I never really

---------------------------------^^^^^^^

Post by Wols Lists

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
bothered with live TV recordings in recent years.

I think this is confusing CONTAINER and CODEC.

Where do we confuse those two? We specifically talked of codecs and
“contain”.

Post by Wols Lists
.ts is a container format, h264 is a codec. I don't understand it myself,
either but think of ts as your directory structure and h264 as your file
structure.

Now you are confusing me. You say you don’t understand it, but then explain
it. TS is like AVI and MKV: a file structure for the payload data. And
payload data can be all kinds of stuff, from ASS plaintext subtitles, over
opus audio to mpeg2 or h264 video.

Post by Wols Lists
Incidentally, sticking this stuff in a .tar is probably okay - that's just
another container, but sticking it in a .tar.gz is not, the gz is your codec
and will make the file BIGGER in all probability.

Tar does not compress, it simply puts all inputs in a 1:1 stream. It does
add some metadata (filename and so on). Packers reduce data volume by
increasing information-per-byte. So if the total information stays the same
(for lossless coding), the number of bytes decreases. Encoded video data
ideally has even entropy. It is indistinguishable from random noise. That’s
why compressing it again does not yield anything, or even adds some volume
again.

[Wols Lists]

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
Where do we confuse those two? We specifically talked of codecs and
“contain”.

"I didn't know .ts could contain h264".

If .ts is the container, then surely the assumption is it can contain
any codec? If not, why not?

(Yes I do get the impression I didn't read the OP properly. But then,
the OP didn't make sense properly so I'm not surprised I got it wrong :-)

Cheers,
Wol

[Michael]

Post by Wols Lists

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
Where do we confuse those two? We specifically talked of codecs and
“contain”.

"I didn't know .ts could contain h264".
If .ts is the container, then surely the assumption is it can contain
any codec? If not, why not?

Not any codec. Some container formats are only compatible with certain
codecs, or rather the other way around. Have a look here:

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

I suppose the answer to 'why not' boils down to the whatever structure and
data the container format is designed to be compatible with, but I don't know
more than this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Informatik-Containerformate-Beispiele.svg

[David Rosenbaum]

Someone has hacked my ph.im 44 years old an pay for every thing.house car
an wifi

Dave

Post by Michael

Post by Wols Lists

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
Where do we confuse those two? We specifically talked of codecs and
“contain”.

"I didn't know .ts could contain h264".
If .ts is the container, then surely the assumption is it can contain
any codec? If not, why not?

Not any codec. Some container formats are only compatible with certain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_container_formats
I suppose the answer to 'why not' boils down to the whatever structure and
data the container format is designed to be compatible with, but I don't know
more than this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Informatik-Containerformate-Beispiele.svg

[David Rosenbaum]

Thanks

Dave

Post by Michael

Post by Wols Lists

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Michael
Depending on the PVR make/model I've seen 1080p resolution

recordings with

Post by Wols Lists

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Michael
.m2ts and .ts file extensions, while the codecs inside them are the

same.
-------------------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Post by Wols Lists

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
I wasn’t aware that ts could contain h264. But then again—I never

really
---------------------------------^^^^^^^

Post by Wols Lists

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
bothered with live TV recordings in recent years.

I think this is confusing CONTAINER and CODEC.

Where do we confuse those two? We specifically talked of codecs and
“contain”.

Post by Wols Lists
.ts is a container format, h264 is a codec. I don't understand it myself,
either but think of ts as your directory structure and h264 as your file
structure.

Now you are confusing me. You say you don’t understand it, but then explain
it. TS is like AVI and MKV: a file structure for the payload data. And
payload data can be all kinds of stuff, from ASS plaintext subtitles, over
opus audio to mpeg2 or h264 video.

Post by Wols Lists
Incidentally, sticking this stuff in a .tar is probably okay - that's

just

Post by Wols Lists
another container, but sticking it in a .tar.gz is not, the gz is your

codec

Post by Wols Lists
and will make the file BIGGER in all probability.

Tar does not compress, it simply puts all inputs in a 1:1 stream. It does
add some metadata (filename and so on). Packers reduce data volume by
increasing information-per-byte. So if the total information stays the same
(for lossless coding), the number of bytes decreases. Encoded video data
ideally has even entropy. It is indistinguishable from random noise. That’s
why compressing it again does not yield anything, or even adds some volume
again.
--
GrÌße | Greetings | Salut | Qapla’
Please do not share anything from, with or about me on any social network.
“Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”
– John F. Kennedy

[Rich Freeman]

Post by Michael
Actually this had me thinking what is the need to back up the ... Internet?

I'm sure the NSA knows the answer to this. Based on discussions I've
had with people who are into such things they basically have their own
Wayback machine, except it obviously doesn't respect robots.txt or
takedown requests.

I kind of wish the NSA sold IT services to the general public. I just
assume they probably have root on all my devices and their own backups
of everything on them. It would be nice if I had a disaster if I
could just pay them to buy back a copy of my data, instead of having
to have my own completely redundant backups.

I'm personally using duplicity for encrypted cloud backups of the
stuff that is most critical (documents, recent photos, etc), AWS
Glacier for stuff I want long-term backups of (older photos mostly),
and then bacula to store local copies of everything I have any
interest in because that is easier than trying to restore it all off
of Amazon if I lose an array or whatever. AWS Glacier is actually
pretty cheap for backup, but be prepared to pay a fair bit for
restoration. I'd only need to go to them in a serious disaster like a
house fire, so having to pay $100 or whatever to get them to mail me a
hard drive with my data isn't really that big of a deal. My backups
are generally one-way affairs.

[Dale]

Post by Wols Lists

 >
 > Howdy,
 >
 > I've pretty much reached a limit on my backups.  I'm up to a 16TB
hard
 > drive for one and even that won't last long.  Larger drives are much
 > more costly.  A must have NAS is quickly approaching.  I've been
 > searching around and find some things confusing.  I'm hoping
someone can
 > clear up that confusion.  I'm also debating what path to travel down.
 > I'd also like to keep costs down as well.  That said, I don't mind
 > paying a little more for one that would offer a much better option.
 >
 > Path one, buy a NAS, possibly used, that has no drives.  If
possible, I
 > may even replace the OS that comes on it or upgrade if I can.  I'm
not
 > looking for fancy, or even RAID.  Just looking for a two bay NAS that
 > will work.  First, what is a DAS?  Is that totally different than a
 > NAS?  From what I've found, a DAS is not what I'm looking for since I
 > want a ethernet connection and the ability to control things over the
 > network.  It seems DAS lacks that feature but not real sure.  I'm not
 > sure I can upgrade the software/OS on a DAS either.
 >
 > Next thing.  Let's say a NAS comes with two 4TB drives for a total of
 > 8TB of capacity from the factory, using LVM or similar software I
 > assume.  Is that limited to that capacity or can I for example
replace
 > one or both drives with for example 14TB drives for a total of
28TBs of
 > capacity?  If one does that, let's say it uses LVM, can I somehow
move
 > data as well or is that beyond the abilities of a NAS?  Could it
be done
 > inside my computer for example?  Does this vary by brand or even
model?
 >
 > Path two, I've researched building a NAS using a Raspberry Pi 4
8GB as
 > another option.  They come as parts, cases too, but the newer and
faster
 > models of Raspberry Pi 4 with more ram seem to work pretty well.  The
 > old slower models with small amounts of ram don't fair as well. 
While I
 > want a descent speed, I'm not looking for or expecting it to be
 > blazingly fast.  I just wonder, if from a upgrade and expansion
point of
 > view, if building a NAS would be better.  I've also noticed, it seems
 > all Raspberry things come with a display port.  That means I could
hook
 > up a monitor and mouse/keyboard when needed.  That could be a bonus.
 > Heck, I may can even put some sort of Gentoo on that thing.  :-D
 >
 > One reason I'm wanting to go this route, I'm trying to keep it
small and
 > able to fit inside my fire safe.  I plan to buy a media type safe
that
 > is larger but right now, it needs to fit inside my current safe. 
Most
 > of the 2 bay NAS or a Raspberry Pi based NAS are fairly small. 
They not
 > much bigger than the three external hard drives and a couple bare
drives
 > that currently occupy my safe.
 >
 > One thing I'd like to have no matter what path I go down, the
ability to
 > encrypt the data.  My current backup drives are encrypted and I'd
like
 > to keep it that way.  If that is possible to do.  I suspect the
 > Raspberry option would since I'd control the OS/software placed on
it.
 > I could be wrong tho.
 >
 > One last thing.  Are there any NAS type boxes that I should
absolutely
 > avoid if I go that route?  Maybe it is a model that has serious
 > limitations or has other problems.  I think the DAS thing may be
one for
 > me to avoid but I'm not for sure what limits it has.  Google
didn't help
 > a lot. It also could be as simple as, avoid any model that says
this in
 > the description or uses some type of software that is bad or limits
 > options.
 >
 > Thoughts?  Info to share?  Ideas on a best path forward?  Buy already
 > built or build?
 >
 > Thanks.
 >
 > Dale
 >
 > :-)  :-)
DAS is direct-attached-storage. I don't think you want that.

Depends. If it fits in the safe, and can be connected using one of
these eSATA thingy connectors, it might be a very good choice.

Synology (sp?) is sort of a big name in home & small office NAS
boxes. You can buy the boxes with or without drives. I suspect you
won't like the prices.

I've been looking :-) I think the empty box costs more than the drives
you're going to put in it ...

I wonder if you might consider what data on your backups needs to be
immediately available and which doesn't. Possibly buy an 8TB USB
drive, take a bunch of the lower priority data off of your current
backup thus system freeing space and move on from there?
I built my NAS devices using old computers ala Wol's suggestion to me
maybe a year ago. They work for me but don't have the fastest network
interfaces.

I get the impression Dale isn't actually PLANNING his disk storage.
It's just a case of "help I'm downloading all this stuff where do I
put it!!!"
How much storage do you have in your actual computer? How much space
do you need IN ONE PARTITION? Can you get an external disk caddy that
you just slot bare drives in?
I've no doubt you have good reason for wanting all this storage. I
just fail to see why you need huge drives for it if most of the time
you're not doing anything with it.
Get yourself a basic 4-way DAS/JBOD setup, PLAN where you're putting
all this stuff, and plug in and remove drives as required. You don't
need all these huge drives if you think about what you're going to do
with it all. (And while it takes time and hammers the system, I
regularly record off the TV getting a 2GB .ts file, convert it to mp4
- same resolution - and reduce the size by an order of magnitude -
maybe more.
If you've got two hot-swap JBOD enclosures, that's brilliant. You can
stream from your media centre to a drive, swap it out, and use a
second system to then organise your collection.
Oh - and if you are worried about disks going walkabout, just LUKS the
whole disk, and without the key nobody can read it ... build your
partitions or whatever over it.
Cheers,
Wol

Getting some good info from different folks.  Picking this to reply to,
last message I read.  I do have a lot of data in my system.  I need the
info at random plus want to keep a backup copy.  If for no other reason,
in case I accidentally delete or overwrite something.  I've done that
before.  I also want backups in case of a sudden drive failure without
warning.  This is about my backup copy, not the drives in my system that
I regularly use.  I have a large Cooler Master HAF-932 case.  I still
got room there.  I may at some point build a NAS for regular storage and
everyday use.  While I would like something power efficient and able to
scale for that, I think a 2 bay, certainly a 4 bay, NAS will give me
plenty of room to grow for my backups.  A NAS for everyday use tho,
that's for another day. 

I kinda like my current setup except that one large directory, it's to
big for a single external hard drive.  I need to span that data over two
or more drives.  That means either a NAS of some sort or another
system.  Since any system I build from old parts I have laying around
would be to large, a NAS is the best long term route.  I mentioned
before, I wish I could split my backup script so that about half of the
data goes to one drive and the other half to a 2nd drive.  If I knew of
a way to tell rsync to split files starting with 'a' through 'k' to one
drive and files starting with 'm' through 'z' to the second drive, then
I could span across two drives without needing LVM or similar software. 
I'm not aware of a way to do that without a ton of work and having to
update my scripts each time I add or remove a directory within the
larger directory. 

Some of this is sort of hard to put into text unless I write half a book
about it.  Basically, I'm needing a way to have external drives with
enough capacity to hold a large directory.  Also some room for growth
and even upgrades would be nice.  Whether I buy a prebuilt NAS or build
one, whichever is the better option and affordable.

Since I forgot to hit send after typing the above, I've got more replies
to read. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Dale
Howdy,
I've pretty much reached a limit on my backups.  I'm up to a 16TB hard
drive for one and even that won't last long.  Larger drives are much
more costly.  A must have NAS is quickly approaching.

Hear hear, ye olde story. ;-)

Post by Dale
Path one, buy a NAS, possibly used, that has no drives.  If possible, I
may even replace the OS that comes on it or upgrade if I can.

Difficult in consumer-grade stuff, but there are ways, like for Synology:
NetBSD on old Synology hardware:
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sandpoint/instsynology/
And another alternative OS for Synology: https://xpenology.com/forum/

However, even though Synology’s current trend of development is a little
concerning with vendor lock-in and hardware restrictions in their newest
devices, why not use the built-in software? It still is very good and easy
to use and offers all you need like HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, CIFS, SSH, Dav etc. It
uses btrfs or ext4 internally.

Disclaimer: I have no first-hand experience with any of those devices, my
knowledge comes from news about new devices and stuff that I read in a PC
tech forum. Qnap’s software quality does not compete with Synology, and they
also have a worse security track record. So don’t hook it up to the Internet
directly.

Post by Dale
I'm not looking for fancy, or even RAID.  Just looking for a two bay NAS
that will work.

Why just two? Sooner or later, it will become cramped again. Go for four
bays and leave them empty for the time being.

Post by Dale
First, what is a DAS?  Is that totally different than a NAS?  From what
I've found, a DAS is not what I'm looking for since I want a ethernet
connection and the ability to control things over the network.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-attached_storage, you are
right: no ethernet, but direct connection to the host. A beefed-up external
drive enclosure, if you will (from the little understanding I got from the
article).

Post by Dale
It seems DAS lacks that feature but not real sure.  I'm not sure I can
upgrade the software/OS on a DAS either. 

There is no software, it is just a drive bay and the host that you hook it
up to does all the logic work.

Post by Dale
Next thing.  Let's say a NAS comes with two 4TB drives for a total of
8TB of capacity from the factory, using LVM or similar software I
assume.

AFAIK, consumer NASes don’t use LVM. Probably only standard Raid-1/5/6/10,
JBOD or single disk access.

Post by Dale
Is that limited to that capacity or can I for example replace one or both
drives with for example 14TB drives for a total of 28TBs of capacity?

Sure, why not? But then I’d buy one without any drives from the start and
install the drives later myself. I wouldn’t know what to do with those small
drives if I replaced them with something larger right away.

Post by Dale
If one does that, let's say it uses LVM, can I somehow move data as well
or is that beyond the abilities of a NAS?

What do you mean by move? AFAIK, Synology offers SSH access, but I have no
idea what you can do with it in terms of plumbing. And why would you? It is
supposed to do everything under the hood. But as I said, I don’t expect any
of those to use LVM in the first place.

Post by Dale
Could it be done inside my computer for example?

With a DAS, you could. ;-) But if push comes to shove, pull out the drives
and hook them up to your “puter”.

Post by Dale
Path two, I've researched building a NAS using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB as
another option.  They come as parts, cases too, but the newer and faster
models of Raspberry Pi 4 with more ram seem to work pretty well.

Just today, in a forum thread about a new Synology with underwhelming
hardware features, people were posting alternatives. One of them was
https://kubesail.com/homepage. Currently it’s only a small case with
2×2.5″. But they also announced a soon-to-come 5×3.5″.

Post by Dale
The old slower models with small amounts of ram don't fair as well.  While
I want a descent speed, I'm not looking for or expecting it to be
blazingly fast.

Only the very old devices with puny ARM chips were so slow they couldn’t
saturate Gbit ethernet—with and without encryption. Synologies of recent
years with a Celeron J4000 will have no problem. Current models with AMD
Ryzen R1600 won’t either, but draw much more power in idle and have no
graphics unit. OTOH, they gain ECC memory support.

Post by Dale
I just wonder, if from a upgrade and expansion point of view, if building
a NAS would be better.

Regardless of whether DIY or OOTB, a NAS is much more practical than a
collection of external single enclosures. Given the rate of your growth and
need of space, I do recommend some kind of RAID for resilience against hard
disk failure. Does LVM offer this at all? TrueNAS runs from a USB stick and
uses ZFS under the hood.

Post by Dale
I've also noticed, it seems all Raspberry things come with a display port.

My Pi 3B has HDMI – and HDMI only.

Post by Dale
That means I could hook up a monitor and mouse/keyboard when needed.  That
could be a bonus.  Heck, I may can even put some sort of Gentoo on that
thing.  :-D

You could, but this is either a sink-hole for time, or you need to get up to
speed with cross-compiling and binhosts. I went with the standard Debian and
evaluate Arch from time to time. But I do run Gentoo on my DIY NAS with an
i3-2000. Gentoo has ZFS in portage without overlays, which–for me–is one of
its biggest appeals.

Post by Dale
One reason I'm wanting to go this route, I'm trying to keep it small and
able to fit inside my fire safe.

How small is small? Given your needs, two bays seem very constrained. And if
four bays don’t fit, consider a dedicated safe – if it is worth the expense.

Post by Dale
I plan to buy a media type safe that is larger but right now, it needs to
fit inside my current safe.

OK. But then it is pointless IMHO to buy a two-bay device now and a four-bay
later. You spend more money, you need to migrate and it is not ecological.

Post by Dale
One thing I'd like to have no matter what path I go down, the ability to
encrypt the data.  My current backup drives are encrypted and I'd like
to keep it that way.  If that is possible to do.

Not sure about that with Synology (it’s probably a small Internet search
away). ZFS has encryption built-in these days. Btrfs does not, it is only
planned, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs. You could use an
encryption layer on your host, so the NAS only receives encrypted data, but
that sounds cumbersome.

Post by Dale
I suspect the Raspberry option would since I'd control the OS/software
placed on it.  I could be wrong tho. 

Your OS, your features. ;-) I also encrypt my NAS. My main “threat” scenario
is having to send in a drive. That’s why I did not set up any barrier for
decryption: the keyfile just sits on the root partition on the system SSD. I
was thinking about having the keyfile on a remote device like my pi, though.

Post by Dale
One last thing.  Are there any NAS type boxes that I should absolutely
avoid if I go that route?

As I mentioned, QNAP struggles a little with security. But as long as you
don’t hook it up to the Internet, that shouldn’t be a problem. On the plus
side, they are a little cheaper. But I don’t have any concrete advice to
that question.

Post by Dale
I think the DAS thing may be one for me to avoid but I'm not for sure what
limits it has.

Well, it has no network, because it has no computer inside. Advantages: one
less system to maintain. Disadvantage: no distributed access, you basically
put the share features onto the host to which you attach the DAS. This also
includes any file system magic like your beloved LVM.

Post by Dale
Thoughts?  Info to share?  Ideas on a best path forward?  Buy already
built or build?

Well, I gave you a piece of my mind. I like tinkering with storage. I am
also still deliberating how to increase my storage. I am at 80 % of my NAS,
which runs 4×6 TB in a RaidZ2 (meaning 2 of the 4 disks—50 % of gross
capacity—is for redundancy). I could:

- Reduce use of space by re-encoding my 3 TB of DVD copys. I wanted to do
that anyways and it could recover more than 2 TB.
- Install bigger drives. Maybe start out with 2×14 TB and migrate
everything. This will lower power consumption, but leaves me with four
6-year-old, but still perfectly working NAS drives.
- go to RaidZ1, losing redundancy but gaining 50 % space.
- Buy a case with more slots and buy more disks, like the new Jonsbo N1
(which I also found in the thread I mentioned above) with five slots:
https://www.jonsbo.com/en/products/N1.html
Or the Fractal Node 304 with six bays:
https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/node/node-304/black/
But both cases require me to buy a new PSU. My current case
(https://www.inter-tech.de/productdetails/SC-4100_EN.html) uses a tiny TFX
one, and that one was very expensive (Gold rated).

My board has “only” six SATA ports. I want to avoid installing a PCIe
card, because that will increase power draw. But since it is a server
board, it has an on-board USB type A, which would allow me to go to
TrueNAS and use all six SATAs for disks.

[Rich Freeman]

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
You could, but this is either a sink-hole for time, or you need to get up to
speed with cross-compiling and binhosts. I went with the standard Debian and
evaluate Arch from time to time. But I do run Gentoo on my DIY NAS with an
i3-2000. Gentoo has ZFS in portage without overlays, which–for me–is one of
its biggest appeals.

++

Obviously I'm a huge Gentoo fan, but on an ARM SBC unless you're
either experimenting or you actually intend to be patching or
reconfiguring packages the precompiled option is the way to go. When
I'm using less-popular SBCs (ie not Pis) then I will usually look for
whatever distros are supporting it in the most first-class way, again,
unless I'm experimenting. Then I look for what has the software I
need already packaged (again, check the arch because a binary package
repo doesn't necessarily include your device, especially if it is 3rd
party). I've had to compile things on ARM SBCs and it is SLOOOOOW.

I have the same philosophy with containers. If I'm just running a
service, and not tweaking things, I'll just pick the least-fuss base
for my container whatever that is.

[Rich Freeman]

Pine64 has an interesting array of SBCs which are both cheaper and (some are) possibly better suited to becoming a NAS than a Pi. One of them even has a PCIe socket I think.

I have the RockPro64 and I'll go ahead and warn you that you'll need
to patch the kernel if you want to use many PCIe cards. I just tested
out a debian image on it and the several year old patch still hasn't
made its way into there.

The SATA expansion card Pine64 was selling at the time did work out of the box.

https://github.com/rockchip-linux/kernel/issues/116

--
Rich




--
Rich

[Rich Freeman]

Post by Dale
Path two, I've researched building a NAS using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB as
another option. They come as parts, cases too, but the newer and faster
models of Raspberry Pi 4 with more ram seem to work pretty well.

For this sort of application the key improvement of the Pi4 over its
predecessors is IO. The Pi4 has USB3 and gigabit ethernet, and they
are independent, so you get the full bandwidth of both (in theory).
That is a massive step up over USB2 and 100Mbps ethernet that consumes
the USB2 bandwidth.

I can't really speak to the commercial solutions as I haven't used
them. Main concern there is just the limited capacity, lack of
expandability, and so on. Some are no doubt better than others in
those regards.

As far as DIY goes, you can definitely do all of that with a Pi4.
Don't expect it to perform as well as sticking it on a decent amd64
motherboard, but for backup and saturating the throughput of 1 hard
drive at a time it can probably mostly make do. Encryption can be
accomplished either with cryptsetup or a filesystem that has native
encryption like ZFS. I've done both on Pi4s for storage. I will warn
you that zfs encryption is not hardware-optimized on ARM, so that will
not perform very well - it will be completely functional, but you will
get CPU-bound. Linux-native encryption (ie cryptsetup/LUKS) will use
hardware capabilities on the Pi4, assuming you're using something it
supports (I think I'm using AES which performs adequately).

For the Pi4 you would need to use USB storage, but for hard drives IMO
this is perfectly acceptable, especially on a Pi. The gigabit
ethernet and internal IO of the Pi is only going to max out one hard
drive no matter how you connect it, so the USB3 interface will not be
a bottleneck. On ARM SBCs that have PCIe you don't really get any
better performance with an HBA and SATA/SCSI simply because the board
IO is already pretty limited. USB3 is actually pretty fast for
spinning disks, but depending on the number of hosts/etc it could
become a bottleneck on a decent motherboard with a large number of
drives. If you're talking about an amd64 with a 10GbE NIC and a
decent HBA with sufficient PCIe lanes for both then obviously that is
going to saturate more spinning disks. For NVMe you absolutely need
to go that route (probably need to consider server-class hardware
too).

I use USB3 hard drives on Pis for my bulk storage because I care about
capacity far more than performance, and with a distributed filesystem
the performance is still good enough for what I'm doing. If I needed
block storage for containers/VMs/whatever then use a different
solution, but that gets expensive fast.

Oh, one other thing. One of your issues is that you're using a backup
solution that just dumps everything into a single file/directory and
requires all the backup storage to be mounted at the same time in a
single filesystem. There are solutions that do not have this
requirement - particularly ones that are adaptable to tape.
Unfortunately the best FOSS option I've found for this on linux is
bacula and that is a serious PITA to use. If anybody has a better one
I'm all ears (the requirement is to be able to store a backup across
multiple hard drives, and this can't involve first storing it all in
one place and then splitting it up later, or having more than one
storage drive attached at the same time - basically I want to treat
hard drives like tapes).

If you're storing a LOT of backups then LTO is another option. Every
time I do the math on that option it never makes sense unless you're
backing up a LOT of data. If you got to a point where your backups
consumed 10+ max-capacity hard drives it might start to make sense.
Those USB3 hard drives on sale for $15/TB though are just really hard
to beat when the tapes aren't all that much cheaper and the drives
cost $1k.

[Dale]

Post by Rich Freeman

Post by Dale
Path two, I've researched building a NAS using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB as
another option. They come as parts, cases too, but the newer and faster
models of Raspberry Pi 4 with more ram seem to work pretty well.

For this sort of application the key improvement of the Pi4 over its
predecessors is IO. The Pi4 has USB3 and gigabit ethernet, and they
are independent, so you get the full bandwidth of both (in theory).
That is a massive step up over USB2 and 100Mbps ethernet that consumes
the USB2 bandwidth.
I can't really speak to the commercial solutions as I haven't used
them. Main concern there is just the limited capacity, lack of
expandability, and so on. Some are no doubt better than others in
those regards.
As far as DIY goes, you can definitely do all of that with a Pi4.
Don't expect it to perform as well as sticking it on a decent amd64
motherboard, but for backup and saturating the throughput of 1 hard
drive at a time it can probably mostly make do. Encryption can be
accomplished either with cryptsetup or a filesystem that has native
encryption like ZFS. I've done both on Pi4s for storage. I will warn
you that zfs encryption is not hardware-optimized on ARM, so that will
not perform very well - it will be completely functional, but you will
get CPU-bound. Linux-native encryption (ie cryptsetup/LUKS) will use
hardware capabilities on the Pi4, assuming you're using something it
supports (I think I'm using AES which performs adequately).
For the Pi4 you would need to use USB storage, but for hard drives IMO
this is perfectly acceptable, especially on a Pi. The gigabit
ethernet and internal IO of the Pi is only going to max out one hard
drive no matter how you connect it, so the USB3 interface will not be
a bottleneck. On ARM SBCs that have PCIe you don't really get any
better performance with an HBA and SATA/SCSI simply because the board
IO is already pretty limited. USB3 is actually pretty fast for
spinning disks, but depending on the number of hosts/etc it could
become a bottleneck on a decent motherboard with a large number of
drives. If you're talking about an amd64 with a 10GbE NIC and a
decent HBA with sufficient PCIe lanes for both then obviously that is
going to saturate more spinning disks. For NVMe you absolutely need
to go that route (probably need to consider server-class hardware
too).
I use USB3 hard drives on Pis for my bulk storage because I care about
capacity far more than performance, and with a distributed filesystem
the performance is still good enough for what I'm doing. If I needed
block storage for containers/VMs/whatever then use a different
solution, but that gets expensive fast.
Oh, one other thing. One of your issues is that you're using a backup
solution that just dumps everything into a single file/directory and
requires all the backup storage to be mounted at the same time in a
single filesystem. There are solutions that do not have this
requirement - particularly ones that are adaptable to tape.
Unfortunately the best FOSS option I've found for this on linux is
bacula and that is a serious PITA to use. If anybody has a better one
I'm all ears (the requirement is to be able to store a backup across
multiple hard drives, and this can't involve first storing it all in
one place and then splitting it up later, or having more than one
storage drive attached at the same time - basically I want to treat
hard drives like tapes).
If you're storing a LOT of backups then LTO is another option. Every
time I do the math on that option it never makes sense unless you're
backing up a LOT of data. If you got to a point where your backups
consumed 10+ max-capacity hard drives it might start to make sense.
Those USB3 hard drives on sale for $15/TB though are just really hard
to beat when the tapes aren't all that much cheaper and the drives
cost $1k.

From my understanding, you are right about USB3 and GB ethernet being
the big change.  They also have more memory and faster CPUs but if you
bottleneck the data with slow USB and ethernet with the old ones, who
needs a fast CPU?  I think they realized that the USB and ethernet had
to improve.  It got better from there. 

https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/sata-hat/products/dual-sata-hat-open-frame-for-raspberry-pi-4

I found the above.  From my understanding, it allows a SATA drive to
connect to either 2 or 4 bays.  That card appears to connect with USB3
ports but I can't see the bottom.  Odds are, especially if data is
encrypted, the CPU will likely max out before the USB and ethernet.  I'd
think anyway.  From what little I've read, they seem to be pretty fast. 

One thing I like about the Raspberry option, I can upgrade it later.  I
can simply take out the old, put in new, upgrade done.  If I buy a
prebuilt NAS, they pretty much are what they are if upgrading isn't a
option.  Some of the more expensive ones may be upgradable, maybe. 

I just wonder, could I use that board and just hook it to my USB port
and a external power supply and skip the Raspberry Pi part?  I'd bet not
tho.  ;-)

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Rich Freeman]

One thing I like about the Raspberry option, I can upgrade it later. I
can simply take out the old, put in new, upgrade done. If I buy a
prebuilt NAS, they pretty much are what they are if upgrading isn't a
option. Some of the more expensive ones may be upgradable, maybe.

The NAS gets you a nice box. The nice box means fixed capacity.

I just use USB3 external hard drives. They're cheaper and easy to
interface. USB3 also has been less likely to give me ATA interface
errors compared to SATA.

I just wonder, could I use that board and just hook it to my USB port
and a external power supply and skip the Raspberry Pi part? I'd bet not
tho. ;-)

Not that one, but USB3-SATA interfaces exist and aren't that
expensive. You can also get nice little enclosures. You can have as
many hard drives as you want on a PC that way, or whatever the USB3
limit is.

[Dale]

Post by Rich Freeman

One thing I like about the Raspberry option, I can upgrade it later. I
can simply take out the old, put in new, upgrade done. If I buy a
prebuilt NAS, they pretty much are what they are if upgrading isn't a
option. Some of the more expensive ones may be upgradable, maybe.

The NAS gets you a nice box. The nice box means fixed capacity.
I just use USB3 external hard drives. They're cheaper and easy to
interface. USB3 also has been less likely to give me ATA interface
errors compared to SATA.

I just wonder, could I use that board and just hook it to my USB port
and a external power supply and skip the Raspberry Pi part? I'd bet not
tho. ;-)

Not that one, but USB3-SATA interfaces exist and aren't that
expensive. You can also get nice little enclosures. You can have as
many hard drives as you want on a PC that way, or whatever the USB3
limit is.

One thing about all the recent upgrades, I have extra hard drives. 
Also, if I go the Raspberry path and can still use cryptsetup, LVM etc,
I can just move the drives I'm currently using and may not even have to
move a lot of data around.  Just insert a drive, add another drive with
LVM to increase space and done for the large directory.  Then in other
two bays, do the same or have two different LVM pools or whatever they
called.  All total, OS and all, I have almost 42TBs of storage inside my
running system.  I have a 16TB new drive for backup of large directory
and a 8TB and 6TB for other data backups which include /root, my
Documents directory and such. 

One way or another, I'm going to figure this out.  lol  I got too.  ;-)

I think back sometimes, I started out with a 30GB hard drive waaaay back
in 2003.  I thought I had problems then.  O_O 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Peter Humphrey]

Post by Dale
I think back sometimes, I started out with a 30GB hard drive waaaay back
in 2003. I thought I had problems then.

Then you won't want to know that I paid extra in 1990 for an 85MB drive in my
first PC. No, not GB: MB.

[Dale]

Post by Peter Humphrey

Post by Dale
I think back sometimes, I started out with a 30GB hard drive waaaay back
in 2003. I thought I had problems then.

Then you won't want to know that I paid extra in 1990 for an 85MB drive in my
first PC. No, not GB: MB.

I worked at a puter place in the late 80's.  They had old hard drives
that were only a few MBs and had 14" platters.  Yes, 14" platters. 
Funny thing is, you could replace the platters in those.  You open the
drive, replace platter, reassemble drive, turn on fan which had a hefty
filter on the intake.  Once it ran long enough to have clean air inside,
spin up the drive and go back to work. 

I even remember when 512KBs of ram was a big deal.  I also remember
having expansion cards that would add a few MBs of ram.  Jeez I'm
getting old.  o_O  We talk about TBs like they are nothing.  My first
puter was a old Vic-20.  4Kbs of ram it had.  I played music on that
thing and freaked my Dad out.  ROFL

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Wol]

Post by Dale

Post by Peter Humphrey

Post by Dale
I think back sometimes, I started out with a 30GB hard drive waaaay back
in 2003. I thought I had problems then.

Then you won't want to know that I paid extra in 1990 for an 85MB drive in my
first PC. No, not GB: MB.

I worked at a puter place in the late 80's.  They had old hard drives
that were only a few MBs and had 14" platters.  Yes, 14" platters.
Funny thing is, you could replace the platters in those.  You open the
drive, replace platter, reassemble drive, turn on fan which had a hefty
filter on the intake.  Once it ran long enough to have clean air inside,
spin up the drive and go back to work.
I even remember when 512KBs of ram was a big deal.  I also remember
having expansion cards that would add a few MBs of ram.  Jeez I'm
getting old.  o_O  We talk about TBs like they are nothing.  My first
puter was a old Vic-20.  4Kbs of ram it had.  I played music on that
thing and freaked my Dad out.  ROFL

I remember those things. About 16 MB per platter. I remember my work
buying a 300MB drive (19 platters in a disk pack, the size of a washing
machine) for our multi-user mini that served the entire company with
256KB of ram ...

Cheers,
Wol

[Peter Humphrey]

Post by Wol

I even remember when 512KBs of ram was a big deal. I also remember
having expansion cards that would add a few MBs of ram. Jeez I'm
getting old. o_O We talk about TBs like they are nothing. My first
puter was a old Vic-20. 4Kbs of ram it had. I played music on that
thing and freaked my Dad out. ROFL

I remember those things. About 16 MB per platter. I remember my work
buying a 300MB drive (19 platters in a disk pack, the size of a washing
machine) for our multi-user mini that served the entire company with
256KB of ram ...

Latest in the willy-waving contest: in the 1970s the national grid was
monitored and analysed with a Ferranti Argus 500 machine with 24KB RAM and a
2MB disk. It was common for American visitors to believe that was just driving
the control engineers' displays, and where was the main computer?

24-bit assembler code. Those were the days - some of my very best. No concept
of a file or a file-system.

[Peter Humphrey]

in the 1970s the national grid was monitored and analysed with a Ferranti
Argus 500 machine with 24KB RAM and a 2MB disk. It was common for
American visitors to believe that was just driving the control engineers'
displays, and where was the main computer?

Er... There was no RAM in those days, not of the type we know today. In fact
it was 2-microsecond core store. Each tiny ferromagnetic toroid was threaded
with one X wire, one Y wire and (I think it was) a sync pulse wire. A
remarkable labour of love to build such a thing.

[Wol]

Post by Dale
I think back sometimes, I started out with a 30GB hard drive waaaay back
in 2003.  I thought I had problems then.  O_O

The first drive I bought was - iirc - a 2GB 5.1/4" Bigfoot.

For a Pentium system where the mobo took chips with a max capacity of 32MB.

That was about ten years before you ...

:-)

Wol

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Dale

Post by Rich Freeman
I use USB3 hard drives on Pis for my bulk storage because I care about
capacity far more than performance, and with a distributed filesystem
the performance is still good enough for what I'm doing. If I needed
block storage for containers/VMs/whatever then use a different
solution, but that gets expensive fast.
[
]

From my understanding, you are right about USB3 and GB ethernet being
the big change.  They also have more memory and faster CPUs but if you
bottleneck the data with slow USB and ethernet with the old ones, who
needs a fast CPU?  I think they realized that the USB and ethernet had
to improve.  It got better from there. 
https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/sata-hat/products/dual-sata-hat-open-frame-for-raspberry-pi-4
I found the above.  From my understanding, it allows a SATA drive to
connect to either 2 or 4 bays.

Looking at the pics, it looks all very wibbly-wobbly. You will either have
the parts lying around open on a desk or you need to find a case for all
that stuff which adheres to no industry standard form factor. Pi accessories
are quite hard to come by, since they’re often sold out.

Post by Dale
One thing I like about the Raspberry option, I can upgrade it later.  I
can simply take out the old, put in new, upgrade done.  If I buy a
prebuilt NAS, they pretty much are what they are if upgrading isn't a
option.

If you just do storage, what do you need upgrades for, anyway? All it needs
to do is receive your data and write it to disk. And then return it later
when asked for. I don’t remember you mentioning running VMs or some such.
Any current commercial NAS has enough oomph for that, unless it’s a very
cheap ARM-based one. (Only the ecryption part remains to be solved with a
ready-made NAS.)

Post by Dale
I just wonder, could I use that board and just hook it to my USB port
and a external power supply and skip the Raspberry Pi part?  I'd bet not
tho.  ;-)

From a practical standpoint, what is the difference then to an HDD dock or a
simple USB-SATA-Adapter? Except that a dock is a “proper”, clean solution
with a nice case, a secure stand on your desk and no finnicky open SATA
cables that could cause disconnects during operation if you touch them the
wrong way.

I know what it’s like to ponder all kinds of options, and it’s fun. But it
seems to me, you’re looking for a solution for a problem you’re still
looking for.

[Dale]

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Dale

Post by Rich Freeman
I use USB3 hard drives on Pis for my bulk storage because I care about
capacity far more than performance, and with a distributed filesystem
the performance is still good enough for what I'm doing. If I needed
block storage for containers/VMs/whatever then use a different
solution, but that gets expensive fast.
[…]

From my understanding, you are right about USB3 and GB ethernet being
the big change.  They also have more memory and faster CPUs but if you
bottleneck the data with slow USB and ethernet with the old ones, who
needs a fast CPU?  I think they realized that the USB and ethernet had
to improve.  It got better from there. 
https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/sata-hat/products/dual-sata-hat-open-frame-for-raspberry-pi-4
I found the above.  From my understanding, it allows a SATA drive to
connect to either 2 or 4 bays.

Looking at the pics, it looks all very wibbly-wobbly. You will either have
the parts lying around open on a desk or you need to find a case for all
that stuff which adheres to no industry standard form factor. Pi accessories
are quite hard to come by, since they’re often sold out.

They have a case for it too.  Check this out.

https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/sata-hat/products/quad-sata-kit-for-raspberry-pi-4-case-only

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Dale
One thing I like about the Raspberry option, I can upgrade it later.  I
can simply take out the old, put in new, upgrade done.  If I buy a
prebuilt NAS, they pretty much are what they are if upgrading isn't a
option.

If you just do storage, what do you need upgrades for, anyway? All it needs
to do is receive your data and write it to disk. And then return it later
when asked for. I don’t remember you mentioning running VMs or some such.
Any current commercial NAS has enough oomph for that, unless it’s a very
cheap ARM-based one. (Only the ecryption part remains to be solved with a
ready-made NAS.)

Well, my pool of data keeps growing.  I may need to add drives or
something.  Plus, every few years, I could upgrade the thing if I go the
Raspberry Pi route.  Keep it running fast and all that.   ;-)

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Dale
I just wonder, could I use that board and just hook it to my USB port
and a external power supply and skip the Raspberry Pi part?  I'd bet not
tho.  ;-)

From a practical standpoint, what is the difference then to an HDD dock or a
simple USB-SATA-Adapter? Except that a dock is a “proper”, clean solution
with a nice case, a secure stand on your desk and no finnicky open SATA
cables that could cause disconnects during operation if you touch them the
wrong way.
I know what it’s like to ponder all kinds of options, and it’s fun. But it
seems to me, you’re looking for a solution for a problem you’re still
looking for.

Given the size of one of the directories I have, it takes two drives, or
soon will, and the use of LVM or something similar.  I can't do that as
it is now.  I've even wondered if I hooked two eSATA drives up and gave
both plenty of time to spin up if LVM would see them both and me be able
to use two drives as one that way.  Thing is, I don't know how LVM
reacts if the two drives become available at separate times, maybe even
many seconds or a minute or so apart. 

My problem is a growing directory.  I admit, It's not increasing as fast
as it was.  When I was on DSL, it limited my speed a lot.  With this new
fiber internet, I can download huge amounts of data in a really short
period of time.  I can download it faster than I can verify it.  I'm
still checking things I downloaded over a month ago.  I'm having fun
doing it tho.  ;-)

I thought about breaking up that huge directory.  Split it into two
parts, the 'a' through 'l' and 'm' through 'z' thing.  Then use two
drives to back it up.  Thing is, the external drive enclosures that I
really like and trust, I can't buy anymore.  They are Rosewill eSATA
drive enclosures.  It has a fan to keep things cool and a display on the
front.  They are really nice and rock solid.  All the USB type drive
enclosures I've tried caused all sorts of problems.  I bricked a couple
hard drives and eventually, the enclosures wouldn't work at all.  The
Rosewill enclosures are the most stable things I've ever seen.  I wish I
could find a few more of them, as spares if nothing else.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Wol]

Post by Dale
Given the size of one of the directories I have, it takes two drives, or
soon will, and the use of LVM or something similar.  I can't do that as
it is now.  I've even wondered if I hooked two eSATA drives up and gave
both plenty of time to spin up if LVM would see them both and me be able
to use two drives as one that way.  Thing is, I don't know how LVM
reacts if the two drives become available at separate times, maybe even
many seconds or a minute or so apart.

If you're using LVM to link them together, it will wait until they
become available. Okay, not quite the same, but I run raid over
dm-integrity, and it always unnerves me when systemd fires up this job
and it says "waiting for lvm/home". But the system just sits there while
dm-integrity checks its drives, makes them available, raid spots and
loads them, and then the raid is there, lvm spots it, makes lvm/home
available, and the system is up and running ...

Post by Dale
My problem is a growing directory.  I admit, It's not increasing as fast
as it was.  When I was on DSL, it limited my speed a lot.  With this new
fiber internet, I can download huge amounts of data in a really short
period of time.  I can download it faster than I can verify it.  I'm
still checking things I downloaded over a month ago.  I'm having fun
doing it tho.  😉
I thought about breaking up that huge directory.  Split it into two
parts, the 'a' through 'l' and 'm' through 'z' thing.  Then use two
drives to back it up.

I think you're going to have to ...

Post by Dale
Thing is, the external drive enclosures that I
really like and trust, I can't buy anymore.  They are Rosewill eSATA
drive enclosures.  It has a fan to keep things cool and a display on the
front.  They are really nice and rock solid.  All the USB type drive
enclosures I've tried caused all sorts of problems.  I bricked a couple
hard drives and eventually, the enclosures wouldn't work at all.  The
Rosewill enclosures are the most stable things I've ever seen.  I wish I
could find a few more of them, as spares if nothing else.

Yup, that's my experience of USB, too. It just isn't reliable. And
anything that works and you like, they discontinue!

Cheers,
Wol

[Dale]

Post by Wol

Post by Dale
Given the size of one of the directories I have, it takes two drives, or
soon will, and the use of LVM or something similar.  I can't do that as
it is now.  I've even wondered if I hooked two eSATA drives up and gave
both plenty of time to spin up if LVM would see them both and me be able
to use two drives as one that way.  Thing is, I don't know how LVM
reacts if the two drives become available at separate times, maybe even
many seconds or a minute or so apart.

If you're using LVM to link them together, it will wait until they
become available. Okay, not quite the same, but I run raid over
dm-integrity, and it always unnerves me when systemd fires up this job
and it says "waiting for lvm/home". But the system just sits there
while dm-integrity checks its drives, makes them available, raid spots
and loads them, and then the raid is there, lvm spots it, makes
lvm/home available, and the system is up and running ...

Really?  Oh that just may start something.  I could easily setup two
drives and use LVM on them.  I just didn't know that it would work.  One
added benefit, they are encrypted with cryptsetup which puts everything
on top of LVM.  So, the data isn't available until I type in the
password and then mount it.  It doesn't try to mount automatically or
anything because of that.  Oh, this could be the start of something. 

Post by Wol
Cheers,
Wol

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[William Kenworthy]

* didn't send to the list the first time :(

Post by Dale
I just wonder, could I use that board and just hook it to my USB port
and a external power supply and skip the Raspberry Pi part?  I'd bet not
tho.  ;-)
Dale
:-)  :-)

Check this one: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4-p-kit/

I have quite few hardkernel devices (inc 5x HC2 using moosefs) and they
are quite good.  I run gentoo, but the included OS is ok. Only gotchais
using an SD card for the OS (less reliable) but getting the optional
eMMC sidesteps that one.

BillK

[Dale]

Post by Dale
Howdy,
<<<SNIP>>>
Path two, I've researched building a NAS using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB as
another option.  They come as parts, cases too, but the newer and faster
models of Raspberry Pi 4 with more ram seem to work pretty well.  The
old slower models with small amounts of ram don't fair as well.  While I
want a descent speed, I'm not looking for or expecting it to be
blazingly fast.  I just wonder, if from a upgrade and expansion point of
view, if building a NAS would be better.  I've also noticed, it seems
all Raspberry things come with a display port.  That means I could hook
up a monitor and mouse/keyboard when needed.  That could be a bonus. 
Heck, I may can even put some sort of Gentoo on that thing.  :-D
<<<SNIP>>>
Thoughts?  Info to share?  Ideas on a best path forward?  Buy already
built or build?
Thanks.
Dale
:-)  :-) 

For those interested, I'm pretty sure this video is about this thing. 
It was new and not released to the general public at the time so it does
mention some bugs and missing drivers.  I suspect those are fixed or
included by now.  Also, the case I saw appears to be newer and not
something that requires all the assembly shown in the video. 

That same channel has another video that was a pretty insane build cost
wise.  It had huge SSD drives.  Bonus video for anyone bored to tears. lol

This is the case I'm looking at.  Pretty sure the card, CPU board and
drives goes into this.  Plus I think they added a display too. 

https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/sata-hat/products/quad-sata-kit-for-raspberry-pi-4-case-only

As I mentioned earlier, I plan to research that seller more.  I want to
make sure they stand behind their sales.  Most likely do but I don't
know that.  ;-)

It seems that people are working on making a really nice Raspberry Pi
device for use as a NAS.  It may not be perfect but even what is in the
1st video would likely work fine for me.  Storage wise.  I like the case
I linked to better tho. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Dale]

Post by Dale
Howdy,
I've pretty much reached a limit on my backups.  I'm up to a 16TB hard
drive for one and even that won't last long.  Larger drives are much
more costly.  A must have NAS is quickly approaching.  I've been
searching around and find some things confusing.  I'm hoping someone can
clear up that confusion.  I'm also debating what path to travel down. 
I'd also like to keep costs down as well.  That said, I don't mind
paying a little more for one that would offer a much better option. 
Path one, buy a NAS, possibly used, that has no drives.  If possible, I
may even replace the OS that comes on it or upgrade if I can.  I'm not
looking for fancy, or even RAID.  Just looking for a two bay NAS that
will work.  First, what is a DAS?  Is that totally different than a
NAS?  From what I've found, a DAS is not what I'm looking for since I
want a ethernet connection and the ability to control things over the
network.  It seems DAS lacks that feature but not real sure.  I'm not
sure I can upgrade the software/OS on a DAS either. 
Next thing.  Let's say a NAS comes with two 4TB drives for a total of
8TB of capacity from the factory, using LVM or similar software I
assume.  Is that limited to that capacity or can I for example replace
one or both drives with for example 14TB drives for a total of 28TBs of
capacity?  If one does that, let's say it uses LVM, can I somehow move
data as well or is that beyond the abilities of a NAS?  Could it be done
inside my computer for example?  Does this vary by brand or even model? 
Path two, I've researched building a NAS using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB as
another option.  They come as parts, cases too, but the newer and faster
models of Raspberry Pi 4 with more ram seem to work pretty well.  The
old slower models with small amounts of ram don't fair as well.  While I
want a descent speed, I'm not looking for or expecting it to be
blazingly fast.  I just wonder, if from a upgrade and expansion point of
view, if building a NAS would be better.  I've also noticed, it seems
all Raspberry things come with a display port.  That means I could hook
up a monitor and mouse/keyboard when needed.  That could be a bonus. 
Heck, I may can even put some sort of Gentoo on that thing.  :-D
One reason I'm wanting to go this route, I'm trying to keep it small and
able to fit inside my fire safe.  I plan to buy a media type safe that
is larger but right now, it needs to fit inside my current safe.  Most
of the 2 bay NAS or a Raspberry Pi based NAS are fairly small.  They not
much bigger than the three external hard drives and a couple bare drives
that currently occupy my safe. 
One thing I'd like to have no matter what path I go down, the ability to
encrypt the data.  My current backup drives are encrypted and I'd like
to keep it that way.  If that is possible to do.  I suspect the
Raspberry option would since I'd control the OS/software placed on it. 
I could be wrong tho. 
One last thing.  Are there any NAS type boxes that I should absolutely
avoid if I go that route?  Maybe it is a model that has serious
limitations or has other problems.  I think the DAS thing may be one for
me to avoid but I'm not for sure what limits it has.  Google didn't help
a lot. It also could be as simple as, avoid any model that says this in
the description or uses some type of software that is bad or limits
options. 
Thoughts?  Info to share?  Ideas on a best path forward?  Buy already
built or build?
Thanks.
Dale
:-)  :-) 

It does appear that several people are making it so NAS boxes can be
easily built by us nerdy types and not be huge.  Things are a bit
interesting right now for hardware and such.  Some parts are expensive,
hard to find or just plain unavailable.  Still, I suspect that this will
get better later on.  The good thing, people are working on this. There
is interest in having a option. 

I may in the meantime have to split up my large directory and the
resulting backup.  Split it in half or something.  I just bought a 16TB
hard drive.  It's over 90% full already.  That said, my downloading is
slowing down quite a lot.  It will last a while.  I may setup a old
system as a NAS and just keep it in a outbuilding for the time being. 
Should offer me some protection at least.

If anyone runs up on some info that might relate to this, please share. 
Maybe something new will come out that we don't know about now. If I do
build something, I'll likely post and share what I used, how much effort
was involved and the end results. Maybe this will help others as well.

Thanks.

Dale

:-)  :-)

P. S.  I currently have a spare 14TB, 8TB and 6TB hard drive not in
use.  That's 28TBs available.  That's a good start on a NAS as far as
drives go.  Currently in use in external enclosures for backups, 16Tb,
8TB and a 6TB hard drive. 

[Mark Knecht]

On Sat, Dec 10, 2022 at 1:42 PM Dale <***@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>

Post by Dale
It does appear that several people are making it so NAS boxes can be
easily built by us nerdy types and not be huge. Things are a bit
interesting right now for hardware and such. Some parts are expensive,
hard to find or just plain unavailable. Still, I suspect that this will
get better later on. The good thing, people are working on this. There
is interest in having a option.

I know I've said this before but yes, people are working on it and it
is buildable by people like us.

https://www.truenas.com/truenas-core/

Any old x64 PC and a few disks will get you up and running. It's
open source as much as BSD is open source. It's not Linux
so there was a little learning to do but it wasn't bad.

Mine has a small SSD as the boot drive and then RAID1 pairs
running OpenZFS for storage. It's inexpensive if you have an
old computer to build on.

Good luck,
Mark

[Dale]

Post by Mark Knecht
<SNIP>

Post by Dale
It does appear that several people are making it so NAS boxes can be
easily built by us nerdy types and not be huge.  Things are a bit
interesting right now for hardware and such.  Some parts are expensive,
hard to find or just plain unavailable.  Still, I suspect that this will
get better later on.  The good thing, people are working on this. There
is interest in having a option.

I know I've said this before but yes, people are working on it and it
is buildable by people like us.
https://www.truenas.com/truenas-core/
Any old x64 PC and a few disks will get you up and running. It's 
open source as much as BSD is open source. It's not Linux
so there was a little learning to do but it wasn't bad.
Mine has a small SSD as the boot drive and then RAID1 pairs
running OpenZFS for storage. It's inexpensive if you have an 
old computer to build on.
Good luck,
Mark

I got a old rig I can use.  I actually burned OpenNAS, TrueNAS or
FreeNAS on a USB stick.  I can't recall which one I put on it tho.  I
downloaded all three.  lol  If you know that one is better than the
others, feel free to share.  Also, I'd like to keep using LVM if I can. 
If nothing else, I already got the data on the drives and won't have to
reformat and copy again.  It took almost 100 hours to copy to the new
16TB drive.  Using LVM would make that easier, and faster.

I'll have to work with what I got for now but I really like the
Raspberry option for its size and good options to upgrade later.  I'll
just make do with something else until that option is doable.  Maybe it
won't be to long. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Mark Knecht]

<SNIP>

I got a old rig I can use. I actually burned OpenNAS, TrueNAS or FreeNAS

on a USB stick. I can't recall which one I put on it tho. I downloaded
all three. lol If you know that one is better than the others, feel free
to share. Also, I'd like to keep using LVM if I can. If nothing else, I
already got the data on the drives and won't have to reformat and copy
again. It took almost 100 hours to copy to the new 16TB drive. Using LVM
would make that easier, and faster.

I'll have to work with what I got for now but I really like the Raspberry

option for its size and good options to upgrade later. I'll just make do
with something else until that option is doable. Maybe it won't be to
long.

Dale
:-) :-)

TrueNAS Core. It's the free one. Works great. Very stable, but it is BSD,
not Linux so you'll be frustrated sometimes. None the less it works very
well.

[Dale]

Post by Mark Knecht
<SNIP>

I got a old rig I can use.  I actually burned OpenNAS, TrueNAS or

FreeNAS on a USB stick.  I can't recall which one I put on it tho.  I
downloaded all three.  lol  If you know that one is better than the
others, feel free to share.  Also, I'd like to keep using LVM if I
can.  If nothing else, I already got the data on the drives and won't
have to reformat and copy again.  It took almost 100 hours to copy to
the new 16TB drive.  Using LVM would make that easier, and faster.

I'll have to work with what I got for now but I really like the

Raspberry option for its size and good options to upgrade later.  I'll
just make do with something else until that option is doable.  Maybe
it won't be to long.

Dale
:-)  :-)

TrueNAS Core. It's the free one. Works great. Very stable, but it is
BSD, not Linux so you'll be frustrated sometimes. None the less it
works very well.

Well, I booted it and it is FreeNAS.  I got it on a USB stick tho. 
Well, I put the installer on one stick and then installed on a second
stick.  Kinda odd but I get it.  I also noticed it is BSD based.  I
played with BSD once before.  One thing I can say, it's secure.  Big time.

I see it uses ZFS or something.  No mention of LVM.  I figured that.  Oh
well. 

If I can't hammer FreeNAS into shape, I'll try TrueNAS next.  If it
works, that's fine too.  ;-) 

Thanks.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

P. S.  When I first booted, I didn't have the ethernet plugged in.  It
wasn't happy about that.  Given it is NAS software, I should have known
better.  ROFL 

[Mark Knecht]

Post by Mark Knecht
<SNIP>

I got a old rig I can use. I actually burned OpenNAS, TrueNAS or

FreeNAS on a USB stick. I can't recall which one I put on it tho. I
downloaded all three. lol If you know that one is better than the
others, feel free to share. Also, I'd like to keep using LVM if I
can. If nothing else, I already got the data on the drives and won't
have to reformat and copy again. It took almost 100 hours to copy to
the new 16TB drive. Using LVM would make that easier, and faster.

I'll have to work with what I got for now but I really like the

Raspberry option for its size and good options to upgrade later. I'll
just make do with something else until that option is doable. Maybe
it won't be to long.

Dale
:-) :-)

TrueNAS Core. It's the free one. Works great. Very stable, but it is
BSD, not Linux so you'll be frustrated sometimes. None the less it
works very well.

Well, I booted it and it is FreeNAS. I got it on a USB stick tho.
Well, I put the installer on one stick and then installed on a second
stick. Kinda odd but I get it. I also noticed it is BSD based. I
played with BSD once before. One thing I can say, it's secure. Big time.

I'm not clear exactly but FreeNAS _BECAME_ TrueNAS Core and TrueNAS
(all 3 versions) are the ones being worked on.

Installing from USB is pretty standard. Installing to a USB flash drive
is not unheard of in home NAS servers but be careful of machine
placement because people talk about USB sockets being unreliable
long term. I'm sure you'll figure it out, but make sure you're using
TrueNAS Core.

I see it uses ZFS or something. No mention of LVM. I figured that. Oh
well.

I see LVM as something that belongs on your machine, not your NAS
device. Your LVM volumes will just be directories on the NAS. You will
make your pools as large as you can afford and the NAS will just store
your data. You don't really need to worry about that much. My NAS
stores backups from 3 different machine, but all the backup data
is in a single ZFS RAID1 pool located in directories which macth the
name of the machine that wrote them.

If I can't hammer FreeNAS into shape, I'll try TrueNAS next. If it
works, that's fine too. ;-)

My input for the third time. Move to TrueNAS Core. That's the one
that is being developed and getting support.

Mark

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 8:01 AM Dale <***@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>

I think I'm going to switch. I need to start over anyway. I set up a

user account and a large pool but while I can mount it, I can't put
anything in it yet. I get a permission error. I likely missed a step or
something. Starting over will help correct that. lol

By the way, when I got it installed, it did update to a newer version. I

didn't look to see if it was dated in any way but updates seem to be
available for FreeNAS. I dunno.

Thanks for the info.
Dale
:-) :-)

At this point I think you're wise to just plug around in it for a little
while. Learn it a little bit. Build a few pools and get used to how it
works. It's a bit different than Linux.

In my case everything is NFS mounts and NFS exports work differently on
BSD. Assume you have a pool:

/mnt/MyPool/mark/Backups

and under that you want to have 3 directories exported to different
machines for backups, so

/mnt/MyPool/mark/Backups/science
/mnt/MyPool/mark/Backups/sciene2
/mnt/MyPool/mark/Backups/StellarMate

where each user machine has a place to put things, and hence you can find
it, but no LVM, it's just a big pool of storage. Note there are all the
standard problems about permissions when you first set these directories
up, like making sure you own them, that they are writable, etc.

In Linux NFS I would likely export all three separately, while in TrueNAS
BSD I export

/mnt/MyPool/mark --alldirs

If you cared about science mucking with science2's backups there are ways
to stop that, but I don't care because each machine on my network has a
bash scripts that points it where I want it to go:

***@science2:~$ cat ./bin/DoTrueNAS
#rsync -avx -n --port=873
--exclude={000_NOT_BACKED_UP,RIPS,.cache,.nv,'google-chrome*',DiskImages,Current}
/home/mark ***@truenas1:/mnt/MyPool/mark/Backups/science2/.

rsync -avx --port=873
--exclude={000_NOT_BACKED_UP,RIPS,.cache,.nv,'google-chrome*',DiskImages,Current}
/home/mark ***@truenas1:/mnt/MyPool/mark/Backups/science2/.
***@science2:~$

where the first one is a test config and the second is a real transfer.
Because it's rsync if something doesn't finish then I can pick up again
with little time lost.

Also, I think there are ways for you to build complex pools like a RAID0
from your 6TB and 8TB drives, and then a RAID1 using the RAID0 and your
14TB drive but I've never tried it because mine don't have enough drive
slots for that.

Also, turn on compression. It saves me between 15-20% so 14TB becomes 16TB
storage. YMMV. Video files don't compress, at least not much. Data files
generally do.

Hope this helps. I think you'll find TrueNAS fun actually but there is a
learning curve. I've used it for about a year and barely scratched the
surface.

Good luck,
Mark

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Mark Knecht
Also, I think there are ways for you to build complex pools like a RAID0
from your 6TB and 8TB drives, and then a RAID1 using the RAID0 and your
14TB drive but I've never tried it because mine don't have enough drive
slots for that.

After a longer fruitless search on the interwebs (I ddidn’t want to start up
my NAS just to check this) I finally found the right search keywords and
found a reddit thread about that. And it even throws LVM into the
discussion. ^^
https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/fitc73/raidz_with_nested_vdevs/

Also <https://zfs-discuss.zfsonlinux.narkive.com/g2THW8n4/nested-vdevs>:
“Here's a definitive answer from the man page for zpool.

Virtual devices cannot be nested, so a mirror or raidz virtual device can
only contain files or disks. Mirrors of mirrors (or other combinations) are
not allowed.”


I would advise against a JBOD pool anyways. Because if one drive dies, the
whole JBOD is gone. That goes for ZFS and probably for LVM, too (though I am
not sure how writes are distributed across JBOD disks). If the goal is
redundancy, you could buy a second drive to match the size of an existing
one and build a mirror. If redundancy is not a goal, then use the drives
separately like you do now. If one fails, then only its content is gone (or
even just the files sitting on the broken sector).

Post by Mark Knecht
Also, turn on compression. It saves me between 15-20% so 14TB becomes 16TB
storage. YMMV. Video files don't compress, at least not much. Data files
generally do.

It doesn’t hurt to switch it on, especially with lzo. But with video, the
benefit will be negligible. When storing a block of data (a “record” in ZFS
speak), it is passed through the compressor and only if the compression gain
is above a given threshold (10 % methinks), the block is written to disk
with compression.

What is more relevant in filesystems for big files (i.e. videos): set the
record size to 1 MB. The default is 64 kB, IIRC. Each record requires one
block of metadata (which includes the record checksum). So bigger records →
fewer meta blocks → better storage efficiency.

If you use big records for small files, then efficiency goes down a little.
It’s a similar (but a little more complicated) principle as when you write a
100 byte text file to a file system that uses 4 kB clusters. That file will
still use up 4 kB on disk.

The record size can be set per-dataset. So in your pool you could create a
dataset with a smaller record size for office documents, images and music,
and another dataset just for videos.

Post by Mark Knecht
Hope this helps. I think you'll find TrueNAS fun actually but there is a
learning curve. I've used it for about a year and barely scratched the
surface.

The main reason for me why I would wanna use it as opposed to a standard
Gentoo install: the OOTB web interface to manage all sorts of accounts,
access and permissions under one nice hood.

[Mark Knecht]

Interesting info. Since this is a duplicate copy already, I'm not to
worried about RAID stuff. I'd rather have two separate backups myself.
Store them in different places for even more safety. Still, one of
these days. ;-)
I'm still getting this error.
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/mnt/Backup/Videos’: Permission denied
I've tried every permission in every place I can find. I have a user
set up, set permissions under storage and pools, all the little
directory thingys under it too. It mounts so I'd think I got everything
set up correctly in the Share section. I actually followed a guide and
I don't think I missed anything. Still, I can't write anything to the
thing. It mounts fine, even shows it is mounted rw. I can't find
anything wrong on the puter or NAS ends. This reminds me of the last
time I played with BSD. It works so different, it just throws a person
upside down and shakes them.
I did switch to TrueNAS tho. Thing is, I got the same result from both,
exact same error. Can't be a bug. It has to be me. No idea what I
missed but I bet I did. lol Just gonna keep banging on it. :-D I do
like the GUI part. That's pretty neat.
Dale
:-) :-)

Update. I thought about just using Dolphin to play with the directory
that's actually on the NAS. I could create folders and files just fine
with Dolphin. Well, isn't that interesting. Finally I found a comment
with google that gave me a clue. I needed to change the options I use
with rsync plus it appears on my computer, I need to su to dale, same
user as on NAS. Now it works. I can rsync my files over.
Then I noticed something else. The network card in the NAS box, it's a
old 100MB card. Has anyone ever poured cold molasses before? Does
waiting on leap year sound familiar? ROFL Just saying.
Hey, at least I got the silly thing to work, slowly, but works. :/
Dale
:-) :-)

Congrats on making progress.

Is this still FreeNAS or did you switch to TrueNAS Core?

Yeah, 100Mb/S, or say 12MB/S takes days to move
multiple Terrabytes. I did it inside of a screen session so that
I could disconnect and leave it running in the background
without having to watch cold molasses flow. I'm looking
to upgrade everything to 2.5Gb/S or higher one of these
days but once the initial backup is done regular backups
are reasonably fast.

I was disappointed in the info Frank found about not being
able to bond Pools, but it still makes me wonder if someone
could create a 14TB RAID0 outside of the pool and then bond
that RAID0 with a 14TB drive to make a 14TB ZFS RAID1.

Not looking to do it myself though... ;-)

- Mark

[David Rosenbaum]

Tanks

Dave

Dave

Post by Mark Knecht
<SNIP>

Post by Dale
It does appear that several people are making it so NAS boxes can be
easily built by us nerdy types and not be huge. Things are a bit
interesting right now for hardware and such. Some parts are expensive,
hard to find or just plain unavailable. Still, I suspect that this will
get better later on. The good thing, people are working on this. There
is interest in having a option.

I know I've said this before but yes, people are working on it and it
is buildable by people like us.
https://www.truenas.com/truenas-core/
Any old x64 PC and a few disks will get you up and running. It's
open source as much as BSD is open source. It's not Linux
so there was a little learning to do but it wasn't bad.
Mine has a small SSD as the boot drive and then RAID1 pairs
running OpenZFS for storage. It's inexpensive if you have an
old computer to build on.
Good luck,
Mark

[David Rosenbaum]

Can I get sum help with privacy an control of my ph.

David

Tanks
Dave

Dave

Post by Mark Knecht
<SNIP>

Post by Dale
It does appear that several people are making it so NAS boxes can be
easily built by us nerdy types and not be huge. Things are a bit
interesting right now for hardware and such. Some parts are expensive,
hard to find or just plain unavailable. Still, I suspect that this

will

Post by Dale
get better later on. The good thing, people are working on this. There
is interest in having a option.

I know I've said this before but yes, people are working on it and it
is buildable by people like us.
https://www.truenas.com/truenas-core/
Any old x64 PC and a few disks will get you up and running. It's
open source as much as BSD is open source. It's not Linux
so there was a little learning to do but it wasn't bad.
Mine has a small SSD as the boot drive and then RAID1 pairs
running OpenZFS for storage. It's inexpensive if you have an
old computer to build on.
Good luck,
Mark

[David Rosenbaum]

Dave

Post by Mark Knecht
<SNIP>

Post by Dale
It does appear that several people are making it so NAS boxes can be
easily built by us nerdy types and not be huge. Things are a bit
interesting right now for hardware and such. Some parts are expensive,
hard to find or just plain unavailable. Still, I suspect that this will
get better later on. The good thing, people are working on this. There
is interest in having a option.

I know I've said this before but yes, people are working on it and it
is buildable by people like us.
https://www.truenas.com/truenas-core/
Any old x64 PC and a few disks will get you up and running. It's
open source as much as BSD is open source. It's not Linux
so there was a little learning to do but it wasn't bad.
Mine has a small SSD as the boot drive and then RAID1 pairs
running OpenZFS for storage. It's inexpensive if you have an
old computer to build on.
Good luck,
Mark

[Dale]

Post by Dale
Howdy,
<<< SNIP >>>
Thoughts?  Info to share?  Ideas on a best path forward?  Buy already
built or build?
Thanks.
Dale
:-)  :-) 

I have a couple questions.  I currently have the NAS thingy on a older
Dell machine.  It has a 4 core CPU and 8GBs of ram so it is acceptable,
for the time being at least.  Bad thing is, only two drive bays.  :/  I
have a few questions that I can't quite find answers to with google. 

1:  I have the OS on a USB stick.  From what I've read, they do fail due
to wear at some point.  If I reinstall TrueNAS on a new USB stick, will
it automatically see the previous pools and such or do I have to set
everything up again fresh?  In other words, will I lose data?  This also
includes if it is encrypted.  Right now it is not, but I plan to restart
and set it up as encrypted shortly.  I suspect that it will work like
LVM does.  I just can't see a OS failure causing a loss of all data. 

2:  Hardware change.  The Dell comes with a 100MB network card.  I
ordered a 1GB card.  I plan to put it in when it gets here.  Will it see
the new card and work automatically or will it take some work to get the
network going?  On my Gentoo rig, I have to enable drivers in the kernel
and recompile.  I'm not sure about BSD tho.  Since it is sort of a
binary thing, does TrueNAS handle hardware changes such as a network
card well? 

I also found out something power wise.  The Dell when booted and sitting
idle consumes about 120 watts monitor and all.  My main rig consumes
just under 200 watts.  Not to bad but a Raspberry Pi would likely
consume 15, 20 watts max according to what I've read.  Given the number
of hard drives, it could pull 25 or 30 watts max but doubtful it would
get that high.  I'm looking at 4 bays but also found a 6 bay.  I think 6
is overkill tho. 

Eventually, I plan to build a Raspberry Pi NAS.  When I do, I'll post
everything major I needed, boards, case etc for everyone to look at. 
I'll even try to upload some pics, or share as attachments if there is
interest.  Unless I find one heck of a deal on a used NAS that is. 
Still may build one even then.  ;-)

Thanks.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Frank Steinmetzger]

I have a couple questions.  I currently have the NAS thingy on a older
Dell machine.  It has a 4 core CPU and 8GBs of ram so it is acceptable,
for the time being at least.  Bad thing is, only two drive bays.  :/  I
have a few questions that I can't quite find answers to with google. 
1:  I have the OS on a USB stick.  From what I've read, they do fail due
to wear at some point.

OTOH, TrueNAS is designed to run from it, so I would assume it handles its
root drive with care. Perhaps you can disable verbose logging and such.

If I reinstall TrueNAS on a new USB stick, will it automatically see the
previous pools and such or do I have to set everything up again fresh?

Pools and their metadata are stored inside the pools. In Linux, you don’t
even need to set up fstab. The pool stores its mount point internally. So
you just start the zfs daemon and it does everything magically.

In other words, will I lose data?

You won’t lose data, of course. But I think you meant settings(?). Probably
about users, shares and such. Perhaps it has an export feature which can be
run periodically.

This also includes if it is encrypted.

Encryption is a built-in ZFS feature. So yes, it will remember that. Not
sure about the decryption process (keyfile).

2:  Hardware change.  The Dell comes with a 100MB network card.  I
ordered a 1GB card.  I plan to put it in when it gets here.  Will it see
the new card and work automatically or will it take some work to get the
network going?

I assume the kernel is built like many general-purpose-distros: with
everything in it you may need for the purpose. But since it is BSD, it may
have driver issues (availability and stability for certain cards).
Sometimes, when I read news about a new product, people complain that the
NIC is not Intel and will thus cause problems with BSD, especially with
niche stuff like the Killer-brand ethernet cards.

and recompile.  I'm not sure about BSD tho.  Since it is sort of a
binary thing, does TrueNAS handle hardware changes such as a network
card well? 

I don’t see a connection between being a “binary thing” and hardware change.
Your gentoo is also a binary thing once it is compiled. ;-)

I also found out something power wise.  The Dell when booted and sitting
idle consumes about 120 watts monitor and all.

I figured as much when you mentioned its 100 Mbps card. It must be old then,
and back then, idle power was a non-issue.

My main rig consumes just under 200 watts.  Not to bad

That’s a very lot for my taste. With a lower mid-range GPU (110 W Radeon R7
370) and one spinning rust, my 8-year-old PC used to idle at 50 W. Without
the HDD and with Intel graphics it is now at 27 W. Still not a good number
when compared with today’s hardware.

but a Raspberry Pi would likely consume 15, 20 watts max according to what
I've read.

My 3B idles at 5 W tops, I think. It cannot be much more under load since it
comes without a built-in heat spreader.

Given the number of hard drives, it could pull 25 or 30 watts max but
doubtful it would get that high.  I'm looking at 4 bays but also found a 6
bay.  I think 6 is overkill tho. 

My four-bay NAS has four 6 TB drives and it draws around 50 W at idle. But
that’s because it is a server board, incuding IPMI chip (and—interestingly—
an internal USB-A for an OS stick). And it’s Haswell generation, so almost a
decade old design. For this reason I switch it on only every few weeks or
even months and only keep it running for a short time.

[Dale]

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Dale
I have a couple questions.  I currently have the NAS thingy on a older
Dell machine.  It has a 4 core CPU and 8GBs of ram so it is acceptable,
for the time being at least.  Bad thing is, only two drive bays.  :/  I
have a few questions that I can't quite find answers to with google. 
1:  I have the OS on a USB stick.  From what I've read, they do fail due
to wear at some point.

OTOH, TrueNAS is designed to run from it, so I would assume it handles its
root drive with care. Perhaps you can disable verbose logging and such.

I've just read that changes were made a while back and they recommend
not using a USB stick anymore.  It works but they tend to not last as
long as they once did.  There could be any number of variables in that
tho. 

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Dale
If I reinstall TrueNAS on a new USB stick, will it automatically see the
previous pools and such or do I have to set everything up again fresh?

Pools and their metadata are stored inside the pools. In Linux, you don’t
even need to set up fstab. The pool stores its mount point internally. So
you just start the zfs daemon and it does everything magically.

Post by Dale
In other words, will I lose data?

You won’t lose data, of course. But I think you meant settings(?). Probably
about users, shares and such. Perhaps it has an export feature which can be
run periodically.

Post by Dale
This also includes if it is encrypted.

Encryption is a built-in ZFS feature. So yes, it will remember that. Not
sure about the decryption process (keyfile).

That's what I was expecting.  I may test that theory just so I don't run
into any surprises.  I kinda figure it works a lot like LVM does. 
Different but details stored on the drive itself.  Basically, works
wherever you put it. 

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Dale
2:  Hardware change.  The Dell comes with a 100MB network card.  I
ordered a 1GB card.  I plan to put it in when it gets here.  Will it see
the new card and work automatically or will it take some work to get the
network going?

I assume the kernel is built like many general-purpose-distros: with
everything in it you may need for the purpose. But since it is BSD, it may
have driver issues (availability and stability for certain cards).
Sometimes, when I read news about a new product, people complain that the
NIC is not Intel and will thus cause problems with BSD, especially with
niche stuff like the Killer-brand ethernet cards.

Post by Dale
and recompile.  I'm not sure about BSD tho.  Since it is sort of a
binary thing, does TrueNAS handle hardware changes such as a network
card well? 

I don’t see a connection between being a “binary thing” and hardware change.
Your gentoo is also a binary thing once it is compiled. ;-)

My thinking was, I didn't compile any of the software myself.  Sort of
like if I install a binary based distro.  It may have a feature or
driver turned on, it may not. Maybe you are right, it will at least have
the driver it needs built as a module and it will load it and work
fine.  I have the same card in my Gentoo box so it is Linux compatible
so in theory, should work in BSD as well.  I'd think.  ;-)  First thing,
it has to get here.  It's already two days later than originally claimed. 

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Dale
I also found out something power wise.  The Dell when booted and sitting
idle consumes about 120 watts monitor and all.

I figured as much when you mentioned its 100 Mbps card. It must be old then,
and back then, idle power was a non-issue.

Post by Dale
My main rig consumes just under 200 watts.  Not to bad

That’s a very lot for my taste. With a lower mid-range GPU (110 W Radeon R7
370) and one spinning rust, my 8-year-old PC used to idle at 50 W. Without
the HDD and with Intel graphics it is now at 27 W. Still not a good number
when compared with today’s hardware.

My Gentoo rig is a little old too.  AMD 8 core CPU, 32GBs of memory,
LOTS of hard drives.  I think there is eight in there right now.  A
couple may be older but most are newer. 

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Dale
but a Raspberry Pi would likely consume 15, 20 watts max according to what
I've read.

My 3B idles at 5 W tops, I think. It cannot be much more under load since it
comes without a built-in heat spreader.

Post by Dale
Given the number of hard drives, it could pull 25 or 30 watts max but
doubtful it would get that high.  I'm looking at 4 bays but also found a 6
bay.  I think 6 is overkill tho. 

My four-bay NAS has four 6 TB drives and it draws around 50 W at idle. But
that’s because it is a server board, incuding IPMI chip (and—interestingly—
an internal USB-A for an OS stick). And it’s Haswell generation, so almost a
decade old design. For this reason I switch it on only every few weeks or
even months and only keep it running for a short time.

From what I've read, the Raspberry Pi pretty much all sip on power. 
They really efficient.  It's nice to know that even tho the one you
mention is more powerful, even it only pulls 50 watts.  Thing is, I
don't plan to run the one I build except when updating backups.  The
rest of the time, tucked into the fire safe. 

Thanks for the info.  Now to read next response. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Mark Knecht]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2022 at 9:08 PM Dale <***@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>

2: Hardware change. The Dell comes with a 100MB network card. I
ordered a 1GB card. I plan to put it in when it gets here. Will it see
the new card and work automatically or will it take some work to get the
network going? On my Gentoo rig, I have to enable drivers in the kernel
and recompile. I'm not sure about BSD tho. Since it is sort of a
binary thing, does TrueNAS handle hardware changes such as a network
card well?

<SNIP>

At the risk of repeating a bit of what Frank said I'll put in my 2 cents as
a
TrueNAS user. No intention to be snarky on my side, just pointing
a few things out.

1) Welcome to the world of "not Gentoo". What I think you are describing
as a 'binary thing' is, for the most part, the way we work out here.

2) I disagree with your description of how "it's done" in Gentoo Land. You
made a choice to put your network driver in the kernel. You could have
built it as a module and loaded that module. Both would have worked.

3) Out here in Not Gentoo Land (NGL) they supply you with 100's of
modules and generally installers figure out which ones to load. My main
NGL machine has literally over 100 modules loaded. I don't know what
they do (for the most part) and mostly I don't care.

4) While I cannot tell you if the card you ordered has a Linux or FreeBSD
driver, I can point out that on the left hand side of your TrueNAS
dashboard, accessible in your browser hopefully, there is a pulldown
called 'Network'. It should hopefully show you the current network
interface which in my case is called 're0'. On the right you might,
hopefully
possibly see a big blue button called "ADD". Consider giving that button
a push after you've installed your new card.

I believe you will get this figured out very soon. Continue exploring
the NGL world.

Mark

[Dale]

Post by Mark Knecht
<SNIP>

2:  Hardware change.  The Dell comes with a 100MB network card.  I
ordered a 1GB card.  I plan to put it in when it gets here.  Will it see
the new card and work automatically or will it take some work to get the
network going?  On my Gentoo rig, I have to enable drivers in the kernel
and recompile.  I'm not sure about BSD tho.  Since it is sort of a
binary thing, does TrueNAS handle hardware changes such as a network
card well?

<SNIP>
At the risk of repeating a bit of what Frank said I'll put in my 2
cents as a
TrueNAS user. No intention to be snarky on my side, just pointing
a few things out.
1) Welcome to the world of "not Gentoo". What I think you are describing
as a 'binary thing' is, for the most part, the way we work out here.
2) I disagree with your description of how "it's done" in Gentoo Land. You
made a choice to put your network driver in the kernel. You could have
built it as a module and loaded that module. Both would have worked.
3) Out here in Not Gentoo Land (NGL) they supply you with 100's of
modules and generally installers figure out which ones to load. My main 
NGL machine has literally over 100 modules loaded. I don't know what 
they do (for the most part) and mostly I don't care.
4) While I cannot tell you if the card you ordered has a Linux or FreeBSD
driver, I can point out that on the left hand side of your TrueNAS 
dashboard, accessible in your browser hopefully, there is a pulldown
called 'Network'. It should hopefully show you the current network
interface which in my case is called 're0'. On the right you might,
hopefully
possibly see a big blue button called "ADD". Consider giving that button 
a push after you've installed your new card.
   I believe you will get this figured out very soon. Continue exploring
the NGL world. 
Mark

1:  The binary thing is a distro or package that I don't compile
myself.  So, yea, not Gentoo. 

2:  True for some I guess.  The only module I have is my video drivers. 
I build everything else I need into the kernel.  It's how I learned to
do it ages ago and so far, it works really well.  BSD tho may do that a
different way.  I played with BSD once years ago.  I been doing the
Gentoo way for a LOT longer.  Last binary distro I used was Mandrake and
it changed names a long time ago I think. 

3:  That's what I'm hoping for but with no recent BSD experience and not
able to find info with google, I hoped someone who used TrueNAS or BSD
would know how its done.  A couple people did.  ;-) 

4:  I have a monitor hooked up still so I can do it the text way if
needed.  It mentions about setting up the network as one of the
options.  Since you mentioned it has a GUI option, I may just do that. 
So long as it works. 

Thanks for the info.  It helped. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Dale

Post by Mark Knecht
4) While I cannot tell you if the card you ordered has a Linux or FreeBSD
driver, I can point out that on the left hand side of your TrueNAS 
dashboard, accessible in your browser hopefully, there is a pulldown
called 'Network'. It should hopefully show you the current network
interface which in my case is called 're0'. On the right you might,
hopefully
possibly see a big blue button called "ADD". Consider giving that button 
a push after you've installed your new card.

4:  I have a monitor hooked up still so I can do it the text way if
needed.  It mentions about setting up the network as one of the
options.
Since you mentioned it has a GUI option, I may just do that. 
So long as it works. 

That’s what I referred to earlier: you get a web interface built-in that
takes care of all the chores. I always wanted to set up shares on my NAS so
that guests could easily access it anonymously, but safely (meaning: no
write access). I never had the patience to go through the whole setup of ftp
and/or samba with the proper users and directories. But a web UI could take
care of all of that. Plus it’s shiny. :D

My point is: there is no need for a monitor. ;-)

[Dale]

Post by Mark Knecht
4) While I cannot tell you if the card you ordered has a Linux or FreeBSD
driver, I can point out that on the left hand side of your TrueNAS 
dashboard, accessible in your browser hopefully, there is a pulldown
called 'Network'. It should hopefully show you the current network
interface which in my case is called 're0'. On the right you might,
hopefully
possibly see a big blue button called "ADD". Consider giving that button 
a push after you've installed your new card.

4:  I have a monitor hooked up still so I can do it the text way if
needed.  It mentions about setting up the network as one of the
options.
Since you mentioned it has a GUI option, I may just do that. 
So long as it works. 

That’s what I referred to earlier: you get a web interface built-in that
takes care of all the chores. I always wanted to set up shares on my NAS so
that guests could easily access it anonymously, but safely (meaning: no
write access). I never had the patience to go through the whole setup of ftp
and/or samba with the proper users and directories. But a web UI could take
care of all of that. Plus it’s shiny. :D
My point is: there is no need for a monitor. ;-)

I noticing that now.  Once the install is done and you have the IP
address, heck, you don't need a monitor for much of anything it
appears.  I even found a console so one can type in things to do.  I
wonder, could one install the LVM stuff and use that?  That would be
interesting.  I wonder if there is a NAS software that uses LVM
instead.  Interesting thought.  I just may go bug google on that one.  o_O

The network card is getting closer.  May be here tomorrow.  Maybe.  One
can never really tell about these things. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
My point is: there is no need for a monitor. ;-)

I noticing that now.  Once the install is done and you have the IP
address, heck, you don't need a monitor for much of anything it
appears.  I even found a console so one can type in things to do.  I
wonder, could one install the LVM stuff and use that?  That would be
interesting.
I wonder if there is a NAS software that uses LVM instead.  Interesting
thought.  I just may go bug google on that one.  o_O

Interestingly, after feeding LVM NAS to my search engine, one of the first
results was a Qnap user forum thread which reads that Qnaps use LVM. It
makes sense, since they most likely use a “normal” linux software RAID
underneath, and LVM is then the best way to dynamically manage the space on
top of that.

While ZFS has the same pooling feature as LVM, meaning you can bunch several
disks together to create a JBOD, it has one big disadvantage over LVM: you
can grow a pool, but not shrink it. Actually, while reading up on stuff for
this thread, I learned that these days it is actually possible to remove a
mirror vdev from a mirror-only pool (a mirror can technically also be a
single device). But according to
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSWhyNoVdevRemoval
it’s not perfect either.

[Dale]

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Post by Dale

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
My point is: there is no need for a monitor. ;-)

I noticing that now.  Once the install is done and you have the IP
address, heck, you don't need a monitor for much of anything it
appears.  I even found a console so one can type in things to do.  I
wonder, could one install the LVM stuff and use that?  That would be
interesting.
I wonder if there is a NAS software that uses LVM instead.  Interesting
thought.  I just may go bug google on that one.  o_O

Interestingly, after feeding LVM NAS to my search engine, one of the first
results was a Qnap user forum thread which reads that Qnaps use LVM. It
makes sense, since they most likely use a “normal” linux software RAID
underneath, and LVM is then the best way to dynamically manage the space on
top of that.
While ZFS has the same pooling feature as LVM, meaning you can bunch several
disks together to create a JBOD, it has one big disadvantage over LVM: you
can grow a pool, but not shrink it. Actually, while reading up on stuff for
this thread, I learned that these days it is actually possible to remove a
mirror vdev from a mirror-only pool (a mirror can technically also be a
single device). But according to
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSWhyNoVdevRemoval
it’s not perfect either.

With LVM, I usually either move data to a larger drive or just add a
additional drive.  I think I shrunk once, I think.  Still, one always
wants to have options.

One thing about LVM, I already know how to use it.  I've got notes on
how to do things and it has worked.  With ZFS I'd have to learn it all
over again plus it could confuse me with my using LVM on my main rig. 
In a way, if I build a Raspberry NAS, I'd like to have Linux and LVM on
the thing.  At least then I have experience moving data and such.  Right
now, I don't even have the basics of ZFS or BSD.  I'm not saying TrueNAS
is bad or anything, just that I don't really care for the learning
curve.  Then the confusion part on top of that. 

I've read there are distros built for Raspberry thingys.  I'd be shocked
if it isn't doable.  I'd be shocked if someone hasn't already done it
even.   

Time will tell I guess.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
While ZFS has the same pooling feature as LVM, meaning you can bunch several
disks together to create a JBOD, it has one big disadvantage over LVM: you
can grow a pool, but not shrink it. Actually, while reading up on stuff for
this thread, I learned that these days it is actually possible to remove a
mirror vdev from a mirror-only pool (a mirror can technically also be a
single device). But according to
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSWhyNoVdevRemoval
it’s not perfect either.

One thing about LVM, I already know how to use it.  I've got notes on
how to do things and it has worked.  With ZFS I'd have to learn it all
over again plus it could confuse me with my using LVM on my main rig. 
In a way, if I build a Raspberry NAS, I'd like to have Linux and LVM on
the thing.  At least then I have experience moving data and such.  Right
now, I don't even have the basics of ZFS or BSD.  I'm not saying TrueNAS
is bad or anything, just that I don't really care for the learning
curve.  Then the confusion part on top of that. 

The beauty of the WebUI is that it abstracts all of that away. You don’t
have to be in the know about the inner works and create pools and vdevs by
hand. Though it might be handy in case something breaks in an unexpected
way.

I've read there are distros built for Raspberry thingys.  I'd be shocked
if it isn't doable.  I'd be shocked if someone hasn't already done it
even.   

It’s called RaspberryPi OS (formerly knows as Raspbian). It has the kernel,
some start scripts and settings files that control which stuff to load at
boot. Pis boot differently to x86 hardware; there is no Grub & co.

I don’t particularly like Debian’s apt, which is why I’m also experimenting
with Arch on arm, Arch being my favorite distro for my everyday these days.

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2022 at 8:50 PM Dale <***@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>

I noticing that now. Once the install is done and you have the IP
address, heck, you don't need a monitor for much of anything it
appears. I even found a console so one can type in things to do.

Exactly. My TrueNAS machines haven't had a monitor attached
since they were built. Everything you need is there. It's more a
storage appliance than a computer.

I
wonder, could one install the LVM stuff and use that? That would be
interesting. I wonder if there is a NAS software that uses LVM
instead. Interesting thought. I just may go bug google on that one. o_O

Maybe I'm missing the point but why would you want LVM on a
storage pool? If I'm doing backups I just want space. I let TrueNas
put it on disk and give it back if asked. Why put another layer
of indirection?

If you're intending to use it as simple NAS - i.e. - the only copy
of some data on your network - then possibly LVM might
be interesting, but then you need a second TrueNAS box
to back that up. NAS as a mountable data location is
different than NAS doing backups which is what I thought
this thread was about. What am I not remembering?

- Mark

[Dale]

I
wonder, could one install the LVM stuff and use that?  That would be
interesting.  I wonder if there is a NAS software that uses LVM
instead.  Interesting thought.  I just may go bug google on that

one.  o_O
Maybe I'm missing the point but why would you want LVM on a
storage pool? If I'm doing backups I just want space. I let TrueNas 
put it on disk and give it back if asked. Why put another layer
of indirection?
If you're intending to use it as simple NAS - i.e. - the only copy
of some data on your network - then possibly LVM might
be interesting, but then you need a second TrueNAS box
to back that up. NAS as a mountable data location is
different than NAS doing backups which is what I thought
this thread was about. What am I not remembering?
- Mark

It's more about me being more used to using LVM.  Also, more used to
Linux as well.  BSD is not something I have much experience with and
until recently, none with ZFS.  Even the little experience I have with
BSD was well over a decade ago, maybe two decades ago.  I barely
remember it really.

By replacing ZFS with LVM, I'm working with something I'm familiar with
and less likely to mess up things.  Things get messed up enough without
adding more confusion.  ;-)

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Mark Knecht]

Post by Mark Knecht

I
wonder, could one install the LVM stuff and use that? That would be
interesting. I wonder if there is a NAS software that uses LVM
instead. Interesting thought. I just may go bug google on that one.

o_O

Post by Mark Knecht
Maybe I'm missing the point but why would you want LVM on a
storage pool? If I'm doing backups I just want space. I let TrueNas
put it on disk and give it back if asked. Why put another layer
of indirection?
If you're intending to use it as simple NAS - i.e. - the only copy
of some data on your network - then possibly LVM might
be interesting, but then you need a second TrueNAS box
to back that up. NAS as a mountable data location is
different than NAS doing backups which is what I thought
this thread was about. What am I not remembering?
- Mark
It's more about me being more used to using LVM. Also, more used to

Linux as well. BSD is not something I have much experience with and until
recently, none with ZFS. Even the little experience I have with BSD was
well over a decade ago, maybe two decades ago. I barely remember it really.

Post by Mark Knecht
By replacing ZFS with LVM, I'm working with something I'm familiar with

and less likely to mess up things. Things get messed up enough without
adding more confusion. ;-)

Post by Mark Knecht
Dale
:-) :-)

Hummm...I don't know Dale, I don't know... ZFS is a file system.
LVM is an abstraction on top (or underneath?) of a file system.
My understanding of LVM is that it frees you from hard decisions
on partition sizes, not that it replaces ZFS or ext3/4/5.

You may or may not know this but TrueNAS is available as a
Linux version:

https://www.truenas.com/blog/first-release-of-truenas-on-linux/

I don't recommend it. It's new. Let someone else figure it out. However
it might be more to your liking, and because it's Linux you'd be more
comfortable messing it up. ;0-

WRT you I recommend that you try living in NGL for a while. Possibly
you are just a bit too indoctrinated in the religion of building packages
30-50 times a year believing (without hard data) that it provides value.
Instead you might just consider relaxing and letting the system
take care of itself. In the last year I've only updated my TrueNAS box
twice that I can remember.

On the other hand if system tweaking is what brings you joy then
Que Sera Sera .....

Good luck,
Mark

[Mark Knecht]

On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 9:42 AM Dale <***@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>

That is true. Thing is, I've learned how to manage LVM even with

encrypted data. I've also learned how to expand storage without losing
data or getting confused about what I'm doing. To me, using LVM is pretty
easy given the notes I have for the tasks I do most often.
<SNIP>

It's not that I want to compile things, it's that I want to use things

I'm already really familiar with. If I bought a Raspberry Pi and built a
NAS with it, I don't care if I compile the software on it or not as long as
it has the software I need or I can install what I need. From what I've
read, compiling on a Raspberry isn't much fun. It's very time consuming.
Having a OS, binary one at that, that is Linux based is a big plus. I can
run LVM, cryptsetup and such in likely every Linux distro out there and get
the same result as on my Gentoo box. Switching to BSD, using ZFS, means I
have to learn a whole new set of tools and methods. I had enough fun
learning LVM and I don't think LVM is going to die anytime soon. It should
be around for the foreseeable future. As it is, even now, I still don't
get how ZFS works. I just followed a guide to get it working, sort of.
It's still not encrypted. Figuring that out is next. That should be fun.
Maybe just live with TrueNAS for a month or two and get to know it on a
friendly level first?

I think I'm still not understanding the need for LVM. Help me understand. I
see ZFS on TrueNAS as a combination of mdadm and a file system. I'm not
sure I even have partitions. My ZFS pool is just using the whole drive, but
that was all I wanted. Are you planning on using your drive space for other
things? (Plex server in a jail, or remote real-time storage for instance)
If so maybe LVM would help isolate backups - which I thought was why you
wanted this machine - from a VM of some type running on the same machine -
which I don't think you've suggested.

My network card is out for delivery. A few days late but better than

never I guess. I'll see if the drivers needed for it are available as
modules or not. I suspect they are tho based on info in this thread.

Good luck. Hope the new card makes your life easier.

[Wol]

Post by Mark Knecht
Hummm...I don't know Dale, I don't know... ZFS is a file system.
LVM is an abstraction on top (or underneath?) of a file system.
My understanding of LVM is that it frees you from hard decisions
on partition sizes, not that it replaces ZFS or ext3/4/5.

Do one thing and do it well. That's LVM. Or ext.

Jack of all trades. That's ZFS.

Do you want the filesystem doing everything from the hard drive up? Use ZFS.

Do you want the system layered, with each layer doing one job? Use
dm-integrity to protect against corruption, raid to join the disks, lvm
to partition them, and ext to manage the directories and files.

I do the latter ...

Cheers,
Wol

[Mark Knecht]

On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 12:10 PM Wol <***@youngman.org.uk> wrote:
<SNIP>

Post by Wol
Do you want the system layered, with each layer doing one job? Use
dm-integrity to protect against corruption, raid to join the disks, lvm
to partition them, and ext to manage the directories and files.
I do the latter ...

No argument there, at least on a group of drives where you
want to have flexibility in the future. Desktop computers or
system drives certainly. You didn't tell me what replaces
the compression aspect of the problem but I'm sure there's
something. It's a great strategy if you have the expertise and
time to set it up and then manage it when a problem arises,
if it ever arises.

I'm just asking what's the purpose of doing LVM, or your
suggested layering, specifically on a storage pool for a
home user like Dale? That's the part I don't understand,
especially for a new NAS user like Dale?

Mark

[Wol]

Post by Mark Knecht
I'm just asking what's the purpose of doing LVM, or your
suggested layering, specifically on a storage pool for a
home user like Dale? That's the part I don't understand,
especially for a new NAS user like Dale?

From my POV, snapshots, in-place short-term backups, it's just flexible.

Actually, my main use of lvm is on my system partition - take a
snapshot, emerge @world, make sure everything is okay ...

What I *thought* I wanted it for was my /home partition - my wife is
forever losing stuff, getting muddled and what have you. But I don't
think snapshotting would actually protect against what she does :-(

But the ability to snapshot anything where you think you might be doing
something dangerous is just great - it means you can revert a disaster...

And below that, integrity/raid? Well raid protects against a drive
failure, integrity protects against disk corruption. They're all
unlikely events, but I've got loads of disk space, a powerful system,
and I don't stress it, so I've got power to spare for it.

Cheers,
Wol

[Mark Knecht]

On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 4:42 PM Dale <***@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>

My reasoning is simple, I'm already familiar with LVM and how to manage

it.
<SNIP>

Take the machine, wipe it and build a NAS from scratch with Gentoo. If all
you want is an NFS mount that won't be difficult. Add an NFS server, export
your mount and you're done, right? Managing it over the long term will be
far more work than TrueNAS but you will be comfortable with changing disks
and adding network cards which is important to you. Life is too short to
deal with things you really don't enjoy.

I would not suggest you look at Ubuntu Server because it's NGL. 10 minutes
to install, 3 minutes to figure out how to add the NFS server. However it's
a different package manager and truly not as nice as emerge/portage so you
probably won't like that part of NGL either. I truly don't like apt, but it
works if I stay in my lane so I've learned to do that, the advantage being
I've never had to build a package from scratch and I've never in 5 or 6
years had an update fail.

Wipe the machine. You'll be happier.

Best wishes,
Mark

[Michael]

Post by Mark Knecht
<SNIP>

My reasoning is simple, I'm already familiar with LVM and how to

manage it.
<SNIP>
Take the machine, wipe it and build a NAS from scratch with Gentoo. If
all you want is an NFS mount that won't be difficult. Add an NFS
server, export your mount and you're done, right? Managing it over the
long term will be far more work than TrueNAS but you will be
comfortable with changing disks and adding network cards which
is important to you. Life is too short to deal with things you really
don't enjoy.
I would not suggest you look at Ubuntu Server because it's NGL. 10
minutes to install, 3 minutes to figure out how to add the NFS server.
However it's a different package manager and truly not as nice as
emerge/portage so you probably won't like that part of NGL either. I
truly don't like apt, but it works if I stay in my lane so I've
learned to do that, the advantage being I've never had to build a
package from scratch and I've never in 5 or 6 years had an update fail.
Wipe the machine. You'll be happier.
Best wishes,
Mark

Well, I finally got it so I could do a backup. I didn't need a hammer
but the thought crossed my mind. lol Even tho I now have a 1GB network
card, it's still really slow. It shows up as a 1GB connection on both
my Gentoo machine and the NAS machine. This is a example of the speeds
I'm seeing. Just snippets.
277,193,507 100% 16.18MB/s 0:00:16
519,216,571 100% 18.86MB/s 0:00:26
738,078,565 100% 23.54MB/s 0:00:29
As you can see, the files sizes are large enough it should do better.
When I use iftop, it shows it isn't doing anywhere near the speed it
should, maybe 1/4th or so. I'd expect at least double or triple that
speed. In all honesty, I'd think the hard drive would be the limiting
factor. Even on my Gentoo rig I only get about 50 to 60MBs/sec for
encrypted drives. I think the encryption slows that down. When copying
from a plain drive to a plain drive, I get 100MBs/sec or so.
I can't figure out why it is so slow tho. The NAS rig is a 4 core CPU
and 8GBs of memory. It should have enough horsepower under the hood.
Maybe it is something I'm not aware of. It is a older rig so maybe it
isn't SATA's fastest version, maybe even the original or something. I
can't find anything in lspci or dmesg so not real sure where to look on
BSD.
Anyway, it's progress for now at least. ;-) At this rate, it'll be
done in about a week, maybe. o_O
Dale
:-) :-)

Has it auto-negotiated a full-duplex connection at 1Gbps? Run ifconfig and
check the output, it should say something like:

media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)

If not, then you may need to set this up manually.

[Dale]

Post by Michael

Post by Mark Knecht
<SNIP>

My reasoning is simple, I'm already familiar with LVM and how to

manage it.
<SNIP>
Take the machine, wipe it and build a NAS from scratch with Gentoo. If
all you want is an NFS mount that won't be difficult. Add an NFS
server, export your mount and you're done, right? Managing it over the
long term will be far more work than TrueNAS but you will be
comfortable with changing disks and adding network cards which
is important to you. Life is too short to deal with things you really
don't enjoy.
I would not suggest you look at Ubuntu Server because it's NGL. 10
minutes to install, 3 minutes to figure out how to add the NFS server.
However it's a different package manager and truly not as nice as
emerge/portage so you probably won't like that part of NGL either. I
truly don't like apt, but it works if I stay in my lane so I've
learned to do that, the advantage being I've never had to build a
package from scratch and I've never in 5 or 6 years had an update fail.
Wipe the machine. You'll be happier.
Best wishes,
Mark

Well, I finally got it so I could do a backup. I didn't need a hammer
but the thought crossed my mind. lol Even tho I now have a 1GB network
card, it's still really slow. It shows up as a 1GB connection on both
my Gentoo machine and the NAS machine. This is a example of the speeds
I'm seeing. Just snippets.
277,193,507 100% 16.18MB/s 0:00:16
519,216,571 100% 18.86MB/s 0:00:26
738,078,565 100% 23.54MB/s 0:00:29
As you can see, the files sizes are large enough it should do better.
When I use iftop, it shows it isn't doing anywhere near the speed it
should, maybe 1/4th or so. I'd expect at least double or triple that
speed. In all honesty, I'd think the hard drive would be the limiting
factor. Even on my Gentoo rig I only get about 50 to 60MBs/sec for
encrypted drives. I think the encryption slows that down. When copying
from a plain drive to a plain drive, I get 100MBs/sec or so.
I can't figure out why it is so slow tho. The NAS rig is a 4 core CPU
and 8GBs of memory. It should have enough horsepower under the hood.
Maybe it is something I'm not aware of. It is a older rig so maybe it
isn't SATA's fastest version, maybe even the original or something. I
can't find anything in lspci or dmesg so not real sure where to look on
BSD.
Anyway, it's progress for now at least. ;-) At this rate, it'll be
done in about a week, maybe. o_O
Dale
:-) :-)

Has it auto-negotiated a full-duplex connection at 1Gbps? Run ifconfig and
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
If not, then you may need to set this up manually.

Mine says that here too. 


media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)


You know, it's not that easy to copy that from a console on BSD.  It was
kind enough to give me a hint on how tho.  ;-) 

I was pretty sure it was at full speed.  In iftop it showed it was a 1GB
connection, just not using much of it. 

I suspect it has something to do with this being a older system.  I
wouldn't be surprised if the SATA was a older and slower version.  I
guess I could google it. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Dale
I suspect it has something to do with this being a older system.

Very likely. :)

Post by Dale
I wouldn't be surprised if the SATA was a older and slower version.

I hate to repeat myself, but no. Here are the speeds of SATA:

Generation Year Gross bandwidth Net bandwidth
---------------------------------------------------------
SATA 1 2003 1.5 Gbps 1.2 Gbps (150 MB/s)
SATA 2 2004 3.0 Gbps 2.4 Gbps (300 MB/s)
SATA 3 2008 6.0 Gbps 4.8 Gbps (600 MB/s)

Even SATA 1 is faster than your new ethernet card.

Post by Dale
I guess I could google it. 

My source (as most often): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA
If you know the name of a technical thing, the quickest way to concise
facts is wikipedia.

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 11:39 AM Dale <***@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>

I suspect it has something to do with this being a older system. I
wouldn't be surprised if the SATA was a older and slower version. I
guess I could google it.

You need to study your specs. Even the first version of SATA, SATA 1,
was capable of 150MB/S. SATA2 does 300MB/S. This is unlikely IMO
to be due to SATA specs.

Have you run iperf yet as I suggested? It will easily tell you what the
network performance is and takes 5 seconds in NGL.

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 12:20 PM Dale <***@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>

Post by Mark Knecht
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
And nothing. Several minutes later, still nothing. And it continues to

sit there. I don't think it is working. :/

Post by Mark Knecht
Still, odds are, whatever it is, I'm not likely going to be able to

change it. That poor old CPU just may not have the needed instruction set
to be really fast for this. Maybe a different encryption would be better.
I dunno. It's temporary anyway.

Post by Mark Knecht
And still nothing. It's been sitting there since I read the last

message. Still, nothing.
Sadly, you didn't read all of my instructions or apparently read the man
page or help file

All you've done is start the server which listens for a connection.

Now go to your Gentoo Land machine that you want to backup and execute

iperf -c IP.ADDR.OF.SERVER

Wait 10 seconds and hit ctrl-C

[Dale]

Post by Mark Knecht
<SNIP>

I suspect it has something to do with this being a older system.  I
wouldn't be surprised if the SATA was a older and slower version.  I
guess I could google it.

You need to study your specs. Even the first version of SATA, SATA 1,
was capable of 150MB/S. SATA2 does 300MB/S. This is unlikely IMO
to be due to SATA specs. 
Have you run iperf yet as I suggested? It will easily tell you what the 
network performance is and takes 5 seconds in NGL.

I ran it but it never returned anything.  I let it sit for at least a
minute but it just sat there.  I don't have that command on my Gentoo
rig.  This is what it did on the NAS box.


***@truenas[~]# iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------


And nothing.  Several minutes later, still nothing.  And it continues to
sit there.  I don't think it is working.  :/

Still, odds are, whatever it is, I'm not likely going to be able to
change it.  That poor old CPU just may not have the needed instruction
set to be really fast for this.  Maybe a different encryption would be
better.  I dunno.  It's temporary anyway. 

And still nothing.  It's been sitting there since I read the last
message.  Still, nothing. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

[Mark Knecht]

Well, I finally got it so I could do a backup. I didn't need a hammer

but the thought crossed my mind. lol Even tho I now have a 1GB network
card, it's still really slow. It shows up as a 1GB connection on both my
Gentoo machine and the NAS machine. This is a example of the speeds I'm
seeing. Just snippets.

277,193,507 100% 16.18MB/s 0:00:16
519,216,571 100% 18.86MB/s 0:00:26
738,078,565 100% 23.54MB/s 0:00:29
As you can see, the files sizes are large enough it should do better.

When I use iftop, it shows it isn't doing anywhere near the speed it
should, maybe 1/4th or so. I'd expect at least double or triple that
speed. In all honesty, I'd think the hard drive would be the limiting
factor. Even on my Gentoo rig I only get about 50 to 60MBs/sec for
encrypted drives. I think the encryption slows that down. When copying
from a plain drive to a plain drive, I get 100MBs/sec or so.

I can't figure out why it is so slow tho. The NAS rig is a 4 core CPU

and 8GBs of memory. It should have enough horsepower under the hood.
Maybe it is something I'm not aware of. It is a older rig so maybe it
isn't SATA's fastest version, maybe even the original or something. I
can't find anything in lspci or dmesg so not real sure where to look on BSD.

Anyway, it's progress for now at least. ;-) At this rate, it'll be

done in about a week, maybe. o_O

Dale

To what end Dale? Aren't you painting yourself into a corner with a

system you don't really want to run? Wipe the machine and start over from
scratch with Gentoo.

From my vantage point you don't provide enough information for me to make

an educated guess.

1) Is your data coming off the host machine able to transfer to other

machines at 1Gb/S type speeds?

2) Can data coming off of your NAS transfer to other machines at 1G/S

type speeds?

3) How are the two machines connected? If they are going through a router

or hub, do you know that hub doesn't limit throughput?

4) Is anything else happening on the network? Video flowing around while

people are watching TV or something?

5) CPU horsepower isn't the only potential bottleneck. Are your disks in

the NAS operating slowly? Are you running out of memory?

Have you considered running something like iperf?
Mark

Run iperf -s in the TrueNAS shell service in the GUI

From you Gentoo Land box run

***@science2:~$ iperf -c truenas1
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to truenas1, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 1] local 192.168.86.43 port 50710 connected with 192.168.86.92 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 1] 0.0000-10.0418 sec 1.07 GBytes 918 Mbits/sec
***@science2:~$

Then immediately wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo, or at least
start over with the Linux version of TrueNAS.

I would have used the Linux version if it had existed when I built the
machine. I don't love BSD, but not because it doesn't work but because
certain CLI tools have slightly different options.

Wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo from scratch...
Wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo from scratch...
Humm, I think you should...
Wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo from scratch...

[Jack]

Post by Mark Knecht
Wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo from scratch...
Wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo from scratch...
Humm, I think you should...
Wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo from scratch...

First there was Linux from Scratch.

Next came Beyond Linux from Scratch.

Then there was Gentoo.

Now, the latest, greatest installment: Gentoo from Scratch.

[Mark Knecht]

Post by Jack

Post by Mark Knecht
Wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo from scratch...
Wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo from scratch...
Humm, I think you should...
Wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo from scratch...

First there was Linux from Scratch.
Next came Beyond Linux from Scratch.
Then there was Gentoo.
Now, the latest, greatest installment: Gentoo from Scratch.

Gawd, that's funny! Thanks for making me smile, assuming I found what
you're talking about:

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_ebuild_tree_from_scratch

Just what every Gentoo user needs. More management!

I really have fallen off the deep end thinking computers are just tools to
get a job done. I'm ashamed of myself...

In the really early days of Gentoo circa 2003 when I started there was some
choice about regular Gentoo or a really low level install. I failed with
the low level one but soon learned that every package on my machine was
going to get rebuilt anyway so why bother?

:-( Sad Mark. I'm a putz...

[Jack]

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Jack

Post by Mark Knecht
Wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo from scratch...
Wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo from scratch...
Humm, I think you should...
Wipe the machine and start over with Gentoo from scratch...

First there was Linux from Scratch.
Next came Beyond Linux from Scratch.
Then there was Gentoo.
Now, the latest, greatest installment: Gentoo from Scratch.

Gawd, that's funny! Thanks for making me smile, assuming I found what
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_ebuild_tree_from_scratch

I actually hadn't seen that, but it fits.

Post by Mark Knecht
Just what every Gentoo user needs. More management!
I really have fallen off the deep end thinking computers are just
tools to get a job done. I'm ashamed of myself...

I've long said that many folks have computers to play games, but for
me, the computer IS the game.

Post by Mark Knecht
In the really early days of Gentoo circa 2003 when I started there
was some choice about regular Gentoo or a really low level install. I
failed with the low level one but soon learned that every package on
my machine was going to get rebuilt anyway so why bother?
:-( Sad Mark. I'm a putz...

Jack

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 12:08 PM Dale <***@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>

I just might find a simple distro that I can install on that thing.

Honestly, I don't really care what is on it as long as it does what I want
and I can figure out how to make it work easily enough.
<SNIP>

Consider Ubuntu Server. It's text only and will likely have everything you
need to start other than the NFS server which is easy enough to install.
ssh is on it by default,

You will need a monitor to install.

Update after install is probably two commands which is more or less
equivalent to emerge -DuN world but takes only a couple of minutes.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

There are lots of web pages that will tell you how to install and configure
the NFS server. It's not hard and only necessary if you actually want to
create mounts. Not necessary for rsync.

[Frank Steinmetzger]

See other reply that has more info.  I'm pretty sure it is the
encryption maxing out the CPU.

The most simple benchmark is dd: unlock the LUKS layer on your HDD. then
first read from the HDD directly and then from the LUKS device:

dd if=<path/to/raw/HDD> of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000
dd if=<path/to/cryptdevice> of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000

It will tell you the transfer rate in MB/s.

Mostly, I need a better CPU.  If I encrypt anyway. 

Did you ever tell us the exact CPU you have in there? All I can remember is
it has 4 cores. And some AMD processor with a II in its name, but that was
you main rig, right?

[Rich Freeman]

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Mostly, I need a better CPU. If I encrypt anyway.

Did you ever tell us the exact CPU you have in there? All I can remember is
it has 4 cores. And some AMD processor with a II in its name, but that was
you main rig, right?

What encryption algorithm are you using? You should see if this is
hardware-accelerated in the kernel for your CPU, or if not if there is
another strong algorithm which is. Most newer CPUs will tend to have
hardware support for algorithms like AES, and the kernel will use
this. This will greatly improve CPU performance.

I've run into this issue with zfs on Raspberry Pis. ZFS does the
encryption internally, and the openzfs code didn't have support for
ARM hardware encryption the last time I checked (this could have
changed). I found that dm-crypt works MUCH better on Pis as a result,
as the kernel does have ARM encryption hardware support.

Again, this all depends on the algorithm. If you're using something
exotic odds are the hardware won't handle it natively.

[Mark Knecht]

Post by Rich Freeman

Post by Frank Steinmetzger

Mostly, I need a better CPU. If I encrypt anyway.

Did you ever tell us the exact CPU you have in there? All I can remember is
it has 4 cores. And some AMD processor with a II in its name, but that was
you main rig, right?

What encryption algorithm are you using? You should see if this is
hardware-accelerated in the kernel for your CPU, or if not if there is
another strong algorithm which is. Most newer CPUs will tend to have
hardware support for algorithms like AES, and the kernel will use
this. This will greatly improve CPU performance.
I've run into this issue with zfs on Raspberry Pis. ZFS does the
encryption internally, and the openzfs code didn't have support for
ARM hardware encryption the last time I checked (this could have
changed). I found that dm-crypt works MUCH better on Pis as a result,
as the kernel does have ARM encryption hardware support.
Again, this all depends on the algorithm. If you're using something
exotic odds are the hardware won't handle it natively.
--
Rich

Great background info Rich. Thanks.

If Dale would supply us with the first few lines of the following command I
think it would help

***@truenas1:~ $ sysctl hw
hw.machine: amd64
hw.model: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2120 CPU @ 3.30GHz
hw.ncpu: 4


Note that hw.ncpu isn't actually cores but rather threads. My
processor has just 2 cores.

I don't know how to get the CPU flags on FreeBSD nor
how to determine if encryption is hardware or software
based on TrueNAS. Given some time I might Google
that.

Cheers,
Mark

[Mark Knecht]

<SNIP>

sysctl hw

SNIP>

sudo dmidecode -t processor -t cache

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Mark Knecht
I don't know how to get the CPU flags on FreeBSD nor
how to determine if encryption is hardware or software
based on TrueNAS. Given some time I might Google
that.

Wikipedia has lists of practically everything:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_processors
(We just need to know on which to click ;-) )

Another good source for such stuff is https://www.cpu-world.com/ .

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Frank Steinmetzger
Did you ever tell us the exact CPU you have in there? All I can remember is
it has 4 cores. And some AMD processor with a II in its name, but that was
you main rig, right?

It took some digging around but I found out it is a AMD Phenom 9750 quad
core.

Great! That’s a model from 2008:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Phenom_processors#%22Agena%22_(B2/B3,_65_nm,_Quad-core)

 It lists some extensions but I don't see any that are related to
encryption.  No AES or whatever for sure.  Unless I missed it.  I used

The instruction set’s original proposal is about as young as your processor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set

My main rig has a AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core Processor and 32GBs of memory. 
I'm thinking about a new rig eventually.  Rig is getting a little age on
it.  ;-) 

At least it has AES ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_FX_processors#Piledriver_Core_(Vishera,_32_nm)

I’ve been thinking about a new build for about a year now, aiming at a
power-efficient Ryzen 5700G. But I can’t let go of my trusty old (8 years)
i5-4590.

[Rich Freeman]

It took some digging around but I found out it is a AMD Phenom 9750 quad
core.

You might want to hook a Kill-a-watt to that and see how much power it
uses. Those older AMD processors were really inefficient.

One thing I've come to appreciate with anything that runs 24x7 is to
consider the energy bill to run things. That's why the bulk of my
storage is running on ARM SBCs. Those things use almost no power when
idle, while even a modern amd64 system will often use more at idle
than an ARM will at full load.

Most of the newer CPUs are MUCH better in performance per watt as
well. A server that uses just 50W 24x7 costs about $65/yr (and I have
pretty cheap electricity due to a 1yr contract - odds are it costs
quite a bit more for most of this list). That's a fairly significant
amount of money so it can pay to optimize things, especially if you
replace what was a power-hungry performance CPU from 10 years ago with
a lower-end CPU from today that probably has double the performance
for 10% of the power draw. Obviously if you want bleeding edge the
electricity bill won't cover the up-front costs, but lower end CPUs
are very cost-effective and efficient compared to really old systems
that people tend to use for these kinds of projects.

[Rich Freeman]

If I like these Raspberry things, may make a media box out of one. I'd
like to have a remote tho. ;-)

So, I've done that. Honestly, these days a Roku is probably the
better option, or something like a Google Chromecast or the 47 other
variations on this them. Keep in mind that low-powered devices like
ARM SBCs (or Rokus) are very picky about codecs. If you're running
something like Plex the software will offload the transcoding to a
server when the codec isn't supported by the player, but if you're
doing something more DIY then you need to ensure your library conforms
to the specs or your player will just die. Even 1080p can be pushing
it for software decoding on an ARM SBC, and forget 4k. Heck, realtime
software transcoding 4k is pretty hard on most amd64 servers as well -
they will do it but it will use a significant amount of CPU just for
one stream.

These days I'm using Pis just for moosefs storage, and all the
compute-heavy stuff is on amd64. For players I just use TV clients or
Rokus plus Plex server on amd64. I don't really get any benefit out
of completely DIYing the client side and LIRC is a PITA.

[Mark Knecht]

Well, I finally got it so I could do a backup. I didn't need a hammer

but the thought crossed my mind. lol Even tho I now have a 1GB network
card, it's still really slow. It shows up as a 1GB connection on both my
Gentoo machine and the NAS machine. This is a example of the speeds I'm
seeing. Just snippets.

277,193,507 100% 16.18MB/s 0:00:16
519,216,571 100% 18.86MB/s 0:00:26
738,078,565 100% 23.54MB/s 0:00:29
As you can see, the files sizes are large enough it should do better.

When I use iftop, it shows it isn't doing anywhere near the speed it
should, maybe 1/4th or so. I'd expect at least double or triple that
speed. In all honesty, I'd think the hard drive would be the limiting
factor. Even on my Gentoo rig I only get about 50 to 60MBs/sec for
encrypted drives. I think the encryption slows that down. When copying
from a plain drive to a plain drive, I get 100MBs/sec or so.

I can't figure out why it is so slow tho. The NAS rig is a 4 core CPU

and 8GBs of memory. It should have enough horsepower under the hood.
Maybe it is something I'm not aware of. It is a older rig so maybe it
isn't SATA's fastest version, maybe even the original or something. I
can't find anything in lspci or dmesg so not real sure where to look on
BSD.

Anyway, it's progress for now at least. ;-) At this rate, it'll be done

in about a week, maybe. o_O

Dale

To what end Dale? Aren't you painting yourself into a corner with a system
you don't really want to run? Wipe the machine and start over from scratch
with Gentoo.

From my vantage point you don't provide enough information for me to make
an educated guess.

1) Is your data coming off the host machine able to transfer to other
machines at 1Gb/S type speeds?

2) Can data coming off of your NAS transfer to other machines at 1G/S type
speeds?

3) How are the two machines connected? If they are going through a router
or hub, do you know that hub doesn't limit throughput?

4) Is anything else happening on the network? Video flowing around while
people are watching TV or something?

5) CPU horsepower isn't the only potential bottleneck. Are your disks in
the NAS operating slowly? Are you running out of memory?

Have you considered running something like iperf?

Mark

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Mark Knecht
<SNIP>

My reasoning is simple, I'm already familiar with LVM and how to

manage it.  
<SNIP>
[
]
Wipe the machine. You'll be happier.
Best wishes,
Mark

Well, I finally got it so I could do a backup.  I didn't need a hammer
but the thought crossed my mind.  lol  Even tho I now have a 1GB network
card, it's still really slow.  It shows up as a 1GB connection on both
my Gentoo machine and the NAS machine.  This is a example of the speeds
I'm seeing.  Just snippets. 
277,193,507 100%   16.18MB/s    0:00:16
519,216,571 100%   18.86MB/s    0:00:26
738,078,565 100%   23.54MB/s    0:00:29
As you can see, the files sizes are large enough it should do better. 

Gbit nets at around 116..117 MB/s.

When I use iftop, it shows it isn't doing anywhere near the speed it
should, maybe 1/4th or so.  I'd expect at least double or triple that
speed.  In all honesty, I'd think the hard drive would be the limiting
factor.  Even on my Gentoo rig I only get about 50 to 60MBs/sec for
encrypted drives.  I think the encryption slows that down.  When copying
from a plain drive to a plain drive, I get 100MBs/sec or so. 
I can't figure out why it is so slow tho.  The NAS rig is a 4 core CPU
and 8GBs of memory.

OK, so you already noticed that encryption slows you down. This won’t happen
with a CPU that has AES instructions (well, and if the encryption you chose
actually uses AES, and not something else like Blowfish). So I guess your
CPU is too old, given your earlier descriptions.

When I built my NAS in November 2016, I installed a Celeron G1840 at first.
A very affordable (33 €) and frugal CPU (2 cores, 53 W, which were never
actually drawn). I knew it didn’t have AES back then (Intel removed that
limit from Celerons in architectures after Haswell), but from experiments I
knew it would achieve around 150..160 MB/s with LUKS, which was enough for
Gbit ethernet. But not for scrubs, when all HDDs were worked in parallel. So
after a year I did an upgrade after all and bought the smallest and cheapest
CPU that had AES, an i3-41xx.

It should have enough horsepower under the hood. 
Maybe it is something I'm not aware of.  It is a older rig so maybe it
isn't SATA's fastest version, maybe even the original or something.  I

SATA 2 is 3 Gbit/s, so still not saturated by a single HDD.

Network transfers are single-core work. If it is really such an old machine,
I guess the CPU is the bottleneck again. Do you transfer via ssh? If so, use
something else that doesn’t encrypt the transport stream. When I am bound by
CPU in such cases (like with my ancient netbook with an Atom N450), and I
don’t want to set up a file server (that is nowhere near as flexible as ssh
anyways), I use netcat:

On the receiving end, start a netcat listener and extract from it:
nc -l -p $Portnumber | tar xf -
The portnumber must be any number above 1024, if you’re not root.

And on the sender, pack all your stuff into a tar (uncompressed!, since
videos aren’t compressible further and it will bog down the CPU again) and
pipe it to the receiver:
tar cf - * | nc $Destination_IP $Portnumber

Once the client is done, press Ctrl+C on the receiver.

Or maybe use rsync with the rsync-protocol instead of ssh. That’ll be more
flexible, because the tar-and-nc method doesn’t know about existing files on
the receiving end. (But I’ve never tested that approach.)

[Wol]

Since this is local, I just use rsync to do my backups.  I did have to
change the options a bit.  It seems TrueNAS doesn't like some of the
permissions or something.

Are you running the rsync daemon on the NAS? I'm probably teaching
grandma to suck eggs, but that massively reduces the need for network
traffic.

Cheers,
Wol

[Wols Lists]

Post by Wol

Since this is local, I just use rsync to do my backups.  I did have to
change the options a bit.  It seems TrueNAS doesn't like some of the
permissions or something.

Are you running the rsync daemon on the NAS? I'm probably teaching
grandma to suck eggs, but that massively reduces the need for network
traffic.
Cheers,
Wol

I mount the NAS on my Gentoo rig.  I mount it under /mnt.  Then I run
rsync and copy from the source to the mount point for the NAS.  I may
could go the other way but never thought about doing it that way.  Kinda
sounds backwards to me but I dunno. ;-)

Sounds to me like you're doing it all wrong either way ...

What is *supposed* to happen is that you have the daemon running on one
machine and the client on the other - doesn't matter which.

Then the client tells the daemon what files are to be copied, THE TWO
COMPARE CHECKSUMS, and only the stuff that fails the checksum is copied.
So if you're doing an incremental backup, network usage and writes are
kept to a minimum.

I tell people to an in-place backup if they're running on a snapshot
setup, because again it only writes stuff that has actually changed.

Cheers,
Wol

[Wol]

I can't figure out why it is so slow tho.  The NAS rig is a 4 core CPU
and 8GBs of memory.  It should have enough horsepower under the hood.
Maybe it is something I'm not aware of.  It is a older rig so maybe it
isn't SATA's fastest version, maybe even the original or something.  I
can't find anything in lspci or dmesg so not real sure where to look on
BSD.

What's the path between systems? Are they both plugged into the same
gigabit router? Have you got a switch or something in there? I've heard
pretty bad things about switches and lowest common denominator and
messing up your speeds ...

Cheers,
Wol

[Mark Knecht]

<SNIP>

I can't figure out why it is so slow tho. The NAS rig is a 4 core CPU

and 8GBs of memory. It should have enough horsepower under the hood.
Maybe it is something I'm not aware of. It is a older rig so maybe it
isn't SATA's fastest version, maybe even the original or something. I
can't find anything in lspci or dmesg so not real sure where to look on
BSD.
<SNIP>

Mine is similar. It's an i3-2120 which is 2 core, 4 threads with 8GB of
DRAM. The NIC is on the motherboard and I don't remember what motherboard I
bought. It was used and cost my about $50.

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Mark Knecht

I
wonder, could one install the LVM stuff and use that? That would be
interesting. I wonder if there is a NAS software that uses LVM
instead. Interesting thought. I just may go bug google on that one.

Maybe I'm missing the point but why would you want LVM on a
storage pool? If I'm doing backups I just want space. I let TrueNas
put it on disk and give it back if asked. Why put another layer
of indirection?
[
]

It's more about me being more used to using LVM. Also, more used to
Linux as well. BSD is not something I have much experience with and until
recently, none with ZFS. Even the little experience I have with BSD was
well over a decade ago, maybe two decades ago. I barely remember it really.

The truenas interface is supposed to hide all that from you. As Mark wrote
two posts up, it’s an appliance. You install it once, that’s it. I think you
can install addons, but don’t have to. You maybe do updates once in a while,
perhaps not even that if it’s a critical production host. You don’t ssh into
it to do maintenance or to add or remove disks on the commandline. That’s
what the web UI is for. All of it. The biggest and most obvious difference
for me would be how devices are named in comparison to Linux.

Post by Mark Knecht
Hummm...I don't know Dale, I don't know... ZFS is a file system.
LVM is an abstraction on top (or underneath?) of a file system.
My understanding of LVM is that it frees you from hard decisions
on partition sizes, not that it replaces ZFS or ext3/4/5.

LVM is “just” an abstraction layer between file system and storage. At the
bottom there are your block devices (drives, image files), which then may or
may not be RAIDed. Then you have LVM on top of that to encompass all those
devices into one big “virtual hard drive” and partition it (logical
volumes). And lastly you put file systems into those volumes. So there are
two, three (or even four, if you add encryption somewhere in between) layers
stacked onto your raw devices.

ZFS OTOH is all of that in one. It takes the raw block devices as a whole,
puts them (optionally) into redundancy structures, allows for “partitions”
(i.e. datasets) and lastly also *is* the file system. The advantage is that
it can combine its knowledge about all those layers to improve performance
and reliability. So for instance it distributes writes according to vdev
occupancy (LVM has no knowledge about the FS layer above it). Or when you
rebuild a RAID, only those parts that are actually used by the FS need to be
reconstructed, not the whole disk.

I may come off as a ZFS fanboy in this thread. But I am in no way an expert,
just a small-time user with just that one NAS with one RAID setup. That’s
it. I did a lot of reading beforehand, whether I should use it or mdadm or
btrfs. All my knowledge comes from that time, I never worked with it in my
professional life.

I also use LVM on my systems these days, just in case my root partition
becomes crowded and needs some extra space that I can take from the media
partition. Had to do this once, it went quick and was a fun experience.

Post by Mark Knecht
WRT you I recommend that you try living in NGL for a while. Possibly
you are just a bit too indoctrinated in the religion of building packages
30-50 times a year believing (without hard data) that it provides value.

+1
I admit I like the occasional update of my Gentoo NAS. But that’s also
because it’s my last living Gentoo device. I always liked the environment,
still do. Gentoo was my first Linux after all, that stuff stays in your
mind. But oh the time-consuming hassle sometimes.

[David Rosenbaum]

Dave

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Mark Knecht

I
wonder, could one install the LVM stuff and use that? That would be
interesting. I wonder if there is a NAS software that uses LVM
instead. Interesting thought. I just may go bug google on that one.

o_O

Post by Mark Knecht
Maybe I'm missing the point but why would you want LVM on a
storage pool? If I'm doing backups I just want space. I let TrueNas
put it on disk and give it back if asked. Why put another layer
of indirection?
If you're intending to use it as simple NAS - i.e. - the only copy
of some data on your network - then possibly LVM might
be interesting, but then you need a second TrueNAS box
to back that up. NAS as a mountable data location is
different than NAS doing backups which is what I thought
this thread was about. What am I not remembering?
- Mark
It's more about me being more used to using LVM. Also, more used to

Linux as well. BSD is not something I have much experience with and until
recently, none with ZFS. Even the little experience I have with BSD was
well over a decade ago, maybe two decades ago. I barely remember it really.

Post by Mark Knecht
By replacing ZFS with LVM, I'm working with something I'm familiar with

and less likely to mess up things. Things get messed up enough without
adding more confusion. ;-)

Post by Mark Knecht
Dale
:-) :-)

Hummm...I don't know Dale, I don't know... ZFS is a file system.
LVM is an abstraction on top (or underneath?) of a file system.
My understanding of LVM is that it frees you from hard decisions
on partition sizes, not that it replaces ZFS or ext3/4/5.
That is true. Thing is, I've learned how to manage LVM even with
encrypted data. I've also learned how to expand storage without losing
data or getting confused about what I'm doing. To me, using LVM is pretty
easy given the notes I have for the tasks I do most often.
You may or may not know this but TrueNAS is available as a
https://www.truenas.com/blog/first-release-of-truenas-on-linux/
I don't recommend it. It's new. Let someone else figure it out. However
it might be more to your liking, and because it's Linux you'd be more
comfortable messing it up. ;0-
WRT you I recommend that you try living in NGL for a while. Possibly
you are just a bit too indoctrinated in the religion of building packages
30-50 times a year believing (without hard data) that it provides value.
Instead you might just consider relaxing and letting the system
take care of itself. In the last year I've only updated my TrueNAS box
twice that I can remember.
On the other hand if system tweaking is what brings you joy then
Que Sera Sera .....
Good luck,
Mark
It's not that I want to compile things, it's that I want to use things I'm
already really familiar with. If I bought a Raspberry Pi and built a NAS
with it, I don't care if I compile the software on it or not as long as it
has the software I need or I can install what I need. From what I've read,
compiling on a Raspberry isn't much fun. It's very time consuming. Having
a OS, binary one at that, that is Linux based is a big plus. I can run
LVM, cryptsetup and such in likely every Linux distro out there and get the
same result as on my Gentoo box. Switching to BSD, using ZFS, means I have
to learn a whole new set of tools and methods. I had enough fun learning
LVM and I don't think LVM is going to die anytime soon. It should be
around for the foreseeable future. As it is, even now, I still don't get
how ZFS works. I just followed a guide to get it working, sort of. It's
still not encrypted. Figuring that out is next. That should be fun.
My network card is out for delivery. A few days late but better than
never I guess. I'll see if the drivers needed for it are available as
modules or not. I suspect they are tho based on info in this thread.
Dale
:-) :-)