Adubs Corner

Community Blog
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Hey guys, Welcome to my little corner of the forum. I plan on using this thread to share my projects, thoughts, ideas, etc. Anything I think someone might be interested in.

To get us started I’ve recently begun a NAS project.

This is “MiniNAS”, a Synology ds216j. For a few years now it has faithfully served my file serving needs. Here she is naked.

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Those drives you see there are a couple of WD 8tb drives shucked from their easystore prison. A damn good deal for $130 IMO. Before I only had a 4tb HGST and toshiba in there and it was starting to get a little cramped.

so what, you swapped the drives in your nas? big deal

Well, now that I have the extra 4tb drives (I have one in my desktop that I use for games) I can start thinking about actually having a backup of my data somewhere.

Enter the project… I dont have a name for it yet, got any ideas?

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So a total of 4x4tb drives

16GB DDR3 1600

Haswell i3

Are you picking up what I’m putting down?

FreeNAS

I’ve never really done anything with freenas and only have a very basic understanding of it. I hope to eventually migrate all my data to a 4 drive raidz2 setup and use the synology as a backup of it, perhaps offsite.

As the build progresses I will try to detail my trials and tribulations. Thoughts, questions, concerns welcome.

EDIT0: Freenas wouldnt even install to those 8gb drives and come to find out, you actually want 16gb drives. Never even knew. :man_shrugging:

EDIT1: That rosewill drive cage thing is junk, spend more on a better cage.

EDIT2: FreeNAS and Synology dont like playing nice

To better organize for the newcomers to the thread, Heres an index of interesting parts of the thread so far:

More to come, stay tuned

Other Projects

Coming SOON™

  • DIY Solar setup
  • Civic front bumper replacement
  • Raised garden bed
  • VW front fender stickerbomb
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You are bringing @AnotherDev’s vision to life

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I wanted to start something a while ago but it never became anything because of my lack of knowledge. I often get ADD and move from project to project never completing anything so maybe this will go somewhere.

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[ Laughs in Regex ]

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Hey adbus, I’m @tsk, and I approve this message thread.

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Stay tuned for an eventual solar DIY project as a battery backup for my basement sump pump.

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I like this, gives me nostalgia for the golden era of the forums where there was 100’s of Personal “corner” like threads.

You doing Gods work here @Adubs

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Something I’m not quite sure of, and maybe someone can chime in here, do I need something like an LSI card to make this work or is the onboard controller compatible?

Also is a 4 drive raidz2 a bad idea? I have no idea but at least I’ll have an actual backup of the data incase it isnt.

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Afaik, You CAN run Raidz2 with 4 Drives. You are leaving 50% of your storage for fallback though. Not sure if this would be worth it to me, but it is possible.

FreeNAS wants as little interference with the drives as possible. So, if your onboard SATA Ports are recognized, this is the best option by far. I’d just boot up FreeNAS and take a look. It’s easy to add a SATA controller later if this doesn’t work.

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I dont mind having 50% for parity but like with raid 6 its generally accepted that you are going to have your performance shit on with only 4 drives and I dont know if this is the case for zfs.

I dont like the idea of only 1 drives worth of parity, though every drive in this array is going to be different minus 2 which will be from different lots.

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This seems to imply, that it’ll be fine. As long as it’s archive, the main performance penalty should be on reads, not writes.

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this is me encouraging more blogs

6 days

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should have the ability to like a pin message lol

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SOON™

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stripping across 2 mirrors would prob be best to be honest
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Easier to expand if you wanted later as well just dump in some more mirrors instead of needing 4 more drives (assuming you want the same pool)

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where did you get those numbers from?

maybe I’m being too critical but I was never a fan of striped mirrors. I guess I will have a back up in the form of the diskstation. I really like the idea of having raidz2.

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https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html

I mean its what level data redundancy you want. My first one was 3x2tb RZ1 then moved to 8x3tb RZ2 now 6x8tbRZ2 with my old 3td drive a 3 mirrors with 2 hot spares

If this is your only backup sure RZ2 is probably the safer way to go, but you said

So souldnt be that concerning

another good read

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so if I wanted to expand the pool I should use 4x4tb more drives if I went raidz2?

I dont get why but I think you’re probably right, mirrors are de wae.

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FTFY.

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Yeah, I dont think the speed difference will matter much to me since I’m only running gigabit but the idea of having to expand the pool 4 drives at a time is something my wallet doesnt like.

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