Not really sure which boards support ECC tbh:(
Asus asrock gigabyte (most at least), the major brands tend to.
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MSI make a point of only enabling it on higher-end boards, in my experience.
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Yea the boards support ECC but do they work with ECC? I think my Asus Formula x570 would support it but thats a $799AUD baord…
I found this video Risk: Linux File Sharing | Run Your Own NAS Server - YouTube
Would that be a good place to start my Linux journey?
Skimmed through, something like that.
(We’re veering off hardware topics here).
Instead of an overly long and overly verbose guide, we should probably put together a checklist for a NAS, in terms of software with things like:
[] encrypted disks / unlockable remotely at boot over ssh or with a usb key
[] Adding/removing users
[] ssh keys and/or certs and/or auth. (e.g. wincryptsshagent?)
[] samba
[] firewall
[] unattended upgrades (or just download and wait)
[] smartmontools
[] periodic snapshots and backups to cloud with rclone
[] email sending for weekly system reports and “email alerting”
[] system level monitoring
[] nginx reverse proxy with let’s encrypt certs
[] nginx reverse proxy with proxy_store caching (steam)
[] docker + optionally portainer
[] adblock
[] qemu / virtd
[] bunch of networking stuff and tuning
The YouTube guide you linked seems to be using lvm raid and webmin. LVM is aka Linux Volume Manager, and is useful and works well the things it’s meant to do, but it presents a single block device that your filesystem that then formats as a single device on top (does raid logic itself). This is not what you want with either btrfs or zfs, that have their own per device checksumming, and data placement and recovery logic.
You can use LVM underneath btrfs and zfs for other stuff, for example you could add caching on top of your HDDs and make a cached LVM volume per HDD that you then use as a building block for btrfs or zfs. Performance wise this is awesome, but caches can hide errors and btrfs and zfs doing scrubbing (going over every piece of data to verify checksums) is not something that should be causing useful data to fall out of a cache. Also, there’s many different types and you should care about ssd dwpd and plp if you intend to for all writes to go through an SSD, a small/medium sized optane workhorse does wonders here.
Webmin is a web ui for tinkering with your server, rather than perhaps doing it from a command-line, or my new favorite way, through code-server 
It’s a nice cherry on top, but I don’t like that I don’t know what it’s doing when using it which makes it harder for me to fix things - so I like to stick to simpler approaches. Just files with notes and screenshots and a command line.
I don’t think I’ll have the opportunity (time) to redo the setup from my guide with screenshots until the weekend. But it starts with a simple 1 disk in a VM. You can try and give it a go.
Installing Samba is not hard either, you need to:
- add a user on the system with a uid/gid, a password that samba can use for auth from windows (smbpasswd utility), and idealy a home directory - where your user files will be.
- edit smb.conf (probably to just tell it that it’s not a domain controller and you want home dirs to be shares ; or list shares explicitly.
- systemctl enable smb ; systemctl start smb - to have it run on boot.
There’s guides on level1 (@Shadowbane has one) ; there’s also this one: Samba/ServerSimple - Debian Wiki ; Samba website has a plethora of documentation too.
Usually folks have issues with:
-
firewalls (smb only needs port 445 to work but windows uses ancient netbios protocols with udp broadcast over port 139 to populate the “network neighborhood”). If you go to \10.2.3.4\share_name or \mynas\share_name ( assuming you have DNS working on your home network) then you only need port 445. You can tell windows to save your credentials and mount (map) your samba share on boot.
-
samba protocol version. Typically, various non diy boxes come with ancient samba, so from windows 10 you don’t get channel bonding, for example. Or I couldn’t access samba shares from my 2018 Panasonic OLED TV - I needed to enable nmb (despite trying an IP address) and ancient windows 95 era LanMan auth to just browse a guest folder with movies – which I got working and then stopped using and switched away to minidlna instead. I may get an odroid n2+ to get proper hdr (DV) and all audio formats supported.
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performance tuning. Might need to increase default tcp buffer size, install irq balancing, enable interrupt coalescing if it’s one of the realtek nics that needs it, tune background dirty pages settings and so on. For small 100MB/s workloads the defaults are probably fine, but samba can do 1GB/s (10Gbps) with some tuning, assuming enough HDDs are in an array that can take the punishment.
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I mean do you have a 2200g or do you have an actual processor that’s built on all the same tech as the server gpu’s.
Are you getting my point or no?
Thank you for the detailed comment Risk and thanks for that link to Samba.
I’m not sure I understand your comment, if I had a 2200G and intended to use one I would have specified. APU’s don’t support ECC anyways.
Yeah fair enough! 
That’s why I ended up with BTRFS as well. And yeah that’s why I won’t go RZ1, I just can’t afford to add 4 drives at a time… I think I heard that someones trying to add that functionality to ZFS. But I guess that will take a while… At least then I’m going to be able to use the democratic CSI driver in K8s!
I think you can (force) enable ecc on all am4 mainboards either with a patched bios or some modprobe arg on the Linux side. But don’t quote me on that
I picked up a 1600AF and Asus Prime B450 Plus board yesterday, I’m leaning towards TreuNas Core because its simple. My question do I have to use ZFS with TrueNas? Can I just run Raid 1 with the 16tb drives?
I’ll have to order some and test on this Asus Prime B450 Plus board
You don’t necessarily have to use ZFS, but it is strongly advised to do so. If you mount the array to /mnt/whatever you should in theory be able to use most features of TrueNAS. I don’t think it’s worth doing that tho as you miss out on the best features like snapshotting, zfs send receive and checksumming. If you’d rather do standard raid you can try out OMV instead. With a little trickery you could use BTRFS and ZFS with it as well.
Ok then I shall use it, I can’t find any info on if my Asus Prime B450 Plus will support ECC so I’m going to use my 2x8gb Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200mhz CL16 kit till I can find a suitable board that supports and works with ECC. Most of the board confirmed working are x470 and the Strix B450-F that I tried to get new but cannot locally:( Not sure if I asked this question but do I really need ECC? This NAS will be for Videos mainly with some photo storage but it will be backed up again on another NAS and drives on my main system.
ZFS doesn’t strictly require ECC, but it is strongly encouraged. If ZFS encounters a bit error it will assume that both the CPU and the RAM did their error handling and so the data on disk is wrong.
If you are using 3200 non-ecc memory I would suggest not actually running it at 3200 unless you are absolutely 110% certain the overclock is stable and doesn’t produce errors. Otherwise run them at default speeds (probably 2666).
AFAIK B460 and basically all Intel consumer CPUs don’t support ECC. AMD has ECC support but not all boards support it.
Oh, nevermind. I have seen many ready-to-go NASes using i3s, Pentiums and Celerons but they didn’t have ECC RAM so I got confused.
Actually the Ryzen Pro series APUs support ECC, it has been tested. For people who don’t want a GPU in their NAS these ones are great.