Yes it was a question, Wow that sounds complicated which is why I wanted to use ZFS. I won’t be adding anymore drives unless one dies or until I require more capacity and it will be just a mirror. Once I require more drives I would probably build a new NAS, this is me just using an old board and processor to get used to building and configuring my own NAS. I will research into BTRFS and Debian though, thank you.
1 Like
How is Unraid? Is it worth the price? I appreciate your input.
If I remember correctly all B550 boards, aside from cheap/weird ones, all support ECC, at least last I knew? Someone on MOC was testing ram kits.
1 Like
You’re welcome. It sounds harder than it really is. But if you didn’t yet do much with Linux, then yes it is very different and maybe a bit hard at first. Having TrueNAS or whatever manage your zfs is pretty nice though. Btw it might be worth to take a look at TrueNAS scale! 
I don’t know. I’m not a big fan tbh, but for easy of use and features it’s pretty nice. For me personally it abstracts too many things and doesn’t let you manage the underlying stuff from the shell. It’s more geared to beginners who doesn’t care about the tech underneath. Do if you want to learn about lInux filesystems etc then it’s not for you, but if you just want sth that works then it might be a good choice. Check out spacinvaderone
1 Like
Raid 5-6 is safe on btrfs provided you don’t use it for metadata, you always have more devices than minimally required, and you do a scrub regularly and especially after certain classes of outages.
So basically, don’t run 3 disk raid5 or 4disk raid6, and keep metadata as raid1 or a 3-way mirror aka raid1c3 when you add more disks.
You can change raid levels of your data/metadata/system; in btrfs, while using the system, incl. adding disks and removing them and resizing them up/down. (Something you can’t do with ZFS).
I have a work in progress guide in the wiki section of the forums going through things like setting up encryption and adding/removing disks if you want to give it a go. You can play in a VM (e.g. with hyper-v) and just add thin virtual 100G disks to try things out. You could do the same with ZFS.
A thinko, I had a small home chassis with space for 5 disks, and using 4 disks in a raidz1 vdev, one disk died in a half wonky way, so I turned the system off plugged in a 5th replacement drive and somehow managed to fumble my way through doing zfs add, such that I ended up with a degraded vdev and another single disk vdev.
So I had to buy another system, with a new set of disks and pair of NICs and slowly transfer the data. This was 10years ago… and I screwed that one up because I locked myself into FreeBSD by not allowing enough space for grub that could boot Linux.
ZFS allows some kinds of removal these days, but it’s still dumb in many ways and you can’t e.g. add a disk to make your 4 drive raid10-like a 5 disk raid5-like in place (wtf zfs!!). And e.g then remove a disk to go back to 4 disk setup, because you have bigger disks now and want to transfer an array to a new faster and smaller system.
With btrfs, you start with 1 disk, and go to a 2-disk 2-way mirror, then go to a 3 disk 2-way mirror, go to a 4-disk 2-way mirror. And then you can replace bigger disks with smaller if you want. Or more with fewer, as long as you have the space overall.
This is useful because not all disks are all the same size and partitioning and encryption and bootloader partitions all eat into overall capacity and at home your needs change and hardware keeps making progress gradually and you want to keep upgrading if you can.
On the other hand, ZFS is great if you have multiple servers and can just nuke and pave a whole machine when you want to reconfigure your array. It’s not very “home gamer friendly” (to borrow an AvE-ism).
1 Like
Hmm TrueNas Scale adds Linux containers that’s really useful, thanks for recommending it.
1 Like
I will check out your guide, thank you. I would like to run VM’s but this 2600k I intended to use would not be suitable, I would need something like a 3950x which I do have but its my main system right now. I’m watiing for Threadripper 5nm and DDR5 before I upgrade. Right now I’m using a Synology DS218+ with the 2x 8tb Drives in Raid 1 I also have 2x 8tb drives in my main system Raid 1 with the same data also I have an external 8tb drive that sits in a docking station and is connected via USB3.0. Really bad way of doing things which is why I want to build one NAS with large capacity drives and still retain the DS218+ as storage for my videos that I render. There is never enough capacity and I’m a data hoarder haha. I do allot of editing and I convert old 8mm, VHS, Beta Cassette to digital and physical formats. I find myself sending off footage to various disks because some are nearly full, I don’t want to delete things. I looked at new Synology units but I would prefer to build my own so I can learn how to configure my own NAS, then I found out about TrueNas and how easy it is to setup. I need to learn more about Linux Debian etc. I would like to thank everyone here for helping me. I’ll look up some How To’s on Youtube so I can learn more, BTRFS mirror on debian might be the way to go. Thank you for your time I appreciate it immensely.
1 Like
Not really sure which boards support ECC tbh:(
Asus asrock gigabyte (most at least), the major brands tend to.
1 Like
MSI make a point of only enabling it on higher-end boards, in my experience.
1 Like
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.
-
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.
1 Like
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