Is Rockstor/BTRFS stable? I know for a while it was unwise to use BTRFS for an important NAS, so is that still the case?
I can highly recommend it. I can also confirm the ZFS support works great, just follow their documentation and you can set it up just fine. Very minimal headache, at least for simple ZFS RAID1 as a backup spot.
The only thing is now that Proxmox has switched to LXC, Wendell's tutorial on setting up an OpenVZ container is outdated. But the Proxmox docs are pretty awesome most of the time, so I'd give it a shot.
It's production ready for its raid 1 implementation, not sure about raid 5/6 etc.
It's quite interesting the way it works. You can have a raid 1 with 3 disks or disks o different sizes and you can add to remove disks without having to format.
Rather than mirroring each block in an identical disk it just makes sure each block (or file, not sure) is duplicated on another disk which makes it much more flexible. Plus you can have different raid levels for the data and metadata and even specify raid levels for individual files if you want.
uhhg, only have 6 sata ports on my MB and want raid6/z2, so need 6 drives just for the raid, then need ports for cache, OS etc. Looking into HBAs now to increase my port count, but then get tempted to just get a used LSI RAID controller in ebay, built in raid 6 support headache free- and if I want to go the software raid route in the future, I can flash the card to IT mode to work like an HBA.
I have used unRAID for several years now (since early 2011 way before it was cool with VMs and other bells and whistles). I have underwent a house fire, multiple mobo/hardware upgrades, drive changes, all without problems. I am currently running unRAID v6 and think for a basic NAS it fulfills my needs, but here are my experiences if it helps. (There are other better NAS OSs out there, but simplicity is important for me since I just want it to work and dont want to dive into FreeNAS or other more complicated solutions).
Previously on v5 you needed to jump through hoops with unMENU and Plex to install these manually and it was a pain. Now with v6 99% of the features from the community I added and used are built in, and the packages used (for plex) to install software are MUCH EASIER to use and configure. I will comment about a failure below, but otherwise with the current build things have worked great as a NAS/PLEX server.
Failure: About one year ago I had a massive failure of the drives, due to my own fault and not paying attention to rebuilding a drive which crashed my array. I don't think this was unRAID's fault, but my own for not thinking and consulting the community forums. In addition I was running beta software, and had not fully upgraded from v5 to v6. It would not matter if I had things backed up as I should, but I did not. All in all I was able to recover the drives individually, I lost about 1 month's worth of content which is not all that bad honestly.
Since then I have been nervous about trusting unRAID as I once had, so I rebuilt the system simply as a plex server (using BTRFS so I can scrub data), and bought a QNAP 4 drive model and have 2 RAID-1 arrays for max security. I don't like how much money it cost or the number of redundant drives im wasting, so I think I will be going back to unRAID fulltime since my rebuild has been so stable. I also plan to back up the data to crashplan direct from the unRAID server itself, as well as keep either external HDDs for archival, or an additional unraid server (havent decided on this yet) for maximum protection. It would still be cheaper to do this than to have the QNAP with larger drives.
Of note: I did a recent search on e-bay and you can get a lot of server grade components for less than $100. Couple that with the pro license for unRAID, and you will have ~80% of your budget to spend on HDDs.
If you have any specific questions about unRAID feel free to shoot me a PM or post here and I will hopefully see.
Hope this helps,
-SnBd
I would go software RAID right off the bat. Moving RAID stuff is a pain, might as well do it "right" the first time. I don't really trust hardware RAID for a lot.
why not a third option. nas4free. imo it is highly underrated. its the easiest to setup, has by far the best support of all kinds of perhepials and mix and match situations. zfs and snapshots are a little harder to setup, but its a matter of set it up once download the config and forget about it.
i run the bleeding edge 10.2.0.2 - Prester (revision 2268 with an amd apu. i am in the same situation as you looking for an upgrade with server hardware. but i dont fully trust unraid. my nas has been running rock solid without needing reboots between updates. samba needs tuning imo but it is mostly hardware bound. overall i cant deny that it is by far the best solution i've used to date. also the easiest. forums are welcoming and there are tons of youtube walkthroughs.
also worth noting. nas4free recently introduced native vm support on 10.2.0.2 embedded. where i once fucked up trying to get a jail running i can now use vm to boot linux and run apps
I personally use OpenMediaVault although there's also RockStor which is Linux(CentOS) based but unlike OpenMediaVault doesn't rely on MD but rather makes use of BTRFS. I haven't looked into it extensively but as far as I'm aware BTRFS parity isn't great right now but maybe that's changed. OpenMediaVault has been great for me though. Not to mention it's based on Debian which is what I run on all my systems so I'm familiar with it. I know @wendell swears by ZFS or other multi-disk file systems like BTRFS but I'm just using it for media storage and no critical information so I think ext4 under MD is fine.
I finally ran some things this past weekend. System, old z800
I'm going to try and sum up a few days worth of advanture messing with three systems- unRAID, Proxmox and VMware.
To keep it short- I think the HP Z800 sabotaged my unRAID and Proxmox user experience. It has an embedded RAID controller based off of a 1068e, but cannot be flashed to IT mode like the PCI card variants. The other 5 SATA ports uses some IBM chipset that I think also throws the two Linux contenders for a loop. unRAID and Proxmox virtualization performed horribly and I think its the motherboard's two sata controllers (one a RAID controller).
I would like to give them another shot, might have to get a used LSI RAID card that can be flashed to IT mode, or just use my Win10 consumer grade box.
With the time I played with them, I liked the webUI a lot, on both. unRAID's direction with their product is exciting, and fills a niche demographic I feel I fall into. You can see that put effort into the UI and instructions/guides (as they should being a non-free product)- and it seemed to run smoother and faster than proxmox. The bummer was I couldn't get a Windows VM to install, all the virtio packages I downloaded wouldn't work. Trying to spin up with GPU passthrough was even worse. The instructions for getting lm_sensors going didn't match and I couldn't figure out the final steps.
I didn't get to do much with Proxmox as the VM experience was slower than unRAIDs, unRAID must of had some kind of optimization setup (even though I played with Proxmox's various settings to optimize issues caused by RAID controllers). There something I like about Proxmox and I can't put my finger on it. One thing I didn't like is how making a USB installation thumb drive kills the thumb drive ( I suspect the software they recommended to make the drive bootable). After using it to install, it write-protects the drive or worse, makes it not even read. This made a Scandisk USB un-savable even after lots of googling and using various USB recovery tools. I had to install Proxmox again but next time around used a Transcend USB as Transcend offers a great USB recovery utility. Proxmox nuked that drive as well, but the utility can flash the firmware and bring it back from the dead-- so some advice, go with a Transcend thumb drive.
I'm not strong on Linux, and both really demanded some Linux background- Proxmox doesn't hide it, and so it was expected, but unRAID seems like a product that is trying to give one a click and go, it just works experience and it comes pretty shy of that IMO-- I wouldn't bash it if it were free, but they charge so I expect better.
So with my heart sunk, and angry at the hardware I selected to be my experiment rig, I loaded ESXi. I dabble with ESXi a little at work, so it wasn't a learning curve like the above two, and maybe because of it's enterprise grooming, it seems to have taken to my red-headed step child of an HP like they were meant to be. The VMs run great, and so far when I go to do something, it just works.
I hope to give unRAID another swing with my MSI PCmate MB with i7, I really like the product concept they have there and it seems like it will just get better over time.
What? This is the first I've heard of this. Do you mean it formats it in such a way that Windows refuses to read it? Or it literally ruins the drive at a hardware level? I've never actually installed it from USB myself, but Wendell did in his video about it and I don't recall him mentioning anything like that. Seems like "hey, FYI, you're totally throwing away this usb stick for all time" would be an important detail.
If I remember correctly, I could not get the USB bootable via the Linux command line (followed Proxmox's wiki to the 'T'), so went to their plan B on the page and used my windows machine to make the USB, and they recommended two different utilities- not going to google it now but went with the one that was from what seems like a forensics company? Anywho yeah, seems to do something to the drive after the install and reboot. It write-protects it and I couldnt get it removed, messed with it so much I think it just kind of died. In all of my searching to save it, found info on Transcend and a utility for it, had one and used it. Big props to Transcend, their utility is amazing-- I'm not strong with this stuff so to use an analogy as to what it seems like to me, the windows software I used to make the Proxmox USB works- in the sense that I could then boot into and install Proxmox on the machine, but after the reboot it can't be used to install again-- it seems 'soft bricked' as Windows could see it is there, I could go into the option to format it, but would get the write protection pop-up after that- it then acted 'hard bricked' as all the typical google'd tricks to fix a USB wouldn't work. Enter the Transcend, their utility can rescue even a 'hard bricked' thumb drive- doesn't see the Scandisk, but can find the Transcend.
Wendell being Wendell, he probably got the Linux command line method of making the thumb drive bootable the first time around, I really think that windows software is the culprit.
Hmmm...strange. Does "Unetbootin" sound familiar?
Whenever I make bootable USBs I use Ubuntu's built in "Startup Disk Creator" utility. It's meant for making bootable Ubuntu USBs, but it'll also let you choose a third party ISO so I've used it for all sorts of things, including Debian, Windows, Fedora, and others, and never had any issues with it.
Went back to Proxmox's instruction page, its OSForsensics USB installer.
I bet this isn't common because its the plan C of the options, and I imagine most people going the proxmox route are strong on Linux and I'm the black sheep... or rather the village idiot, that needed to use it.
I usually use LiveUSB Installer / pendrivelinux.com for my live USB needs, I tried it as well (even though it was not mentioned) and one error pops up, the process completes, but the USB is not bootable.
You're not the village idiot, lol, bootable USBs can be very screwy at times. I keep a DVD-RW around just to avoid dealing with bootable USBs on machines that have optical drives. It's slower, yeah, but on older hardware with crappy support for USBs, it's awesome. There always seems to be some voodoo insanity going on with the USB boot on older machines.
Ive made and remade many usb installs both windows and linux. The guy is speaking shit. You can reformat the usb stick no problem.
Thats the motherboard and BIOS or UEFI not the usb stick.
Thats really necessary? Its my experience and I'm not even saying its 100% this cause, or that cause, it is what happened, the USB was rendered trash- be it the HP MB, BIOS, the flash tool, whatever it may be- using the other USB that's chip at least has good vendor support requires a firmware reflash before gparted, or windows, can do anything about it.
does it really matter. i mean usb sticks are a dime a dozen. last week i bought 4 8gb sticks at 16 dollars. thats 50 cents per gb. also it wasnt unbranded or anything, it was sandisk. it also works with unraid because it has a guid.
also regarding formatting a usb stick. theres a way to recover the stick if you no longer use it for booting.
look up rufus. it cleanly burns isos and also wipes the drive if you ever need it to. windows noob friendly solution. i've burnt through alot of usb iso images this year. and it has helped me tremendously.
1 Like
tried rufus, not making this stuff up- lots of googling, lots of various brands of tool kits, command line tricks in both windows and linux etc. USB was hard bricked, need a utility to flash it at that level, much like hard bricking an Android phone with a snapdragon, doesn't mean its trashed, but you need a jtag and the right software to bring it back (depending on snapdragon and utility version). In this case, Transcend offers said software, the other brand did not. Like @bryann816a said, thumb drives are cheap, I didn't fret at all and I think my post doesn't make it sound like it was the 'low point' of the experiment, just a notation for others- be it using that OSForsensic tool, or when choosing a USB stick where brand X, Y and Z are about the same price, might as well go with the one that offers a utility that can bring it back from hard bricking (again not Proxmox's fault, but if you want to mess around with stuff, might as well have that insurance).
I'm a fluke instance, somehow my variables caused this instance. 99,000 people can buy a rock solid X brand truck, there is going to be 'that guy' that gets the 99,001 one that is a lemon, or blows it putting diesel in the gas tank etc.
lol i think its a simple case of hardware failure. unless the device is recognised upon plug in. you can safely assume that it is dead.
if you get a beep telling you that the device needs formatting all you need to do is go into rufus,
select: device, fliesystem,
unselect: create bootable disk
then click start.
if this doesnt work you might try the windows terminal diskpart utility. i've salvaged usbs and sd cards this way.
although more recently i've not needed to go further than rufus. :)
i