One small thing I continue reading through the posts - NAS. NAS (as a device), if I understand correctly, cannot be configured to be separate - one drive = one separate accessible item of storage.
And not an element, which will be formatted and added to the pool, after which any data, pushed to the “storage”, will be shored in several instances across the NAS storage (if I didn’t have this requirement, I would go for Synology and wouldn’t even start the topic). Basically, if I add a 8Tb drive, I get 8Tb storage added (and not the what I assume I get with NAS storage as clearly not the same).
You do understand drives come both un-formatted and pre-formatted, and which format a pre-formatted drive comes with is up to the drive maker. Your drives have to be formatted with a file system which you use is up to you. By default modern windows usually picks NTFS if its formating a drive. Differnet Operating systems can and cant read and or write to different drive formats. Typically portable drives come pre-formatted but out side of that its up to chance.
Also hardware raid cards present a group of drives as a single drive to your operating system, which then formats the group as a whole(becasue the raid card presents them all as one together to the os).
ZFS, BTRFS, and i believe Synologys format(someone knowledgable aobut synology stuff should probably correct me) all are interesting in that there a file system and drive manager in one and are doing the part of a hardware raid card and file system at the same time.
My point in this, is are you only looking to use NTFS and Windows?
Do you even understand the difference between the formats, and why you would possibly pick a different one?
It really does not matter though the op, is pretty against the idea of a HDD and any type of file system other than a bog standard windows file system and non raid like setup as far as i can tell.
I can understand that. For my own truenas zfs setup I am planning on giving the truenas vm pcie devices, not individual drives.
So the truenas VM will get:
access to a partition on a 118GB SSD for virtual memory so that does not pollute the zfs log…
SAS controller
u.2 drive
10g ethernet controller
16g to 32g of ram
it will talk to:
other VMs
the host OS
My mac laptop with a 10g ethernet to thunderbolt adapter.
I am planning on putting the disk array in another room connected by a long sas cable through the attic to a storage room with an air conditioner vent. , ie:
I hope that they have worked out the bugs with btrfs. Last I looked into it…
zfs if something goes wrong, ie filling too much of the drive, it can take 2 to 6 hours fix it’s self.
btrfs if something goes wrong, ie brownout where the drives go up and down frequently for a few hours, it can take weeks to months for the index to get uncorrupted.
To understand why we don’t rely on pcie cards to provide raid anymore you need to watch:
That is the start of why I am pro-zfs.
and there is not a good way to do zfs from windows except through a virtual machine.
The most popular ways to provide NAS services backed by zfs is through truenas. It is appliance like, ie you can configure everything via a web interface.
Yes, I understand that. But what if I’m moving from a current/temp solution and already have a few drives lying around filled with data? They are NTFS.
This is why I currently intend on avoiding RAID. I do understand its uses, but for me that use is currently out of purpuse.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m going Win only because of the software. The idea is that IF I will not be going NAS or a dedicated storage device, but an actual desktop hardware, why not place it near the TV and play movies and stuff from it directly (without my current hassle of a 30m long HDMI cable connected to my home PC, and scripts for switching between monitor and TV).
Windows, SADLY, has the polished DaumPlayer(you cannot get the same level of playlist functionality without summoning Velzevul and together figure out how to do it through VLC) and more. I would be quite glad to move from Windows to Fedora for my home use, but that attempt failed horribly in terms of Corsair, Roccat, Creative and other pc part software.
For the ZFS, BTRFS. I have a “what I’ve read around Linux forums”. But never had a practical or a need, which would steer me in the direction of those FS.
In general, the file system things are stored on is pretty irrelevant for most stuff.
On Linux you might run into a few issues with regards to file permissions, they might be a slight annoyance but are quickly resolved by a couple of owner changes. Biggest hurdle is basically default file masks are set to owner 1000 and rw-r–r-- when you want your samba user to be able to write to those shares. It’s an easy fix.
If you have a network share already, the sharing protocol don’t give two flying fricks whether or not it’s NTFS. It will be the same files regardless. Doesn’t matter if it’s SMB, SFTP, NFS or whatever other sharing protocol you use, file system can be anything. Only if you want to access said files locally from Windows without installing a specific driver, do you need to use NTFS.
To use the obligatory bad car analogy, filesystems are like the roads the cars travel on and the actual files are cars themselves. Doesn’t matter if you’re driving on the super highway state (ZFS), the old country road (Ext4) or the back streets of Miami (NTFS), neither will damage the cars driving on them. However, they will have an impact on transfer speeds and safety / reliability though. No tech is perfect, they all come with tradeoffs.
Of course that approach is going to fail, Linux does not support all Windows software. On Linux it is all about finding alternatives that work for you, trying to replicate a workflow to use 100% windows software and Windows products is doomed to fail from the start. A lot of the fiddly things you need to do in Windows is either installed by default or there is a handy package for that in Linux.
If you are happy with Windows just run Windows, problem solved
after running my media server on windows for 6 years i switched to ubuntu server about 3 years ago. I bought a 8TB drive and then moved all the data to that drive and reformatted the other drives. Then i used mergerfs to have a file based jbod. essentially it will spread files over multiple drives without striping. but still shows as a single mount point. I just had media on there, so no real redundancy needed.
The reason i switched to linux? windows forcefully restarted the computer and broke everything to do updates…
If you have a sound system with a subwoofer, you want to put it as far as the TV as your cables allow and try to add additional dampening to your HDDs.
They’re cheap, but they might not like the vibrations if your PC will be near a vibration emitting device (like speakers and especially subwoofers).
There are designed to sustain a bit more vibrations than the barracudas, but not sure about audio vibrations. Barracudas are made to be in a PC, with maybe 4 drives at max inside. Ironwolfs have specific designs, some up to 8 drives, some up to 24 drives, check the specs on which one you’re looking to buy.
Not sure which ironwolfs I have, as I didn’t care about vibrations much, since I only have 2 in a case (got the 16tb cmrs, don’t remember which model). You can hear them when they get some action, but not for long. At idle and after they loaded most of the thing you were seeking on them, they are silent (I sit around 2 meters away from the NAS, which is not very sound dampened, it’s a rockpro64 official case).
I won’t comment on the os or the build and I don’t feel like going through 70 comments to see what was recommended already. And given you aren’t planning on any redundancy, you can just slap any os and it’ll be fine anyway, just make separate shares for each, or do a shortcut / symlink / bind-mount to the other drives on a single share, up to you.
Not sure if to call my favoured solution, a 2.0 Edifier r2700, a “sound system”, but I have them sitting 1 meter above ground on wooden furniture.
Same. My main concern is how loud the header and the motor are. This is why I basically stick to Barracudas - I am familiar how they sound and that level of noise is fine for me (and hope it will be a bit cut off when it will go in a case).
I thought of going for a beQuiet case with their efforts in direction of dempening, but I REALLY don’t want an average pc case sitting next to the TV. Something cosmetic (like the Fractal I linked previously) yes, but not a standard factor case.
Yes, this thread came out of control But, at least, I hope that the next person with the same questions as I will have “something to read”.
The car analogy is probably the worst part here… File systems would not be the roads, rather the hard drive is the road, the car is the file, and the file system is the rules and laws that govern how you drive park and generally participate. Also your car just may be straight up not compatible with another set of rules. You if you live in America and take your car to England and are not aware that you drive on the other side of the road your probably going to crash and losse your car. So no file systems are pretty relevant.
Lets give an example where file sharing protocols cannot bridge the gap in certain cases, for example APFS(apple file system) and any other file system for the most part, due to most file systems having a file name limit of strictly 255bytes vs apfs’s limit of 255 uni-code characters, which interestingly enough a uni-code character can be betweeen 1-4bytes. Meaning an apfs file may have a name with a length longer than 255bytes. File sharing protocols simply error out, when you try to copy these files with longer names across.
File sharing protocols and other file and folder management api’s are not perfect and their differences make managing files across computers not quite as straight forward as you may think. One of the more obvious cases of this is manifested in windows and ntfs. While ntfs is case sensitive, however the windows api that all programs and the operating system use is not. Readme.txt and readme.txt are two different names to ntfs and many file systems and other operating systems including Mac OS and linux, even file sharing protocols like smb can differentiate them. However windows itself treats both names as the same and if it sees them, will assume they are one and the same and you will only see one of the files on windows. Many Mac and Linux users have folders with the same name but with different case differentiating them. Windows thinks there the same folder and feaks out about what to do with them and their files.
Another seemingly small but big impact item is different operating systems disallowed characters in names list.
Now in regards to file permissions lets not even go down that rabbit hole suffice it to say that OS’s mainly determine that mess, not file systems. Windows ACL’s are there own animal.
These issues above can simply create file management chaos in any home or office where multiple computers are not using the exact same software stack from top(application) to bottom(Operating system and filesystem), if the user is not aware of these problems.
You sir are technically correct. And also completely missed the context that reply was aimed at.
Draaksward does not seem all that well versed in file systems or OSes as a whole. While I am not saying choice of file system does not matter at all, in the context of Windows compatibility with a NAS, file system does not matter, only compatibility. A .mp3 or .avi file will work just the same on Ext4, BTRFS, ZFS, NTFS… That was the question.
Can a Windows machine be a NAS? Yes, of course. Is it recommended? No, because NTFS is a pretty basic file system that misses all the bells and whistles that a more advanced file system has. Thus, it is not recommended to use Windows, not because Windows itself is terrible at serving files, but because the file system is.
Let’s not add an entire books worth of reading to the poor fella. Let’s start small and simple yes?
Sirs, you are both correct in the background, from which you are going from. And I really appreciate the effort (learned quite a lot to be honest). Thank you
People really buy “renewed” drives for their media storage? Arent you just begging to lose your data with that?
Just use Storage Spaces then. It works nearly as well as ZFS feature-wise, can use the NTFS file system, and is able to create drive pools in all versions of Windows. However, you can only make ReFS pools in Workstation or server versions. ReFS can lead to problems though, as every once in a while Microsoft breaks it and then releases a patch to fix the filesystem and bring your array data back. lol. May want to give it 2-4 more years. But anyway, I believe you could even make a “pool” with just 1 drive if you wanted and then if you want to expand that drive space you can add another drive to the pool down the line.
People always seem to forget about Storage Spaces. When used with NTFS (and pooling multiple drives) you still gain some of the benefits like storage tiers, mirror or parity (raid1, 10, 5 or 6 type behavior), striping capability (raid0 type behavior), pool rebuilding in the event of drive failure, repair file, volume, or disk errors (if you have parity or mirror copy), rebalance the pool when you add or remove a drive, can still move your drives from that PC to any other Windows PC and your pool will still be intact, disk snapshots. enclosure awareness if you have a large enough system to warrant drives in other shelves or clusters. You know, all your basic array/pool type features.
If you switch to ReFS in Storage Spaces though you gain more functionality like deduplication, block cloning, file level snapshots, and error scrubbing.
Windows also lets you use standard Backblaze to store unlimited terrabytes of data for $12/mo. Something that could costs thousands of dollars a month by being forced into B2 storage or Azure when running Linux to get ZFS.
Absolutely. The data set from back blaze has shown that there is no bathtub curve.
Drives are dead within the first day, or they eventually fail. If they eventually fail, there is no curve, it is linear. Any drive more than a month old is just as likely to fail next week as it is to fail last week.
The main reason to buy retail drives is that each drive is shipped in a static bag with at least an inch of padding surrounded by a cardboard box.
I have had to return several boxes of hard drives where 2/3 of the box was empty, and there were a bunch of hard drives in the box without padding. Several of the circuit boards were shattered. In one case the cast aluminum had a hole punched in it.
If you buy from a dealer who sells computer parts then they will package the drives properly.
