oowhh this make things very interesting!! thnx a lot!
I think you mean vdev
No I meant pool. For true noob friendliness it would be safe and easy to expand a pool without bolting vdevs to vdevs and accidentally creating a single point of failure with a single non parity drive added alongside an existing raidz vdev.
Iāll throw my hat in for ZFS on Ubuntu LTS. Much less finicky and more user friendly than FreeNAS. Just a matter of installing and configuring ZFS and Samba.
If you did end up going with an all-in-one solution like a Synology NAS @MattyC, youāve got to keep in mind that the processors in them are normally pretty weak, so transcoding in anything other than Video Station is not great. I had a DS416Play for a while, and it was not a good experience on that front.
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Thanks to everyone for your replys, I am going to use the hardware I have and get 6 drives, probably Seagate ironwolf drivers. Here in the UK we donāt have anything like micro center most retailers are online. I can get 6x 2tb drives at quite a good price and I believe that in Z2 I should have around 8tb I will try and work a ups and some ECC ram into the budget.
Is it worth getting ECC ram, does anyone know if it works correctly with the x58 chipset, I think the memory controller is in the CPU?
The backup drives I was planning to connect via USB to the NAS.
Still up to the motherboard manufacturer whether they want to support it, do note that not all boards that accept ECC RAM also actually support the ECC function.
From checking the Gigabyte website I do get the impression this specific board does not support ECC RAM.
SAS isnāt really needed for my purposes, so SATA works just fine.
as far as i can see x58 is missing ECC support.
some crystal clear information would be nice to have hear but this seems to be related to some extra hardware that is needed in the form of cables and bios function.
you can get 3-4 8 GB WD whites for about ~150 each https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07FNK6QMT?linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&creativeASIN=B07FNK6QMT&tag=geizhals07-21
you should get some molex to sata cable to make this work.
these are pretty much the save disk as WD reds (the slow wd red)
Iād also suggest having a look in the supermarket next time you go shopping. My last 4TiB Reds came from Tesco as they were having a clear out and had them half price. The Mrs though I was mad buying 3 of them.
Edit for clarity, shucked drives branded as usb external drives for Mac users). Work fine in freenas when you add them to a vdev.
how does the warranty work with this method of getting drives?
I did check my motherboard and it didnt say that ECC was supported, is it worth getting ECC ram or just use the stuff I have already got?
ECC is generally recommended but outside of your budget.
3 external 8 TB in raid z1 (raid5) and a low end ryzen board with a low end CPU is maybe possible.
the warranty with shucked drives depend on the country.
in the US it is full warranty.
in the UK well the warranty directly from WD should still apply.
One of the advantages to shucking (sometimes) is that you can afford another spare disk anyway. A warranty is nice to have but a warranty doesnt cover data loss. When disks fail, youre working against the clock. Having a disk there on hand ready to swap it with or having it hot in the enclosure already is preferable to waiting for a warranty disk.
On the topic of ECC, This is a good read.
Also this
https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/
In the USA, the āwarranty void if removedā stickers are illegal, so assuming you donāt damage the enclosures and can reassemble them for warranty reasons, it will last the 2 full years. Outside the USA, check your laws locally.
To echo the point about warranty not saving data loss, basically treat the disk as a consumable commodity. It wonāt last forever. Itās rare for disks to die after the first week so consider doing the burnin test with it in the usb caddy.
If it does die quickly, Keep the receipt and the case from the shucked drive. If it does die in the first year (and your previous data is not accessible on it) take it back to tesco or Curryās or wherever and they will honour a no quible guarantee. Itās above their paygrade to figure out why you lost data.
That said, if they insist on keeping the disk, consider is your personal data getting chucked in a skip worth the cost of the Ā£80 drive.
Raid is NOT a backup. So the savings can not be considered as risking your data. I canāt drive this point across enough. Raid is about UPTIME not data security.
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In this case op is talking about using this as his backup so this is perfectly applicable to him.
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As long as everyone understands itās not a safe backup, then fair enough.
Thatās exactly why I use encryption. The down side being data recovery may or may not be possible or worth it. That is why backing up the data (via replication on another device) is so important. I have to echo kdb424ās point RAID is only good to help with up time really. I would never rely on it instead of a backup.
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I would use the Nas as the main store for my data with the intention to have a local backup onto an external hard drive plugged into the Nas via USB and my more critical data will also be backed up to the cloud. I donāt intend to use the raid as my only copy of the data it is just easier to look after 1 machine with the data on than the 4 that I have at the moment.
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If keeping proper backups as you say, another good option for personal use is just RaidZ. The main reason itās ever not recommended is because itās easy to lose the entire pool if a resilver goes wrong, but if you have backups, itās definitely a great compromise. My 20 TB RaidZ was built with 2 10TB disks that were shucked. I built the array with the 2 disks and a sparse file as a third disk, with the intention to replace the file with a real disk at a later point. This left me with a very large array for really cheap, because my old array was offlined and fireboxed to secure the data. If I lose my data when I get the last disk, I donāt care. Itās a thought, as long as you have the backup. If you donāt like the idea of shucking, the USB enclosures CAN be used, but generally itās not recommended.