Re: [gentoo-user] NAS suggestions for home user

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 9:39 AM Wols Lists <antlists@××××××××××××.uk> wrote:
>
> On 01/10/2021 17:08, Mark Knecht wrote:
> > This old machine is now about 10 years old. It's a big Cooler Master
> > case, 6 or 8 removable drive bays, heavy. It collects dust and
> > sometimes the fans are quite noisy. If I was going this direction
> > I think I'd have to tear the whole thing down, redo the case fans at
> > least. If I did all that then I think I'd use it for the new machine,
> > but you do have a point.
>
> Okay, get your new disk drive, stick it in your old server, put btrfs on
> it, learn to play with the backups etc. You can hoover out the inside at
> the same time, and possibly replace the fans - they might be noisy
> because the bearings are shot.
>
> There's no reason why your backup drive has to be in a different machine
> (other than the physical safety of it being separate), so play with it
> as part of your current machine. Learn btrfs, learn rsync, learn all
> that stuff.
>
> (Your case sounds a bit like the N300 I've just bought. I want to put a
> whole load of 1TB drives in it as a raid testbed - you might have
> noticed my name on the raid wiki :-)
>
> The other thing, if you are interested and happy with just one disk not
> raid, look at getting one of these HOST MANAGED shingled drives, and use
> a log-structured file system. Again, I don't know anything about these
> other than what they are, but for backups it should be a good and
> reasonably cheap solution.
>
> If you want to go down the pi route, I think you can get little cases,
> and I've got a USB thingy into which you can plug two drives. But at
> about £30-40 each, that's $100 for hardware over and above your drive.
> I'd recycle the old machine :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Wol
>

So here I am reporting back after a couple of months of not working on
this task.

I dug around in the garage and found an old i5 Clarksdale machine that
literally hadn't been turned on since we sold a house back in about
2013. Unboxed it, cleaned it up a bit, took out all the old hard
drives, the CD and the floppy and put in 2 500GB WD Enterprise drives
I had sitting here from a previous upgrade. Darned if the machine
didn't boot right up from a FreeNAS (now TrueNAS Core) flash drive. I
installed the OS to a second USB thumb drive, booted the machine,
created a 500GB ZFS mirrored pool, created a user directory and 3
hours later I'm doing backups. So far it's done 30GB of about 450GB
and just seems to be humming along nicely. CPU usage is only about 5%
most of the time. The processor is only 2 cores, 4 threads, but most
of the time it's only using about 5% CPU.

No idea how stable it will be but the computer itself was always a
good machine 10 years ago so I'll keep my fingers crossed and see how
it goes.

I'll be adding a SSD front end cache to the storage pool later this
week and will likely move the OS to something internal (SSD or maybe
an old HDD) as I don't like the idea of depending on a USB boot.

Cheers,
Mark

Anyone looking for some similar solution so far I really couldn't be
happier with how easy it was to get this up and running.