Someone recently told me about a RAID configuration that can mitigate bit rot but it was a long conversation and I forgot a lot of what they said. I’m currently in the planning stages of setting up my first NAS so if anybody could point me in the right direction that would be pretty sweet.
What the hell is RAID and NAS ? I have a bad ass DvD collection to the tune of 3k films ( no pineapple express bull shit ) that I’ve been wanting to back up. I don’t know shit about computers but have a 2014 MacBook pro with a disk drive that has never been online just used to watch movies when the power is out and to load my cd collection to mp3 players.
Adding to that, depending on your RAID configuration you can have one or more drives fail and not lose any data.
Also you can install things like Plex media server or Immich and set up basically your own equivalent of Netflix server or google photos and look at your media from pretty much anywhere.
NAS stands for “Network Attached Storage”, basically a computer whose sole purpose is storing and serving files in your home.
RAID stands for “Reduntant Array of Inexpensive Disks”, and is broadly a way to merge multiple disks into one.
RAID 0 means that files are evenly distributed on all disks, which improves IO speed and extends a file system (≈ a partition) 's capacity, but it’s useless against disk failure;
RAID 1(mirroring) means that all disks have the same data as a sort of real-time backup, and as long as one disk remains functional, all the other disks can fail without the data becoming inaccessible;
other RAID levels use clever math to offer a mix of the first two, spreading files among disks (like RAID 0) but still tolerating failures of a small number of disks (like RAID 1 but way less redundant).
Wikipedia has a less abridged explaination on its RAID page.
Ahh , I see , i still have no clue 😅. But at least the acronyms are kind of giving me an idea. Thanks !
So these are not like a physical 1 terabyte external storage thingy that I’ve seen on ebay etc.? Would one of those external drives work for backing up physical media collections, or are they a bad idea? Is that considered NAS?
I’m sorry I don’t understand any of this stuff , I really should. I will check out the RAID wiki !
I am currently buying hardware for building my first NAS.
For inspiration, this is what I am building:
Case: White Jonsbo N4
CPU: Ryzen 4600G
RAM: Corsair Vengence 32GB DDR4 3600mhz
Boot drive: Crucial T500 500GB nvme drive.
Storage drives: Seagate Ironwolf Pro NT (I have not yet decided of what capacity I will use).
PSU: Corsair SF750 (overkill, I know)
A piece of advice with ZFS, get the largest drives you can afford.
Expanding ZFS is painful and it’s wayyyyy easier to just start big then to grow big.
ZFS is also a RAM hog, max out your ram cause that.
If you want to add meta data caches, do it when you first build the array.
The L2-arc cache and SLOG don’t do what you think they will. Make sure you really understand them before you throw them on. They’re easy to take off though.
Last but certainly not least, ZFS is a money sink. It was made for enterprise solutions, meaning it benefits from more money being thrown at it than say XFS. Figure out what’s good enough and live with it.
That is a fair point, earlier I considered OpenMediaVault with a softraid and an LVM on top if it, but I take a lot of photos and have already seen bitrot in them, so I’d rather have some insurance for that.
I will in general avoid expanding filesystems, and simply decide that when I need more space to start building a new NAS, copy the data to it and repurpose the old NAS with larger drives or as a test machine.
Though this depends on how financially stable I am, I tend to buy parts over time…
I switched to raid z2 from a 6 drive mirror and what an ordeal that was. It’s because I had to grow into it and buy drives over time but eventually the mirror was too inefficient.
I moved data around like 5 times all because I still didn’t have enough disks to build my new array and keep my data on the system at the same time. And expanding raidz expands parity on all disks but not the data so you have to recopy all your data so it stripes fully.
I had a backup on a DAS but USB is slow and I didn’t want to have it be the only copy.
Disks that can fail. I can lose 2 and be okay. That gives me time to swap in my spare or order a new one. For a home user imo 2 drive redundancy is plenty but 3 for a 6 drive mirror was too much. These things aren’t cheap!
Someone recently told me about a RAID configuration that can mitigate bit rot but it was a long conversation and I forgot a lot of what they said. I’m currently in the planning stages of setting up my first NAS so if anybody could point me in the right direction that would be pretty sweet.
What the hell is RAID and NAS ? I have a bad ass DvD collection to the tune of 3k films ( no pineapple express bull shit ) that I’ve been wanting to back up. I don’t know shit about computers but have a 2014 MacBook pro with a disk drive that has never been online just used to watch movies when the power is out and to load my cd collection to mp3 players.
Help me out here !!!
A RAID is essentially a way to have multiple “hard drives” connected in a way that looks as if it’s one drive so you can have a ton of storage.
A NAS is a sort of like a remote storage device. Not quite a PC, but more than just a storage drive.
Not sure how you’d go about doing any of that with a MacBook.
Adding to that, depending on your RAID configuration you can have one or more drives fail and not lose any data.
Also you can install things like Plex media server or Immich and set up basically your own equivalent of Netflix server or google photos and look at your media from pretty much anywhere.
NAS stands for “Network Attached Storage”, basically a computer whose sole purpose is storing and serving files in your home.
RAID stands for “Reduntant Array of Inexpensive Disks”, and is broadly a way to merge multiple disks into one.
RAID 0 means that files are evenly distributed on all disks, which improves IO speed and extends a file system (≈ a partition) 's capacity, but it’s useless against disk failure;
RAID 1(mirroring) means that all disks have the same data as a sort of real-time backup, and as long as one disk remains functional, all the other disks can fail without the data becoming inaccessible;
other RAID levels use clever math to offer a mix of the first two, spreading files among disks (like RAID 0) but still tolerating failures of a small number of disks (like RAID 1 but way less redundant).
Wikipedia has a less abridged explaination on its RAID page.
Ahh , I see , i still have no clue 😅. But at least the acronyms are kind of giving me an idea. Thanks !
So these are not like a physical 1 terabyte external storage thingy that I’ve seen on ebay etc.? Would one of those external drives work for backing up physical media collections, or are they a bad idea? Is that considered NAS?
I’m sorry I don’t understand any of this stuff , I really should. I will check out the RAID wiki !
ZFS has bit rot protection.
I am currently buying hardware for building my first NAS.
For inspiration, this is what I am building:
Case: White Jonsbo N4
CPU: Ryzen 4600G
RAM: Corsair Vengence 32GB DDR4 3600mhz
Boot drive: Crucial T500 500GB nvme drive.
Storage drives: Seagate Ironwolf Pro NT (I have not yet decided of what capacity I will use). PSU: Corsair SF750 (overkill, I know)
A piece of advice with ZFS, get the largest drives you can afford.
Expanding ZFS is painful and it’s wayyyyy easier to just start big then to grow big.
ZFS is also a RAM hog, max out your ram cause that.
If you want to add meta data caches, do it when you first build the array.
The L2-arc cache and SLOG don’t do what you think they will. Make sure you really understand them before you throw them on. They’re easy to take off though.
Last but certainly not least, ZFS is a money sink. It was made for enterprise solutions, meaning it benefits from more money being thrown at it than say XFS. Figure out what’s good enough and live with it.
That is a fair point, earlier I considered OpenMediaVault with a softraid and an LVM on top if it, but I take a lot of photos and have already seen bitrot in them, so I’d rather have some insurance for that.
I will in general avoid expanding filesystems, and simply decide that when I need more space to start building a new NAS, copy the data to it and repurpose the old NAS with larger drives or as a test machine.
Though this depends on how financially stable I am, I tend to buy parts over time…
I switched to raid z2 from a 6 drive mirror and what an ordeal that was. It’s because I had to grow into it and buy drives over time but eventually the mirror was too inefficient.
I moved data around like 5 times all because I still didn’t have enough disks to build my new array and keep my data on the system at the same time. And expanding raidz expands parity on all disks but not the data so you have to recopy all your data so it stripes fully.
I had a backup on a DAS but USB is slow and I didn’t want to have it be the only copy.
I plan on having a raid of 5 drives and a hot spare, with a cold spare next to the NAS.
I am considering 8/10 TB drives, I currently have less than 10 TB of data in my archive.
What are the advantages of the different raid z leves?
Disks that can fail. I can lose 2 and be okay. That gives me time to swap in my spare or order a new one. For a home user imo 2 drive redundancy is plenty but 3 for a 6 drive mirror was too much. These things aren’t cheap!