robbrown99
Cadet
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2020
- Messages
- 7
Hello, I'm not a TrueNAS/FreeNAS user yet, but I having been running an OpenZFS zpool on my Mac for the last 6 years. I have been mostly successful, but have suffered a couple of hiccups, which is making me think I should be considering a self contained NAS instead to avoid such problems again. Hence the look at TrueNAS.
Issues I've had so far with OpenZFS on OSX:
My use cases are:
I’m confused by all of the RAID options though. RAIDZ2 looks interesting for performance and some protection. I also assume I need 5 drives for that. I would probably be going with Seagate Ironwolf red 6TB disks. I bought 2x of them, so now I’m committed I think, so guess I would just buy 3x more.
Question 3: For the above use cases, I'm figuring a TrueNAS MiniX may be a good fit? It has >1 1GB ethernet (shame it doesn't have 10G), has 5 bays.
Question 4: compared with my direct attached drives today (2x mirrored disk directly into motherboard), I assume I will be seeing a performance hit over 1GB Ethernet, to a NAS... but how bad? 2x slower? 4x slower? Should I instead be considering going with a simple large single disk in my computer for main storage, then a NAS for backup? Put it this way - does any use their TrueNAS directly attached to their computer over 1GB and actually enjoy editing photos from it?
Thanks for any tips
Issues I've had so far with OpenZFS on OSX:
- When I upgraded from Yosemite to El Capitan in 2017, I had some permissions issues
- Last week one of my drives (two 1.5TB disks, mirrored in a single zpool) threw a bunch of errors. During the process of resilvering, the process stalled and both drives ended up erroring and now won’t mount. I had to backup from an HFS+ drive.
My use cases are:
- For storing my large photo (and a very small number of videos) collection as the primary disk storage, and having fault tolerance / bit rot protection for that. Ideally here I need decent speed, and for the next 5 years I’m figuring I need approx 6TB storage to cover that use case. I'm currently just under 1.5TB. My computer is an old 2009 Mac Pro. At some point I want to ‘upgrade’ to a new Atom based Mac Mini.
- I'd like a really easy way of sucking the images from my camera off my SD card, onto the NAS, rename them and copy up to flickr. Not sure if there are plugins that allow this?
- There’s a growing collection of computers in my house, so I’d like to have an easy method of backing those up by giving access to a NAS over wireless. I would need maybe 4TB storage to cover that.
- I don’t yet do plex or anything, but the ability to do such things is intriguing to me. However, I get most of my content from online services, and don’t have a movie collection, so it would be just for the odd TV show recording here and there. Very light usage! No idea how much I’d need for that. 2TB?
- I’m toying with the idea of having a simple surveillance camera setup to record a couple of weeks of video at a time from 2-3 cameras. No idea how much for that. 1TB?
- I'm toying with running my website and own email off the NAS also, because why not? It costs me $90 a year to host elsewhere (but maybe my electricity bill would go up)?
- My son is getting into gaming, would be fun for him to set up a server on the NAS if that's possible (e.g. minecraft, steam)
- my 2600AC Synology wireless router is upstairs (unfortunately) in the middle of the house for good coverage. My photo editing computer is downstairs in my office. I’m ok with just normal wireless for the other computers in the house to backup, but that photo editing computer needs a direct connect I think. My current Mac only has n capability, not ac.
I guess therefore my options for connecting my NAS to the network are:
i) put NAS in back of router upstairs. Ethernet over power line from office to router. Wireless to all rest of devices.
ii) put NAS in office, plug into my computer via RJ45. Get a wireless mesh expander and plug that into the NAS. Synology sell a mesh hub that connects with my main wireless router.
I’m confused by all of the RAID options though. RAIDZ2 looks interesting for performance and some protection. I also assume I need 5 drives for that. I would probably be going with Seagate Ironwolf red 6TB disks. I bought 2x of them, so now I’m committed I think, so guess I would just buy 3x more.
Question 3: For the above use cases, I'm figuring a TrueNAS MiniX may be a good fit? It has >1 1GB ethernet (shame it doesn't have 10G), has 5 bays.
Question 4: compared with my direct attached drives today (2x mirrored disk directly into motherboard), I assume I will be seeing a performance hit over 1GB Ethernet, to a NAS... but how bad? 2x slower? 4x slower? Should I instead be considering going with a simple large single disk in my computer for main storage, then a NAS for backup? Put it this way - does any use their TrueNAS directly attached to their computer over 1GB and actually enjoy editing photos from it?
Thanks for any tips