Low End Consumer Grade NAS(es)

[Crumar]

Hi all,

I am in the process of building my first NAS and want to use FreeNAS. I have asked for advice on different sites (e.g. Reddit) but have not come to any confirmation that my plan will work.

Actually, I am planning to build three NAS, which will probably utilize different hardware. I will start with my local setup, which will include:

Crucial MX500 250GB, M.2 (CT250MX500SSD4)
AMD Ryzen 3 3200G, 4x 3.60GHz, boxed (YD3200C5FHBOX)
G.Skill Aegis DIMM Kit 16GB, DDR4-3000, CL16-18-18-38 (F4-3000C16D-16GISB)
Gigabyte B450M DS3H
BitFenix Phenom M schwarz (BFC-PHM-300-KKXKK-RP)
be quiet! Pure Power 11 400W ATX 2.4 (BN292)

I plan to acquire one 8 TB WD Red (or WD My Book White) as the only storage disk for starters.
What I want to achieve:

• Storage availability for laptops / smartphones / desktop PC (windows, linux, android) for 2 users on my site
• Backups of said storage
• Replication of backups to the other two NAS
• Replacing some minor services currently run by Raspberries (e.g. DHCP, DNS, Pihole, Wireguard VPN connection, DynDNS updater)

I do not wish to use RAID and in my opinion I dont need to - high availability is not an issue. If a disk breaks, I can take my time, order a new one, and rollover backups. This is personal, not commercial. If I get this done in a week or so, everything is fine.

The other two will probably include even less performance, with one being an old SB or IB i3.

Now, can I achieve this with the above hardware?
I would like to provide 2 TB locally for the users present, creating an incremental backup locally each night, then replicate it to the other two.
Do you see any major flaws within my plan?
Will my Ryzen 3 be even able to run VMs / Containers on FreeNas (the documentation says RVI / NPT is required, but I cannot find that information on the Ryzen, however it seems to support Amd-V and VT-Vi)

Thanks for all advice! And please hit me with a stick if I ignored any Guidelines and will try to amend.

 

[garm]

Do you see any major flaws within my plan?

Ya,

you are using consumer hardware instead of supported and reliable hardware.

I do not wish to use RAID and in my opinion I don't need to - high availability is not an issue

“RAID”, or parity to be more precise, isn’t primarily for HA in ZFS, it’s the foundation for data integrity. Each block written to disk is checksummed to ensure that they do not get damaged, what you write is always what you read. To be able to recover damaged blocks you need parity. Set up a storage server correctly and there is no theoretical life expectancy for the data stored on it, as long as the pool is kept intact. My current system is only a few years old, but I have two decades of data on it. Prior to using ZFS late last decade, I would loose data to disk corruption fairly regularly. And if you backup broken data, you restore broken data... sins using ZFS I have not lost a single block, every picture, document, image etc stored are exactly the same as once written.

 

[Crumar]

Hi garm,

thanks for your reply. I do wish to keep my budget as low as possible. From my Point of View, with the local HDDs without Backup I have never had any corruption. I guess you are referring to ECC by supported and reliable hardware? I think an ECC upgrade may be out of my budget.

If that only refers to RAID:
What do you recommend? My understanding was ZFS does this anyway on the disk, but not requiring a second disk for that?
Looking at my desired setup, I would need 2x 8 TB per NAS (=6) to ensure that:
Each of the three offers 2 TB of total space for the local users.
The rest 6 TB are available for backups of the others and have some available storage for data growth.

 

[sretalla]

From my Point of View, with the local HDDs without Backup I have never had any corruption

I think what you're saying is "I haven't yet noticed any corruption", which is not the same thing. It's unlikely that there is no corruption, but for various reasons (usually at a higher level like in software) you could have been able to cope with it in a way where it looks the same to you.

With most file systems (other than ZFS), there's no checksum for each block, so without a couple of external points of comparison, you can't test for it without trawling over each bit on the disk (comparing it with exactly what you knew was supposed to be written there).

More generally, you should be able to run virtualization and jails (but you're pushing it with 16GB of RAM... FreeNAS needs all of the first 8 just to run, so anything on top will be fighting for slices of the next 8.

You should also make yourself aware that Ryzen is not yet well supported (although it does work) on FreeBSD 11... this means until TrueNAS 12 Core (the next FreeNAS) you won't have a guaranteed great experience, although the indications are that things do work, more or less.

 

[garm]

I guess you are referring to ECC

And you wouldn’t be incorrect. I mean reliable hardware, built to a higher standard then gaming gear, meant to run 24/7, with solid kernel support in FreeBSD. There are plenty of “cheap” options out there. My off the shelf Dell server was just a few hundred USD new when I bought it, end of life model.

My understanding was ZFS does this anyway on the disk

Checksums yes, recovery no, not without parity. Once you start using ZFS and running scrubs you will start appreciating the complexity of maintaining data long term

 

[Crumar]

Thanks for your replies.
@sretalla Of course you are right, I have not noticed it but will probably have had it somewhere. I believe if I can keep it too such a level, I and the others in my family will not complain. There is no business critical data that I want to store.

With most file systems (other than ZFS), there's no checksum for each block, so without a couple of external points of comparison, you can't test for it without trawling over each bit on the disk (comparing it with exactly what you knew was supposed to be written there).

And for ZFS I need two Disks - alright, got it. Nearly doubles the costs, sadly.

More generally, you should be able to run virtualization and jails (but you're pushing it with 16GB of RAM... FreeNAS needs all of the first 8 just to run, so anything on top will be fighting for slices of the next 8.

The services run on a single raspberry pi - with 1 GB of ram currently. I guess thats fine for now, but I selected a MB that has a total of four RAM slots, leaving room for an upgrade to 32 GB if required.

You should also make yourself aware that Ryzen is not yet well supported (although it does work) on FreeBSD 11... this means until TrueNAS 12 Core (the next FreeNAS) you won't have a guaranteed great experience, although the indications are that things do work, more or less.

Good info, thanks. I look forward to evaluate at first on the machine I have before buying the others anyway. I guess until I am finally setup a good portion of 2020H2 has passed, so I hope it comes in time.

And you wouldn’t be incorrect. I mean reliable hardware, built to a higher standard then gaming gear, meant to run 24/7, with solid kernel support in FreeBSD. There are plenty of “cheap” options out there. My off the shelf Dell server was just a few hundred USD new when I bought it, end of life model.

I was actually looking at decommissioned server hardware and could also ask my employeer if we can get cheap decommissioned hardware from our data centers. Again, the additional SAS storage costs have discouraged me to go down this road. Furthermore, while I plan to have a Rack in my next home, in my current home it would be unbearable in any room due to the noise, even if I had the means to connect it to a switch.
My goal is to store my data somewhat safer than I do now (which is not at all, I do not create any kinds of backup currently. Lot of my vacation pictures are only available on my smartphone which is coming to its end storage wise. It would be a shame to lose them, but life goes on without it.

So all in all. I can use the setup above, but have to keep in mind:

• Possible issues due to ryzen compatibility
• Buy 2 disks per system to get ZFS parity checks
• RAM may become a constraint for my additional services, 16 GB is the bare minimum for my setup
  • Then again I have two users max, and data will not even change everyday probably

I have seen an online calculator that says I have roughly 7.7 TB left if I use RAID-Z1 with two 8 TB drives.

1. How much net space can I roughly calculate? 2 TB User Space, 4 TB for Backups of other NAS?

I have read that the ZFS Snapshots grow fast.

2. Is there a possibility to "squash" them together into one or something like that?

Like, I would like to do backups each night, but when they get 4 weeks old, I only need the last of each week? If they are over a year, I dont need them at all.


Thanks so far for your guidance.

 

[garm]

I have seen an online calculator that says I have roughly 7.7 TB left if I use RAID-Z1 with two 8 TB drives.

You cannot use raidz with two drives, you can only make a mirror vdev. There will be some overhead for ZFS metadata, but do also account for 20% of space not being utilized. When you hit 80%, your upgrade path needs to be put to action.

I have read that the ZFS Snapshots grow fast.

2. Is there a possibility to "squash" them together into one or something like that?

No, snapshots “grow” as data change. If no data is changed or removed, the space used for snapshots are negligible.

Like, I would like to do backups each night, but when they get 4 weeks old, I only need the last of each week? If they are over a year, I don't need them at all.

One way of doing this would be to use snapshots, set up a backup target dataset, trigger a backup and take a snapshot when done. Then each conservative backup overwrite the last and versioning is done with snapshots. Then it’s just a matter of replicating the snapshots to secondary targets and offsite.

 

[NickF]

Just time chime in here, as someone who is using a Ryzen system on FreeNAS (and has been since ~November) my experience has been rock solid.

But I am using a "server" grade baord with ECC memory, so YMMV with consumer hardware.

That being said, I have had, and in some cases, still have, multiple business class PCs (HP 8200, HP 8300, HP 800G1) running small FreeNAS installations with 16GB of ram (non-ecc) and consumer i3's. But in each of those cases they ran mirrors, not a single drive.