Quick first time buyer question

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nalyD

New Member
Dec 26, 2019
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I want to start a home NAS and I've had plenty of experience at work buying and configuring prebuilt Dell servers and the likes, but I can't say I've ever on my own had to buy a RAID controller that didn't come in a prebuilt system already. The sticky in this forum has been a huge help because the regular model numbers without knowing the internal controller is a mess.

I considered a Z-RAID2 but my particular scenario will be with 5x5TB Toshiba drives, so no TLER/ERC to benefit from using an HBA instead, and RAID6 will let me be more platform agnostic if I decide to run Windows.

all of that said, does this Dell H710 look like a solid deal?
 
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nikalai

Member
Oct 26, 2018
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Hello,

It would be better to give direct acces for your disk and not use RAID to prevent some issues.
Look for DEll H200 / DELL H310 | LSI 9207-8i / LASI 9211-8i. You can find them on ebay and some of them are preflashed with IT firmware.
Do you want to use FREENAS?
 

Marsh

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May 12, 2013
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What is the purpose of your NAS?

Media files
VM storage
General purpose files
 

nalyD

New Member
Dec 26, 2019
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Hello,

It would be better to give direct acces for your disk and not use RAID to prevent some issues.
Look for DEll H200 / DELL H310 | LSI 9207-8i / LASI 9211-8i. You can find them on ebay and some of them are preflashed with IT firmware.
Do you want to use FREENAS?
I haven't decided on the OS/final setup yet. I might use FREENAS.

Do you think the direct disk access still holds true even with no TLER/ERC? From what I've been reading that seems to be the primary benefit of using Z-RAID over hardware RAID

What is the purpose of your NAS?

Media files
VM storage
General purpose files
Honestly a little bit of everything. Mostly media, I have a few server backups that I would prefer to have locally, and I have a ton of ebooks that I would like to have in a better backup at home.


Thanks both of you guys for the quick replies btw! It would be awesome if I could figure this out today and get stuff ordered before I go back to work, took a staycation for the holidays
 

BoredSysadmin

Not affiliated with Maxell
Mar 2, 2019
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The whole point of TLER is to help in hardware raid configs. For running Freenas or any other ZFS based system, you don't want hardware, but direct disk access with HBA card or Raid Card in IT mode. It's really no brainer for none-TLER drives NOT to use hardware raid.
 

Marsh

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May 12, 2013
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Mostly media
If you use the NAS to store mostly media and ebook files
Take a look at Unraid OS. It is well suitable to store media files.

Or
Any Linux based ( Debian , Proxmox ) , raid 5 or 6 or ZFS
Better yet, not using raid but to use mergerfs and snapriad.
 

nalyD

New Member
Dec 26, 2019
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The whole point of TLER is to help in hardware raid configs. For running Freenas or any other ZFS based system, you don't want hardware, but direct disk access with HBA card or Raid Card in IT mode. It's really no brainer for none-TLER drives NOT to use hardware raid.
Oh you're right something else I was reading earlier about some raid controllers having their own TLER that might fight with the HDD's confused me. What a rabbit hole data redundancy has been for the last 24 hours.

If you use the NAS to store mostly media and ebook files
Take a look at Unraid OS. It is well suitable to store media files.

Or
Any Linux based ( Debian , Proxmox ) , raid 5 or 6 or ZFS
Better yet, not using raid but to use mergerfs and snapriad.
I've looked at unraid before, it's another thing in my considerations

and I've never head of snapraid, down the rabbit hole I go with more research!
 

Marsh

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May 12, 2013
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I have a fileserver with 8 hot swap bay.

Between late 2017 to May 2019 , I had 8 x 8TB disks inside the server.

With mergerfs and snapraid setup,
I changed 4 x 8TB to 4 x 10TB dives without buying 8 x 10TB same time,
it is a good thing, I was waiting some cheap 12TB disks , then 14TB show up cheap this Christmas.

Fast forward to Dec 2019, I purchased 4 x 14TB drives, replaced the 4 x 8TB drives.
Now, fileserver is using 4 x 14TB and 4 x 10TB drives.

I am just waiting for another price drop for the 14TB drives ( down from $200 ) or
cheap 16TB disks.
 
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T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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I have a fileserver with 8 hot swap bay.

Between late 2017 to May 2019 , I had 8 x 8TB disks inside the server.

With mergerfs and snapraid setup,
I changed 4 x 8TB to 4 x 10TB dives without buying 8 x 10TB same time,
it is a good thing, I was waiting some cheap 12TB disks , then 14TB show up cheap this Christmas.

Fast forward to Dec 2019, I purchased 4 x 14TB drives, replaced the 4 x 8TB drives.
Now, fileserver is using 4 x 14TB and 4 x 10TB drives.

I am just waiting for another price drop for the 14TB drives ( down from $200 ) or
cheap 16TB disks.
How long on mergerfs and snapraid?
How are you liking that?
Going to change to something else when you upgrade drives?
 

BoredSysadmin

Not affiliated with Maxell
Mar 2, 2019
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Why just hardware raid? Wouldn't ZFS benefit from faster responses reporting drive failures too?
It's not really about the benefit of faster to fail, it's about what is expected behavior. Hardware Raid will not allow drive enough time to recover, while native non-hardware raid will. ZFS, just like native OS will give sufficient time to drive to attempt self-recovery, but don't quote me on this, maybe someone more knowledgeable in inner-workings of ZFS could confirm or deny this. maybe @gea could help...
 

nalyD

New Member
Dec 26, 2019
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Thanks for all the debate you guys, I've been reading more about ZFS and these kinds of filesystems.

My initial hold off with Linux was that this is also kind of a media center PC in my living room that my girlfriend and I emulate some games on in the living room occasionally, it's not a huge deal to move to Linux but I'm already set up on Windows and it was just a time saving effort.

Now after reading more about ZFS, I understand how outdated RAID is becoming and some of the potential issues with parity and bit rot.I've found how recommended ECC memory is with these software setups, and this is an issue because not only do I not have ECC memory, but the DDR4 in the current machine is overclocked to 3600Mhz so the AMD chipset runs at it's recommended 1800Mhz, and while I ran memtest86 for like 8 hours to verify my OC, it seems likely this system would have a RAM error over a longer period of time so ZFS would be potentially catastrophic?

It seems like in every case there's still a single point of failure, whether I move it off to bad RAM bits, or a RAID controller screwing up
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
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It seems like in every case there's still a single point of failure, whether I move it off to bad RAM bits, or a RAID controller screwing up
And now that you know this, you'll make sure that your backups work ;):D:p

There is no perfect setup, just one that, on balance, performs as you expect, is reliable enough to meet your needs and is within your budget :)
 
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