Unraid, freeNAS

Unraid, freeNAS

[Rob]

I'm looking at building a network attached storage solution. In googling around, the two OS options I seem to run across most often are Unraid (payware) and freNAS (freeware.)
Does anyone have experience with installing these and getting them up and running? Once installed, all administration can be done over a webUI but I'm not sure if you can use ssh or something to run the actual install process.

Re: Unraid, freeNAS

[Kirk Reiser]

I think you might want to give us more information on exactly what you
wish to accomplish. How much storage do you need/want? What types of
devices need/want access to the storage. I could think of other
questions but that should make my point.

The simple solutions would be to use btsync, syncthing or owncloud. If
you need storage you don't have then consider buying an external usb
drive and tie it to your network through a linux machine. If you want
to buy something like the MyBook World by Western Digital they can be
connected directly to your LAN.


On Fri, 11 May 2018, Rob wrote:

> I'm looking at building a network attached storage solution. In googling around, the two OS options I seem to run across most often are Unraid (payware) and freNAS (freeware.)
> Does anyone have experience with installing these and getting them up and running? Once installed, all administration can be done over a webUI but I'm not sure if you can use ssh or something to run the actual install process.
> _______________________________________________
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Re: Unraid, freeNAS

[Rob]

Kirk Reiser <kirk@reisers.ca> wrote:
> I think you might want to give us more information on exactly what you
wish to accomplish. How much storage do you need/want? What types of
devices need/want access to the storage. I could think of other
questions but that should make my point.

At present I have about 20 tb of bare hard disk. The idea is to consolidate it all in one central location, grouped into an array of some type, be it zfs, lvm/raid, or something else. It can then be accessed by any computer/device on my network, like my phone/tablet, my laptops and my regular desktop computers.
I want the storage array to be dynamically expandable without having to rebuild everything, which i understand something like Unraid can do. I found out last night that zfs won't let you dynamically expand a raid array without replacing every drive in the pool, so that went out as an option. The hard disks are going to be in esata 4 to 8 bay enclosures.

Re: Unraid, freeNAS

[Gregory Nowak]

What kind of raid do you want, striped, mirrored, distributed parity,
or a combination of these? For a striped raid, lvm should be good
enough, though I haven't yet had to replace a lvm disk, so don't know
how well moving extents from one physical volume to another works in
practice, especially if moving from a drive that is failing or has
failed. For the other raid types, I'd suggest using mdadm to create a
/dev/mdx device, put something like ext4 on that, and export with
samba. I don't use /dev/mdx devices anywhere right now, but when I did
use that a long time ago, I remember it handled failing/failed drives
in the array nicely, without needing to rebuild the array. I imagine
it has gotten better than it was over the years if anything.

Greg


On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 06:33:36PM -0500, Rob wrote:
> At present I have about 20 tb of bare hard disk. The idea is to consolidate it all in one central location, grouped into an array of some type, be it zfs, lvm/raid, or something else. It can then be accessed by any computer/device on my network, like my phone/tablet, my laptops and my regular desktop computers.
> I want the storage array to be dynamically expandable without having to rebuild everything, which i understand something like Unraid can do. I found out last night that zfs won't let you dynamically expand a raid array without replacing every drive in the pool, so that went out as an option. The hard disks are going to be in esata 4 to 8 bay enclosures.
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Re: Unraid, freeNAS

[Rob]

Gregory Nowak <greg@gregn.net> wrote:
> What kind of raid do you want, striped, mirrored, distributed parity,
or a combination of these?

I'm not really sure yet; I still have to read about it. I want redundancy, so that when one disk fails the whole thing doesn't come crashing down. I'm not sure what the best solution for that would be at this point.

Re: Unraid, freeNAS

[John Covici]

zfs would work very nicely, but not raid, use mirrored devices
instead, if one device fails, you can replace it and it will rebuild
what's on the device, and you don't need raid at all.  It will also
prevent bitrot.

On Fri, 11 May 2018 20:10:12 -0400,
Rob wrote:
> 
> Gregory Nowak <greg@gregn.net> wrote:
> > What kind of raid do you want, striped, mirrored, distributed parity,
> or a combination of these?
> 
> I'm not really sure yet; I still have to read about it. I want redundancy, so that when one disk fails the whole thing doesn't come crashing down. I'm not sure what the best solution for that would be at this point.
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@linux-speakup.org
> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici wb2una
         covici@ccs.covici.com

Re: Unraid, freeNAS

[Kirk Reiser]

I have to agree with John here. Mirroring is the easiest and best
solution but 20tB is a lot of data.

I experimented with a couple different raid back-up arrangements over
the years with mixed results. raid-1 worked best for making large
amounts of storage look like one single file system but was a bitch to
piece back together when a drive crapped out. The other raids weren't
much better cost wise than just mirroring drives.

Over the years I've checked commercial network storage and it's always
been ideal and wonderful for amounts of data significantly less than
what I wanted to store. For amounts in the 3tB and up commercial costs
were always astronomical. I imagine those costs have slightly come
down but probably not as much as storage devices like hard drives
become cheaper as well.

The solution I finally settled on for myself was to mirror our
audio/text book collection which is currently about 3tB. I also have
another 700gB that I mirror with rsync on four different machines on
my LAN. Those 700gB are what I consider the data I don't wish to lose
like my personal music collection, my working source code repositories
such as chrome, opencog, etc.

My feeling is that unless you are a commercial enterprise and need to
keep 20tB of data safe, you will find it very expensive to do so. If a
good chunk of that data you share with other folks then each of you
taking on the mirroring of that portion may be a solution too. If you
need to keep all that data in a single file system then raid/lvm/mdam
will work but once again backing it up will turn out to be very
costly.

That's been my experience with large data sets and storage for what
it's worth.


On Fri, 11 May 2018, John Covici wrote:

> zfs would work very nicely, but not raid, use mirrored devices
> instead, if one device fails, you can replace it and it will rebuild
> what's on the device, and you don't need raid at all.  It will also
> prevent bitrot.
>
> Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
> How do
> you spend it?
>
>         John Covici wb2una
>         covici@ccs.covici.com
> _______________________________________________

cut cut cutting!

Re: Unraid, freeNAS

[Brian Buhrow]

	hello.  chiming in on this thread.  Another approach to backing up
large amounts of data is one I've been using for over 10 years.  My main
server has 4 disks on it, raided together with a raid5 configuration.  At
the time I built it I used 768GB disks, giving me a total storage of just
over 2.3TB of storage capacity (768 X 3 disks).  I then allocated half of
that space for backups, and partitioned the remainder for normal use.  I
then run backups of the data to the backup area, to cover human errors or
to restore old copies of files.  And, because I'm using raid5, as disks
died, I was able to replace them without a loss of data or even much down
time.  This approach is scalable using larger and larger disks, or, if you
hav more physical space, more and more disks.  I like raid5 because you
only lose one disk worth of space for the parity disk and you can lose any
one disk and still be ok.  The down side is that you need to be ready to
replace any disk at a moment's notice, since you don't want to run in
degraded mode for any length of time.  If you're paranoid, you can run
raid6, which means you only need to spend 2 disks worth of storage, but can
lose up to 2 disks simultaneously without losing any data.  The raid5 and
raid6 configurations are a bit more complicated to set up, but they let you
use your total storage capacity more efficiently and are more resilient to
different kinds of disk failures.
	Another approach, which might be easier to set up and operate, is to
use raid1 and raid5/6 simultaneously.  Use raid1 (mirroring) on some
relatively small boot disks, so you can boot from either disk and still be
good to go.  Then, use larger disks in the raid5/6 sets for data and
backups.  

	All of this can be done with off the shelf consumer hardware, using
standard linux tools, without paying too much money.


Just my 2 cents.

-thanks
-Brian