TR Forums

Arvald wrote:

Exception is the deduplication. 2GB RAM per 1 TB of storage for the comparasons for deduping.

dedupe is one of those things normals shouldn't ever touch.

Like it isn't some nice regular feature to consider, no, if you don't already know you 100% want it with a reason a lot more rigorous than "well, I know have some duplicate pictures in there and such and I don't want to waste the space", do not enable it.

I'm pretty sure Waco has said this himself.

Rapster wrote:

I've been using a Synology 1815+ filled with WD Reds for about a year now, and it has been flawless. Some folks make a cost argument against such devices, but the amount of time the Synology saves me and the wonderful worry-free sleep I get at night more than make up for any small cost differential. I'll never go back to home-brew storage servers.

And this is kind of post I have zero quibbles with. If the time/worry isn't worth your money, then it absolutely isn't. No argument.

Rapster wrote:

I've been using a Synology 1815+ filled with WD Reds for about a year now, and it has been flawless. Some folks make a cost argument against such devices, but the amount of time the Synology saves me and the wonderful worry-free sleep I get at night more than make up for any small cost differential. I'll never go back to home-brew storage servers.

Bingo!

I've been using a DS1512+ paired with a DX510 since 2012. Absolutely brilliant products as far as my experience has been. Hot swap drive replacement is a dream.

Glorious wrote:

demolition wrote:

Not sure if you are referring to the fact that 4x6TB > 16?
Since I am using RAIDZ1, and after other overhead etc. is factored in, the net storage space of my pool is 16.6TB so pretty much spot on.

No.

Ryu was pretty clearly indicating what Waco just said: you are perpetuating two false canards that are propagated by a certain person on a certain forum.

It's just a frustrating situation.

Basically this whole post 100 times over. That certain person shouldn't be recommending anything to anyone. I have patches in the ZFS tree - I'm pretty sure he's never actually delved into the internals of ZFS or even built it from source himself. Not trying to speak to any authority I have in ZFS matters, but that certain person and I butted heads enough that I quit the forum when his response to everything was "that's unsupported, you can't do that, what kind of moron are you, etc" along with his active attacks on anyone who disagreed with his recommendations or even asked what his reasoning was behind them.

Arvald wrote:

Exception is the deduplication. 2GB RAM per 1 TB of storage for the comparasons for deduping.
Default is dedupe off.

There are extremely few workloads that benefit from deduplication. I don't recommend ANYONE enable it without seriously considering the ramifications and whether they'll even benefit for the added complexity, performance implications, and memory requirements.

I run exactly one filesystem with dedupe enabled, and that's my Minecraft jail (since I backup/archive the server contents hourly). Even for that, I spent a long damn time deciding whether the space savings would be worth the hassle.

Rapster wrote:

I've been using a Synology 1815+ filled with WD Reds for about a year now, and it has been flawless. Some folks make a cost argument against such devices, but the amount of time the Synology saves me and the wonderful worry-free sleep I get at night more than make up for any small cost differential. I'll never go back to home-brew storage servers.

My setup is worry free in that I never worry about my data integrity or availability. I touch it only when I update the OS or a drive dies - which requires minimal touching. Pull out dead drive, insert new drive, run repair command (or click, if you like the GUI). It just requires a bit of learning up front that Synology (and things like it) don't.

There's some great stuff in this thread from people that know what they're doing with storage and filesystems, but as someone that does that all day every day I still just recommend people get a simple "dumb NAS" in a 2-bay enclosure of their preferred vendor and just get two disks of the capacity they want in RAID1.

Terabytes are cheap, and having a system that is fully understood by the user is often more valuable that brilliant technical solutions that can be undermined or even made completely useless simply because a user doesn't really understand what they're doing.

Waco wrote:

Arvald wrote:

Exception is the deduplication. 2GB RAM per 1 TB of storage for the comparasons for deduping.
Default is dedupe off.

There are extremely few workloads that benefit from deduplication. I don't recommend ANYONE enable it without seriously considering the ramifications and whether they'll even benefit for the added complexity, performance implications, and memory requirements.

I run exactly one filesystem with dedupe enabled, and that's my Minecraft jail (since I backup/archive the server contents hourly). Even for that, I spent a long damn time deciding whether the space savings would be worth the hassle.

Agreed. and good job on using for Minecraft jail. Good choice.
I'm a storage administrator as part of my job at work (decent size HP 3PAR array) so I understand the idea. We chose no dedupe on the high end array as the savings did not warrant it.

Chrispy_ wrote:

There's some great stuff in this thread from people that know what they're doing with storage and filesystems, but as someone that does that all day every day I still just recommend people get a simple "dumb NAS" in a 2-bay enclosure of their preferred vendor and just get two disks of the capacity they want in RAID1.

Terabytes are cheap, and having a system that is fully understood by the user is often more valuable that brilliant technical solutions that can be undermined or even made completely useless simply because a user doesn't really understand what they're doing.

+1.
I have a FreeNAS I am currently in the final stages of setting up.
Not straightforward for the plug and go crowd.
I would not recommend it for the amateur who is wanting it just to work.
For the amateur wanting to play and learn sure.

Defnitely FreeNAS, no question. It's great.

My first thing to go to is Synology honestly... I've only messed with a single open source NAS OS and it wasn't too difficult to setup, but when it comes to smoothness, features, quality and just care free setup and maintenance I can't imagine anything gets easier than Synology. If you are talking purpose built, I can maybe see the argument for a home build assuming you are as familiar as JBI or Waco on the topic. I just don't have any customers that would ever need a build extensive enough to warrant the amount of time that would go into building one however. Typically a 2-4 bay NAS works great.

Oh, to throw this out there also... IOSafe who I like to use for on-site backups for their Waterproof/Fireproof enclosures also makes Synology based products that that are also disaster proof. The warranty on those things is insanely affordable and adds pretty comprehensive coverage that includes shipping to anywhere, from anywhere to the data recovery of your choice, no questions asked, and a few 100k insurance type policy if data can't be recovered. For something like $100 for 4 years, the first year is included.

I wish I could also contribute to the home build realm but I can't

I like what I've seen of Synology's products, though I personally am too lazy to use a NAS. Lots of features, comes with a LAMP stack and off-the-shelf plugins for things like mediawiki, low power, etc. Note that Synology is like Ubiquiti for NAS, i.e. it sits between the cheap consumer products and high end customized deployments in not only price and features but also configuration difficulty. I'm also notoriously picky about space and power requirements which biases me toward purpose-built solutions.