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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2022-07-21, 13:14

It finally happened. I was hit hard by two drive failures over the last month, and now I'm figuring out a better plan going forward.

At home, I have a tower PC running in the corner of a room that I use as a very poor man's NAS; it's actually just an old Hackintosh with its drives shared over SMB. Its boot drive is an SSD, which is fine, but I've been using a 4TB HDD as its main shared document and media storage for many years. That HDD started to fail a few weeks ago, and I immediately scrambled to transfer whatever I could onto another external HDD that I've used for occasional backups but never bothered automating fully.

Well, fast forward two weeks, and that second external drive started failing. When it rains, it pours! Fortunately, I had another new-in-box drive that I had been planning to use as the middle part of the classic 3-2-1 backup strategy. I've been able to get everything from the second drive onto that third drive, but now I'm back to only having one reliable copy of everything.

Oof.

I've had this idea for a long time to build/repurpose a PC as a dedicated NAS with more fault-tolerant software and hardware for the "live" copy of the data (I know I'd still need to automate external backups), and this latest crisis has prompted me to take action. ZFS has been at the top of my list, but there's a lot to learn about proper management. I'll want to give it multiple HDDs so it can do full parity, and my understanding is that I'll need to give its system lots of RAM, preferably the more expensive ECC kind, for best performance.

I could (okay, I should) take the time to learn all the ins and outs of ZFS zpool and vdev management right now, but I kind of want to just get something up and running quickly and learn more about management best practices along the way. That's what led me to TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS). It's a Linux distro that's built to get you running with ZFS and various helper and monitoring tools out of the box, and it's supposedly tuned and locked down specifically for storage management. A lot of folks in the /r/datahoarders community use and recommend that distro especially for folks just getting started running their own NAS.

Does anyone here have any experience with ZFS, TrueNAS, or similar high-reliability data storage solutions? I know that I could buy a dedicated NAS from a company like Synology, but I don't like the idea of it just being an appliance. I want to be able to get in there and learn, tinker, troubleshoot, and further optimize things.

What do you use for shared storage around the home network? Any other ideas I might not have considered?

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