backupbuddy
Cadet
- Joined
- Dec 19, 2012
- Messages
- 2
For the past four years I've struggled with finding a solution or combination of solutions that encompass some HTPC and backup needs. As a result of my job I generate about 500GB to 1TB of data a year that is important and needs backing up. I also do not have cable and download everything I watch on TV. Everything I watch is downloaded, I don't even care about netflix anymore.
Historically I have about 1.5TB of data compressed that needs backing up. I tried in order the western digital mybook, iomega storcenter and buffalo linkstation quad. The first two had awful performance taking a week or more to copy the data to them and then each had a disk failure each in the first year. Recovery (mirror) on each did not work. I always try to keep my data in as many places as I can for redundancy so I still had originals. Then I got the linkstation which seemed like it would be good but was much more expensive. I setup raid 5 with hot spare. It uses linux MDRAID which I have found to be horrible. Again within a year I had a disk fail. It had numerous recovery problems also, though I was finally able to get the data off it. Bufallo support was beyond worthless. The RAID 5 rebuild took 4 days with the cheapo processor they had in there and the network performance was never very good. Then OSX lion came out which is incompatible with the time machine on the buffalo. Even though I only had it 6 months it is completely unsupported. I will never buy from buffalo again, I feel like I was basically scammed by them on that system. The buffalo system also rattled and buzzed like a motherfucker which drove me crazy. The only goos thing about it was the case.
I let all those sit for about 6 months because I was so pissed and was thinking I was going to need to buy an "enterprise" type NAS which runs easily $2-3K or more. Doing some research I stumbled onto FreeNAS which was last week and as of now 100% of my backup and HTPC needs are solved just like that. Here is what I built and I am extremely happy with it!
I knew that I wanted a RAID 6 type setup. I always seem to have horrible luck with hard drives. I don't think it is environmental because it has persisted across different homes, etc. I can be guaranteed that I will loose 1 per year or more which is why I know use SSDs in all my laptops and have had much better luck with them.
I knew I wanted RAID 6 which means 4 drives or more which means either a RAID card/sata expander or a mainboard with 4+ ports. I also wanted mini-itx so there were not a lot of options but I settled on the ASRock AMD A75 FCH mini-itx board after testing several out. I have not used an ASRock mainboard before but everything about it seems extremely high quality. It has 4 sata III ports and it has an HDMI port also which was a nice to have but not a requirement for me. Little things stood out to me that make the ASRock seem excellent. On a gigabyte board I tried it had each pair of sata connectors oriented so that that cable releases were sandwiched on the inside which makes it nearly impossible to remove. Just careless or stupid engineering. The ASRock layout, connectors and bios seem incredibly well thought out.
For the RAID 6 I settled on using RAIDZ2 instead of other options. I don't trust mdraid anymore at all and it seemed like RAIDZ was the best option with FreeNAS. I am extremely pleased with that decision, everything about it seems rock solid and I have been doing simulated failures and rebuilds for a week without any problems. A million years ago I worked for SUN and the engineering there was always top notch. I can see how that comes through in RAIDZ and ZFS in general. I selected the AMD A4-3400 CPU because it was lower wattage and still high performance which I felt would increase the raid rebuild and scrub speeds. My 4x1TB RAIDZ2 rebuilds/scrubs in about 2.5 hours at 200-300MB/s. I consider anything under 3 hours acceptable.
For a case I ordered the Lian-li PQ-25 which seems a great fit. It has a 5 disk SATA backplane and takes a standard PSU in a reasonably small form factor with good ventilation. At some point I'm going to need to upgrade storage size and will probably up my processor and goto 5x2TB drives.
I started with 4GB ram but will add 4GB more to see if it further improves scrub speeds and transfers at all though I am happy with where they are now.
I have seagate 7200RPM 1TB drives that came from the buffalo (one replaced with identical new).
I bought everything amazon prime except the case. My total costs were:
Drives $0 (came from buffalo, value about $96/each)
Mainboard: ASRock Socket FM1/AMD A75 FCH/SATA3&USB3.0/A&GbE/Mini-ITX Motherboard A75M-ITX $89.99
Memory: Transcend Information 4 GB DDR3 1333 L-DIMM - Frustration-Free Packaging (JM1333KLN-4GE) $18.99
Processor: AMD A4-3400 APU with AMD Radeon 6410 HD Graphics 2.7GHz Socket FM1 65W Dual-Core Processor - Retail (AD3400OJHXBOX) Includes CPU cooler $39.99
USB Boot Drive: SanDisk Cruzer Fit 4 GB USB Flash Drive SDCZ33-004G-B35 (micro size) $6.99
PSU: Diablotek DA Series 250-Watt ATX Power Supply PSDA250 $14.99
Total without case and drives: $170.95
Drives if I bought new Seagate ST2000DM001 Barracuda 7200RPM 2 TB SATA 6 GB/s NCQ 64 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (4x2TB for 8TB): $407.88
I struggled a lot with cases. I don't know why manufacturers don't offer better home HTPC/NAS cases. I settled on the Lian-Li PQ-25 for now at $137.99 with shipping. I have a laser cutter and may consider making a small (cheap) laser cut NAS case design and put it on ponoko if there was any interest. Alternatively I deal with China a lot of there is a nice aluminum enterprise type 4-bay NAS hot swap case I can get around $150 including PSU in some kind of group buy if others were interested.
I would be happy to share more benchmarks of the system if I knew how. For me it was able to sync my 95% full 500GB macbook over timemachine first load in around 6 hours so that's perfect and beats everything else I have tried by at least 2 full days. I know I can loose 2 disks of 4 and my data is still protected. I have tried this including just yanking drives out cold and RAIDZ2 recovered perfectly (no write hole). I can now have all my macs sync timemachine every night including some over wifi and be 100% confident it will be done before I get up. I stupidly wasted about $2K on other solutions before I found FreeNAS.
The only frustation I had was trying to get 1TB of data into the system from a 3TB USB drive I had. There is no filesystem that is supported by FreeNAS and linux that works in that scenario. FreeNAS would not recognize my ext2, ext3 or ext4 formatting even when I set inode to 128 and did three separate 1TB partitions. I could not get Ubuntu to reliably write to UFS. I also tried NTFS which ubuntu seemed to be OK with and was able to mount in FreeNAS but it would randomly hard lock the FreeNAS system during copying. Ultimately I setup a vmware on my mac with ubuntu live cd and mounted the drive there and copied using rsync without compression over ssh. It took 1.5 days but worked.
Thanks so much, I hope this helps other people thinking about doing the same.
Historically I have about 1.5TB of data compressed that needs backing up. I tried in order the western digital mybook, iomega storcenter and buffalo linkstation quad. The first two had awful performance taking a week or more to copy the data to them and then each had a disk failure each in the first year. Recovery (mirror) on each did not work. I always try to keep my data in as many places as I can for redundancy so I still had originals. Then I got the linkstation which seemed like it would be good but was much more expensive. I setup raid 5 with hot spare. It uses linux MDRAID which I have found to be horrible. Again within a year I had a disk fail. It had numerous recovery problems also, though I was finally able to get the data off it. Bufallo support was beyond worthless. The RAID 5 rebuild took 4 days with the cheapo processor they had in there and the network performance was never very good. Then OSX lion came out which is incompatible with the time machine on the buffalo. Even though I only had it 6 months it is completely unsupported. I will never buy from buffalo again, I feel like I was basically scammed by them on that system. The buffalo system also rattled and buzzed like a motherfucker which drove me crazy. The only goos thing about it was the case.
I let all those sit for about 6 months because I was so pissed and was thinking I was going to need to buy an "enterprise" type NAS which runs easily $2-3K or more. Doing some research I stumbled onto FreeNAS which was last week and as of now 100% of my backup and HTPC needs are solved just like that. Here is what I built and I am extremely happy with it!
I knew that I wanted a RAID 6 type setup. I always seem to have horrible luck with hard drives. I don't think it is environmental because it has persisted across different homes, etc. I can be guaranteed that I will loose 1 per year or more which is why I know use SSDs in all my laptops and have had much better luck with them.
I knew I wanted RAID 6 which means 4 drives or more which means either a RAID card/sata expander or a mainboard with 4+ ports. I also wanted mini-itx so there were not a lot of options but I settled on the ASRock AMD A75 FCH mini-itx board after testing several out. I have not used an ASRock mainboard before but everything about it seems extremely high quality. It has 4 sata III ports and it has an HDMI port also which was a nice to have but not a requirement for me. Little things stood out to me that make the ASRock seem excellent. On a gigabyte board I tried it had each pair of sata connectors oriented so that that cable releases were sandwiched on the inside which makes it nearly impossible to remove. Just careless or stupid engineering. The ASRock layout, connectors and bios seem incredibly well thought out.
For the RAID 6 I settled on using RAIDZ2 instead of other options. I don't trust mdraid anymore at all and it seemed like RAIDZ was the best option with FreeNAS. I am extremely pleased with that decision, everything about it seems rock solid and I have been doing simulated failures and rebuilds for a week without any problems. A million years ago I worked for SUN and the engineering there was always top notch. I can see how that comes through in RAIDZ and ZFS in general. I selected the AMD A4-3400 CPU because it was lower wattage and still high performance which I felt would increase the raid rebuild and scrub speeds. My 4x1TB RAIDZ2 rebuilds/scrubs in about 2.5 hours at 200-300MB/s. I consider anything under 3 hours acceptable.
For a case I ordered the Lian-li PQ-25 which seems a great fit. It has a 5 disk SATA backplane and takes a standard PSU in a reasonably small form factor with good ventilation. At some point I'm going to need to upgrade storage size and will probably up my processor and goto 5x2TB drives.
I started with 4GB ram but will add 4GB more to see if it further improves scrub speeds and transfers at all though I am happy with where they are now.
I have seagate 7200RPM 1TB drives that came from the buffalo (one replaced with identical new).
I bought everything amazon prime except the case. My total costs were:
Drives $0 (came from buffalo, value about $96/each)
Mainboard: ASRock Socket FM1/AMD A75 FCH/SATA3&USB3.0/A&GbE/Mini-ITX Motherboard A75M-ITX $89.99
Memory: Transcend Information 4 GB DDR3 1333 L-DIMM - Frustration-Free Packaging (JM1333KLN-4GE) $18.99
Processor: AMD A4-3400 APU with AMD Radeon 6410 HD Graphics 2.7GHz Socket FM1 65W Dual-Core Processor - Retail (AD3400OJHXBOX) Includes CPU cooler $39.99
USB Boot Drive: SanDisk Cruzer Fit 4 GB USB Flash Drive SDCZ33-004G-B35 (micro size) $6.99
PSU: Diablotek DA Series 250-Watt ATX Power Supply PSDA250 $14.99
Total without case and drives: $170.95
Drives if I bought new Seagate ST2000DM001 Barracuda 7200RPM 2 TB SATA 6 GB/s NCQ 64 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (4x2TB for 8TB): $407.88
I struggled a lot with cases. I don't know why manufacturers don't offer better home HTPC/NAS cases. I settled on the Lian-Li PQ-25 for now at $137.99 with shipping. I have a laser cutter and may consider making a small (cheap) laser cut NAS case design and put it on ponoko if there was any interest. Alternatively I deal with China a lot of there is a nice aluminum enterprise type 4-bay NAS hot swap case I can get around $150 including PSU in some kind of group buy if others were interested.
I would be happy to share more benchmarks of the system if I knew how. For me it was able to sync my 95% full 500GB macbook over timemachine first load in around 6 hours so that's perfect and beats everything else I have tried by at least 2 full days. I know I can loose 2 disks of 4 and my data is still protected. I have tried this including just yanking drives out cold and RAIDZ2 recovered perfectly (no write hole). I can now have all my macs sync timemachine every night including some over wifi and be 100% confident it will be done before I get up. I stupidly wasted about $2K on other solutions before I found FreeNAS.
The only frustation I had was trying to get 1TB of data into the system from a 3TB USB drive I had. There is no filesystem that is supported by FreeNAS and linux that works in that scenario. FreeNAS would not recognize my ext2, ext3 or ext4 formatting even when I set inode to 128 and did three separate 1TB partitions. I could not get Ubuntu to reliably write to UFS. I also tried NTFS which ubuntu seemed to be OK with and was able to mount in FreeNAS but it would randomly hard lock the FreeNAS system during copying. Ultimately I setup a vmware on my mac with ubuntu live cd and mounted the drive there and copied using rsync without compression over ssh. It took 1.5 days but worked.
Thanks so much, I hope this helps other people thinking about doing the same.
