Hi,
my personal private journey with network attached storage began some time after the millenium with a small Linksys Box running NSLU2 which made my 500GB external hard drive available to my hacked xbox, PC and laptop.
While in university, I got free access to windows server 2008 r2 and replaced the Linksys Station (which had a broken USB flash drive after excessive use) with a low power AMD Athlon X2 4050e. As money was scarce, I loved the ability to add disks of various sizes, speed and age to the (video) storage space system on windows server 2012 - But my most important data was still stored on a mirrored soft raid1. This server is still up and running with 4TB mirrored and a JBOD of the historic disks.
Meanwhile I did an experiment with the cheapest QNAP I could find (TS-228), only to find out, that all the nice stuff (e.g. Snapshots, rsync/rsnapshot) was either crippled by low power ARM or crippled by QNAPs software. Got the rsnapshot stuff running, but it was very tedious to configure it to be persistent. So QNAP and me is a very distanced relationship. Also the first disk died pretty soon, as the case is not really made for 24/7 usage. It is still running once a week as a backup device.
So there is one fragile server, which was meant to run 24/7 but is too old, slow and I fear it will brake down if I switch it on too long or too often and a NAS with 8TB in RAID 1 which was only meant for backing up the server :)
To follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, a new machine needs to be built to fulfill the 24/7 requirement.
Fortunately a network cabinet (only 500mm depth) is already in place and the long planning phase has come to an end with the discovery of the IPC-G438 rack chassis.
The Supermicro A2SDI-H-TF had dropped in price recently (EU) and the enterprise grade hdd types have a good €/TB ratio as well within the helium filled ranges, so I ordered two 12 TB Toshiba enterprise hdd as well as 2x32GB Samsung registered ECC RAM.
Together with two cheap but new Intel 128GB SSDs, everything is in place and the burn in phase started with two successful passes of Memcheck.
As some fans are still missing, the cpu test is postponed and the SMART Tests are currently running.
The CPU was constantly on 65°C during Memtest with a room temperature of 19°C, so the fan setup needs to be optimized. Currently it is sitting at abut 51°C during idle/long SMART test. But additional fans are already ordered, the case is closed but not in the cabinet yet and the cables are not yet perfectly in place as I'm waiting for the PSU, to have 12 original SATA power plugs and less cables with the beQuiet Straight Power 11 and 3x CS-3440 cables.
Further room for updates is available, the maximum will be 10xHDD, a ZIL/L2ARC in PCIex4 and m.2 slots.
But this won't be necessary until I buy two 10GBit Ethernet switches and a 10G card for my PC.
This machine will be the central data storage for our family. The old server might become a backup machine in addition to the qnap box.
On the software side I'm looking forward to TrueNAS Scale, as my experience with Suse/RedHat/Debian/Raspbian is on a medium level since more than 15 years while my FreeBSD experience is about 18hours long since the first experimental TrueNAS install.
Two (temporary test) pictures and best regards,
Jonas
my personal private journey with network attached storage began some time after the millenium with a small Linksys Box running NSLU2 which made my 500GB external hard drive available to my hacked xbox, PC and laptop.
While in university, I got free access to windows server 2008 r2 and replaced the Linksys Station (which had a broken USB flash drive after excessive use) with a low power AMD Athlon X2 4050e. As money was scarce, I loved the ability to add disks of various sizes, speed and age to the (video) storage space system on windows server 2012 - But my most important data was still stored on a mirrored soft raid1. This server is still up and running with 4TB mirrored and a JBOD of the historic disks.
Meanwhile I did an experiment with the cheapest QNAP I could find (TS-228), only to find out, that all the nice stuff (e.g. Snapshots, rsync/rsnapshot) was either crippled by low power ARM or crippled by QNAPs software. Got the rsnapshot stuff running, but it was very tedious to configure it to be persistent. So QNAP and me is a very distanced relationship. Also the first disk died pretty soon, as the case is not really made for 24/7 usage. It is still running once a week as a backup device.
So there is one fragile server, which was meant to run 24/7 but is too old, slow and I fear it will brake down if I switch it on too long or too often and a NAS with 8TB in RAID 1 which was only meant for backing up the server :)
To follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, a new machine needs to be built to fulfill the 24/7 requirement.
Fortunately a network cabinet (only 500mm depth) is already in place and the long planning phase has come to an end with the discovery of the IPC-G438 rack chassis.
The Supermicro A2SDI-H-TF had dropped in price recently (EU) and the enterprise grade hdd types have a good €/TB ratio as well within the helium filled ranges, so I ordered two 12 TB Toshiba enterprise hdd as well as 2x32GB Samsung registered ECC RAM.
Together with two cheap but new Intel 128GB SSDs, everything is in place and the burn in phase started with two successful passes of Memcheck.
As some fans are still missing, the cpu test is postponed and the SMART Tests are currently running.
The CPU was constantly on 65°C during Memtest with a room temperature of 19°C, so the fan setup needs to be optimized. Currently it is sitting at abut 51°C during idle/long SMART test. But additional fans are already ordered, the case is closed but not in the cabinet yet and the cables are not yet perfectly in place as I'm waiting for the PSU, to have 12 original SATA power plugs and less cables with the beQuiet Straight Power 11 and 3x CS-3440 cables.
Further room for updates is available, the maximum will be 10xHDD, a ZIL/L2ARC in PCIex4 and m.2 slots.
But this won't be necessary until I buy two 10GBit Ethernet switches and a 10G card for my PC.
This machine will be the central data storage for our family. The old server might become a backup machine in addition to the qnap box.
On the software side I'm looking forward to TrueNAS Scale, as my experience with Suse/RedHat/Debian/Raspbian is on a medium level since more than 15 years while my FreeBSD experience is about 18hours long since the first experimental TrueNAS install.
Two (temporary test) pictures and best regards,
Jonas
