On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 07:03:30PM +1000, Piers Rowan wrote:
Friday random semi-serious question;
Like many people I have too much data some work, some create some family, some other...etc. I have some on some backup USB drives that I have never gone back to and also a few unplugged HDD's in the tower (I can't remember even why).
I don't really want to go and buy something (or pay for data of cloud storage) but I thought I might do something with the stuff I have lying around. Does anyone know if this is possible:
unfortunately, doing this with USB drives defeats the purpose. USB drives just aren't reliable enough for a "cloud"-like always-on backup solution. IMO if you're going to do it at all, do it right - and with an eye towards the future. that means spending some money. you'll need a case, a motherboard, RAM and a powersupply. The Silverstone DS380 is very nice (8 x 3.5/2.5" hot-swap SAS/SATA bays + 4 internal 2.5" bays), but costs nearly $200 ($185 from CPL is cheapest i could find). And that doesn't include a power supply - it takes an SFX small-form-factor PSU...that's another $50-$100. http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=452 http://www.shopbot.com.au/pp-silverstone-ds380b-price-481778.html the silverstonetek.com site seems to be down at the moment, so here's a review: http://www.silentpcreview.com/SilverStone_DS380 even if you have no intention of ever filling all 8 hot-swap bays, the extras are useful for occasionally inserting a drive, running a backup (e.g with rsync or btrfs send or zfs send) and then removing it, AND taking it off-site (e.g. to work, to a family member, or anywhere else) and having hot-swap bays that can hold 3.5" AND 2.5" drives is ideal. SSDs are rapidly becoming bigger and cheaper. for any business or org with a good budget they're already a better choice than HDDs for storage servers (e.g. samsung 2TB SSDs are under $1000 in au, and they just released a 4TB SSD for $1500 USD), and it won't be more than a few years before 1-4TB drives are cheap enough to be a no-brainer for home use too. There's also the Norco ITX-S8 which looks better made, but is $330 from techbuy (who have some very good stuff but usually at inflated prices). I can't find any other australian suppliers. http://www.norcotek.com/product/itx-s8/ http://www.techbuy.com.au/p/403563/CASINGS_ITX_CASES/Norco/ITX-S8.asp (nice, i just noticed it has 2 x SFF-8087 connectors. probably no use to you, but very convenient if you're using an LSI 9211 or similar SAS/SATA card like I am) I wish these cases had been around when i built my fileserver a few years ago. lack of decent mini-itx cases with hot-swap bays was the main reason i chose a full-tower case. For a motherboard, use the cheapest / lowest-power / quietest mini-ITX board you can find. Needs to have enough sata ports for your drives (or use a PCI-e slot for a cheap LSI card). anything with built-in AMD radeon or Intel GPU and a built-in GB NIC and/or wifi will be fine. Put as much RAM in it as you can afford. more RAM == more disk caching Use btrfs or zfs for the filesystem. snapshots, COW, error-detection & correction, etc etc. if you don't like them for some reason, you could use LVM and ext4 or xfs, i suppose (but i don't see why you'd want to) For the OS, ubuntu or FreeNAS (or FreeBSD) have good it-just-works out-of-the-box ZFS support. All linux distros have good btrfs support. Also think about what other services aside from samba and/or NFS that the box could provide to your network - internet gateway, firewall, dns cache, dhcp server, wireless AP, ntp time server, radicale or other caldav server (so you don't have to use google or apple calendars to have your calendar synced between desktop, phone, and tablet), squid proxy, web server, etc. debian and ubuntu are good - pretty nearly anything you need is available pre-packaged so can be installed easily. fedora has a lot too. You can run all your own cloud-buzzword-enabled software on your own machine! With a decent CPU and enough RAM, it could even run VMs for you - either kvm or lxc (or docker), e.g. for experimenting with stuff or just to keep the various services isolated from each other. Ok, all this adds up to quite a bit. $185 (case) + $50-$100 (PSU) + $100-$250 (motherboard) + $60-$500 for a CPU) + ~$50 (8GB RAM) totals over $400 if you bought everything brand new. but it'll last for years, and should just sit quietly in the corner doing its job without requiring any attention or fiddling with unless a drive dies. Scrounging and ebay-ing for 2nd hand stuff could be considerably cheaper (except for the case and psu - you probably won't find them 2nd hand). There was a thread on luv-main last March that ended up with lots of good info about building a good home NAS (or whatever) for as little as possible. The miser-NAS stuff starts here: https://lists.luv.asn.au/pipermail/luv-main/2015-March/007601.html The QC5000 mb+cpu combo recommended by Rick Moen in the thread seems to be no longer available. a shame, that was a very nice board at around $145. The Asrock Q2900M (using an Intel BayTrail-D J2900 CPU rather than an AMD A4-5000) seems like a reasonable alternative (actually, better in most respects except it only has two sata ports rather than 4, so an extra sata or sas card will be required. intel does it again) http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Q2900M/ Seems hard to find in .au, could only find it on ebay from a shop in sydney for $177. OTOH, you can still get an AMD A4-7300 for $56 from MSY and a ASRock A68M-HD+ (newer than the ASRock A58M-HD+ in my post from last march) for $73. or get one of the newer A6/A8/A8 CPUs (sorted by price): $ msygrep fm2 cpu -v cooler -p 56 AMD AD7300OKHLBOX x2 A4 7300 Dual Core 3.8Ghz/1M/65FM2 CPU Integrated Radeon HD8470D 75 AMD AD740KYBJABOX x2 A6 7400K Dual Core 3.5Ghz/1M/65FM2 CPU Integrated Radeon R5 Series 128 AMD AD765KXBJABOX x4 A8 7650K Quad Core 3.3Ghz/4M/95FM2 CPU Integrated Radeon R7 Series 129 AMD x4 A10 7700K Quad Core 3.4Ghz (3.8Ghz MAX) /4M FM2 CPU AD770KXBJABOX 155 AMD AD786KYBJCSBX x4 A10 7860K Quad Core 3.6Ghz /4M FM2 CPU Integrated Radeon R7 Series 181 AMD AD787KXDJCBO x4 A10 7870K Quad Core 3.9Ghz/4M/95FM2 CPU Integrated Radeon R7 Series $ msygrep -p fm2 motherboard 68 Gigabyte GA-F2A68HM-DS2 A68 FM2 2xDDR3/1xPCI-Ex16/DVI/D-SUB/SATA3/USB3.0/MicroATX Motherboard 73 AsRock FM2A68M-HD FM2 A88X 2xDDR3/1xPCIe/SATA3/FRONT USB3.0/HDMI/DVI/D-SUB/mATX Motherboard 85 ASUS A68HM-PLUS FM2 A68H 2xDDR3/1xPCI-Ex16/SATA3/USB3.0/DVI/D-Sub/HDMI/RAID/MicroATX Motherboard BTW, some relevant links: http://blog.brianmoses.net/2016/02/diy-nas-2016-edition.html https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/3minso/build_complete_smallest_12... and this site specialises in articles and reviews and discussions about DIY enterprisy stuff on a home or soho budget: http://www.servethehome.com/
- Set up a Raspberry Pi server which exposes a single file system
rpi only has a few USB ports, no sata.
Bonus point: - I can remove one of the drives and access the data on it directly (so it is FAT32 not Linux RAID)
this defeats the purpose of having a good, reliable backup server. and fat32 is just horrible. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>