Oh man this is nice. I've been juggling space with an 8TB drive for years (got one when it was the biggest you could get). Recently after deleting some old stuff to free up space I discovered all the newer stuff was fragmented to shit. I was able to squeeze as much as I could onto SSDs and SD cards, defragment the entire thing with Defraggler, and move everything back into defragmented free space. I've managed to pack it like a can of sardines - I've gotten it down to less than 2GB free with no more than 2 or 3 fragments for most files, 7 tops. Still transfers both read and write at around 80MB/s average.

I've experimented with Plex, but since I used to only use the one system with Kodi I never bothered. I recently got a small HTPC to use with an old 3D TV and it's super easy to move Kodi's db to an external MySQL server to sync paused playback and completed lists etc.

I can also just connect Kodi to nVidia shield/moonlight and watch my entire library on my handheld wherever I go, without any additional setup other than Kodi on my desktop and making use of Moonlight which I use for emulating games a bit too powerful for my handheld

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blottootto 3 points 3 years ago

Nice

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lightrush 3 points 3 years ago

Great hardware.

Unraid... shudders

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rbos 2 points 3 years ago

[googles] "Unraid is a proprietary" ... NOPE

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cheerytext1981 1 point 3 years ago

What would you pick over Unraid?

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lightrush 2 points 3 years ago

Linux software LVMRAID or better yet - ZFS.

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quafeinum 3 points 3 years ago

But I don't want to spend my free time managing yet another server. Slap unraid on it an call it a day.

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lightrush 1 point 3 years ago

I was referring to the actual storage system. Unraid's funny JBOD vs some easy to use industry standard solutions. Not the overall OS with any dancing bears it displays, or doesn't. ☺️

If you're looking at the latter, I have no argument against installing something with easy to use interface etc. like Unraid.

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antony 1 point 3 years ago

Do you have any guides for setting this up and optimising it? I'd like my next build to use Debian (like my desktop and servers) instead of Unraid or Synology, both of which are lacking in different ways and ready for retirement.

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lightrush 1 point 3 years ago

Guides no, but there's good documentation. E.g. LVMRAID and ZFS. Here's some overview of ZFS.

For storage arrays, I would use ZFS over LVMRAID for a few reasons the most important being data integrity.

For the system drive, i.e. where the OS is installed, LVMRAID might be simpler to use. There's probably a wiki somewhere for installing Debian on ZFS but LVMRAID has been a Linux staple for a while and it's easy to install an OS onto. E.g. via the OS installers. You could install on LVM then after you're up and running, you can convert that to an LVMRAID with a single command and a second SSD.

The simplest possible scheme I can think of from setup perspective is to use the Debian installer to put your OS on LVM. Once Debian is running, install a second SSD, the same size or larger, then use LVM's lvconvert to convert to a RAID1. See "linear to raid1" in the LVMRAID man page (doc). Then for storage, install ZFS and create a zpool of the desired type from the available disks and throw your data on it.

Read the docs (RTFM), write down a planned list of steps, build the commands needed for each step from the docs (where commands are relevant), then try it on a machine without data.

Here's a sample command I've used to create one of my zpools:

sudo zpool create -f -o ashift=12 -o autotrim=on -O acltype=posixacl -O compression=lz4 -O dnodesize=auto -O normalization=formD -O relatime=on -O xattr=sa -O sync=disabled -O mountpoint=/media/storage-volume1 -O encryption=on raidz /dev/disk/by-id/ata-W /dev/disk/by-id/ata-X /dev/disk/by-id/usb-Y /dev/disk/by-id/usb-Z

It looks complicated but it's rather straightforward when you read the doc.

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joshhsoj1902 2 points 3 years ago

When it comes to a fileserver, I still prefer Truenas.

I've freenas/Truenas for 10 or so years now and unraid for about 5. For the last year I've been working on migrating everything back to Truenas (scale in my case)

Some of my pain points with unraid:

disk read speeds. (Since read is only ever happening from a single disk, it's much easier to notice bottlenecks)
disk replacement. When a disk fails, I find the process of replacing the disk (or decideding to not replace the disk and scatter the data across the remaining disks) fairly tricky and honestly a little scary. I've had to do it twice now and it's the biggest reason I'm now only using unraid to run services but not store any important data.
cache disks are meh. Over the years I've had 3 or 4 times where the mover just stopped, which resulted in a cache disks filling and not flushing to HDDs, which then corrupted some database or file an application was using. Like on one hand you have to use SSD cache disks to run apps or VMs since there is no way to speed up read speeds on HDDs, but on the other it just doesn't work well given enough time.

Some pros:

Application/service hosting is still great in unraid. It's still a pain in the ass getting a VM running on Truenas scale, but with Truenas Scale you can run docker directly.
being able to just add single disks at a time in unraid is nice (until you need to replace one...)

Anyway that's my off the top of my head reasoning. Truenas is a little more work to use overall, but I've found it much more stable

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lightrush 1 point 3 years ago

Sounds a bit like a clown raid if you ask me. It's as if it wasn't designed to be robust under production loads. 🤔

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Goodtoknow 2 points 3 years ago

What does your parirty arrangement look like?

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SlovenianSocket 2 points 3 years ago

Just a single 16tb drive for now. I need a bigger chassis to do dual parity

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MentallyExhausted 2 points 3 years ago

Oof, definitely recommend dual parity for this many drives.

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learning2Draw 2 points 3 years ago

Any recommendations on hdds?

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SlovenianSocket 7 points 3 years ago

External HDDs and shuck the drive out of them. Usually 25% cheaper than internal drives

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someguy3 2 points 3 years ago

Really? Used to be the opposite.

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papertowels 2 points 3 years ago

Shuck stop is my go-to price tracker for this.

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sup 1 point 3 years ago

Thank you for sharing! Wish there was a Canadian version too

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lightrush 1 point 3 years ago

Well the external ones are often slower, but who gives a shit when you put so many of them into a single storage array.

I'm using 4 external drives in their external enclosures over USB and the storage array performs pretty great for larger files. It's even pretty good for random IO but ZFS contributes to that.

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Bardak 1 point 3 years ago

I've been thinkg of getting a refebushed 1 litre office PC and a couple external HDDs to build a basic starter NAS for cheap.

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bier 1 point 3 years ago

Refurbished Segate Exos drives go for around 13€/TB German-Site For example drive

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thekaufaz 2 points 3 years ago

Crazy. I have about 50 usable. Do you have it all backed up? Right now my backups fit on two 14tb drives.

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kionite231 1 point 3 years ago

Do you host any public instance in it?

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SlovenianSocket 1 point 3 years ago

No. Only public facing services is ombi and game servers

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