I am sorry if this the wrong community to ask in, while I have been on Lemmy for more than a year now, I am still learning my way around, and this seems like a relatively active community in a relevant area.
Right, on to my questions!
I am planning to build a NAS over the summer, at the moment all of my personal photos are stored on a single mechanical 2TB Seagate drive that is about 4 years old.
I have other media on another drive that is older but larger, all in all I expect that I have about 8TB of data that I care about.
I am working as a 365 admin, and have been the main Linux admin at my last place of work, I am also a hobby photographer in my spare time.
Currently, I am looking at using either the N4, the N3 or the N5 from Jonsbo, the N4 is a beautiful case!
I am thinking of running four 6TB drives in a softraid like this:
Linux > MDAM (raid 5) > LVM > ext4
My thinking is that I will probably need to migrate to new drives every X years or so, and with the LVM, I can just add a new external (larger) drive to the VG, and move the LV from the old drives to the external drive, remove the old raid drives from the VG, put in new drives, setup MDAM, add the raid to the VG and move the LV back to the raid.
Am I overthinking this? this NAS will be my main media machine and will probably see a decent ammount of use over the years.
I have thought about setting up OpenMediaVault or TrueNAS as the OS, but having never run them, I wonder if they will be as flexible as I want them to be.
I am currently considering just running Debian and setting this up from the terminal, but I am not a super fan of SMB settings in the terminal, I did consider using cockpit as a web admin tool once it is setup to monitor the system, can I do the SMB config from that?
I am apprehensive about a manual SMB config, as the last time I did it, it was a weird mess for the team who had to use it…
I am more familiar with AMD hardware over Intel, and I am looking at the old AM4 plattfrom, but what I don’t know is how much power a homebuilt NAS will use in standby or when active.
Do you really want to run this yourself? If the data is that important to you, I’d probably rather invest in something like a Synology NAS. They make sure that updates won’t kill your data, everything stays secure and you don’t have to mess with
mdadmor LVM yourself.Under the hood, Synology’s SHR also uses bog-standard MD and LVM. So even if the NAS dies, you can still read your data on any Linux machine. But you won’t have to think about updates potentially breaking anything and it has a plethora of features around storage management that you can configure with a few clicks instead of messing around with system packages, config files and systemd.
I’m a big fan of my Synology NAS. It solved the problem I needed it to solve quickly and securely. And now that I have a solid backup system in place, I’ve been building out my own locally hosted services in my own time, stress free. It’s a good safety net that way.
I made a misstake in a previous comment where I mentioned that Synology was a US company, it is not, I’ll update my comment later.
My main issue with Synology is that at this point I want to run something I know is fully offline, I don’t want it reaching out to company servers, I just want a semi-dumb box I can throw my data in.
I am also concerned about Synology’s raid implementation, sure, it cool that you can add new drives as your need grows, but I worry about a raid being unevenly worn.
I mean, you have a Synology raid setup with three drives, you work off of it constantly, and after three years you add another drive and expand the storage but the old drives are still there, with three years of work on the m counting down to when they die, breaking the raid entierly…
Damn, looking back at what I wrote, it is clearly just my anxiety playing up…
I guess im confused at the worry about raid…
The point of raid is speed, but also redundancy. And the odds of 2 drives out of 3 failing at the exact same time is super small…
Synologies raid aray can be set up so that if one drive fails, you can replace it with a new drive and carry on. The array is shared in a way that one bad drive doesnt break the entire system. Sure, your 30tb is functionally less, but your data is safe outside of flooding or a house fire. Thats how i understood it.
maybe im wrong. Idk.