Considering a SAN for your home?
Jan. 23rd, 2023 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneI've been thinking about one for some time for single-sourcing backups and possibly for local streaming. I mentioned this to Dave, and he says 'Did you see the one in the BackerKit email?' I had not so he sent me this link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/storaxa/fully-customizable-home-cloud-storage-with-remote-access-nas
It's a heck of a solution if you need one. Five 3.5" spinning rust bays (2.5" adapters will be available), 4 SSD bays, it comes with a 120 gig SSD for the linux OS, has a built-in OpenWRT 6E WiFi router, and bare with no drives is about $265 with shipping to the USA! Supposedly VAT/customs is included in your final price, though some backers in Europe are skeptical. You can Plex with it if you stick with the Intel N6005 CPU, they're going to offer an AMD CPU that will support ECC RAM, but the N6005 has a specific feature set that makes it much better for transcoding.
It's small in that the motherboard powering it is a Mini ITX, 17cm square. And you can access it across the internet if you so desire, myself I'll probably block it at my router from the wild. It will do RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10. They claim you can put in 100 TB of disk! And the power system has an additional 30 watts of overhead for higher capacity drives in the future. The base software is Proxmox VE linux with TrueNAS-SCALE and OpenWRT.
Assuming no serious component shortages or other problems, they expect to ship their first thousand in June. While they don't have a gold prototype yet, they say that everything is in place to start rolling as soon as Kickstarter releases the money and they crunch the numbers on exactly how many of what they're building. The creators are a very skilled hardware team. The project is massively over-funded and closing in 18 days.
The team behind it is going to do a series of instructional videos after the project ends at various skill levels from novice to skilled linux admin.
I haven't started looking at SAN drives yet, I think five 6 TB drives should be fairly affordable. I don't know that I'm going to plug SSDs into it at this time, I don't think they're cost effective for large volumes of storage compared to spinning rust.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/storaxa/fully-customizable-home-cloud-storage-with-remote-access-nas
It's a heck of a solution if you need one. Five 3.5" spinning rust bays (2.5" adapters will be available), 4 SSD bays, it comes with a 120 gig SSD for the linux OS, has a built-in OpenWRT 6E WiFi router, and bare with no drives is about $265 with shipping to the USA! Supposedly VAT/customs is included in your final price, though some backers in Europe are skeptical. You can Plex with it if you stick with the Intel N6005 CPU, they're going to offer an AMD CPU that will support ECC RAM, but the N6005 has a specific feature set that makes it much better for transcoding.
It's small in that the motherboard powering it is a Mini ITX, 17cm square. And you can access it across the internet if you so desire, myself I'll probably block it at my router from the wild. It will do RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10. They claim you can put in 100 TB of disk! And the power system has an additional 30 watts of overhead for higher capacity drives in the future. The base software is Proxmox VE linux with TrueNAS-SCALE and OpenWRT.
Assuming no serious component shortages or other problems, they expect to ship their first thousand in June. While they don't have a gold prototype yet, they say that everything is in place to start rolling as soon as Kickstarter releases the money and they crunch the numbers on exactly how many of what they're building. The creators are a very skilled hardware team. The project is massively over-funded and closing in 18 days.
The team behind it is going to do a series of instructional videos after the project ends at various skill levels from novice to skilled linux admin.
I haven't started looking at SAN drives yet, I think five 6 TB drives should be fairly affordable. I don't know that I'm going to plug SSDs into it at this time, I don't think they're cost effective for large volumes of storage compared to spinning rust.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-24 12:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-24 04:24 pm (UTC)I remember we had a problem at one time with this one server repeatedly crashing. Turned out we put the print spool on the C:, which also had the OS page file, and this twit was sending multiple multi-gig print jobs rather than just telling the program to print X copies. The print queue would fill the disk, then when the page file needed to expand a little, the OS would lock up and crash the server. We had stern words with the twit and relocated the print spool to a different drive.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-25 01:00 am (UTC)Hugs, Jon
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Date: 2023-01-25 07:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-25 08:19 pm (UTC)I agree, it would be expensive to populate all of those slots immediately. I just specced an 8 TB at Newegg for $390 for a NAS/SAN-level drive, you could easily go beyond $1k. But you could also just slot two drives in it and have them mirrored, then as money becomes available add more drives and expand the RAID capability. I paid a lot less than that for a 6 TB bare drive, but it wasn't a SAN drive, which would probably be desirable. Another thing to consider is sourcing drives. If you were to buy five drives, for example, same make and model from the same dealer, they would probably be from the same manufacturing batch. Which means all of them would have about the same MTBF. The problem here is that when one drive fails, you replace it, and the SAN begins rebuilding it: stressing the other drives that are also probably pushing their max life, and you're likely to have additional drive failures. It's best to mix up the drives to get them from different vendors so you're likely to get different batches and reduce the chance of cascading failures during rebuilds.