Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

Meanwhile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

As someone with a bit of experience on this topic:

HDDs doesn't like micromovements. If you put it on a pink foam mat (both a computer and yoga ones) it wouldn't matter. If you 'rigid mount' it but your screws would came lose then your HDD wouldn't like it because it wo&ld result in microvibrations from the self induced oscillations.

Rubber washers are good because they eat those microvibrations. The hard foam which is talked about in the linked article is not good because it is bad from the all aspects - too hard to eat up microvibrations, too soft to be a rigid mount.

The worst thing you can do is to rigid mount an HDD to a case which is a subject to a constant vibration load eg from a heavy duty fan or some engine.

Thanks, very interesting. TIL.

Yes. If you need this you are far better off buying SSDs than wasting time on these silly ideas.

I'm pretty sure whatever that community experienced is more anecdotal that statistically provable...

Have you considered 2nd hard enterprise SSDs?

Sometimes larger sized models of those (15TB+) can be found with very good pricing. :)

The official TrueNAS docs recommend against using USB drives [1]. My understanding is that between the USB controller, flaky connectors and cables, and usb-to-sata bridges of varying quality, there are just too many unknowns to guarantee a reliable experience. For example, I’ve heard that some usb-to-sata controllers will drop commands and not report SMART data. That said, there are of course many people on the internet who have thrown caution to the wind and report that it’s working fine for them.

Personally I’m in the process of building a NAS with an old 9th gen Intel i5. Many mobos support 6 SATA ports and three mirrored 20 TB pairs is enough storage for me. I’m guessing it’ll be a bit more power hungry than a ugreen/synology/etc appliance but there will also be plenty of headroom for running other services.

[1] https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/13.0/gettingstarted/coreha...

I own this and it's worth it's weight in gold https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-H-T...

Yes. It's pricey but it's never been a problem. It can connect like 12 HDDs with 256GB ram and has 10GBe and runs at a tiny TDP. Has IPMI. Fits in a tiny case.

The only issue I had with this motherboard was that it was difficult to find someone who sold it. Love it

Also I don't see the built-in UPS. The external drives still use external power

The laptop batteries tend to go bad(either just stop working or expand and become a major fire hazard) after a year or two as they are not built to be fully charged for years on end. I tried doing it twice and that is what happened both times.

Would not recommend; if you want a UPS just buy one, the small ones are not that expensive, like 70 USD.

I don't use a laptop, but I use something fairly adjacent: the Beelink SER6 (https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-4-75GHz-PCIe4-0-Supports-HDMI...), which is basically a gaming laptop converted into a small desktop. For the most part, it has actually been pretty great. It's quiet, has a CPU that is much better than I expected, and a decent enough GPU to do hardware transcoding for Jellyfin without much issue.

I use USB chassis of hard drives to work as the "NAS" part, and it works fairly well, and this box is also my router (using a 10 GbE thunderbolt adapter) though my biggest issue comes with large updates in NixOS.

For reasons that are still not completely clear to me, when I do a very large system update (rebuilding Triton-llvm for Immich seems to really do it), the internal network will consistently cut out until I reboot the machine. I can log in through the external interface with Tailscale and my phone, so the machine itself is fine, but for whatever reason the internal network will die.

And that's kind of the price you pay for using a non-server to do server work. It will generally work pretty well, but I find that it does require a bit more babysitting than a rack mount server did.

If you don’t need any performance it’s a great backup strategy. If your only way of connecting the drives to the laptop is USB I would be concerned about data integrity if it’s important data.

I ran an old Thinkpad as a home router and small home server/NAS device for quite a long time, usually swapping out my old work upgrades every 3 years or so.

They all had onboard gige so it worked fine - native vlan for the inbound Comcast connection, tagged vlans out to a switch for the various LAN connections.

They were from the era of DVD drives so I was able to put an extra HDD in the DVD slot to expand storage with. One model even had a eSATA port.

They worked great. Built-in UPS and they come with a reliable crash cart built-in!

For me it was important to have ECC RAM and laptops pretty much never have that. My personal recommendation is an old IBM/Lenovo workstation tower as the base. I bought one for $35 on eBay and added $40 of RAM (32GB). A $10 UPS from Goodwill with a $25 battery from Amazon, and whatever hard drives you want. I run Ubuntu and ZFS on it but next time would probably opt for FreeBSD for a nicer OS.

When I used a laptop as server, the battery became a spicy pillow. I think laptops are not designed to be running continuously and on warmer temperatures than normal.

i had a m.2 to pci-e for a sata controller. worked fine but the ups thing is a bit non workable as the drives are not powered by the laptop

Used a Lenovo X220T with a cracked screen and missing keyboard a few years back. Worked like a champ (as a server). Cooling was much better without the keyboard.

I see a lot of people using M710 mini desktops - I think you can pop a pcie 10gbe card in and a m.2 SATA card and 3d print a disk stand?

I’ve use an P51 for about a year now with no issues. I initially bought 6bay DAS, but I’ve since moved to pure SSD storage inside the laptop.

You can. It works fine if you know the limitations. An important one is, drives could disconnect, so traditional RAID wouldn't be good.

If you want redundancy, look at something like SnapRAID, http://www.snapraid.it

If you want to combine into a single volume, consider rclone. These remotes specifically are the ones I'm thinking could be useful,

- https://rclone.org/local/

- https://rclone.org/combine/

- https://rclone.org/cache/

Good luck o7

> I was about to buy a NAS.

The UNAS Pro 8 just came out and I'm thinking about getting it, switching away from my aging Synology setup ... only thing I wish it had was a UPS server as my Synology currently serves that purpose to trigger other machines to shut down ...

> How do you store ~100 TB of content with room to grow without a wide NAS?

In the cloud (S3) or on offline (unpowered HDDs or tapes or optical media) I suppose. Most people just don't store that much content.

> So far none of this seems to solve the problem that is solved quite elegantly by the 1U enterprise box... if only you don't look at the power bill.

What kind of power bill are you talking about? I'd expect the drives to be about 10W each steady state (more when spinning up), so 180W. I'd expect a lower-power motherboard/CPU running near idle to be another 40W (or less). If you have a 90% efficient PSU, then maybe 250W in total.

If you're way more than that, you can probably swap out the old enterprisey motherboard/RAM/CPU/PSU for something more modern and do a lot better. Maybe in the same case.

I'm learning 1U is pretty unpleasant though. E.g. I tried an ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 in a Supermicro CSE-813M. A standard IO panel is higher than 1U. If I remove the IO panel, the motherboard does fit...but the VRM heatsink also was high enough that the top case bows a bit when I put it on. I guess you can get smaller third party VRM heat sinks, but that's another thing to deal with. The CPU cooler options are limited (the Dynatron A42 works, but it's loud when the CPU draws a lot of power). 40mm case fans are also quite loud to move the required airflow. You can buy noctuas or whatever, but they won't really keep it cool. The ones that actually do spin very fast and so are very loud. You must have noticed this too, although maybe you have a spot for the machine where you don't hear the noise all the time.

I'm trying 2U now. I bought and am currently setting up an Innovision AS252-A06 chassis: 8 3.5" hot swap bays, 2U, 520mm depth. (Of course you can have a lot more drives if you go to 2.5" drives, give up hot swap, and/or have room for a deeper chassis.) Less worry about if stuff will fit, more room for airflow without noise.

There's a bit of a trend of vendors packaging mobile CPUs in desktop form factor which are a good candidate for this. Rather than the prebuilt mini PCs this also includes mini-ITX boards. Personally I use the Minisforum BD795i SE, but there are others too.

Check for PCIe bifurcation support. If that's there you can pop in a PCIe to quad M.2 adapter. That will split a PCIe x16 slot into 4 x M.2s. Each of those (and the M.2s already on the motherboard) can then be loaded with either an NVMe drive or an M.2 to SATA adapter, with each adapter providing 6 x SATA ports. That setup gives a lot of flexibility to build out a fairly extensive storage array with both NVMe and spinning platters and no USB in sight.

As a nice side effect of the honestly bonkers amount of compute in those boards there's also plenty of capacity to run other VM workloads on the same metal which lets a lot of the storage access happen locally rather than over the network. For me, that means the on-board 2.5GbE NIC is more than fine, but if not you can also load a M.2 to 10GbE adapter(s) as needed.

I have to imagine that the best NAS build is simply a 6-core or 8-core standard AMD or Intel with a few HBA controllers and maybe 10Gbit SPF+ fiber or something.

"Old server hardware" for $300 is a bit of a variation, in that you're just buying something from 5 years ago so that its cheaper. But if you want to improve power-efficiency, buy a CPU from today rather than an old one.

--------

IIRC, the "5 year old used market" for servers is particularly good because many datacenters and companies opt for a ~5-year upgrade cycle. That means 5-year-old equipment is always being sold off at incredible rates.

Any 5-year-old server will obviously have all the features you need for a NAS (likely excellent connectivity, expandibility, BMS, physical space, etc. etc.). Just you have to put up with power-efficiency specs of 5 years ago.

If you want instant access to any bit of the 100 TB content, you need a wide NAS.

Otherwise, you can have a couple of HDD racks in which you can insert HDDs when needed (SATA allows live insertion and extraction, like USB).

Then you have an unlimited amount of offline storage, which can be accessed in a minute by swapping HDDs. You can keep an index of all files stored offline on the SSD of your PC, for easy searches without access to HDDs. The index should have all relevant metadata, including content hashes, for file integrity verification and for duplicate files identification.

Having 2 HDD racks instead of just 1 allows direct copies between HDDs and doubles the capacity accessible without swapping HDDs. Adding more than 2 adds little benefit. Moreover, some otherwise suitable MBs have only 2 SATA connectors.

Or else you can use an LTO drive, which is a very steep initial investment, but its cost is recovered after a few hundred TB by the much cheaper magnetic tapes.

Tapes have a worse access time, of the order of one minute after tape insertion, but they have much higher sequential transfer speeds than cheap SATA HDDs. Thus for retrieving big archive files or movies they save time. Transfers from magnetic tape must be done either directly to an NVME SSD or to an NVME SSD through Ethernet of 10 Gb/s or faster, otherwise their intrinsic transfer speed will not be reached.

Nah buy the right enterprise gear instead

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-H-T...

If you want 100TB, you need a bigger NAS than most, and that makes most of the DIY NAS not so good. 2-4 drives seems to be where DIY shines. These days motherboards often stop at 4x sata, so you'll need a HBA or USB (eww).

Personally, I just don't have that much data, 24TB mirrored for important data is probably enough, and I have my old mirror set avaialable for media like recorded tv and maybe dvds and blu-rays if I can figure out a way to play them that I like better than just putting the discs in the machine.

check out the Jonsbo N5 NAS case, you can toss 12 drives and a low power mITX motherboard (see sibling comments) in it for a cheap-ish neat-ish box with a not-proprietary upgrade path

Uhh could you provide a hook for such a deal? I've been starving for more storage and can now handle a rack mounted system but have been avoiding dropping $1000 on a pair of new hard drives.

A fortune? I'm getting 14tb SAS drives "recertified" on ebay for 150usd. Substantially less than most other sources of hard drives.

Depending on your drive enclosure it should also be able to power down drives that aren't actively being used.

Recertified/used enterprise equipment is the only way to affordably host 100s of terabytes at home.

I would also prefer having a large number of high capacity SSDs so I could replace my spinning hard drives.

But even the cheapest high capacity SSD deals are still a lot more expensive than hard drive array.

I’ll continue replacing failing hard drives for a few more years. For me that has meant zero replacements over a decade, though I planned for a 5% annual failure rate and have a spare drive in the case ready to go. I could replace a failed drive from the array in the time takes to shut down, swap a cable to the spare drive, and boot up again.

SSDs also need to be examined for power loss protection. The results with consumer drives are mixed and it’s hard to find good info about how common drives behave. Getting enterprise grade drives with guaranteed PLP from large on-onboard capacitors is ideal, but those are expensive. Spinning hard drives have the benefit of using their rotational inertia to power the drive long enough to finish outstanding writes.

RAID. Preferably RAID 6. Much, much better to build a system to survive failure than to prevent failure.

I have a dozen refurbished exos disk in my storage machine. Works super! SSD for bigger storage is simply too expensive

And I prefer to have a healthy bank account balance.

Storing 18TB (let alone with raid) on SSDs is something only those earning Silicon Valley tech wages can afford.

Might be a bit adventurous for primary storage (though with enough backup and redundancy, why not). But seems perfect for me for backup / cold storage.

Every drive is "used" the moment you turn it on.

The "OS" on the drive stands for "off-spec". As far as I understand, here's where they come from:

1. A large company (think cloud storage provider or something) wanting to build out storage infrastructure buys a large amount of drives from Seagate.

2. When the company receives the drives from Seagate, they randomly sample from the lot to make sure the drives are fully functional and meet specifications.

3. The company identifies issues from the sampled drives. These can range from dents/dings in the casing or torn labels to firmware or reliability issues.

4. The company returns the entire lot to Seagate as defective. Seagate now doesn't want anything to do with these drives, so they relabel them as "OS" with no Seagate branding and sell them as-is at a discount to drive resellers.

5. The drive resellers may or may not do further testing on the drives (you can probably tell by how much of a warranty a given reseller offers) before selling them onto people wanting cheap storage.

Apparently Seagate drives that weren't good enough to have their own name on them... which given the history of even their branded drives, is something I'd only use for temporary caching of data that's easily regenerated.

Trying to think of reasons why the manufacturer wouldn't want their name on them and none of them are good. And for not even much of a discount.

Weren't shucked drives (removed from enclosures) referred to as White label drives at one point?

If CSPRNG encrypts /dev/urandom, encrypting the data using a binary 256 bit AES cmd to update entropy pool would double contain the data, which is writing /dev/random to /dev/nvme0n1p1.

The reason you don’t see videos arranged by product is because everyone knows not to trust unknown creators telling you how great a product is.

Viewers want to see opinions from specific people they’ve come to trust, not the first video that comes up for a product.

There's Kakaku.com[1] in Japanese Internet for all consumer electronics, Minkara for cars, bookmeter.com for books, and 5ch.net as fallback. It's surprising that there's only Goodreads on English Internet that everyone have heard of...

1: https://review.kakaku.com/review/K0001682323/ | https://review-kakaku-com.translate.goog/review/K0001682323/...