Not a great time price-wise to be building a NAS, but I have been doing so for the last two weeks. Inside a Jonsbo N6 case, which is pretty nice with an 8x SATA backplane and drive bays (unlike the earlier Jonsbo variants).

I ended up on shucking 4x the 14 TB WD Elements Desktop. They contain helium drives, the WD140EDGZ in my case, and are about a third cheaper than 4x the 12 TB WD Red Plus drives (which are air-filled). The shucking was easier than I expected too, and the performance seems very comparable. The warranty is a definite downside (European, so no Magnuson-Moss), but I think I can even get them back in their enclosure should they fail during the 2-year warranty period.

I've put some second hand 256 GB M.2 SSDs in there as boot drives. It was a bit of a struggle to get it to work in a way that failure of one of the drives doesn't hold up booting, combined with LUKS, TPM keys and ZFS on root. Learned a lot about systemd-boot which I have never used before, but feels a lot saner to me than grub ever was. So now I have a large script which debootstraps a Debian based NAS into being.

I noticed that there are a lot of ZFS myths and cargo culting. For example TFA mentions ECC RAM, which in some circles is a must-have because ZFS would wreck your pool during a scrub otherwise, which is a myth. It's also very expensive, especially this year. You also don't need much RAM for ZFS, L2ARC doesn't use much RAM at all, to name a few others.

Still doubting about setting `dnodesize=auto` (which is the default), because there are some horror stories about that [1]. And it seems impossible to find a cloud storage provider with reasonable prices that supports `zfs send`. Rsync.net upped their minimum order to 10 TiB recently, which is far too much for my use case.

[1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/11353

[2] https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html

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realityfactchex 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Not a great time price-wise to be building a NAS

That under-states the matter. It is a terrible time, price-wise, to build a NAS.

I'd almost rather have no AI whatsoever and have storage 1/10 the price of pre-AI times.

(If there were a magical choice between having AI and significantly more expensive storage, and having no AI and some program to dump that investment money into getting and somehow leveraging significantly more available storage, that is.)

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bigstrat2003 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

I would kill (figuratively, anyway) to have no AI whatsoever. No slop machine threatening to replace my job, or turn my job into babysitting its stupidity, and hardware would be reasonably priced? That would be awesome. AI has brought me nothing but downside.

	▲	dotancohen 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		AI has freed most people I know from the tedious job of writing actual emails and birthday greetings - leaving then more time to e.g. wash dishes or clean the floor. Seriously, if arts and creativity is what sets humans apart from other animals, then AI has almost completely displaced our capacity to even consider doing these activities ourselves. People reach for AI when they should be composing a birthday greeting themselves.
	▲	dandanua 12 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But we now have trillionaires, aren't you happy about that? It means you might be the one some day too /s

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ylyn 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You assert that ECC RAM being necessary for ZFS is just a myth but provide no justification for why that is untrue.

Is it not the case that if you don't have ECC memory, ZFS could end up writing a checksum that does not match the data if you get a bitflip in just the right (wrong) spot?

	▲	Confiks 9 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, indeed. ECC RAM is better than non-ECC RAM, also for ZFS. The myth, popularized by a notorious thread on the TrueNAS forums [1], is specifically that ZFS requires ECC RAM, and will do worse than other filesystems without it, because scrubbing will multiply a single bitflip into a failed pool. A ZFS core developer says that that isn't the case [2]. Here's some more reasoning [3], also about many other myths. [1] https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18480016 [3] https://kldload.com/zfs-wiki/myths
	▲	naturalmovement 10 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> You assert that ECC RAM being necessary for ZFS is just a myth but provide no justification for why that is untrue. ZFS without ECC is no more risky than any other file system / software RAID without ECC. As no one owes you an explanation, it would take you five seconds to Google this and discover: 1. It's been disproven, with one of the original ZFS developers chiming in. 2. The original source of the rumor was a forum post that somehow became canon.

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Fr0styMatt88 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m running an 8-drive ZFS RAIDZ2 pool. I’m wondering if you know — are the free space recommendations around ZFS cargo or real?

Like I’m already giving up two full drives for redundancy (which saved my ass - I recently had two drives fail on me in quick succession — both SSDs from what looks like an identical batch) but then the advice is kinda saying I need to keep at least another drive worth of space free for the pool to perform well and not crap itself. That hurts with current prices for sure.

	▲	Confiks 17 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I’m running an 8-drive ZFS RAIDZ2 pool. I’m wondering if you know — are the free space recommendations around ZFS cargo or real? I'm not entirely sure, but it seems to me that free space (and the 20% reservation) is mostly a proxy for fragmentation, and you can therefore better look at fragmentation directly. That would mean that if you mostly store large files, there shouldn't be a lot of fragmentation even at high utilization. The whole "ZFS changes allocation algorithm from 80% usage on" is something of 10+ years distant past, and lots of things around the allocator have been improved. It's also something that probably isn't too different from the performance of other filesystems at high utilization, so it shouldn't be exaggerated.
	▲	gpt5 28 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		ZFS will auto-degrade performance if there isn't enough headroom. In addition, if you use SSD, you also want the headroom, because otherwise you end up writing and rewriting on the same small empty space which kills SSD (unless you have enterprise SSD, which have built-in headroom).

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watermelon0 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been thinking about building my own NAS as well. Mind sharing how much did you pay for those hard drives, and what motherboard did you choose?

	▲	conradev an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		https://diskprices.com/ is great for this You have SATA or SAS to pick from. The CPU requirements for a storage server are not high. On a typical ATX board you have motherboard SATA and can put SAS controllers in the spare PCIe slots. My first "NAS" was two 22TB hard drives in a ZFS pool on my motherboard SATA
	▲	Confiks 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It was €329 per hard drive (through a reputable store), and I chose the ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 mATX motherboard combined with a Ryzen 5 8500G. Stock CPU cooler, replaced the Jonsbo case fans with Arctic P12 Pro PST LN. I only slightly regret the PSU (MSI MAG A650GL), which could be quieter. Not that it's very noisy, and it's a great PSU otherwise, but I should've chosen one that just shuts the fan down at low power usage.

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neilpanchal 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 4x the 14 TB WD Elements Desktop.

I recommend staying away from SATA drives (huge consumer rush) and look for SAS drives on eBay, particularly HC520 Helium drives from HGST/WD. Need a SAS3008 PCIe adapter ($20) and a SFF-8643 splitter ($30). No backplane is required. Huge lots of decommissioned drives frequently appear. I bought Qty 10* of HC520 (12TB) SAS drives for $1000 about 3 weeks ago, avg age is about 2.5 years, still well within its rated lifetime.

Yea may be some of the stuff is fear mongering and cargo culting. I was told ECC is necessary for ZFS. When the article was written, it was cheap af (2024) to buy ECC RAM so not much consideration was given to it.

-- (*) I have no idea what to do with it. Anyone has any good idea for using 120TB space? I have about 40TB unused bandwidth in the datacenter, may be host a Debian mirror? Donate storage/bandwidth to Internet Archive? Please contact me, appreciate it.

	▲	Confiks 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> I bought Qty 10* of HC520 (12TB) SAS drives for $1000 about 3 weeks ago, avg age is about 2.5 years, still well within its rated lifetime. That's cheap indeed. Enough headroom for some failing disks too. How is the noise and power usage? I didn't look at SAS drives at all, because my impression was that they're very noisy. I can place my NAS in a closed off room, but it's not too far away and I was afraid SAS drives would be audible through the wall.

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Hamuko an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm also planning a new home server build now and the prices are definitely relatively ass. So far I've spent 820€ on two 22 TB WD Elements HDDs, 375€ on 2x16 GB DDR5 kit, and 520€ on two 2 TB M.2 SSDs (cache). About 1700€ and I still have no server to show for it. Doesn't help that I've been procrastinating on picking the CPU and motherboard.