And you probably weren’t even listening to Rhythm Nation![0]

0 - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=10...

And I've never used a QNAP, but I'm on my second Synology and their drive carriages all use rubber/silicone grommets to isolate drive vibration from the case. It's not silent - five drives of spinning rust will make some noise regardless - but it sits in a closet under my stairs that backs up to my media cabinet and you have to be within a few feet to hear it even in the closet over background noise in the house.

I don't use any of their "personal cloud" stuff that relies on them. It's just a Linux box with some really good features for drive management and package updates. You can set up and maintain any other services you want without using their manager.

The ease with which I could set it up as a destination for Time Machine backups has absolutely saved my bacon on at least one occasion. My iMac drive fell to some strange data corruption and would not boot. I booted to recovery, pointed it at the Synology, and aside from the restore time, I only lost about thirty minutes' work. The drive checked out fine and is still going strong. Eventually it will die, and when it does I'll buy a new Mac and tell it to restore from the Synology. I have double-disk redundancy, so I can lose any two of five drives with no loss of data so long as I can get new drives to my house and striped in before a third fails. That would take about a week, so while it's possible, it's unlikely.

If I were really paranoid about that, I'd put together a group buy for hard drives from different manufacturers, different runs, different retailers, etc., and then swap them around so none of us were using drives that were all from the same manufacturer, factory, and date. But I'm not that paranoid. If I have a drive go bad, and it's one that I have more than one of the same (exact) model, I'll buy enough to replace them all, immediately replace the known-bad one, and then sell/give away the same-series.

So I’ve got a setup like this:

It’s an 8Bay Synology 1821+. Cost about $1300 for the machine, 32GB of ECC memory, and the 10gbe network card.

I have 4 8Tb drives in a btrfs volume with 1 drive redundancy giving me 21TB of space.

All the important stuff gets also backed up to another 8TB drive periodically and sent to glacier.

The way synology’s shr1 setup works seems to be like RAID5 + a bit more flexibility so I can add more drives to the array but as long as they are 8TB or larger.

The docker manager seems to work pretty well. I run a few services there and mount certain volumes into them. A few DNS records and some entries into the reverse proxy in the control panel of it and you can run whatever you want.

Most critically power draw is very low and it’s very quiet which was an important consideration to me.

I might be misunderstanding your needs but my home server uses just LVM. When I run out of disk space, I buy a new drive, use `pvcreate` followed by `vgextend` and `lvextend`.

> Is there any solution that lets me mix and match drive sizes as well as upgrade?

Probably more than one, but on my non-Synology box I use SnapRAID, which can take any number/size of drives. Downside is that it isn’t realtime, you have to schedule a process to sync your parity: http://www.snapraid.it/

> As soon as I've set up a file system with the drives I already have the only solution is to buy the same amount of drives with more space once I run out.

Recent versions of zfs support raidz expansion [1], which let you add extra disks to a raidz1/2/3 pool. It has a number of limitations, for example you cannot change the type of pool (mirror to raidz1, raidz1 to raidz2 etc.) but if you plan to expand your pool one disk at a time it can be useful. Just remember that 1) old data will not take advantage of the extra disk until you copy it around and 2) the size of the pool is limited by the size of the smallest disk in the pool.

[1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15022

I started thinking about this a year ago. Unraid works great for me. Just bought another 32tb to extend to 104tb usable space, 8gb to 20gb drives. It’s a JBOD with dual parity setup, next upgrade path requires a disk shelf but hopefully that won’t be for a couple of years.

BTRFS

Value of your time and effort maintaining it is not zero.

I used to play with stuff like this. It was fun when I was single and had lots of free time. I don't play with it anymore. If I pay someone $500 over nominal value to provide me with 8-9 years of support for security updates, etc., and I just install their packages... that's worth it to me. My first Syno was a DS412+ and my second was a DS1621+. Nine years between introduction of the two. The 412+ is still running just fine at a friend's house. I gave it to him with ~12 TB total drive space, said just help me next time I need something done with car audio (he's a DJ and knows cars) and we're square.

He's happy, I'm happy. I go set up his network, he installs my head unit. We both win by doing what we're good at and letting someone else use their expertise instead of learning a lot of stuff we will almost never use again.

I totally understand the article title, I have a ZFS NAS that makes the same kind of noise as described there. Roughly every five seconds the drives make sound that is different from the background hum of a running computer. In a calm environment this is very distracting. I even had a guest sleeping in an adjacent room complain about it once.

SSDs are great. Quieter, can be denser, faster, available in small sizes for small money, more reliable, etc.

But they're not great for low cost bulk storage. If you're putting together a home NAS, you probably want to do well on $/TB and don't care so much about transfer speeds.

But if you've found 10TB+ ssds for under $200, let us know where to find them.

A 20 TB HDD is <$400

An 8 TB SSD is >$600

$80/TB vs $20/TB is a four fold increase.

Also a 16 TB drive is $2,000 so more like a 5x increase in a data center setup.

I can buy a 16TB refurbished enterprise drive with warranty for less than a hundred.

> The most effective way to remove HDD noise is to remove HDDs and add SSDs.

Lame

lvm-cache works as well, if you're already using LVM.

https://github.com/45Drives/autotier is exactly what they were asking for as well

My assumption with bcache is that it operates on blocks rather than entire files. Am I wrong?

Yeah, bcache is exactly that

Is it fully merged to the kernel? I remember a few weeks ago some drama between Kent Overstreet and Linus about it but I didn't go into details. Has that been resolved?

Edit: or maybe it was some drama over userspace tooling, I can't remember tbh.

Bcachefs has not proven that it can be trusted to not eat data, and has also recently undergone an on-disk layout change which further demonstrates its lack of maturity.

I should point out that the SLOG only caches synchronous writes, which are written twice with ZFS.

Also, the L2ARC is great, but does still have RAM overhead. There are also useful tunables. I had a workload on a RAM limited machine where directory walking was common, but data reads were fairly random and a L2ARC configured for metadata only speed it up by a large amount.

> ZFS has caching for writes

Not really.

It will accumulate synchronous writes into the ZIL, and you put the ZIL on a fast SLOG vdev. But it will only do so for a limited amount of time/space, and is not meant as a proper write-back cache but rather as a means to quickly service synchronous writes.

By default asynchronous writes do not use the ZIL, and hence SLOG vdev at all. You can force it to, but that can also be a bad idea unless you have Optane drives as you're then bottlenecked by the ZIL/SLOG.

Yes, I think nowadays you do this with

  blockdev --setra <num_sectors> /dev/sdX

good idea, but that's not his problem. he needs a media player that will sprint through to the end of the file when he first opens it. They don't do that cuz they figure they might be streaming from the net so why tax that part of the sytem.