Article: Reevaluating My Music Storage

[luisma]

Hi Chris:

 

I read your post but none of the comments (yet)

 

Having TrueNAS at home and being a dealer of Synology, QNAP, HP, and with knowledge of even Enterprise NAS I would say leave NAS as a NAS, you can rotate your existing NAS and repurpose this one as a backup and get a new NAS, TrueNAS for home use gives you a few perks, the best one is you can keep an HBA controller as a spare and you can care less if the main unit dies, new PC with the HBA and the drives or existing PC with replacement HBA and you are in business.

 

Yes the Computer NAS solution gives you other flexibility but you are a MAC owner and I don't think you will like to deal with Linux, Proxmox or virtualization that's why I would recommend you to keep a NAS just like you do today.

 

My NAS holds family photos, movies, important files, audio and run with 10G interfaces fast enough to sustain 290 Mbps of transfers, I run it virtualized but that's just me.

 

I was about to comment on your wireless experiences before but I decided not too

 

PM me or post publicly here if you have any comments. I have no commercial interest in selling anything here.

[luisma]

37 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Do the TrueNAS Mini XL+ units have HBAs?

Hi Chris, I can't find out at the moment with a quick search but I know the HBA adapters allows TrueNAS and the software to build the ZFS vdevs (these are ZFS's logical RAID units) and system, making it transparent to migrate to another RAID / vdev upon failure of the controller. Which is something other technologies don't do. Synology will rebuild a NAS for you but you need to call support and pray they figure it out.

 

ZFS in general:

It has a huge disadvantage which is the writes, if you write continuously without deleting much you are good, if you constantly write and erase, write and erase it will degrade with time, that's the ZFS Achilles heel. I don't write/delete much o it is fine.

The other disadvantage of ZFS is capacity, once you cross 70% of used capacity it degrades performance.

 

Aside of that is a wonderful system, the XL comes with WD REDS, these in the past where SMR (you don't want SMR), I believe now are CMR which are good but I would not go with WD RED's 

https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/

 

I usually build my NAS and select Enterprise drives for it (I'm a huge fan of former HGST part of WD today) enterprise drives IMO is the best way to go and they are not much more expensive if you know where to buy.

 

With 8 bays you could do with 14 TB drives (you could use higher capacities 18TB if needed)

 

1x vdev with RAIDZ2 (RAID6) = 14x 6 = 84 TB

 

I personally would do:

 

2x vdevs with RAIDZ2 = 28TB + 28TB = 56 TB (a tad faster and even more resilient) assuming 56 TB is enough for you

 

If you ever need to expand storage you must replace all drives in a vdev one by one and it takes time, that's why I like to split vdevs in maximums of 4 drives and not 8 drives.

 

Synology is much much much more simplified but the overhead of the system, the limitations and the abilities of TrueNAS to do maintenance and check drives etc. are just better IMO.

 

EDIT: 1st paragraph I meant to say "making it transparent to move the drives to a new ZFS system and read the RAID and operate it there independently from the actual hardware controller"