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So, as a nerd, let’s say you need 100 terabytes of home storage. What do you do?
My solution would be a commercial NAS RAID, like from Synology, QNAP, or Asustor. I’m a nerd, and I have setup my own Linux systems with RAID, but I’d rather get a commercial product. When a disk fails, and a disk will always eventually fail, then I want something that will loudly beep at me and make it easy to replace the drive and repair the RAID.
Some choices you have are:
- vendor (Synology, QNAP, and Asustor are the vendors I know and trust the most)
- number of bays (you want 8 to 12)
- redundancy (you want at least 2 if not 3 disks)
- filesystem (btrfs or ZFS) [not btrfs-raid builtin, but btrfs on top of RAID]
- drives (NAS optimized between $20/tb and $30/tb)
- networking (at least 2-gbps bonded, but box probably can’t use all of 10gbps)
- backup (big external USB drives)
The products I link above all have at least 8 drive bays. When you google “NAS”, you’ll get a list of smaller products. You don’t want them. You want somewhere between 8 and 12 drives.
The reason is that you want two-drive redundancy like RAID6 or RAIDZ2, meaning two additional drives. Everyone tells you one-disk redundancy (like RAID5) is enough, they are wrong. It’s just legacy thinking, because it was sufficient in the past when drives were small. Disks are so big nowadays that you really need two-drive redundancy. If you have a 4-bay unit, then half the drives are used for redundancy. If you have a 12-bay unit, then only 2 out of the 12 drives are being used for redundancy.
The next decision is the filesystem. There’s only two choices, btrfs and ZFS. The reason is that they both healing and snapshots. Note btrfs means btrfs-on-RAID6, not btrfs-RAID, which is broken. In other words, btrfs contains its own RAID feature that you don’t want to use.
Over long periods of time, errors creep into the file system. You want to scrub the data occasionally. This means reading the entire filesystem, checksuming the files, and repairing them if there’s a problem. That requires a filesystem that checksums each block of data.
Another thing you want sn
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