ZFS NAS Box, Part 2

Sunday, November 15 2020

Back in part one of my NAS project I discussed how I wanted to set up my hardware. Today, I set up the NAS (almost).

There were some hiccup along the way, like learning that M.2 slots can disable some of your SATA ports or waiting a month for a host bus adapter to come in from China.

Why Did It Take So Long

So it turns out I was going to spend a lot more on this project than I originally anticipated. I ended up getting a server machine instead of a sleek NAS box. Here are some of the quick specs:

Standard ATX case by Thermaltake.
LSI 9211-8i.
The cheapest HDMI graphics card I could find on Kijiji.
6x 3TB Segate HDDs.
1x 250G Kingston SSD.
AMD Ryzen 5 3600.
MSI B450 Gaming Plus Max.
2x 8GB FlareX 3200Mhz RAM.
1x 16GB Kingston 3200Mhz RAM.

ZFS

This is how I decided to configure my storage pools. In hindsight, this was not the best choice for upgrading. I may change it in the future to a 0+1 setup, but it works for now.

I have 5x 3TB in a RAIDZ2 with one drive not attached for redundancy’s sake. How does one setup a ZFS pool. Check this out:

# zpool create poolname raidz2 \
/dev/by-id/blahblahblah1 \
/dev/by-id/blahblahblah2 \
/dev/by-id/blahblahblah3 \
/dev/by-id/blahblahblah4 \
/dev/by-id/blahblahblah5

And zippidy-doo! We’ve got a ZFS pool! We can check its status with zpool status.

$ zfs status
  pool: raid
 state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub in progress since Wed Nov 18 18:41:41 2020
    1.84T scanned at 8.51G/s, 121G issued at 562M/s, 1.84T total
    0B repaired, 6.45% done, 0 days 00:53:25 to go
config:

    NAME                                         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    raid                                         ONLINE       0     0     0
      raidz2-0                                   ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-HGST_HUS724030ALA640_PN2234P8JTNMYY  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-HGST_HUS724030ALA640_PN2234P8JVSXTY  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-HGST_HUS724030ALA640_PN2234P8JXAS8Y  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-HGST_HUS724030ALA640_PN2234P8JXBARY  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-HGST_HUS724030ALA640_PN2234P8JXP77Y  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

I had run a scrub right before this, so there’s some extra detail in that. This is really fun! I will be doing more home storage projects soon. Perhaps Raspberry Pi NAS using all 4 USB ports to load SATA drives on it. Now that would be fun!

So I Kinda Have A NAS Now…?

So right now I can only copy files with rsync, scp and moving data via a physical drive. The one major disadvantage this has is speed.

Due to this machine being connected directly outside my network and pulling DHCP like a normal router would, I need to send my data through the WAN connection to get my files to it. This is rather unfortunate as my upload speed is capped at 20 megabits per second, despite my upload being in the 300+ range.

Part 3 will involve a LAN card so I can connect both to the DHCP server of my ISP and my local router. This way my transfer speeds should be in the range of 1 gigabit per second. This will make my life much easier, at least on the local network.

Fun Fact!

Do not try to use the M.2 slot on a consumer motherboard where you are also using all the SATA ports. On my consumer gaming motherboard, the SATA ports next to the M.2 slot became disabled when I attached the M.2 SSD. I found this out form my motherboard documentation, which I read only after a week of thinking my motherboard itself was defective, and sending it in for repairs that did absolutely nothing.

Thoughts

I like having all this space. I plan on using it up pretty fast, so I’m already looking at how to expand. Hopefully that gives a decent overview of how I set up my drives.

Happy hacking!