Questions about NAS

[cobito]

@Fassou hello, I tend to be quite austere with aesthetic issues. Now, that said, the case has a generous amount of LEDs on the front that I will show when everything is assembled.

This is the top:

From here you can see the layout of the 4 SATA connectors and how it is not possible to use 90º elbow cables. One of the things I liked is the fact that the 4 drives are powered by a single molex, which is very appreciated for saving cabling.

The fan that is right behind the SATA connectors (the PCB has holes to help with ventilation), I found to be very quiet and the airflow is not bad.

This is one of the sides:

Two more SATA cables will be connected to this side of the board. In total: 4 sates and the one for the ventilation power. There is plenty of space here because they have left 4cm to be able to put a PCI-e card.

The other side:

Here you can see the mess of power cables. 8 wires go to the molex (it has 2 cables per pin) and then the ATX bundle to the board. The power supply, by the way, is cantilevered and anchored only by the 4 screws at one end. It is well fixed but being so long and heavy, it would not have been bad to have the possibility of screwing it at the other end. The power supply comes with a metal piece for that but the case does not have holes for screws.

And this is what I like the least:

The memory modules are mounted vertically, the ATX power connector is right in front of this module and the caddy plate is right above. Here the cables have to be quite bent. And right to the right of the power supply, there are the connectors for the case buttons and leds. So with these two cable bundles connected next to the memories and with that distance, you have to put the board in with great care so that it does not rub at the bottom.

[cobito]

After a couple of days running a memtest and after checking that all three disks are correct, today I decided to install OMV. Unfortunately, it seems that this distro doesn't get along very well with installations on pendrives. The installation took almost an hour and a half (when in a virtual machine it's a matter of minutes). When the system is just starting up, the interface is quite slow but after a while it starts to work well.

I have tried all 4 USBs on the back (two USB 2.0 and two other USB 3.x). In all it goes just as badly, but what can you do... As long as the RAID is running at cruising speed I don't have any major problems with this.

Now I am creating the RAID 5 and it will take about 5 hours. Here are a couple of photos.

With the door closed:

And with the door open:

Each caddy has two leds: power and activity. At the bottom there are 6 leds: power, general disk activity, 3 for 3 network interfaces and one for alarm. The last 4 I don't use because I have nowhere to connect them. Curiously, the general disk activity led doesn't always correspond to the activity of the disks, I suppose because that indicates the requests of the controller and the ones on the caddys indicate the actual movement of data.

Another important comment about this board that could make it not suitable for ZFS systems: not all SATAs go at the same speed. It has two controllers: one Intel and one ASMedia ASM1061. The Intel goes at maximum speed: during the surface tests of the two disks connected to it, the read speed was about 320MBytes/s on each one with both disks reading at the same time. In contrast, on the third disk, about 270MBytes/s were measured. If I connect two disks to the ASMedia, the read speed of the two at the same time drops to about 180MBytes/s each. From the performance point of view, it shouldn't be dramatic since in the end the gigabit card is the biggest bottleneck, but I don't like it to be that way and even less when ZFS has data loss when there are significant performance differences between disks.

EDITED: It seems that when installing OMV on a pendrive, it is highly recommended to install the openmediavault-flashmemory plugin so that certain folders are copied to a ramdisk and thus extend the life of the memory. To install it, first you have to install omv-extras by running in the console as root, this: wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/packages/raw/master/install | bash

[cobito]

To wrap up the topic, after some tests I decided to use SMB (until now I had been using SSH) for speed reasons. It is also compatible with any operating system and it is easy to create mount points on different machines.

It is clear that the biggest bottleneck for sequential transfers is the processor. In writing, a rate of about 55MBytes/s is reached while in reading it is about 30Mbytes/s. That is much more than I need but it is far from the limit of the Gigabit network.

On the other hand, it seems that this rate is reached for each transfer initiated. I tested two simultaneous transfers and in total in writing about 100Mbytes/s are reached and in reading a little more than 50.

Non-sequential transfers go very fast (much faster than a conventional mechanical hard drive) although I have not done any test from which to extract objective data; it is just a feeling of mine. I thought not, but a generous amount of RAM seems to help a lot with performance and to reduce the activity of the hard drives in OMV.

About the processor itself, it seems that it has a decent performance and is comparable to CPUs from the era of Conroe and even the first i7. But it is clear that encrypting the data has a certain computational cost with which it is not possible to squeeze the gigabit connection.

On the subject of using a pendrive for the system, after installing the plugin and making some changes to the OMV configuration, it now works normally. The page load time is at most 2 or 3 seconds. Apart from installing the plugin, I have followed the recommendations of its developer which basically are to configure the root partition with the noatime and nodiratime parameters (which is a way to access the drive asynchronously) and to delete/disable the swap partition.

For the moment I am doing various tests of data integrity by downloading large files and then making a checksum. I will be doing basically that this week that begins and if by next weekend I have not seen anything strange, the gadget will definitely go "into production".

[Mystique]

Since you say that OMV takes a long time to install and respond after starting up, why don't you try xpenology? I have it on an AMD A8-7600 and it runs smoothly (until you do transcoding in Plex of 4k videos)

Take advantage and tinker now before putting things in the NAS and test several systems, that in "physical" you test it better than with virtual machines

I tried freenas at the beginning and I opted for xpenology after trying it

[cobito]

@Mystique The issue of the slowness of the pendrive has already been resolved with the plugin. Everything is going well now.

I see that your A8-7600 has a similar performance to my Celeron J4104. What transfer rates (copying and reading a single file) do you get with Xpenology and what protocol do you use?

One of the things I don't like about Xpenology is that it doesn't detect all the hardware (for example, I see that on some motherboards WOL doesn't work and I would like to have it to manage power supply failures). That's not counting the rest of the hardware I mentioned before.

I've read a little and it seems that it uses the "standard" RAID (which is what I need at the moment) but when looking for what advantages this option has over others, I only read that it is the system used by Synology NAS, which is good because it comes from a well-known hardware manufacturer, but it's still a bit weak when other options like OMV are based on a general-purpose distro intended for PCs, with a relatively recent kernel (detects all hardware more than 5 months old), open, well-known, well-documented and very stable. That is, is Xpenology more stable, faster, more reliable...?

In summary, there must be very strong reasons to replace something like OMV with something like Xpenology. In the case of FreeNAS for example, if it weren't because it doesn't offer what I need now (being able to expand by adding disks), I would have been willing to sacrifice hardware support and the fact that it uses FreeBSD in order to have ZFS with its cache and compression. Technically, it outperforms standard RAID by a thousand.

I'm only going to use the NAS as storage. Nothing like Plex or other services (for that kind of thing I already have a server and a Raspberry Pi).

In your case, what made you decide to go for Xpenology?

[Mystique]

@cobito said in NAS doubts:

@Mystique The issue of the USB drive's slowness has already been resolved with the plugin. Everything is working fine now.

I see that your A8-7600 has a similar performance to my Celeron J4104. What transfer rates (copying and reading a single file) do you get with Xpenology and what protocol do you use?

Basically, there are two types of movement. One between volumes that I manage in the web panel and another from/to my PC via SMB. I haven't even bothered to measure it, to be honest. Tell me what you want me to test and I'll give you the numbers

One of the things I don't like about Xpenology is that it doesn't detect all the hardware (for example, I see that WOL doesn't work on some motherboards and I would like to have it to manage power supply failures). That's not counting the rest of the hardware that I mentioned earlier.

I solve that with a Sonoff card for remote control of power on and off. I can activate push notifications in the mobile app and define the state I want it to go to if the power goes out (similar to the BIOS). If it freezes, I can turn it off with this (by setting a pulse of more than 4 seconds and turning it back on)

I've read a bit and it seems that it uses the "standard" RAID (which is what I need at the moment) but when looking for what advantages this option has over others, I only read that it's the system used by Synology NAS, which is good because it comes from a well-known hardware manufacturer, but it's still a bit weak when other options like OMV are based on a general-purpose distro intended for PCs, with a relatively recent kernel (detects all hardware more than 5 months old), open, well-known, well-documented and very stable. That is, is Xpenology more stable, faster, more reliable...?

Look, I bought an AMD processor at the beginning and it's not recommended for Xpenology. My motherboard wasn't on the hardware list, I think, and it works without problems

In summary, there must be very strong reasons to replace something like OMV with something like Xpenology. In the case of FreeNAS, for example, if it weren't because it doesn't offer what I need now (the ability to expand by adding disks), I would have been willing to sacrifice hardware support and the fact that it uses FreeBSD in order to have ZFS with its caching and compression. Technically, it outperforms standard RAID by a thousand.

I don't get into the technical part at the level of RAID and ZFS, but the simplicity that Synology has achieved I don't think others have it (although some are very close and even have more possibilities)

I'm only going to use the NAS as storage. Nothing like Plex or other services (for that kind of thing, I already have a server and a Raspberry Pi).

In your case, what made you decide to go with Xpenology?

I tried FreeNAS and I couldn't get what I wanted (I didn't insist much and each test was done after a long time). A work colleague recommended Xpenology and I tried it. It worked very easily so I stayed with it
It's true that there are things I wanted to do that I couldn't achieve, but I've compensated for it in other ways

Recently, I've moved some applications from being Synology packages (applications that run and are seen in the Synology explorer) to migrating to more standardized Docker containers... watch out, this Docker thing is addictive. I started with sickchill and the next ones will be couchpotato and pihole

[cobito]

@Mystique said in Doubts about NAS:

@cobito said in Doubts about NAS:

@Mystique The issue of the slow USB drive has already been resolved with the plugin. Everything is working fine now.

I see that your A8-7600 has a similar performance to my Celeron J4104. What transfer rates (copying and reading a single file) do you get with Xpenology and what protocol do you use?

Basically there are two types of movement. One between volumes that I manage in the web panel and another from/to my PC via SMB. I haven't even bothered to measure it, to be honest. Tell me what you want me to test and I'll give you the numbers

It's more out of curiosity than anything else. What rates do you have from/to your PC with Samba? My 55-30MB/s are sufficient for what I need, but to be honest, I expected the gigabit card to end up being the bottleneck. And I expected that because in my younger days, when I had a Pentium II at 300MHz with Windows XP as an eMule client, I could achieve rates of 10-12MB/s (the limit of a 100Mbps connection) without much CPU usage. But of course, I imagine that back then there was zero encryption and things have become more sophisticated now. Since I switched everything to Linux, I've used SSH and have been pretty disconnected from the SMB world.

One of the things I don't like about Xpenology is that it doesn't detect all the hardware (for example, I see that in some motherboards WOL doesn't work and I would like to have it to manage power supply failures). That's not counting the rest of the hardware I mentioned before.

I solve that with a Sonoff card for remote control of power on and off. I can activate push notifications in the mobile app and define the state I want it to go to if the power goes out (similar to the BIOS). If it freezes, with this I can turn it off (by setting a pulse of more than 4 seconds and turning it back on)

I didn't know those gadgets existed. It would have come in very handy a couple of years ago for the crashes of the old server.

I'm only going to use the NAS as storage. Nothing like Plex or other services (for that kind of thing I already have a server and a Raspberry Pi).

In your case, what made you decide to go with Xpenology?

I tried FreeNAS and didn't get what I wanted (I didn't insist much and did each test after a long time). A work colleague recommended Xpenology and I tried it. It worked very easily so I stuck with it
It's true that there are things I wanted to do that I couldn't, but I've made up for it in other ways

Recently I've moved some applications from being Synology packages (applications that run and are seen in the Synology explorer) to migrating to more standardized Docker containers... watch out, this Docker thing is addictive. I started with sickchill and the next ones will be couchpotato and pihole

Of course, your NAS is much more than a NAS. In principle, OMV is offering me everything I need, which is sharing folders via Samba, managing permissions and users. Anyway, I'm going to take a look at Xpenology. Maybe I'll decide to squeeze a bit more out of the thing.

[Mystique]

@cobito said in NAS doubts:

@Mystique said in NAS doubts:

@cobito said in NAS doubts:

@Mystique The issue of the slow USB drive has already been resolved with the plugin. Everything is working well now.

I see that your A8-7600 has a similar performance to my Celeron J4104. What transfer rates (copying and reading a single file) do you get with Xpenology and what protocol do you use?

Basically there are two types of movement. One between volumes that I manage in the web panel and another from/to my PC via SMB. I haven't even bothered to measure it, to be honest. Tell me what you want me to test and I'll give you the numbers

It's more out of curiosity than anything else. What rates do you have from/to your PC with Samba? My 55-30MB/s are sufficient for what I need, but to be honest, I expected the gigabit card to end up being the bottleneck. And I expected that because in my younger days, when I had a Pentium II at 300MHz with Windows XP as an eMule client, I could achieve rates of 10-12MB/s (the limit of a 100Mbps connection) without much CPU usage. But of course, I imagine that back then there was zero encryption and things have become more sophisticated now. Since I switched everything to Linux, I've used SSH and have been pretty disconnected from the SMB world.

Right now, (with a Twitch stream open at 1080) copying a 21GB 4K movie is getting 112MB/s. It's almost the 120 MB/s that the gigabit network theoretically gives you. The open stream and some overhead make it drop a bit

One of the things I don't like about Xpenology is that it doesn't detect all the hardware (for example, I see that on some motherboards WOL doesn't work and I would like to have it to manage power supply failures). That's not counting the rest of the hardware I mentioned before.

I solve that with a Sonoff card for remote control of power on and off. I can activate push notifications in the mobile app and define the state I want it to go to if the power goes out (similar to the BIOS). If it freezes, I can turn it off (by setting a pulse of more than 4 seconds and turning it back on) with this

I didn't know these gadgets existed. It would have come in very handy a couple of years ago for the crashes of the old server.

Half my house is automated with Sonoff. There's everything on AliExpress but basically it's a relay connected to the internet and controlled with an app. It's integrable with the usual assistants (Google Home, Alexa, and Siri). For example, saying "ok Google, turn on the computer" turns on my PC, speakers, and monitors as I have it configured. But that's something you ask about in another post

I'm only going to use the NAS as storage. Nothing to do with Plex or other services (for those kinds of things I already have a server and a Raspberry Pi).

In your case, what made you decide to go with Xpenology?

I tried FreeNAS and didn't get what I wanted (I didn't insist much and each test was done after a long time). A work colleague recommended Xpenology and I tried it. It worked so easily that I stuck with it
It's true that there are things I wanted to do that I couldn't, but I've made up for it in other ways

Recently I've moved some applications from being Synology packages (applications that run and are seen in the Synology explorer) to migrating them to more standardized Docker containers... watch out, this Docker thing is addictive. I started with SickChill and the next ones will be CouchPotato and Pihole

Of course, your NAS is much more than a NAS. In principle, OMV is offering me everything I need which is sharing folders via Samba, managing permissions and users. Anyway, I'm going to take a look at Xpenology. Maybe I'll decide to squeeze a bit more out of the gadget.

I opted to put more things into a PC that was going to be on 24/7 and skipped a NAS and a server for everything in the same machine. I can't compare consumptions because before I had the Netgear NAS with 4 disks and a modest low-power PC (mainly as a seedbox) and now everything is in the NAS with 9 disks

Now that you've just started, it's the moment to try it out, maybe you like the Xpenology interface better for what you want to do. And then, as with almost everyone, you end up adding functions little by little. I'll tell you that I was interested in combining NAS and seedbox (I switched from uTorrent to Transmission) and added Plex, SickChill, CouchPotato and soon I'll migrate Pihole from the Raspberry Pi to a Docker container

And I'll stop for today. Lots of text

[cobito]

Disaster! I've been pushing the NAS pretty hard for a week and today it succumbed. Right after watching a movie, I saw that a couple of computers where I have a partition mounted with cifs started giving connection errors with the NAS. I went into the web interface and it was showing a 500 error (internal error). I tried to access it via SSH and it was rejecting connections. I connected an external monitor but the result was that there was no signal. It only responded to ping.

So I turned it off, turned it back on and it came up with a console shell with a pretty limited set of commands that I couldn't do anything with. I put the thumb drive into a PC with Linux and couldn't mount it because it was "read-only". So I downloaded a tool to do a low-level format on it and it kept giving I/O errors.

That is to say, that after a week of working, the thumb drive is dead. It was a 32GB Intenso USB 3, so not a cheap piece of junk.

In summary, never use OpenMediaVault from a thumb drive.

BTW @Mystique, that rate is what I expected. I've seen ways to improve smb performance in OMV around, but it's clear that Xpenology outperforms it in that aspect.

P.S.: As a workaround, I installed OMV on a USB hard drive and both the RAID and the file system seem to be okay. I'll see what I do in the next few days...

[Mystique]

@cobito One good thing about xpenology is that the usb is just the loader. The system is on the hard drives (it forces you to choose a volume during installation and puts itself on it)

One thing I liked about FreeNAS (which I don't know if you would eventually run into the same problem) is that the system could be installed on a couple of usb (basically, a raid 1 of usb for the system), so you were relatively protected from these cases

But well, everything can break. As a security measure, an image of the drive on your PC to recover it if it breaks again is not a bad idea

[cobito]

I've been quite busy this past month and haven't been able to tinker with the NAS. In the end, I didn't try xpenology (although I had it in mind) and at this point, I'm going to stop experimenting.

There are a couple of things I've noticed. On the one hand, from the server, I get transfer rates of around 100Mbytes/s, just like from my Windows 10 PC (which I expected from the beginning). But for some reason, when I boot Linux on my PC, it stays stuck between 60-70MBytes per second, so I'm putting it down to something related to the PC, even though the CPU is far from reaching 100%.

Another thing is that when a file transfer fails, it gets stuck on the NAS, so you can't delete it via SMB. There are only two ways to delete it: access it from SSH as root and delete it or restart the NAS. When there are many files stuck, periodically, the NAS stops responding for a few minutes, which resets the connections of all the devices connected to it. If during this disconnection you were writing to a file, the file is left incomplete. This is dangerous for the server because you have to check the log periodically. To avoid this, you just have to restart the NAS if for some reason, the transfer of a file has failed. If the NAS is fresh, it can go weeks without producing this kind of blockage (and I say weeks because that's the time I've been able to test so far and I hope it's indefinite if no transfers are messed up).

Overall, I'm happy with the device. It's been a relatively important investment (equivalent to the components to build a pretty decent PC), but if the hardware doesn't give me problems in the coming years, it will have been worth it. On the one hand, I've been able to centralize the storage of several devices, which gives me convenience and security. On the other hand, I have a storage device with a large capacity and very good performance in random access, which I can expand and manage as I see fit, which ultimately, was what I was looking for.

[_Neptunno_]

Of course it's great to read your experiences and impressions about NAS, OVM and Xpenology. I have so far made moderate use of my little "gadget" with OMV and I will probably have to refresh myself a bit on the subject although it is true that before leaving it running I did make a USB image just in case, in addition to installing a Plugin (which, for the sake of it, I can't remember how I did it) to avoid the degradation that these devices suffer.

@cobito I will tell you that I used a 16GB 2.0 Toshiba from Amazon (about 8€) and so far it keeps working without any problem. But I think it's always good to have another pen usb ready in case the one you have fails. The only thing is if you make modifications and in the emergency one they are not implemented those modifications. Of course I'm talking to you in a simple and straightforward way, surely there are a thousand ways to have the other copy or image updated

Anyway, thanks to both of you for your advice and experiences!!

[cobito]

One year later...

With just a few days to go until the NAS turns one, one of the drives has failed. For the past few months, there had been an occasional clicking sound. A few days ago, the clicking became more frequent, so I witnessed the drive's demise in real time. The NAS spent a few minutes trying to access it, and during that time, the file system was inaccessible. After that, the failed drive's activity light stayed on permanently, and the RAID continued to function normally. That same night, I ordered a replacement drive (the truth is that the 4TB Red NAS drives from EFAX are becoming less common). I received it yesterday and ran a surface scan (as I always do when I buy a mechanical drive). Last night, when it passed without any issues, I proceeded with the replacement.

It has been rebuilding the RAID5 for 11 hours and is back to where it started, with the NAS in general and the RAID in particular performing as expected. Now I need to process the RMA for the failed drive, and I'll keep it as a spare or as an expansion for the RAID if I run out of space (whichever comes first).

Regarding the hardware, the motherboard with integrated CPU seems like a good choice. In addition to being quiet and low power, I haven't had any issues with crashes, instability, or anything else. It also offers more than enough processing power. Even during the RAID reconstruction, which is a costly operation, neither of the cores reached 100% (the rest of the cores were idle). The NAS has been running with the 2.5" USB external drive with the system since the USB stick failed, and although it's not ideal, I think it will continue like this. The best future solution will be to put an M2 SSD drive.

And about the case, it seems that the blue LEDs indicating the presence of a drive in the bay are turning off. They might be burning out. It could be dirt, but the green activity LED (which is right below) is as bright as it was on the first day, so it looks like it's a design flaw.

[cobito]

Two months later...

I have received a replacement drive. I don't know if it's normal or not, but the process seems to have been a bit slow and with little information. In case anyone is curious, the RMA process with Western Digital has been like this:

• On September 12, I created an RMA
• On the 16th, I made the shipment.
• On September 20, the drive was received (according to Correos) at the logistics center that WD has in Ontígola, Toledo.
• Seeing that the status did not change, after two weeks or so, I wrote to WD, at which point they updated the status to 'processing'.
• On October 18, they sent me an email saying that they had received the drive.
• On November 3, the RMA status changed to 'Completed pending return'.
• On November 11, I received an email from WD saying that my drive had been shipped on November 3 and was waiting to be picked up at a UPS collection point since November 4.
• Today, November 12, I went to pick up the drive.

Apparently, they were about to return it for exceeding the maximum time, but I arrived in time.

The good side: it looks like they have given me a brand new drive with a manufacturing date of August 31, 2021, so they are getting away with it.

Tonight I will do a surface scan and leave it stored for when I need it (expansion or replacement of a defective drive).

[jordiqui]

@_Neptunno_ I had two scassi in raid 0 and one for storage and I never had any problems with the raid. I think it was on Windows Server 2000.