My power goes from 10c+ VAT for 2-4am to 17c+ VAT for 11pm to 8am to 35c+ VAT for 8am to 11pm. My 2013 Mac Pro runs at 100w so, it’s off most of the time. Ireland isn’t the cheapest for power but not the most expensive either. I like that your focussing on power draw, most of the US based RU-vidrs make little to no reference to it. Thank you 🙏
Also yes, a deeper dive explaining those Ansible playbooks would be awesome Jeff! I'd watch that thing even though I don't know a lot about storage itself.
The shelves for your workbench @ 13:55 grabbed my attention. I've just started setting up a dedicated space using a 48x24-inch motorized desk and had been mulling over how to attach storage space to it. Preferably pegboard and not involving much engineering on my part to make it sturdy and stable. If I've worked out the dimensions of those 2x4basics brackets correctly, I could add some beams across the back to attach 32-inch horizontal Wall Control pegboard panels between the vertical studs and it ought to fit my desk's width near enough exactly. Thanks for the inspiration!
sorry to hear that, you have been asleep for 26 years. good news The Lunar Prospector spacecraft is launched into orbit around the Moon, and later finds evidence for frozen water....
regarding the U.2 Kioxia SSD mount - if those drives are anything like WD U.2 drives, they can generate a decent amount of heat, and mounting them close together and vertically, I'm afraid that 1 of the 2 might heat up without any air flowing over it (it might be totally fine as well - you can usually check temperatures via `smartctl`). For those that don't have motherboards with SlimSAS (or similar) PCIe ports, there's relatively cheap 1-drive U.2 to PCIe slot adapters...which can be wasteful plugging into x16 or x8 slots (the drives are only 4 lanes), but might be the only solution for many server chassis.
Hey Jeff, great stuff indeed ! Very well documented, and really cool to share all that beautiful knowledge with us. About your 3-2-1 backups I was thinking that since you moved from your house to your new location, if you make backups to some NAS or else at your house, then you've got your offsite copy, don't you !! No monthly paiements to some internet cloud !! "Make your own cloud at home !" (wow, sounds like some TV commercial ad, lol) ;-)
See i like these projects a lot. I like to have 3:2:1 style backups, but with my limited budget i have internal disk, external disk, and cloud. I could definitely build something like this and get more reliability, and cloud savings. Space is at a huge premium almost as big as budget, so i know i could have a cheap NAS done myself, but a cheap and tiny NAS is what i need.
Wish this stuff was actually available. Same with the board Linus showed. You just can't buy this stuff in Europe or they are sold by weird shops asking 2x the price. At which point getting a Synology is cheaper😅
@JeffGeerling Hey I have the same configuration, from the day you uploaded your first video about it and I am very satisfied with it. My old 4 Bay Synology NAS uses about 39 Watts and this only 9-10 Watts. I now turned over to use this as my personal cloud and do the backups of it to my old Synology NAS, by waking it up via WOL, doing the backup and then shutting it back down.
Power prices is why I've decomissioned my Intel server. The twin Ivy Bridge Xeons are still beasts, but the switch to a single Skylake Xeon 4108 has saved a bunch of power.
Cool, love the content and especially the details of the power consumption of the different NAS now that I've moved in with a girl who's _Very_ conservative with power usage at home. But we both are in need of local backups at home and Lil NAS would be perfect, so I'm going to build my own with inspiration from you (not the first time)! BTW, I wasn't aware of the third chanel and it was really hard to hear you say the name of it, so took me a while to find it. You should definitely market it a bit more, bcs we're so many people that get excited every time you post some new content ❤
My approach is to have multiple NAS boxes for different use cycle. Smaller, power-efficient boxes that are on 24/7 for the active files. Big boxes with the massive storage capacity for lesser used files and backups, that I power up only when needed.
@@JeffGeerling Haha, for a second historical event, this is the first time a creator has replied to my comment, so we're busting records left and right here! Love the video btw (now having actually taken the time to watch it!) I'm very tempted to build a pair of lil nases and hide one of them in my parents' utility room, they aren't using their 500/500 fiber for anything, so I might as well finally have the "1" in 3-2-1! (I've heard that the attic doesn't count!)
I saw another RU-vidr get a cheap tape drive do periodic offsite backups. Write to tapes mail to friend or put in another safe place like a fireproof safe. Tape sits there no power consumption holds loads of data and in the right conditions will stay that way for 50+ years. Rotate with a second set of tapes each week or month and you got yourself apocalypse level protection. House burns down, you just need to restore from the tapes and you don't pay export fees from offsite cloud, though you would need to find another tape drive if you house burned down, nothing is perfect.
I have considered tape archive in the past, the annoying part is how manual/physical the process is. But when I was younger, I was in charge of the weekly tape backup rotation between two radio stations. Was a fun and easy task to do every Friday :)
Tapes sound great until you have to do restores... Even "enterprise" backup software can be buggy (database corruption, etc), and LTO drives only offer 1-2 generations of backward compatibility. And if your tape robot fails after 10 years, you're at the whim of what might be available on eBay as a replacement. HDDs aren't perfect either, but a heck of a lot easier to just plug a drive into 3.5" hot-swap bay or even a SATA-USB adapter. LTO-9 tapes (18TB) are about half the price of HDD, but you also have to factor in the cost of the LTO-9 tape drive (usually thousands of $, not even counting an auto-loader). Lastly, if you're storing tapes (or HDDs or even SSDs) in fireproof safe, make sure to pack and maintain desiccant (larger gun safes can get powered dehumidifier accessory) - this is why off-site storage facilities like Iron Mountain use old mines - basically free climate control underground.
@@jasonboles1526 Production database backups are a surprisingly difficult challenge especially with a "slow" backup device, since there are probably writes happening when the backup is in progress. Probably best to use a file system that supports snapshots, then backup strategy is to tqke a snapshot then send that to the backup device.
Also yes, a deeper dive explaining those Ansible playbooks would be awesome Jeff! I'd watch that thing even though I don't know a lot about storage itself.
@@joelv4495 I wasn't referring to backing up a database... I was referring to the internal db (tape library inventory, metadata, etc) that a particular enterprise backup "solution" software was using internally. If that software's db got corrupt, then you don't know where anything is on any of the tapes, and the differentials are useless. (this was 20 years ago, I'm sure such software is better now, and there's also several open source software nowadays as well)
Rather than putting a rtc on the pi to turn on scheduled backups. Set backups to run on boot, and shut down after, then use an Home Assistant automation to send a WOL packet. Then super easy to adjust schedule, even with the pi off
True; the only downside is if I want to boot it up for debug, I'd have to set some sort of trap I could escape the backup. Maybe a hotkey to hold or something.
@@JeffGeerling get HA to monitor disk activity, set the automation in HA to start shut down when disk activity under threshold for 5 mins. Shut down precedure can check a flag in HA you set to keep it online. So for debug set "keep lil NAS" online to true, it won't shut down. When HA detects the server stays shut down for 5 mins auto clear the flag. Then to boot and change things, set the flag to true, boot server, do what you need, 5 Min shut down grace let's you restart without clearing the flag, when your done changing stuff shut down, will auto clear the flag, ready for the automation to automatically shut down next time. Will let you adjust the schedule easily in HA and do more advanced scheduling, let's you keep it online as needed for debug. Should give you the best of both worlds.
@@JeffGeerling you could stop the auto backup by adding a 30 sec delay to the start script, checks for user interactions and won't start if the user interaction is present. Or just check for a file exists, so you can just touch a file in home to stop script from starting
Its always nice to have a NAS with auto backup set up. I use a WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra and I like the My Cloud software. The only issue I have had was one of the drives in a Raid 1 configuration failed last week (WD Gold 16TB drive).
Please, pleeeeaseeee show us the add-on card with the four M.2 SSDs! I will also equip my Mixtile Cluster with such drives, as the backplane has M.2 slots on the back, one for every node.
Great video and thank you for sharing your updates @JeffGeerling As far as your RPi5 SATA Hat update where you show you are using a USB3 2.5Gb Ethernet adapter. Where did you get it? I didn't see a link in the description for the newer hardware used. :) Thank you for the update that you have a second channel. I just subscribed to that one. :) Keep up the good work @JeffGeerling ! :D
@@JeffGeerling Thank you sir I found it and just put it in my cart to order. I am trying to get that SATA hat right now, but seems to be out of stock right now. I would really like to try out the ZFS stuff on a Raspberry Pi :)
Knowing how often Jeff's bars are seen in the videos, he probably came up with this title months ago giggling to himself and now he finally has the chance to post it 😂
Man that HL-15 is such a beautiful case but $799 for a case and backplane is nuts when you can buy a Meshify 2 or Define 7 and miniSAS breakout cables that holds as many drives for 1/8th the price
Yeah; it's a premium case, with a premium price. I hope these show up on the used market at some point since the cases are so versatile, and will probably outlast the ATX standard and 3.5" drive production!
Haha so true. I regret throwing out a box of old SCSI, parallel and serial cables when I moved to college. Some adapters I had in there cost $50+ to get a beat up used replacement nowadays.
Regarding your Comment on the Prices of SSDs increasing, I remember reading (a while ago, mind you, but not more than a year ago) that Samsung and other Flash Storage Manufacturers reduced their production due to a massive glut of Flash storage and dropping prices, I guess this is an after effect that got ya.
I know you wrote 'Not a server' but still please emphasize that backups are NOT safe on non-ecc based computers. Even though it does not happen often with that limited amount of memory it still does not induce 'piece of mind'. I love your videos! Thanks Jeff! 🙂
For a secondary NAS/backup, using ZFS and scrubbing gives me more peace of mind than ECC. I would like full ECC on cheaper devices but it probably won't happen any time soon. The LPDDR4x has built-in ECC mostly to help with the fact it needs it internally, but I'm less worried about that for my data (especially video, which can deal with a flipped bit every now and then, with no noticeable artifacts). If I were storing financial data or databases, I would be a lot more concerned, though! Or if I had a photo library I wanted to preserve for the next 10,000 years. As it stands, ECC is too expensive for me to want to put it in every system I build.
I never use long direct attach cables, I find it much easier to use fibre SFP+ adapters at each end, because fibre patch cables are pretty cheap and available in any length.
I didn't even know that industrial micro sd cards exist, very cool. Edit: they use TLC nand, so they are better then some SSD's (only endurance, not speed).
Transcend makes them (and ssd's that have power loss protection, the real kind), it's just a pain in the butt to find a place to buy them. Under the Embedded category if you ever look, not consumer.
apalrd uses Proxmox Backup Server running ZFS. Then, he connects an LTO tape drive and manually backs that up to tape (supported feature in PBS). He sends those tapes to a family member. I am considering this because I cant run another ZFS server to replicate to offsite.
With two locations (home and office) I guess the question is do you ditch Amazon glacier and just replicate home->work and vice versa for your off-site?
Sadly, home is within a nuclear blast radius of the office, so if one went down, both would go down. But the 'undisclosed RU-vidr' is far outside the blast radius, so I hope to work on that later this year :)
@@JeffGeerling Same situation with my work/home but I figure I'm not really that important, so I'm allowing the nuclear blast as a reasonable excuse for then deciding to retire from RU-vid... 😆☢
0.13 USD per kWh? (laughs in Quebec) Consider moving to Montreal just for the 0.067 CAD (0.048 USD) per kWh. Come for the electricity prices, stay for the university tuition for your kids (5300 CAD per year, or about 3900 USD). EDIT: And the A&W is actually good here, as we discussed previously.
I had 4 Sata SSD shoved into my Dell Optiplex SFF - it used like 20 watts most of the time. The SATA card was my choke point. But I only had 1TB ssd so - limited to 3tb of space.
4TB NVME boards are cheap now, only abut $200/ea, you could cut the cost of storage to $1600 (rather than $2500) with 8 NVME boards, but you need 8xPCIe lanes to support it ...
the other day i used a pi 4 as a tiny nas just for a few files that i need to open on 2 devices useing ubuntu 24.04 LTS and samba the pi 4 has only a 32gb sd card nano NAS :>
build that all in a case and populate with data, then hand over and wait for it to sync home , and think remote sites. I have always thought a friends network where u build/buy, setup knowing target networ settings, archive
