I got 4 20TB drives from Amazon around Black Friday that I want to get setup for network storage. I’ve got 3 descent Ryzen 5000 series desktops that I was thinking about setting up so that I could build my own mini-Kubernetes cluster, but I don’t know if I have enough motivation. I’m pretty OCD so small projects often turn into big projects.
I don’t have an ECC motherboard though, so I want to get some input if BTRFS, ZFS, TrueNAS, or some other solution should be relatively safe without it? I guess it is a risk-factor but I haven’t had any issues yet (fingers crossed). I’ve been out of the CNCF space for a while but Rook used to be the way to go for Ceph on Kubernetes. Has there been any new projects worth checking out or should I just do RAID and get it over with? Does Ceph offer the same level of redundancy or performance? The boards have a single M.2 slot so I could add in some SSD caching.
If I go with RAID, should I do RAID 5 or 6? I’m also a bit worried because the drives are all the same so if there is an issue it could hit multiple drives at once, but I plan to try to have an online backup somewhere and if I order more drives I’ll balance it out with a different manufacturer.
Wow this is an amazing explanation! I’ve been starting to lean towards UnRAID but I didn’t realize their fault tolerance wasn’t as vetted as my cohorts believe. I’ve been taking a painful option to keep an lvm on ubuntu for my drives, but I’m trying to get out of my mistake and build something for offsite so I can feel comfortable with redoing it all.
I mean, lots of people use UnRAID without problems. Lots of people use single disks without problems (until it all fails catastrophically). Some people use ZFS/MDADM/etc and do have problems. My biggest point is that UnRAID uses a custom and proprietary solution, as such it has had less eyes on it and a shorter history than some other options like ZFS or MDADM. BTRFS is also pretty young (and has had some serious issues with reliability in recent memory), but is open source and has gotten pretty reliable because of that. Which is better? Who knows.
There are some really nice things about UnRAID. It is one of the few solutions that handles mixed disk sizes well. Further, like some other solutions I mention, everything but the parity drive(s) are just regular filesystems, so even with a “total loss” you only lose the data from the disks that fail. If the X parity drives + 1 data drive fail you only lose the stuff on that 1 failed data drive. If you lose X + 1 data drives, you lose all of the data from those X + 1 data drives, and your parity drives can’t do anything to help you.
I am more than happy to share my thoughts and experiences. I can’t guarantee that my experiences and impressions are up to date as it’s been years since I’ve used UnRAID at this point, and I haven’t followed it super closely. Do your own research, hopefully these posts serve as a decent starting point and list of topics to get you wondering about. If you find a silver bullet that doesn’t involve paying come company millions of dollars or me hiring an engineer to run it let me know.
Good luck!