Hi! I have a NUC with 250GB SSD inside. It’s running everything from pihole through arr apps to 3d printing frontend. Since my family is starting to think “hey that’s a good idea can I use it too”, 250GB is starting to be not enough.
Do you have any recommendations? A NAS? A DAS? Something else?
For now, I’m downloading and deleting shows/movies cos I don’t have space obviously, but eventually I’d like to keep some that are cool. Or backup photos to it and stuff.
Thanks :)
Ok first of all disregard any advice to connect a permanent drive with USB. It will suck. You will get disconnects and maybe even filesystem failures. And yes you can recover from failures (most of the time) but why polish a turd?
If you can add an internal hdd to the NUC that’s all you need. Get one in whatever size you need and you’re good to go.
If you want to safeguard against that HDD crapping itself then you can use a secondary HDD on USB. Connecting a HDD occasionally to USB for backups is ok. Keeping it connected 24/7 isn’t. Use a specialized backup software like Borg Backup, take a backup of whatever you consider essential data, and keep the backup HDD in the drawer the rest of the time.
You don’t have to get an external HDD btw, you get a crappy USB enclosure and a crappy HDD with a shiny brand on it. Get a regular HDD from a good brand, it can also be a 2.5" (laptop) HDD, and an USB SATA adapter. Also, Orico makes some nice HDD cases for drawer storage.
If a second HDD is too expensive for you get an optical unit (can be USB, can be internal + USB-SATA adapter) and burn backups to Blu Ray discs from Verbatim with parity data created with par2. Store the written discs in zip-up CD wallets or jewel cases, not in bulk spindles. You can also burn DVDs if BRs are too expensive where you live. DVDs can also be long-lived if stored properly and any backup is better than no backup. But BR are really best for durability.
Don’t listen to advice about making RAID this and RAID that. How much space do you need? They make 20TB HDDs nowadays. Get one HDD and be done with it. Do you want to spend 5x more and also have to buy a NAS to store them, and learn about RAID levels and in how many ways they can fail? Do you need 100 TB? Do yourself a favor and get one single drive and take periodical backups and you’ll be golden.
You are absolutely right! Thank you!
As much as I would have fun learning about RAID and stuff, I don’t think I need so much space and money spent right now. I will probably just buy one drive for now. If needed, I’ll buy another one.
Do you recommend any special HDDs? Or something to watch out for? As the drive is going to be running 24/7 basically.
There is one thing to watch out for called SMR and CMR technologies. CMR is the classic tech, SMR a recent one. SMR makes the tracks on the HDD platters overlap, allowing the manufacturer to pack more data on them, and to use fewer platters. But it comes at the cost of writing performance, basically SMR drives will take long pauses every once in a while when writing large amounts of data.
You don’t want a SMR drive for a 24/7, instant access drive so you’ll have to watch out for this spec. SMR is ok for a cold backup drive because it doesn’t matter, you leave the backup program to do its thing however long it takes and you disconnect when it’s done. But you don’t want to take a long break while you’re doing something with your main live drive.
Other than that anything from Seagate, WD or Toshiba will be ok. People will swear by one or other of these brands but it’s pretty much the same.
This page will tell you if a drive is SMR or CMR by the model number: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/
Awesome, thanks!
I have been running two usb3 based raid-1 arrays for over 10 years and I had zero failures, zero corruption’s and plenty of speed (ssd’s over dedicated usb3 ports).
The disks are on a UPS (a very small one) to avoid powerlosses due to power failures.
SSDs draw less power than HDDs, first of all. But regardless, if the enclosure chipset is poor quality and/or hasn’t been designed to run 24/7 it can overheat and disconnect intermittently or permanently.
And that’s without going into the quality of the USB and drivers on the host.
You either lucked out or you’ve been having silent file corruptions going for 10 years without realizing. What filesystems do you have on those disks?
I use an expensive JBOD USB/e-SATA BOX to host 4 ssd’s (nowadays, but those has been hdd’s until 2022) connected via usb3. The box has a huge fan too.
I think the issue is not USB itself but how cheap you go with your enclosure…
No, can confirm no data corruption. Can I be 100% sure? No I cannot of course.
I use EXT4, which again never gave me issues whatsoever. So far.
I’m strongly in favor of keeping things compartmentalized. I have two main servers: One is a Proxmox host with a powerful CPU and a few hard drives set up in a fast but not-so redundant array (I use ZFS, but my setup is similar to RAID10). Then a have second server that runs TrueNAS; the CPU is slower, but it has a large amount of storage (120TB physical) arrayed in an extremely fault-tolerant configuration.
My Proxmox box runs every service on my network, but all that gets stored the hard drives are the main boot disks. It backs up daily, so I’m not so concerned about drive failure. All my data is stored on the NAS, and it’s shared with the VMs via NFS, SMB, or iSCSI, depending on which is more appropriate.
For you, I’d recommend building a NAS, and keep all your important data there. Your NUC can host your services, and they can pull data from the NAS. The 256GB on your NUC will be more than enough to host whatever services you need.
Thanks, I’ll consider it. I’ll see what others say.
You’re right that 250G should be enough. Right now it takes 10G for 30 containers. But it was a mistake to make an only 20G root partition lol. This overlay2 folder sure grows
My home server is also on a NUC and I just connected a 2TB SSD to it via a USB cable. I know that’s not ideal but I didn’t want to become like an enterprise IT guy at home. Jellyfin rocks with this setup. YMMV.
8TB SATA SSD can be had for less than $300
Meanwhile 4tb sata ssd is 300€ in germany
Where?
if the cpu performance and memory capacity is still enough, i’d recommend upgrading the storage. SSDs are reportedly getting more expensive, but it isn’t that bad yet.
running an external drive through some kind of USB 3.X connection would also be possible, although at reduced speed. (won’t matter with a HDD, obviously)
Get a decent machine and run true as scale.
All of these things can be installed as helm/k8s “apps” and they almost self configure.
They update aswell.
It’s spectacular.
Then throw drives at it.
I have one “pool” of storage that’s a raid 10 for things I care about and then a giant zfs “jbod “ that has no backups for just mass storage of things that I don’t really care about.
Attach 2 external disks via USB 3. Add them to a ZFS mirror. Use the mirror for storage. Buy a third one for backups.
Performance is great and reliability should be pretty good assuming your disk enclosures aren’t junk. I’m using WD Elements and WD MyBook. I’ve had some problems with one WD Elements where its SATA to USB controller was overheating causing it to disconnect under extreme prolonged load. I solved that by slapping a small heatsink on it and drilling a hole in the case immediately above it for ventilation. I haven’t had failures on this pool since then. The other pool I run hasn’t had failures since inception circa 2019. Not a single squeak. It even uses a USB hub to split one port between 2 disks. 🥹
I’m also using a couple of these and they’ve been supremely reliable. They’re identical to this.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity k8s Kubernetes container management package
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
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