Thanks again for sending the Lockerstor, Marco! I learned a lot while making these two videos.

@@JeffGeerling We learned a lot from you too!

I think the most important aspect for me is software support. Synology offer I believe 7 years, which is the benchmark for me.

@@KZfaqGlobalAdminstrator Hi! We've only begun to retire our oldest products this year due to hardware limitations as they are 32 bit. They are 10 years old.

I'm not surprised at all that Jeff found plusses and minuses of both approaches. I'm really intrigued by the app support of the Asusstor. My home NAS has 10 drives. Maybe Asus can/will accommodate larger home solutions? Bottom line? I want both :D

The self-awareness is gold

Very true! And ECC RAM. Oh wait...

ZFS over packet writing raid0 Universal Disk Format SCSI DVD's ^_~

Did you just heart your own comment 😂. Anyway zfs has a trade off that nobody seems to talk about, they are all quite happy to brush it under the carpet, also if you loose 1 vdev everything is lost. Anyway good video

Obviously a long term project but was looking at SNAP RAID and if you can get it running on a Pi with low enough overhead it could be the real deal for Pi NAS OMV type storage.

We do appreciate the compliment!

I came to see what hoops one needs to jump through for the Raspberry Pi.

Heh... the estimate is a bit low :)

Bingo, we have a winner !

What is omv?

any recommendations for the 1? finding something trustable which doesn't cost much/monthly is pretty hard

Not paying monthly is probably cheaper overall but might cost more upfront. Some ideas: - Take an encrypted disk to work and leave it in a drawer. - Give a nas box to family/friend and backup over the internet.

@@iainwade simple and easy. Never thought of that, thanks

Of course it was cheaper. FFS the ironwolf drives alone makes this a stupid comparison video. Like comparing a 1960's beat up van to a current mustang.

@@bobsmith-qu2oq oh were the HDD specs that much different? I didn't watch the pre-built NAS part of the video and just assumed he bought similar drives

@@bobsmith-qu2oq , I thought he used the exact same drives?

Praise is always appreciated!

Those pesky kids running around :)

I'm considering doing a more in-depth video on backup and talking about that script later this year.

Yes! Please do!

​@@JeffGeerling I would love to hear your experience with Rclone. My current setup for satisfying the "3" and "2" in 3-2-1 is "Jenkins + custom rsync scripts". I chose Jenkins for visibility around scheduling and to handle cross-platform backups with its various agents. I'm still missing an automated solution for "1" and tend to sneaker-net that every so often.

@@T3hBeowulf I definitely need to do a video on rclone, it sounds like. It's pretty simple if you are okay storing your '1' backup in Backblaze, S3, S3 Glacier, or the like.

RAID10 *can* experience a complete data loss if two drives fail at the same time (RAID10 is kind of a compromise between RAID1 reliability and RAID0 performance) . RAID6/RAIDZ2 will protect against that scenario. Let's do the math. Assuming an AFR (annual failure rate) of 3%, the chances that any one of the 4 drives fail is 12% pa (per annum=per year). How long will it take for you to fix the drive? Do you have a spare at hand, or do you need to buy it first? Will the NAS alarm you at 2 o'clock in the morning while you are on a party, and how fast can you return to the NAS whilst heavily intoxicated 😉? Let's assume that it will take 3 days for you to fix the issue (a few hours to react, wait until the shops reopen after weekend, plus the rebuild/resilver). The chances that 1 specific drive fails within these 3 days is ~1:4000, the chances that any one of the 3 remaining drives fails is ~1:1300. In a RAID10 scenario, there is 1 in 3 chance that the 2nd failing drive is the wrong one and complete data loss occurs (total chance 1:4000). With RAID6/RAIDZ2, this chance is reduced to 0. Considering the time it takes to resilver: when the NAS is under heavy load, it needs to decide whether resilvering or regular use gets prioritized (bother resilvering and regular use read off the three (or two) remaining disks). If the NAS prioritizes resilvering, it might become unusable for regular work, if it prioritized normal use, resilvering might take much longer - ultimately, it depends on how much faster the disks are than the network interface. However, the performance impact of resilvering must be addresses when planning the NAS, as the NAS will have to perform periodic scrubs, which have a similar performance impact. The math above dealt only with complete drive failures, nut localized surface defects. The scrubbing reads all the disks to find corrupted data, which is then corrected (ideally also alarming the admin that it had to fix some data because of some surface defects; the issue may be benign, but if a lot of "weak blocks" begin to appear, it might hint to wards an imminent drive failure). Resilvering (and scrubbing) under ZFS only considers the actual data stored on the disks. On hardware RAIDs (and some software RAIDs), resilvering goes through the whole disks, regardless whether there is any data or not. Scrubbing can be done on a OS level (since the OS where data sits)...or it's done via the "whole disk" approach, or (quite popular, but dumb) not at all. Likewise, initializing a new RAID array finishes immediately under ZFS, while other solutions require hours for that trivial task. I prefer ZFS for these reasons. TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) is available for free and runs on x86 platforms (so no Raspberry Pi support). Another downside if the "ZFS tax" - a ZFS RAID drive should be filled only up to 80% (to run at optimum performance). Of course, when it's just used as a data archive where writes are infrequent, and some additional seek times (in the case of spinning disks) are tolerable, you can go up to nearly 100%. A ZFS NAS is not as simple as one of the ready-for-use things intended for the home user. It allows the user to specify priorities and timing of scrubs and resilver operations vs. normal use, which is nice for me, but too technical for the average home user. My own NAS uses some cheap "old junk" mainboard, a few SATA controller cards and a few SATA enclosures with port multiplier built-in. The 32 spinning disks are organized in various volumes, some consisting of 4 disks (RAIDZ1, for less important data) and others consisting of 8 drives (RAID2, for data which I consider a bit more important). I use ZFS snapshots (taking a snapshot of a volume finishes immediately) to protect against accidental file deletion; with a cron job taking the snapshots at regular intervals (interval depends on how much the data changes and its importance). And, yes, on one of my 8 disk RAIDZ2 volumes, I once had 2 drives fail within a few hours. I had one spare at hand and needed to order another one. So, no data loss, but maybe I should have gone for RAIDZ3... And, like you mentioned: offline backups for the real important data. Apart from disk failures, fires and burglary are also real life threats.

True. One risk is you might forget to even apply the changes 😅

The ASUSTOR does offer folder-level encryption (AES 256-bit, it looks like, though with limitations) and a LUKS option for 'My Archive' volume encryption (but not the main storage volume), and there is a LUKS full disk encryption plugin you can use on OMV. I haven't covered either but will be exploring these at some point. Best to have multiple layers of security (in case someone walks off with my drives!).

@@JeffGeerling thanks! Looking forward to when you do so! :)

Some of the external actually contain a white label NAS drive

thanks, what NAs do you have ? what about the Pi transcoding for Plex, is it powerful enough. Did you consider other options

Thank you! We appreciate the compliment!

Great tip. It's not just the storage capacity. Important is also the network speed. Raspberry Pi is very slow for sharing data. You need lots of drives and very fast network. Ethernet and internet. So that's a lot of money to invest.

I'd love to hear about the things that you wanted to use but were not included.

@@ASUSTOR_YT I have been trying to remember what exactly it was I couldn't find, and must confess I just can't remember it. It might even be something that is available now in the NAS SW store. I know of one thing though that will keep me away from a prebuild NAS. Notifications. I hate them like a disease. And it's not limited to neither one vendor nor a NAS. Even on my phone I do everything to disable all notifications. Except for receiving a phone call or SMS I don't want to see them. Again that's just me ;-)

@@madeyeQ Hi. We don't send notifications unless you enable them specifically.

Life is good! 2020 was super not-fun but at least I could share some fun projects on the channel with all of you!

@@JeffGeerling Keep it up my dude, you're providing great content and have a very friendly and marketable face. That smile screams you love what you're doing.

@@sixforks6543 I'm having the time of my life :) Glad it comes through in the videos.

sounds like good how to KZfaq content to me

@@kingmasterlord Not really, I had to deal with tons of security stuff like directory traversal, injections and XSS and 99.9% of people watching don't know anything about this stuff. If they were to expose some ports on their home routers with badly secured web app, then some hackers, or most likely bots wold easily get access to their home networks... There's always a risk they'll forget to patch stuff that might enable remote code execution... In short, unless you really know what you're doing, don't do it... Building complex APIs needed for login and permission systems isn't easy, and securing it is a nightmare...

Any idea where to start (maybe topics to read) and futher to have similar built like you? Thanks..

@@khairulihsan8417 I'd honestly first start by building a simple API for reading files from the server, some routes like API/file/get/pathToFile, reading the target file and then thinking of securing it, so things like dir traversal protection and possibly locking the server to a certain directory, that would be its root

I cover this in a few of my earlier videos in March-right now it seems only the newer generation RAID cards are compatible with ARM64, and I demonstrate using a Broadcom MegaRAID card, but those cards currently cost $200+ (used). I'm still hoping I can get an older RAID card to work though. I have a pile of them.

It is doable; I would need more PCIe slots though. I've been trying to get a 4-slot PCIe switch board since last October... every order I've made keeps getting cancelled. Fingers crossed I get one someday.

Actually, try DigitalOcean Spaces. They have a $5/250GB/Month + 1 TB traffic plan and it is S3 compatible. Restic, rclone and others can talk to it. I stuffed about 2 TB of deduplicated backups in there using both backup and the SFTP translator built into rclone.

Definitely an option. I did the calculations and found that the S3 Glacier option ended up being about 1/4 the cost of any other standard S3-compatible storage plan, plus I put a lot of faith in Glacier's data storage reliability. I have had to restore a few times (usually for some giant project I accidentally deleted locally and didn't realize it until much later), and the costs aren't bad if you're okay waiting a day or two for the download to start, and at a kind of slow rate.

@@JeffGeerling really depends on how fast the recovery should be and how much data you will download in such a situation. Traffic from any of the big clouds is very expensive. If you mostly just send data in and want to keep them for a long time, S3 Glacier is really good and likely the most reliable option and quite cost effective.

​@@JeffGeerling Thanks! Probably they store it on tape and the wait time is for the queueing. By the way, interfacing an LTO drive with the Raspberry would be an interesting video. Technically not a challenge now that you have a SCSI card attached :) But I wonder if the Pi can cope with the transfer speeds this requires - as some kind of periodic backup agent.

In this case, no. It hard locked up (required power reset), and there was no indication the temperature was ever above about 55C

I was almost worried that using FAT32 for all of my drives is a problem.