I'm a data hoarder. And I regularly need access to old data. My previous solution - a blu-ray backup storage, was insufficient. It was hard to manage and search through. I even written a tool that stored metadata for all files on the disks, so I could find on which disk to find a specific file. It was inconvenient.
But then I looked at the prices... Well, building a NAS isn't cheap, even when you try to spend as little as possible. My build costed me roughly 620$.
I wanted to find a solution to mount all the drives. Getting an old office computer would be a great solution, certainly way more extensible and reliable than mine. But desktop cases are bulky and I didn't want to find a custom case just to spend a ton of money on PC parts. I went for a DAS USB enclosure. It was somewhat cheap (150$ 5 bay orico enclosure), looks pretty, doesn't take much space and takes care of power. It comes with one big disadvantage though: it doesn't support UASP, so you can't control APM on the HDDs. It would have been a better idea to go with an esata enclosure.
For the drives I used 5 4tb Skyhawk 5400rpm drives. They were the most expensive part of this build: roughly 470$ at the time. But I didn't regret choosing these drives. After 6 months none of the drives died or had any problems. They have good enough speed, especially in my use case. And the default APM settings are very sane: they rarely park their heads, keeping the Load Cycle Count low. They are also meant for 24/7 use, so I keep them spinning constantly.
For the brains of my NAS I used a raspberry pi 4 that has been laying around my home. I installed openmediavault on it with ZFS plugin. After patching the "isusb" function in openmediavault, I could create a zfs pool on my drives and easily manage it. I also attached a USB SSD as ZFS cache to speed up reads.
I used raid-z2. Any 2 drives can die before any data loss occurs. I want it to be extra reliable, in case one of the drives dies during the replacement period. That's why a 5 bay enclosure seemed perfect for me.
Performance was ok. It could saturate 1G Ethernet most of the time, but not always. Raspberry pi 4 even with an overclock was a bottleneck. Its CPU got pegged by USB mass storage protocol.
Surprisingly I had no issues related to USB. Raspberry pi is known to cause problems when using USB attached storage. And people seem to have issues with UASP all the time. But I didn't stumble upon amy of them this time.
After a few months I replaced the raspberry with a mini PC. It costed me just 40$, but offered way better performance. I also added an SLOG drive to improve the write performance, but that needs further testing.
Would I recommend anyone repeat this? Probably not. While the end product looks good on a shelf in my living room, making almost no noise and sipping very little power, the performance isn't awesome. I'm not sure how I could improve this build in the future, though. Other than building it in a PC case (which I don't have a place for), or using a thunderbolt DAS, there aren't any other solutions that don't involve a ton of wires. Even an eSata enclosure would be limited in speed by a sata port multiplier inside it.
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