When HN users recommended it
2 HN users recommended this between 2021 and 2023, in 2 comments.
20072026
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
2 HN users recommended this between 2021 and 2023, in 2 comments.
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
Not OP, but I built a NAS not that long ago. For the case I purchased the Fractal Design Node 304 (https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/node/node-304/...) and am very happy with it.
For the Mobo I suggest finding a decent board (AMD based one if you want ECC RAM) and then use a PCI-e controller card to support the hard drives you need. It is hard to find a nice MB with all the SATA ports you need, using an external card gives you a lot more options. When I researched it everyone recommended an "LSI Logic Controller Card LSI00301 SAS 9207-8i" (eg. https://www.amazon.com/LSI-Controller-LSI00301-9207-8i-Inter...) and it has performed very well for me. If you go that way you'll need a SAS to SATA cable, they are easy to find as well.
Sure!
It's a repurposed gaming PC, so a 1st Gen Ryzen 1800X, 32 GB RAM. Took out the good GPU and bought the cheapest card I could find to support a tiny monitor for maintenance, but generally I manage it from my primary windows machine with X2Go (just a remote X server/client over SSH for Windows), and ssh directly if I'm on one my linux boxes.
I use this SATA expander card to fit 8 4TB HDDs (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008J49G9A/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...) for the main array, and have a 64 GB SATA SSD for the OS.
OS is Arch Linux, which I'm partial to for the AUR and documentation. For the root drive I just use ext4. I initially got started with Arch's ZFS wiki pages: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS/Virtual_disks
Note if you go this route, I've had bad luck with the DKMS builds of ZFS where they sometimes fail to install during kernel upgrades, so I use the binaries from the archzfs repository. Sometimes I have to wait for the repo maintainer to build new packages to keep up with arch kernel releases, which is annoying, but it's preferable to getting a broken system back up and running. I've also had bad luck with ZFS-on-linux native encryption, with my system intermittently seg-faulting when reading from an encrypted dataset under heavy load. So I use LUKS/dm-crypt on top of ZFS (the LUKS volumes are unlocked at boot, then the ZFS pools are imported). However I suspect this is a hardware peculiarity with my system, as I can't find any mention of the same issue online. So YMMV
Some resources for dm-crypt/LUKS: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Device_encryption https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/System_configurati... https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_enti...
Hope it helps, with the exception of the native encryption issue I found ZFS to be remarkable easy to use and bombproof so far. Have fun!