homelab
Void Linux + mdadm in RAID5 + BTRFS with snapshots enabled. Trust me, you won't regret it 😉. I have a working storage like this, but with 6 drives (scrap 2TB ones in RAID5) and BTRFS with zstd set at 10. Compression on MPEG2 content is... more than I ever hoped for to be honest, like 30, 40% compression. MPEG4, not as much, but you can shim about 5 to 10%.
MPEG2 is, by today's standards, horribly inefficient, so that is to be expected. Transcoding, in that case, will gain a lot more. But if your mp4 files still compress significantly with a standard lossless compression algorithm, something is wrong with your encoder settings. Even xz, which, even at the default Level 6 is often better than zstd at 19, will generally do less than 1%, typically 0.2%, even at level 9 (the highest).
To be honest, that percentage was after deduping everything, so it could be due to dups being deduped. The first one (the MPEG2 one) was before deduping, so that should be valid.
zstd can go up to 15 on BTRFS, not higher.
Do not do this setup if your data is critical. btrfs raid 5 isn't stable
Definitely. I just built one by throwing an old mb/CPU into one of those cheap rosewill rack cases and tossed some old 2TB drives i had in. Works like a charm with trueNAS as a VM in proxmox
Like @octobob said, don't go with the rosewill rails if you can help it. I made that mistake and they're a big pain
Is there better rails? Do you need much processing power for truenas?
Look at iStart rails. Never used them myself, but seen others speak highly of them.
I'm running 6x2TB drives on a Ryzen 2200G and it's more than enough, I don't think it's very CPU heavy. I can't speak for any other rails just yet but I might try a generic rail brand and see if it makes life easier
I was using a home built machine for several years as a Nas, and it was fine, but I ultimately upgraded to a Dell R510. They can be had pretty cheap, and have 12x 3.5" bays. I also added an HBA that I plug into a Lenovo sa120 (direct attached storage) I bought, for a total of 24x 3.5" drives.
I mention the sa120 because it just leads to expandability down the road for you. My r510 is one of my most favorite machines. I'm currently migrating data from 15x 4tb drives, over to 6x 10tb drives and I'm going to be shutting the DAS down to save electricity.
The r510 isn't easy on electric usage, but it has been Rock solid for me.
I have a similar setup with my 2 HPE dl380. 1 with a netapp. And the other a Lenovo.
I wouldn’t mind throwing in a dell, just to learn something new. Is there plenty of resources for the R510 like there is with the 380’s?
What software do you run to make it a nas?
I'm running Trunas. I've been using it for many years, and it's been an fantastic solution for me.
As far as resources, what do you mean? It's an older server, so Google is your friend for sure. But I've had zero issues sourcing parts that I may have needed.
Excellent!
Yeh, I meant parts and drivers and firmware and whatnot.
As to filling up the drives so fast, have you considered transcoding it to a smaller format (such as HEVC/H.265) in real time? I know that would require quite some CPU power. Even H.264 is likely to improve on camera native formats, as those often need to encode the videos with embedded/low-power CPUs. Do you need to retain the footage beyond 3 months?
I’ll check it out.
There’s no set period I need to retain. It’s just been handy, got myself out of trouble a few times in compliance complaints. a couple times I have wished I was able to go back further. That’s all.