I just converted a mini PC into a NAS, with TrueNas OS. My purpose was just to learn the basics of truenas so I can in the future move away from proprietary OS’s. I bought a 250GB NVME drive for the OS and attached an unused 2TB external SSD drive via the USB port. So far it is doing the job.
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I should add the NVME cost me just €15.
The funny part is… there is a on-line backup system built into TrueNAS, although it is called “Cloud Sync Tasks”. I have credentials set up for Google Drive and Dropbox, then, on a nightly basis, back up those cloud drives to my TrueNAS box. Then, I backup some critical “I can’t lose these directories” to Backblaze using their B2 integration. The cost for those backups (around 594GB stored) has cost me less than $4 per month.
How is two drives as single pools connected to the same hardware and running at the same time where pool A has a copy of pool B and pool B has a copy of pool A not better off as a mirror with snapshots?
The mirror removes all the intermediate copy work - you get a single ‘write’ event instead of duplicate drive effort, you get immediate correction benefits on scrub thanks to the additional copy and you don’t have to schedule transfer tasks with the additional IOPS overhead that entails, and you get double the read IOPS as a bonus.
And the second drive inside the same machine, running at the same time on the same hardware doesn’t qualify as a backup any more than a mirror disk iff you have appropriate snapshot intervals. Both drives are subject to the same attached hardware failures, the same malware inputs, the same user inputs…
A backup should isolate you somewhat from those common failure drivers.
What am i missing?
As for the rest of the thread, “Low End hardware” begins and ends at the software requirements documentation. If it says it needs two disks, you don’t get to use one disk. And for the peanut gallery, Truenas is not ZFS. It uses ZFS, but it has additional requirements as an appliance. Simples.
Yeah, but you’re forgetting that not everyone has high bandwidth symmetric connection. My ISP, for example, has blazing downstream of 350 Mbps, but a piddly 15 (usually more like 10) Mbps upstream. It would take forever to upload gigs of data at that speed. Also, ISP’s are often one of those things where you’re at the mercy of the provider because there is often little to no competition in the area because for whatever reason, the providers have decided not to encroach each other’s territories.
That describes pretty much any cable connection. Only fiber customers commonly have symmetric connections. Comcast and like ISPs also customarily underperform admirably re: promoted connection speeds vs. reality. This becomes really apparent during business hours when there are a lot of high-bandwidth, QoS-dependent transactions like video-calls.
Well, it has a nice, user friendly user interface out of the box that makes management much easier then installing a desktop OS, thin it down and install all the utils on it using CLi.
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Well, the OP has only one storage drive, so it is quite irrelevant.
That slot is not used anyways.
I could buy 16 GB M.2 Optane drives on Aliexpress, used for like 5 EUR each.
They are cheap and work nice.
But for 20 EUR/USD,m you can even buy a brand name, 128-256GB NVMe too.
It is, but he currently does not plan to use any of those.
If he will later, he can buy a PCIe slotted M.2 card for 1-2-4 NVMe drives.
I also started out with 6x USB HDDs as my storage.
I had constant problems with it, by the array falling apart at least once a day.
SInce then I never recommend to use this.
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I can understand the concern. I am very blessed to have fiber in my neighborhood with almost gigabit download and upload speed. When I moved here, they were still installing the fiber, so I had a gigabit internet connection with 35 megabit upload. This was still better where I previously lived where I had a ADSL connection with 20 megabit down/1 megabit upload.
Having said that, only critical data goes to a online-offsite backup. Those online backups are scheduled to take place at around 12:30 AM local time where I am most likely to be sleeping.
Well this is an interesting thread, the internet these days, I thought I was on reddit for a minute there. This thread was complete by post 3 I think, OP got his answer then people just kept the heat going.
Haha
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