Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

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>so total storage is about ~288TB

?!?

How do you fill 288 TB? Is it mostly media?

>I liked FreeNAS for awhile, but after a certain point I kind of just learned how to properly use Samba and NFS and ZFS, and after that I kind of felt like it was just getting in the way.

I've been a mostly happy TrueNAS user for about four years, but I'm starting to feel this way.

I recently wrote about expanding my 4-disk raidz1 pool to a 6-disk raidz2 pool.[1] I did everything using ZFS command-line tools because what I wanted wasn't possible through the TrueNAS UI.

A developer from iXsystems (the company that maintains TrueNAS) read my post and told me that creating a ZFS pool from the zfs command-line utility is not supported, and so I may hit bugs when I use the pool in TrueNAS.

I was really surprised that TrueNAS can't just accept whatever the state of the ZFS pool is. It feels like an overreach that TrueNAS expects to manage all ZFS interactions.

I'm converting more of my infrastructure to NixOS, and I know a lot of people just manage their NAS with NixOS, which is sounding more and more appealing to me.

[1] https://mtlynch.io/raidz1-to-raidz2/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/comments/1m7b5e0/migrating_...

> How do you fill 288 TB? Is it mostly media?

I kind of purposefully don't fill it up :).

This has been a project of tech hoarding over the last ~8 years, but basically I wanted "infinite storage". I wanted to be able to do pretty much any project and know that no matter how crazy I am, I'll have enough space for it. Thus far, even with all my media and AI models and stock data and whatnot, I'm sitting around ~45TB.

On the off chance that I do start running low on space, there's plenty of stuff I can delete if I need to, but of course I probably won't need to for the foreseeable future.

> I'm converting more of my infrastructure to NixOS, and I know a lot of people just manage their NAS with NixOS, which is sounding more and more appealing to me.

Yeah, that's what I do, I have my NixOS run a Samba on my RAID, and it works fine. It was like fifteen lines of config, version controlled, and I haven't thought about it in months.

I'm in a similar position on my storage... though mostly that I bought a new nas with the intent of storing for Chia, but after 3 days, I decided it was a total waste as I'd never catch up to the bigger miners... So I repurposed it for long term and retired my older nas.

older nas was 4x 4tb drives when I retired it and passed it to a friend.

Current nas is a 6-bay synology with ram and nvme upgraded, along with a 5-bay expansion. All with 12tb drives in a 6drive 2-parity and 5-drive 2-parity arrays. I'm just under 40tb used mostly media.

Well you got it, I just wonder if half that storage would still be effectively infinite for you

I bought the drives used on Ebay, and the prices weren't that different for the 8TB vs 16TB when I bought them. Like on the order of ~$15 higher, so I figured I'd just eat that cost and future proof it even more.

Fair enough, though you could’ve bought half as many if you didn’t mind the hit to the speed no?

I am omitting some context. The original incarnation of this had 24 2TB drives and I wanted to upgrade that. I already had the three enclosures, and I incrementally upgraded the disks over the course of a year.

Haha it’s all good I didn’t mean to interrogate you, enjoy your overkill storage, life is short

288TB might be enough to store a complete set of laser disk arcade games. /s

I don't think that /s is needed, that's probably true. The entirety of Gamecube games is only a few terabytes.

I'm surprised that would even reach 1 TB. The discs only hold 1.46 GB. Though I guess the number of game discs images you'd have would depend on if you have each region's version of each game.

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