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Comment by leobg | Hacker News Reader

I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in.

The author is using a ThinkPad T430.

Any experiences?

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The official TrueNAS docs recommend against using USB drives [1]. My understanding is that between the USB controller, flaky connectors and cables, and usb-to-sata bridges of varying quality, there are just too many unknowns to guarantee a reliable experience. For example, I’ve heard that some usb-to-sata controllers will drop commands and not report SMART data. That said, there are of course many people on the internet who have thrown caution to the wind and report that it’s working fine for them.

Personally I’m in the process of building a NAS with an old 9th gen Intel i5. Many mobos support 6 SATA ports and three mirrored 20 TB pairs is enough storage for me. I’m guessing it’ll be a bit more power hungry than a ugreen/synology/etc appliance but there will also be plenty of headroom for running other services.

[1] https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/13.0/gettingstarted/coreha...

Been using like 7 external usb drives with 40-50tb total for a few years with no issues. Not raid, just backing up drive to drive. No controller or drive issues. Mix of seagate and wd 8/12/16gb.

I hate blanket recommendations like this by docs. To me, it just sounds like some guy had a problem a few times and now it's canon. It's like saying "avoid Seagate because their 3tb drives sucked." Well they did, but now they seem to be fine.

RAID is much different. You can try it over USB, you won't have a good time. TrueNAS is primarily talking about RAID users.

Yes I should have specified that this advice is specific to RAID configurations in NAS applications.

If you're occasionally copying data to an external USB drive, that's totally fine. That's what they were designed for.

The issue is that they were not designed for continuous use, or much more demanding applications like rebuilding/resilvering a drive. It's during these applications that issues occur, which is a double whammy, because it can cause permanent data loss if your USB drive fails during a recovery operation. I did a little more research after posting my last comment and came across this helpful post on the TrueNAS forums going into more depth: https://forums.truenas.com/t/why-you-should-avoid-usb-attach...

YMMV. I have a 4-drive 20TB mdraid10 across two different $50 USB3.0 2-drive enclosures, I've read petabytes off this array with years of uptime and absolutely zero problems. And it runs on one of those $300 off brand NUCs. The 2.5G NIC is the bottleneck on reads.

What may work anecdotally can't necessarily be used for official recommendations for a large range of users across an unknown range of hardware configurations. If it works for you, that's fine. That isn't sufficient to make a general statement that everybody will be fine using external USB drives, particularly for RAID, especially when people will then make you responsible if something goes wrong for not making sufficiently safe recommendations. You understand that, right?

Is that with ZFS or something else?

Mainly I wouldn't do it because of there's space and SATA ports it seems stupid. Hotter. Worse HW.

Can't really see much good reason to do it tbh except it's in a small hot case which is relatively easy to move around. Maybe if you do occasionally backups and you don't care about scrubbing and redundancy? Otherwise why not shuck them and throw them in a case?

you say

> 40-50tb total

> 8/12/16gb

How many drives are those?

You are kidding.

I've had the same thing from random disconnects etc from various USB hard drives and SSD's over the years.

These shucked USB adapters from WD Elements external drives are pretty reliable, from my experience. They kinda have to be, since otherwise it would affect the reputation of WD's external drives as a whole.

Obviously, direct SATA is still better if possible, but if not, these are probably the next best thing.

Those pesky WD bridges usually support USB Bulk Storage only but not UASP, resulting in worse performance and higher CPU usage.

Also HDD power management is often complicated by the bridge chip sometimes intervening.

Not recommended for long-term use.

I own this and it's worth it's weight in gold https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-H-T...

Yes. It's pricey but it's never been a problem. It can connect like 12 HDDs with 256GB ram and has 10GBe and runs at a tiny TDP. Has IPMI. Fits in a tiny case.

The only issue I had with this motherboard was that it was difficult to find someone who sold it. Love it

Also I don't see the built-in UPS. The external drives still use external power

That's an amazing board. I had no idea something like this existed.

Wow. It even has ECC!

How much power does it use?

Not a lot. Idk 25W TDP for the 16 core?

I don't use a laptop, but I use something fairly adjacent: the Beelink SER6 (https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-4-75GHz-PCIe4-0-Supports-HDMI...), which is basically a gaming laptop converted into a small desktop. For the most part, it has actually been pretty great. It's quiet, has a CPU that is much better than I expected, and a decent enough GPU to do hardware transcoding for Jellyfin without much issue.

I use USB chassis of hard drives to work as the "NAS" part, and it works fairly well, and this box is also my router (using a 10 GbE thunderbolt adapter) though my biggest issue comes with large updates in NixOS.

For reasons that are still not completely clear to me, when I do a very large system update (rebuilding Triton-llvm for Immich seems to really do it), the internal network will consistently cut out until I reboot the machine. I can log in through the external interface with Tailscale and my phone, so the machine itself is fine, but for whatever reason the internal network will die.

And that's kind of the price you pay for using a non-server to do server work. It will generally work pretty well, but I find that it does require a bit more babysitting than a rack mount server did.

There’s also variants of three mini PCs with hard drive bays. I recently bought an Aostar WTR Pro and I’d considered the Ugreen competitor.

Yeah, though I have 24 drives so I think by definition I couldn't really have a "mini" with enough bays to handle that.

The laptop batteries tend to go bad(either just stop working or expand and become a major fire hazard) after a year or two as they are not built to be fully charged for years on end. I tried doing it twice and that is what happened both times.

Would not recommend; if you want a UPS just buy one, the small ones are not that expensive, like 70 USD.

On my ThinkPad T430, I have a weekly full discharge cycle set up using "tlp recalibrate BAT0", it helps avoid that issue and helps confirm that the battery is still functional.

On Thinkpads tlp(8) can set a maximum battery charge threshold of 80%. The embedded controller takes care of it. Never had problems.

Makes batteries live way longer.

After a year or two is exaggerating - it's rare to see issues within 5 years.

If you don’t need any performance it’s a great backup strategy. If your only way of connecting the drives to the laptop is USB I would be concerned about data integrity if it’s important data.

Why is USB so bad at data integrity. Doesn't it have error detection/correction? If so, that sounds like a huge design flaw.

Individual writes are safe, in my Experience with thousands of uSB drives in many configurations, some with 12 2tb drives hanging on multiple USB hubs at the same time.

However, there are disconnects/reconnects every now and then. If you use a standard raid over these usb drives, almost every disconnect/reconnect will trigger a rebuild — and rebuilds take many hours. If you are unlucky enough to have multiple disconnects during a rebuild, you are in trouble.

I've had bitflips with USB transfers of 1-10TB. I don't remember the specifics, but my personal confidence in USB is low.

I ran an old Thinkpad as a home router and small home server/NAS device for quite a long time, usually swapping out my old work upgrades every 3 years or so.

They all had onboard gige so it worked fine - native vlan for the inbound Comcast connection, tagged vlans out to a switch for the various LAN connections.

They were from the era of DVD drives so I was able to put an extra HDD in the DVD slot to expand storage with. One model even had a eSATA port.

They worked great. Built-in UPS and they come with a reliable crash cart built-in!

When I used a laptop as server, the battery became a spicy pillow. I think laptops are not designed to be running continuously and on warmer temperatures than normal.

Thinkpads can use tlp to cap battery charge at 80%. It works.

For me it was important to have ECC RAM and laptops pretty much never have that. My personal recommendation is an old IBM/Lenovo workstation tower as the base. I bought one for $35 on eBay and added $40 of RAM (32GB). A $10 UPS from Goodwill with a $25 battery from Amazon, and whatever hard drives you want. I run Ubuntu and ZFS on it but next time would probably opt for FreeBSD for a nicer OS.

Why is it important for an NAS to have ECC RAM?

When Bitrot happens, ECC catches it, where non-ecc doesn't

So that you don't lose your data to random bit flips from cosmic rays.

> I was about to buy a NAS.

The UNAS Pro 8 just came out and I'm thinking about getting it, switching away from my aging Synology setup ... only thing I wish it had was a UPS server as my Synology currently serves that purpose to trigger other machines to shut down ...

I'm considering doing the same, I guess one would basically just be splitting functions, a dedicated NAS, and a dedicated server for all the functions that Synos tend to perform (generally not very well, but at least with pretty low power usage).

I think they just released some new prosumer ups.

I believe Synology's UPS monitoring is based on nut-server[1]. In my setup, I am running the server on a separate machine that reads UPS state over USB and Synology is just a client. Maybe UNAS could also just work as a client.

[1]: https://networkupstools.org/

Used a Lenovo X220T with a cracked screen and missing keyboard a few years back. Worked like a champ (as a server). Cooling was much better without the keyboard.

I’ve use an P51 for about a year now with no issues. I initially bought 6bay DAS, but I’ve since moved to pure SSD storage inside the laptop.

I see a lot of people using M710 mini desktops - I think you can pop a pcie 10gbe card in and a m.2 SATA card and 3d print a disk stand?

You can. It works fine if you know the limitations. An important one is, drives could disconnect, so traditional RAID wouldn't be good.

If you want redundancy, look at something like SnapRAID, http://www.snapraid.it

If you want to combine into a single volume, consider rclone. These remotes specifically are the ones I'm thinking could be useful,

- https://rclone.org/local/

- https://rclone.org/combine/

- https://rclone.org/cache/

Good luck o7

i had a m.2 to pci-e for a sata controller. worked fine but the ups thing is a bit non workable as the drives are not powered by the laptop

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