Just wanted to share project working on currently

[+BudMan MVC]

Figured share little project running on my home infrastructure.  One bad thing about working from home - is its harder to geek out with fellow techy people at work over "chat"  that is always more fun over after work beers, etc.

So I run plex for friends and family, and been hovering around 75% storage of roughly 17TB total.  I have been purging and shrinking stuff for awhile to stay under or around that 75% mark.  Nas running 3x4TB in raid 0, and another 8TB disk..  This fills its 4 bays.

I could of prob let that get closer to 80% but knew at some point it would need to be able to be moved off to a single disk, and didn't want that disk to have to be too big.  Prices on disks have been a bit out of wack over covid, but they seem to be getting back to reasonable.

So finally pulled the trigger on 2 18TB exos drives.. Found a good price, and very happy with how secure they shipped them.. If you have ever ordered a disk from say amazon - they tend to just throw them in a big box with some of those air pillow nonsense things.. Good luck if those actually work when you get them These were not that, they were very nicely packaged - like one of those egg science things you did as a kid where the egg had to survive drop off the school roof If interested in site where ordered just pm me.

So moving all the files off to one of the drives via usb dock.. Takes a while to move some 12TB of files, especially when loads of them are the tiny little files that plex creates.. Some 313K files copied already, and only 38% complete.  Been running for about 17 hours now.  A few questions from users already on why plex is down - check your email people! I sent out multiple warnings about the upcoming upgrade and extended down time Or check the status page I host on another site, that says if service is up, and I announce any up coming planned outages, and or info, etc.

I didn't think it would take this long - I did some benchmarking of transfer speed via the usb dock, and it was more than capable of disks max sustained transfer rate, etc. But didn't account for 100's of thousands of little files plex creates, nor that backup isn't going to just max out the performance of the disk and system..

Just waiting for the backup to finish, then have to pull the original disks.. Then install another disk in nas, restore and then move all the files back.. Figured project would be like 3 days tops.. But seems like its going to be more a week long thing.  That is if everything goes well..

I'm hoping everything works out as planned - worse case since not really doing anything to the original disks.  If the backup and restore crashes and burns, I can always just put the original disks back.  And go back to the drawing board

I prob put would of put this off longer, but running out of stuff willing to purge, and have already done as much reduction can do converting large stuff to x265, etc.  And this was a good price for those sized drives, and the current drives are getting a bit long in the tooth.. I have never worried about back up the plex media, only home movies and really hard to come by stuff.. But then again normally change out disks with larger ones well before age where they should or could start to fail..  Moving to these larger drives, I can now put these older disks in my das, get rid of the 4 2TB drives in there and have about 20TB to backup large portion of my media..  If not all of it for a while.  And future space needs will be easy because I will free up 2 bays in my nas - so I can just add couple more disks as needed.. Bigger drives coming out all the time, but even if add 2 more 18s - your talking like 72TB.. That is some serious storage if you ask me

Not asking any sort of question or advice just wanted to share..

Now the bigger concern is - what sort of look is my wife going to give me when she sees the CC bill, While the price was good on the drives, they sure were not "free" hehehe

[FloatingFatMan]

72TB? Maaannn.. Makes my little 24TB Plex server seem tiny!

Is the NAS really worth it?  I store everything in a DAS with Plex running on a little Intel NUC PC as it was more CPU grunt than most of the NAS's I've seen and costs a fraction of the amount...

[+BudMan MVC]

I have been very happy with the nas..   Sure you can get some nuc off ebay fairly cheap, etc. And prob has more cpu than the nas, etc. But its about low power consumption, its about aesthetics, it comes with easy to use gui based interface (DSM).  And simple to load packages, clicky clicky can run a docker, clicky clicky can run VMs..  Clicky clicky install xyz, etc. 

A simple solution for current storage problem sure would of been to hang some disk(s) off it via usb or via esata.   Not very pleasing looking setup.  And doesn't do anything about my current disks getting close to 5 years in age anyway.

There are always ways to budget out on something.. The nas wasn't all that expensive..  $550 back in early 2018..  How much was your nuc, how much was the das box.  Can you run raid on your das.. 

The only thing I can say in hindsight, is should of gotten one with more bays.  Should of gotten one I could have added 10ge too, etc.  Should of gotten one that supported more ram.  But the original plan was to run smb3 multichannel (nas has 2 gig interfaces) And I did that for a while - was seeing 220MBps that way.  Then I moved to a 2.5ge usb interface and see 280ish.  I had even thought of just upgrading the nas completely so I could do 10ge, and have more bays.. But this was more cost effective solution.  And if I do pull trigger on say a new nas in next year or so, these drives can be used in it, etc.

Also some buddies at work were running synology and very happy with them.. I wanted to see what they were talking about, etc.  Overall been very happy with the purchase, its be rock solid stable that is for sure.

 

 

[+BudMan MVC]

So mark this project completed.

All went pretty smooth. I did run into slight snag that the new drives didn't come set with 4096 sectors.  While are 4k native, it comes with them set to 512e.. I was part way into moving files back when I noticed this and had to start over.  Simple enough to setup, just popped the drive into my pc and using seatools changed to 4k, while at it also noticed they were on sn02 firmware verse latest of sn04 so updated that as well.  I did learn that guess you can do this while they are in the nas, but that was a bit more complicated and was just easier and faster to pop them into pc.

Everything went back pretty easy if a bit slow, dockers, vms and the most important plex.. And everything is back up and running.

Also changed plans a bit, I was just going to turn the cache back on with the nvme that I had.. But was like this is prefect time to just create a volume with them, from reading this seems to be a much better use of them when running plex.  So I found nice easy to follow guide, and bobs your uncle.  Even moved my docker and vm manager package to the new 1TB ssd raid1 volume.  So plex, dockers and vms are now fully running off SSD, With only the actual plex media sitting on the rust drives.

I do a have a bit of cleanup, can prob delete some of the stuff I had sitting in multiple locations. Want to make sure my important stuff has copies on both hdd volumes.  And the real important stuff also stored on pc as well, etc.  This way also be sure have everything before I wipe the old drives and put them in the das.

I also waiting for some velcro tape - these drives do make a bit more noise, so going to try the velcro tape trick and see if that helps - it should be here today.

Its nice seeing all that space available Have plenty of space to continue to grow the library without having to worry.

[i_was_here]

On 06/11/2022 at 06:07, BudMan said:

Also changed plans a bit, I was just going to turn the cache back on with the nvme that I had.. But was like this is prefect time to just create a volume with them, from reading this seems to be a much better use of them when running plex.  So I found nice easy to follow guide, and bobs your uncle.

Link for said guide?

[+Jester124 Subscriber²]

That is awesome! I will be looking to do an upgrade on mine soon as well and was very comparable to your original setup.

[+BudMan MVC]

On 06/11/2022 at 10:19, i_was_here said:

Link for said guide?

Oh to use SSD as a volume.. here

https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/pwrch3/how_to_create_a_usable_poolvolume_to_use_as/

 

I'm using Samsung 980's which are not on their "compatible" list but work just fine, neither are the 18T exos, again not on list the list only goes to 16T for the exos line.  But other than the warning - they are working just fine.