I built @LinusTechTips' Jonsbo N1 NAS. Some thoughts | NAS Review

[Music] yeah [Music] recently I ran into some problems with my existing storage solution I used to store my files on three and a half inch SATA hard drives that I would simply dock into a SATA 2 sp3 adapter a manually created copies of my important files and was honestly quite happy with this approach it was cheap and relatively easy to live with however I started working on my own businesses some time ago and for a couple of reasons this storage system is no longer feasible add a look for a new solution and decided to build a network attached storage for short and Nas myself so I started looking for a system that ticked all the boxes and after quite some time settled on a modified version of the nas that Linus tactics built about half a year ago in this video I want to show you around the system explain what the upsides of an S solution are tell you about my experiences with it and point out the modifications that I made so that it perfectly fits my needs let's dive right into it there are at least three significant upsides of using an S Storage Cost Storage redundancy and remote access to your data let's start with storage cost upgrading MX Studio to 8 terabyte will run you 2760 Euros here in Germany granted that's pricey and very fast storage probably some of the most expensive storage you can get but the system I'm showing you today will run you around 2 000 Euros and has 16 terabytes of usable storage roughly double that of the Mac Studio the cost of the mass storage is around 500 Euros in this configuration so more importantly you can expand it to essentially any capacity for the cost of just upgrading the hard drives for example a configuration that holds about 32 terabyte of usable search would run you around 2500 euros and going all the way up to 100 terabyte will cost you around 4 200 Euros all in all you might say that these cost savings come from storing the data on hard drives which means that you'll get less performance than out-of-the-mex Studio drives and yes that's absolutely true but on the system that I'm showing you today I can still edit 4K video off of this storage without issues and you could still go with SATA ssds to get speeds of theoretically up to 1.25 gigabyte per second both ways the second point is storage redundancy well if the hard drive in your computer dies the data on it dies with it and is probably unrecoverable at least not for a price that makes sense to a normal user for some use cases this is quite fine and it's still possible to create backups of your data to external hard drives or to cloud storage but these approaches come with additional complexity additional limitations and additional cost the storage configuration in this Nas is currently set up so that OneDrive can fail without any data getting lost at all one could easily set it up to allow for two Drive failures while sacrificing some more usable storage on top of that my server uploads some of the most critical data sets to cloud storage and encrypts them on the client side to make sure that the data is still securely stored there even if my house burns down or something like that it also acts as a backup Target for a few files that I store locally on my computer or fully automatically finally because the server is always on and running it is ideal as a remote access point to all your data please be careful how you set up your network to keep it secure personally I use a VPN to access my local network remotely and then run the normal SMB protocol to access my data remotely but other configurations are of course feasible and there are plenty of tutorials all over the Internet showing how to set up all kinds of remote access there are even more reasons why getting an S can be a good idea just to list a few it can act as a virtual machine host it can act as a media and transcode server it can orchestrate your smart home and many more basically it's a general purpose server that you get to use for anything that you can think of with the reasons for why you should consider an S out of the way let's see what I built into my particular Nets this build is heavily inspired by one deadline is tactics created about half a year ago you can find the link to their build guide below I think their configuration is actually ideal for home and small business use but there are a couple of things that I wanted to change and we'll go through them as we look at the system so let's start with the case it's called The johnsbow End one and it's honestly the ideal case to build an as in in my opinion it's quite compact has acceptable airflow and can be stored either upright or laid down it comes with some front i o but for an S you really at most need a USB port for local copies given the speed of the networking in this particular Ness and the speed of a USB 3 interface however it doesn't really make sense to connect anything directly to it you'd probably rather connect your source to another computer on the network and then transfer the files more comfortably using the SMB protocol so let's open it up and look at the individual components inside the motherboard I chose is identical to the one that LTT shows it's an Asus Rog strix b550i Mini ITX motherboard the cool thing is that it comes with 2.5 gigabit per second Lan onboard I wasn't sure when building it if 2.5 gigabit per second would be enough for my use case and so I decided to go with it first run some tests and potentially upgrade to 10 gigabit down the line spoiler alert I actually did this board also comes with two m.2 connections which is quite crucial to make the storage configuration work one is actually on the back of the motherboard so you can't currently see it the other one is in the front and hosts a SATA HBA in the m.2 slot on the back I currently run a Samsung 980 SSD with 512 gigabyte of storage as a cache Drive I probably would choose different SSD at this point as this one seems to have software issues that occasionally report 84 degrees of temperature while the disk is actually idle and has been for multiple hours it's not enough of a problem for me to switch it out at this point I'd have to take the whole motherboard out and everything but just know that going for a different SSD might make your life a bit easier here the CPU in this build is definitely a point to discuss for a minute LTT shows a AMD ryzen 3100 this is a pretty cheap chip that would serve you well in a Nas like this however I wanted a chip with onboard graphics for a couple of reasons first it simplifies the OS install quite a bit and secondly I wanted to have it for a potential future use in for example virtual machines or transcode applications now this is the point where my main problem with this configuration came up I really wanted to run error correcting memory the reason for this is that ZFS the Disk Management and file system that I'm using heavily relies on storing data in Ram even for longer periods of time this can potentially lead to compromised data in the case of bit flips in Ram now granted the risks are arguably relatively low but for me it wasn't worth taking them especially given that I'm building a dedicated storage server anyway and that the cost of using ECC memory is really only ever so slightly higher than using non-ecc memory the problem with ECC memory is that it's not fully supported by all CPUs on the Intel side of things things are already quite confusing if you ask me but they are even more complicated on the AMD side to some degree basically every ryzen CPU has untested support for ECC this means that ltt's ryzen 3100 should work fine with ECC memory no guarantees from AMD though the b550i motherboard that I and ltus will also support ECC fine so I'm not quite sure what LCT didn't use ECC memory it would have worked just fine with their setup however things get more complicated when you want integrated Graphics or what AMD calls an APU instead of a CPU here ECC support is deactivated on all models except for the pro lineup of apus on those however there's even official validated support from what I understand so I got them just buy an APU and enough story well not so fast actually AMD isn't selling the pro apus directly to customers but only to system integrators so getting one was quite the hassle I finally managed to track down a ryzen pro 5650g from a local hardware seller and then paired it with 32 gigabytes of 3200 Mega transverse Ram from mushkin this is honestly too much for the storage applications that I'm running on this server the CPU never Cracks around 10 of usage while accessing the storage and you should calculate roughly one gigabyte of ram per one terabyte of usable storage on ZFS so 16 terabytes would have been fine in my case in fact I first ran the servo with 16 gigabytes as a test and it worked perfectly however when running virtual machines in addition 16 gigabytes is just too little and so I decided to go with 32 gigabytes in the end this by the way also enables dual Channel access to the RAM and should increase performance a tiny bit let's go over the remaining components in this system I went with the EVGA 550 GM sfx power supply that LTT spec mostly because I don't have much experience with power supplies and I wanted something that works that's efficient and it's from a reputable brand honestly it's probably overkill for this system but it served me well during the past weeks of usage and I don't expect any issues with it in the long term the operating system is stored on this single course error 250 Gigabyte SATA SSD I would have preferred to run the operating system on another disk in parallel to ensure uptime if the drive fails however I currently don't have another SATA port available and also no native mounting space for another SSD in this case also this doesn't affect data Integrity negatively in any way and it's really only an issue for uptime so maybe I'll switch to HBA at some point for one with more ports and then add another small SSD as a backup boot drive somewhere in this enclosure but for now I think it's fine for networking I chose an Intel 550 10 gigabit per second network interface card it just plugged right in and worked without issues finally I chose five four terabyte Seagate Iron Wolf drives totaling 20 terabytes of raw storage in the configuration I used them in I sacrificed one drive worth of capacity for redundancy and I end up with 16 terabytes of usable storage I expect that this should last me for a couple of years at least and once the time comes I can always upgrade the system to up to 100 terabytes of raw storage so that's been it for the hardware let's talk about the software side of things when it comes to software for such storage systems there are a few different choices that one could make for me the choice was quite clear and I went with trunes scale it uses ZFS as a Disk Management and file system it's free developed by a reputable company and offers all the features that I could possibly need scale is quite new to be honest but in contrast to chord which is based on BSD it is based on Linux and hence has much greater support for hardware and software for instance you can easily run Docker containers on this thing and you can set it up with virtual machines it's really brief super easy another alternative could have been underage however unrate is not free and uses better FS which for my purposes isn't as well suited as CFS surely there are many other ways on the software side but to me trueness scale seems like the way to go let me know in the comments if you think something else would be a better fit for the system in terms of configuration I opted for a raid Z2 configuration for my disks giving me data Integrity with up to one disk failure once you have tuna set up you can safely disconnect all the displays from the machine and it'll run just fine all it really needs is power networking I access all my shares using the SMB protocol one of the many cool things that ZFS can do is that you get to specify how each data set should behave so some of my data sets are encrypted for data security some are not for performance then some data sets use a stronger compression to save space on data that I access rarely sacrifice and performance While others use no compression at all to maximize performance while sacrificing disk space this means that once everything is set up I don't have to think about anything when using the storage I just create projects in my project data sets where they aren't compressed and I work at full performance once I'm done I just move them to the archive data set where they are compressed heavily to save space for added Integrity I have two measures set up most of my data sets have snapshot tasks attached to them this means that the file system will create virtual copies of these data sets and keep them for a specified amount of time legally relevant documents will be held for the amount of time required by law even if I delete them other data sets will keep their snapshots for a few weeks or months so that I can recover accidentally deleted files and protect myself against ransomware attacks some of my data sets are automatically uploaded to cloud storage these uploads are encrypted on the server before they are sent their way to ensure that they can be read on the cloud storage there are few more things that didn't find Space anywhere else in the video so here they go there's a trade-off that you're making by using consumer Hardware such as this b550i motherboard you are saving money by not buying server grade Hardware but you are also sacrificing features that might be useful in this application such as redundant power supply support and an ipmi interface however since I host this machine in my flat where I essentially have access whenever I need it and given that I don't rely on the 24 7 availability of the data on the system I don't absolutely need those features and they aren't worth the additional cost for me at least going with the Server Motherboard would almost inevitably mean that I need to run another case and I would likely need to spend significantly more money for a less tailored system in this particular case so I'm truly happy with the choices I made here then in the past weeks of using the system I spent quite some time with the trueness support and their technical team the main reason was honestly on me I was running Mac OS Ventura on one of my machines and until a recent version of this beta which resolved this issue there was a bug that prevented Mac OS Ventura from properly reading and writing from and to the shares on trueness the trueness team was incredibly responsive in debugging the issue with me and even provided a workaround on their side with a custom smbx computable that enabled these buggy versions of Mac OS Ventura to work with the trueness shares I'm mentioning this to point out the big upset of sourcing the software for your system from a reputable company with loads of experience this is the way to go if you need your systems to run and finally I want to point out a couple of downsides of the Johns point one case it's been great all around but I've had some small alignment issues with the pcie slot on my motherboard and it definitely does like dust filtration given that this system and systems like it probably run 24 7 for most people this definitely will increase the maintenance effort as you will probably have to clean it a couple of times a year all right so this is all I wanted to show you today and I hope you enjoyed this overview of my Nest build thanks to Linus Tech tips for showing off this cool build it's been a pleasure having you in my channel if you found this video helpful I'd appreciate it click on the like button below and I invite you to subscribe to my channel for more videos such as this one have a great day and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Florian Bodlee

Views: 33,363

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Id: r_ml0Wa0Vqc

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2022