Greyscale

Went swarm instead. I dont need a department of k8s consultants.

relatedly, I used to use a 4x bay USB3 caddy for some disks… It was OK, but didn’t expose the raw disks and the controller was pretty fucky swallowing things like SMART.

It and some other network appliance bits draw ~ 100W continuous.

I think a good chunk of that is the disks, but I could be wrong.

How much power does just the NAS use?

the NAS is the bulk of the 100W.

Are you running something like Unraid or TrueNAS, or are you just running a ‘regular’ Linux distro?

Ubuntu + ZFS. I don’t see the appeal of running a non-mainline distribution. All I did was set it up so ZFS sends me emails and a crontab to run a ZFS resilver weekly.

Another reason to avoid a Synology. I had a HP Microserver gen 8 that I ditched due to CPU constraints and ECC ram. Just got 32G of cheap DDR4.

Run your fun things in containers and you can’t make a mess of the host.

I’d consolidate to let it pay for itself over the longer term in electricity savings.

My single NAS runs everything I could ever want, though I regret not finding a used 6700k, finding out teh 6600k didn’t have HT.

Also, I run frigate on it inside a container and use a Google Coral Accellerator to people-detection from 4x2k camera streams. Its pretty swish, though it took some fiddling to get the kernel to be groovy with it and do container-device passthru from PCI-e.

In total, my single NAS runs the following in containers:

• Personal projects
• Home Assistant
• MQTT for Tasmota
• Game servers
• Deluge for yarr harr fiddly dee
• Frigate NVR

The whole shebang, NAS with permanently spinning rust, UPS, ISP Modem and Ubiquity Dream Machine run ~100W.

Edit: I’ve noticed ZFS is twitchier than most about disks failing. It fails disks about once or twice a year, which are getting cheaper every year. Most of the time the disk still works as far as SMART is concerned, but I’m not gonna question the ZFS gods.

Can you just put stock ubuntu on it? Is the CPU worth a damn?

If it can’t do either of those, it is manufactured ewaste, imo.

Don’t buy a synology. For less money you can make a better system. I use a cheap itx board, a used 6600k, Silverstone DS380 and 8x4TB disks of spinning rust and a 256G NVME as my current iteration of my NAS. its basically silent, and runs ubuntu + zfs + shit in containers. Its excellent.

I am however considering 10G ethernet cards for it and my desktop and just doing point-to-point. Not that 1G is too slow for my needs, but because it’d be fun.

I mean, this is why my NAS is just ubuntu and zfs and garden variety docker.

I’d quite like an answer to this too for work reasons.