StorJ | Rent your NAS Storage

I found a project called StorJ. With it, you can “be the cloud” by renting out your spare NAS or hard drive storage. The consumer side is Tardigrade which allows people to store their data. It seems to be targeted at people looking for a decentralized version of Amazon AWS S3. About Tardigrade A few … Read more

56TB Zpool Upgrade

My Proxmox server was at 85% capacity. The daily email from Proxmox reminded me of two drives throwing SMART errors. It was time to replace the array. I like to think hard drives can last 5-years so it’s best to proactively replace drives around that age before the failure rate starts to increase. I ask … Read more

I switched to Duplicati for Windows Backups and Restic for Linux Servers

So long, CrashPlan! After using it for 5 years, CrashPlan with less than a day notice decided to delete many of my files I had backed up. Once again, the deal got altered. Deleting files with no advanced notice is something I might expect from a totalitarian leader, but it isn’t acceptable for a backup … Read more

Benchmarking Guest on FreeNAS ZFS, bhyve and ESXi

FreeNAS 11 introduces a GUI for FreeBSD’s bhyve hypervisor.  This is a potential replacement for the ESXi + FreeNAS All-in-One “hyper-converged storage” design. Hardware Hardware is based on my Supermicro Microserver Build Xeon D-1518 (4 physical cores, 8 threads) @ 2.2GHz 16GB DDR4 ECC memory 4 x 2TB HGST RAID-Z, 100GB Intel DC S3700s for … Read more

ZFS Dataset Hierarchy | Data Hoarder Edition

ZFS is flexible and will let you name and organize datasets however you choose–but before you start building datasets there’s some ways to make management easier in the long term.  I’ve found the following convention works well for me.  It’s not “the” way by any means, but I hope you will find it helpful, I … Read more

FreeNAS Mini XL, 8 bay Mini-ITX NAS

Catching up on email, I saw a Newsletter from iX Systems announcing the FreeNAS Mini XL (the irony).  On the new FreeNAS Mini page it looks just like the FreeNAS mini but taller to accommodate 8-bays. Available on Amazon starting at $1,500 with no drives. Here’s the Quick Start Guide and Data Sheet. The pictures show what appears to be equipped … Read more

VMware vs bhyve Performance Comparison

Playing with bhyve Here’s a look at Gea’s popular All-in-one design which allows VMware to run on top of ZFS on a single box using a virtual 10Gbe storage network.  The design requires an HBA and a CPU that supports VT-d so that the storage can be passed directly to a guest VM running a ZFS … Read more

Supermicro X10SDV-F Build; Datacenter in a Box

I don’t have room for a couple of rackmount servers anymore so I was thinking of ways to reduce the footprint and noise from my servers.  I’ve been very happy with Supermicro hardware so here’s my Supermicro Mini-ITX Datacenter in a box build. Motherboard: Supermicro X10SDV-F CPU/Motherboard: Xeon D-1540 X10SDV.  8 cores (16 including HT … Read more

FreeNAS 9.10 on VMware ESXi 6.0 Guide

This is a guide which will install FreeNAS 9.10 under VMware ESXi and then using ZFS share the storage back to VMware.  This is roughly based on Napp-It’s All-In-One design, except that it uses FreeNAS instead of OminOS. This post has had over 160,000 visitors, thousands of people have used this setup in their homelabs and small … Read more

Best Hard Drives for ZFS Server (Updated Oct 2022)

Updated October 19, 2022. Today’s question comes from Jeff…. Q. What drives should I buy for my ZFS server?  Answer: Here’s what I recommend, considering a balance of cost per TB, performance, and reliability.  I prefer NAS or Enterprise-class drives since they are designed to run 24/7 and also are better at tolerating vibration from … Read more