Build nas for mac
![build nas for mac build nas for mac](https://bburky.com/NAS/images/nas-finished.jpg)
If you are going to build hardware-RAID, remember to purchase Enterprise Hard Drives.
#Build nas for mac software#
So I purchased two Seagate IronWolf 12TB hard disks.īesides, if you are making software RAID (by mdadm) or ZFS pool, you don’t need to worry too much about the specification of hard drives. In my case, I’d like to have a 12 TB space with ZFS mirrored setup (equivalent to RAID 1), which requires two 12 TB hard disks. Once you have the knowledge about RAID or ZFS pool, you may want to estimate how much storage space you need and how much redundancy is required according to the importance of your data and the budget you have. For some further discussion, you may read this article. So you can have your own good disk plan based on this knowledge. The only way to expand your ZFS pool is by adding a new VDEV into it.
![build nas for mac build nas for mac](https://www.garydanton.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/building-a-diy-mac-mini-nas-768x432.jpg)
An important note is that you CANNOT add extra disks to an existing VDEV. Then, a ZFS pool is built on top of these two VDEVs. As illustrated in the figure above, the blue VDEV is made by two blue hard disks operating in a mirror mode, while the red VDEV is built by five red hard disks in a raidz2 (RAID-6) mode. The redundancy is assigned during the construction of VDEV. In ZFS architecture, we construct a VDEV by using several hard disks. Since I’ve decided to use ZFS in my NAS, I’d like to emphasize more about the constrain in ZFS. The usable storage size of a RAID-6 array equals the size of N-2 disks. A more secure setup is a RAID-6 array (or a raidz2 VDEV), where you can have two disks fail at the same time. In short, you can have one disk failure at one time for a RAID-5 array, which has a usable storage size equals to the size of N-1 disks.
![build nas for mac build nas for mac](https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Apple-Mac-Mini-M1-Rear-USB-Side.jpg)
How much missing data is resolvable depends on the length of parity data and the algorithm. With the parity data, if some parts of your original data are missing, it is possible to resolve them. The parity data is like the check digit of your credit card number. This is because, in a RAID-5 array, the parity data of the amount equal to the size of a disk will be calculated when you write data into the array. You can replace the failed disk and rebuild the data in it by using the data in other N-1 disks. When you use N disks to build a RAID-5 array (or a raidz1 VDEV), you allow any one-disk failure to happen at one time. However, do I really need to sacrifice so much space for redundancy? If you what to have larger storage space with the same amount of disks, you may take a look at the solution realized by using parity data. If the budget is okay, you should go for it. This is the simplest way that requires minimal computation power for redundancy.
#Build nas for mac full#
The other half amount of the disks will be used to store a full copy of your data. In the case of mirroring (or RAID-1), you can only use half amount of your disks for data storage. They either simply mirror the data to a second disk or store some parity data in several extra disks. When it comes to redundancy, the general concept behind RAID and ZFS are quite similar. A software-RAID can be built by the mdadm command, while the ZFS-setup can be managed by zpool and zfs commands. I’d recommend using RAID or ZFS to set up such a large storage volume for home-usage. Also, we would require some redundancy such that the data in the large pool can survive under some hard disk failures. In a NAS, we usually combine many hard disks into a single large storage volume for convenience. Today, I’m going to take a note about how I build my NAS, which also works as a Time Machine backup place for my Macbook. However, these PCs may still be suitable for serving as a NAS server. It’s pretty common to have some PCs whose CPUs are no longer fast enough for our heavy tasks like rendering 8k-video or running numerical simulations. Building NAS with ZFS, AFP/Samba for Time Machine