Nmve Backup

Moving from Berlin I decided to update my very old backup system, and go almost fully solid state. SSD have become more and more affordable, for the amount I need (~5 TB) they become competitive. They are still more expensive but access and transfer is much faster, and also from the energy point of view they need less energy for reads. To write they use the same or even more, but my usage is read heavy.

I decided to go also this time with AMD, to be able to have error correcting RAM and enough power. Intel atom or Xeon do support ECC RAM, and intel has changed in supporting it also on other chips but only the more expensive ones, so it wasn’t competitive for my use case.

I went with the AMD Ryzen 5 5600, as it supports PCIe 4.0 (a bit overkill for my usage, but good for future proofing), it has good performance (good for ZFS), and does not use too much power. Power usage was also what made me choose a B550 based motherboard (also for that reason and price I did not jump to the latest released AMD) With a motherboard able to use a PCIe x16 as 4 x x4 a cheap Quad M.2 NVME SSD auf PCI-E 4.0 X16 Adapter can be used to connect 4 NVMe m.2 SSD. It was tricky to find motherboards supporting the split of a PCIe slot x16 as 4 x4, and find a readily available and reasonably priced one. Initially I went with a Gigabyte B550 AORUS ELITE V2, but it turns out that it does not support the PCIe split to 4 x4, so I switched to a ROG Strix B550-F Gaming WiFi II which does and was available. As I choose the Ryzen5 5600 and not the GX variant I did need a graphic card, I went with the cheapest, but it turns out that the BIOS did not support it (it is very tricky and not fully documented which graphic cards are actually supported by the BIOS), I went with the next cheapest one, and had more luck.

Finally with

  • Midi be quiet! SILENT BASE 600 silver: 129 CHF
  • Kingston KSM32ED8/32ME 1x 32 GB: 2x186 CHF
  • SSD M.2 2TB Kingston KC3000 NVMe PCIe 4.0 x 4: 2x210CHF
  • SSD M.2 2TB Kingston FURY NVMe PCIe 4.0 x 4: 2x 229.00 CHF
  • Corsair Netzteil RM550X 550 W: 126,00 CHF
  • an internal icybox with 4 hot swappable SATA disks
  • an old SATA SSD as boot drive

I had a server just shy of 2000 CHF. Given the issue with the motherboard and graphic card I wonder if next time I should go for a real server (like a super micro), which are much better to manage remotely, but until now I had good price performance and reliability using gaming oriented boards.

For the SSD I bought two different kinds and of each kind I wrote some 100 GB of random data (that I deleted) so that (hopefully) they will not fail all at the same time. This because the SSD have a maximum write amount, and the two types have a different one, and by writing something on one it will make all of them differnt. Otherwise I think that when writing with similar loads they might fail all exactly at the same time, and the ZRAID setup I did would be almost useless. I still do backups to SATA disks as described here, now I could even use multiple disks as target, thanks to the icybox.

I also switched to truenas scale from FreeNAS/TrueNAS CORE.

I do not know if the licensing issue between ZFS and Linux is really solved, but I think that it is good enough for my usage.