Still looking for a usable NAS for Ubuntu 23.04

[Tony Arnold]

Hi Jay,

On Sun, 2023-08-06 at 16:59 -0500, Jay Ridgley wrote:
> On 8/6/23 07:48, Chris Green wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2023-08-04 at 17:17 -0500, Jay Ridgley wrote:
> > > > Since I have been trying to find a NAS unit that will work "out
> > > > of the
> > > > box" or with minor tuning with Ubuntu 2.04. It appears that a
> > > > replacement MyBook MIGHT work but I am not clear if that is
> > > > true.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > It largely depends on what you expect out of a NAS box.
> > 
> > Exactly!  Jay, tell us what backup software you want to run on
> > Ubuntu
> > that you want the NAS to work with.  Without knowing that it's well
> > nigh impossible to answer your question.
> > 
> All,
> 
>   THANKS
> 
>   Pretty sure that I am going to go with a Synology DS220j with 2 2TB
> Seagate Barracuda drives installed. That would provide 4TB storage
> which 
> is more than adequate for my needs.

So far as drives are concerned I would favour disks that are meant for
NAS drives. I use the Western Digital Red range which are just that.
I've had really bad experience with Seagate drives in the past which
appear to fail far too soon.

As Karl has pointed out you have no redundancy in your proposed config
so a single disk failure could cause all of your backups to be lost.

>   The software I want to use is Backups (Déjà Dup Backups, currently 
> 42.9); I have used it in the past and like it. Besides it comes as
> the 
> default installed package.
> 
> A question I have is what is the maximum size of the partition that
> may 
> be allocated in a single partition under Linux? Can it span multiple 
> physical drives; as in ONE partition that is ~4TB in size? I am going
> to 
> try to find that answer myself as well...

It depends on what kind partition table with which the disk has been
initialised. For MBR I think the maximum is 2TB. For GPT the maximum is
huge and probably never to be worried about! This article may help:
https://www.maketecheasier.com/differences-between-mbr-and-gpt/

Disk partitions cannot span more than one drive. There are file systems
which will allow a 'volume' to span many drives such as Logical Volume
Manager (LVM), ZFS, BTRFS to name but 3. I think the Synology boxes use
BTRFS internally, but the web i/f hides those details for you.

> Thanks for the help and I will let you know how it goes, from here.

I look forward to hearing how you get on.


Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold MBCS, CITP | Retired IT Security Analyst