I’ve done a whole bunch of things but the problem is that the issue w/ the OS locking up was intermittent, so really between every change I would have to wait and see and risk downtime.

I’ve thought about that before, I’ve used proxmox in the past and liked it. The hope I guess would be that proxmox is better able to handle the physical hardware than Unraid is, and the Unraid can blissfully mismanage it’s vCPUs all it wants! I don’t love the overhead of having a hypervisor, but maybe it would be worth it in this case.

You’re right and that’s exactly my plan! I’m going to get 2 20TB drives the next time I need to upgrade, that way I can keep the number of drives low.

With my current power usage and energy prices I’m paying $280 per year for this server alone, so I’m pretty well incentivized to replace parts (particularly since I can sell the parts I’m replacing to offset even further). With my current plans I’ll see a positive ROI within a year almost guaranteed

Oh yeah these are super cool. Seems like they’ve gotten pretty expensive lately though, I can’t seem to find a good deal on Aliexpress

Yeah, the power supply is absolutely too big. I think I used it for a gaming pc before this, so it’s in the ballpark of 800W. I also doubt it was a particularly efficient one to begin with, since I don’t care much if a gaming PC is effecint since I don’t keep it on.

I’ll look into getting a lower-power one for cheap and see if that helps. Thanks!

I would, and I plan to someday, but my whole storage system is setup on it and migrating would be an enormous pain. Also right now I rely on it’s ability to create a RAID array with differently sized drives. Next time I upgrade, I plan go get homogeneous drives, so maybe then would be the time to move away from Unraid.

Oh interesting, that sound plausible. I’ll check out the bios and see if I can find that setting. Thanks!

Okay maybe I can mess with that. I think when I initially was having problems I just nuked everything I could related to power states just to get things working again. Maybe I can try turning some stuff back on.

I’m only running 3hdds at the moment, and they’re setup to spin down automatically which does save some power for sure.

Yeah good point. I’ve been slowly working to move away from Unraid for those reasons, and have been having fun trying NixOS.

Anyway, I just made a post on the official support forums so hopefully I can get this looked at. Since I initially had the problems many updates have come out, so maybe it’s not a thing anymore. I just can’t risk testing that for myself!

It’s not that easy sadly. The entire NAS runs on Unraid and the issue is with that OS. I can’t switch without totally restarting from scratch which would be a huge data migration, and a massive PITA configuration-wise.

Eventually I’d be open to switching to something like TrueNas Scale, but for now I need Unraid’s unique ability to run a RAID array with differently sized drives

Okay that’s good to know. Right now I’m only using ZFS for the ssds so it’s only like 2TBs, but I eventually want the ability to migrate the main array which will be more like 40TB (raw capacity, so some will be used for parity)

I specifically had to set things up in the BIOS so that it would never enter any efficient power/sleep states. It’s a bug in the OS I’m using that was forcing me to do it, otherwise the whole thing would lock up on me.

That said, I have some smart-plugs that do power monitoring. I can try hooking up the nas to one of those just for kicks, it should be accurate enough for this sort of thing.

Edit: Just measured and looks like I was about right: 100W under load and around 80W idle

I guess that’s a good point, but then is the right move to just get the lowest power CPU possible? I really don’t need it to do all that much and rn it’s hogging power.

I have the nas connected to a UPS that reports it’s power draw and it sits at about 100W at all times. There are one or two other small devices connected to it usually, so the nas itself is probably using a hair less that that at idle, but still it’s quite high.

That’s an interesting issue. Do you think the problem would be the same for any CSI plugin? I’m thinking of using my NAS as the storage brains of the operation and hooking it up with NFS or something, but would that have issues with stateful stuff like DB’s too?

This is awesome, ZeroToNix is exactly what I was looking for. I’ve been interested in trying NixOS for a while but I always found the documentation obtuse (extensive, which is great, but not super beginner friendly). I’ll give it a try!

This seems like a sensible choice, but it would be a bit messy for multi-node which is the direction I’m heading in

Thanks for this, I’ve been sort if interested in both Nomad and NixOS for the exact reasons it seems like you use them. Thanks for linking that repo, I’ll check it out for inspiration!

Do you find that you sometimes struggle to get things working in Nomad? My one worry is that, because it’s not as well established as kubernetes or docker, there won’t be good compatibility or documentation. For example most services in their docs will show how to deploy with kubernetes or docker, but rarely Nomad. Do you find that it’s easy enough to translate these instructions that it doesn’t matter?

I mean I think it really depends on the type of website you’re trying to host. A static blog would use way less bandwidth than a media server for example. Traffic would have the same effect too, where 1 concurrent visitor to a blog would probably be fine but 10,000 would be a problem.

Thanks, yeah I’ve heard good things about casaOS. I think that I’m trying to move in the other direction though: fewer UI’s and more CLI’s + Configuration files.