Storage

In my previous article of https://blog.lanlocked.xyz/data-hoarding-in-an-rv/, I documented how I was using a Synology DS1520+ as my NAS. After fighting with it and the main array of weird issues Synology desires to implement, which I won’t get into here, I have recently sold the setup and gone with a much more robust system, or systems, in my RV.

I have built three new server systems, but first lets start with what hardware I am currently running.

I like to data hoard but I don’t take it the extreme. I am able to prune things I really don’t need. Living in an RV doesn’t help with having excess. In fact part of the liberating thing of the RV life is to get rid of things that we don’t really need. Believe me it was hard giving up on my networks, and servers, server racks, and full tower PCs, but going miniature and finding out what you really need is freeing. It’s not totally based on the fact that I don’t want things its also based on the fact that I don’t have room enough to put stuff in.

A few tricks to reduce SSD (NOT NVMe/M.2) wear when running ZFS:

• Remember to enable autotrim option on the pool. You should also setup a cron job to run zpool trim tank0 weekly or bi-weekly. Replace tank0 with your tank/dataset name.

zpool get autotrim tank0  # check trim
zpool set autotrim=on tank0   # enable trim on tank0
zpool trim tank0  # run trim manually

• Use a large ashift of at least 12 but 13 is better. It will reduce write amplification. Jim Salters, recommends that you go higher than lower when choosing ashift which a too low can cripple whereas a high ashift won’t have much impact on most normal workloads. (You cannot change a pool vdev ashift once it has been set.