@newt
I can't come up with what role this machine might have — a workstation? Why so much storage then? 30 Tb seems too much for there to be any redundancy, I'd rather go for redundancy at the cost of having less space. And if it's just a volume for throwaway stuff (and not rare digitised music does belong to this category), why bother with zfs at all?
If it's a file server of some sort, why bother having a GUI — the less stuff you have installed, smaller the attack surface to worry about 🤷

@m0xee
>I can't come up with what role this machine might have — a workstation? Why so much storage then?

It's my computer. I do computer things with it.

>30 Tb seems too much for there to be any redundancy

It's 3x18Tb with one parity drive.

>why bother with zfs at all?

Because I use ZFS almost everywhere. It's pretty cool and has lots of nice features.

@newt
Of course it does, but none of them are relevant for storing stuff like music and movies that you can easily download again — I'd rather have stuff like that on a plain ext4 partition on a spinning rust hard drive that spins down to save power in half an hour of inactivity, plugged into an ARM machine like Raspberry Pi.
Run samba and minidlna on it and you can access your library from any machine on the network — watch movies directly from the TV, no need to keep your workstation running.

@m0xee
>I'd rather have stuff like that on a plain ext4 partition

ext4 doesn't support RAID.

>Run samba and minidlna on it and you can access your library from any machine on the network

I don't have other computers on the network.

@newt
> ext4 doesn't support RAID
That's the point, why bother with RAID if you can grab that stuff from original media (or illegally p2p-download it if that is more your thing) — in case you ever lose it.
> I don't have other computers on the network
There are still good reasons to have those things available without having your main rig running — like power saving.
I also really appreciate being able to enjoy music and movies without having to keep any "real" computer running.

@m0xee
>That's the point, why bother with RAID if you can grab that stuff from original media (or illegally p2p-download it if that is more your thing)

No, I can't.

>There are still good reasons to have those things available without having your main rig running — like power saving.

Again, there are no other computers. Power isn't a problem here either, the cost of electricity for this machine is cents per hour. I could run it at max load all day long if I wanted to.

Your entire argument is that I should have two computers instead of one, because somehow putting three hard drives into a computer with a monitor and a keyboard somehow isn't kosher. In other words, utter nonsense.

@newt
> No, I can't
Queen? Yeah man, nobody but you has that in their collection.
> I should have two computers instead of one
You can even plug an USB hard drive into your router — it would be a poor file server, but still enough to listen to the music and watch 4k movie rips.
Don't have a router because power is cheap and you prefer using a computer with active cooling for that too? 😂
That was my original point, the role of this machine is unclear to me.

@newt
Using one computer for everything but the kitchen sink makes sense to you — okay, not that I can make you not do it anyway.
Also "I don't want to bother — I use ZFS for everything" would be a valid point, "I'm storing music on ZFS because it has nice features" — nope! What are those features that would make sense for a digital music collection? Replication, snapshots? 🤭

@m0xee
>You can even plug an USB hard drive into your router — it would be a poor file server, but still enough to listen to the music and watch 4k movie rips.

Why would I do that? It would be slow as fuck. Right now, the read speed from the pool is around 400-500 megabytes/s (3-4gbits/s) before caching. Should I install a 10GbE into my router just for it to serve files?

Then again, the pool also has a 500G NVMe drive as a read/write cache, so the recent data has a much greater access speed.

>That was my original point, the role of this machine is unclear to me.

It's a computer. I do computer stuff on it.

>What are those features that would make sense for a digital music collection? Replication, snapshots?

i store many things in this pool, not just music. Many of those things are hard to obtain, so I'd rather have some redundancy. Are you saying that I should buy separate drives just to store music because it doesn't benefit from ZFS features? Again, sounds like utter nonsense.

@newt @m0xee i'm itching to see your build list on this one, newt. years ago i ran one "workstation" which was a beast and follow a similar pattern of taking care of everything. times changed, budgets changed, power costs in my region changed and i started shifting things around a bit. however with some of the newer (meaning used 1-2 gen backward) hardware it's more efficient so having a "gibson" under your desk is not as problematic as it may have been for me back then.

@m0xee that's pretty clever with the dlna server in play did you ever go down the path of jellyfin or plex? i had, with varying results.

@jae @m0xee

Threadripper 3970x
ASRock TR40 Creator
128G DDR4 3600
Radeon rx6900
Samsung 990 PRO 1Tb
3x18Tb WD HC550 drives + Toshiba 500G NVMe for cache (don't remember the model).

Some other misc stuff that I don't remember.

@newt @jae @m0xee

@newt @m0xee great build!

i have opinions, but one i will stand by firmly is..

> WD HC550

this is the correct answer. these are some of the best drives one can procure. i've purchased some from serverpartsdeals in the past and while "recert" they passed with flying colors and still exist in a client's hypervisor somewhere in the ether.

@jae
> did you ever go down the path of jellyfin or plex?
No, I've never tried Jellyfin. When I'm not home I assume I would be mostly offline so I have ~300 Gb of music on my phone with me — not enough to hold my complete collection, but more than enough for the things I listen to more or less often.
@newt

@jae
And when I'm at home I use DLNA or Samba to access my collection, in addition to it, the machine hosting the music is plugged into the amp and I have cmus running on it and a tiny web interface, so I can control it from a phone without any special software, the remote is HTML with minimal JS so I can use any phone no matter how old — I have my old Windows phones scattered around the place and they do the job just fine 😁

@newt

@jae
For movies DLNA is amazing, I didn't even realise how handy it is until a couple of years ago. I have another machine that is my torrent seedbox — it has transmission-daemon and minidlnad, I can download a movie or a show and immediately watch it of any TV (one has Xbox plugged into it and the other one has built-in DLNA client) — without going into the trouble of transfering anything. The comfort of Netflix without any subscription costs 😂
@newt

@m0xee @jae "the comfort of Netflix" is an oxymoron. I had a paid account for several months and the shit barely worked. Torrents are so much better at everything.

@newt @m0xee @jae netflix caps bitrate if you watch in a browser now apparently

@sun @m0xee @jae it never allowed me to watch above 720p without DRM.

@newt @m0xee @sun i had little to no luck with it myself. back to my catalog of handbrake-rips and argh-m80 releases

@newt @m0xee @jae It's astonishing to me that people actually give money for the privilege of using such a user hostile service

@m0xee @newt this is a good use of legacy items (windows phones). lately for myself it's been a broken thinkpad with no screen plugged into whatever display i may have. works pretty well without having to be too complicated

@newt
Oh, FFS, I'm not here to make you do things my way: if you like your setup — fine, to me it seems unusual — that's it. But if you think that the way I see it is exotic and what you do isn't, I don't think so — people use things like AirPlay, Time Capsule or plug in USB disks into their routers to have a makeshift NAS and use DLNA with that — my solution just isn't a pre-made consumer device, yet very few keep their music collection on a ZFS volume in RAID 5 array.

@newt
> It would be slow as fuck. Right now, the read speed from the pool is around 400-500 megabytes/s (3-4gbits/s) before caching.
And why exactly would you need throughputs like that for music? Want to have a fast storage with redundancy and advanced features and keep your music there too — fine, me? I'm really glad that I can listen to the music or watch a movie without having to interact with a computer I do computer stuff on.

@m0xee
>Oh, FFS, I'm not here to make you do things my way:

Then why are you writing all this?

>And why exactly would you need throughputs like that for music?

As I wrote more than once already, this pool does not only contain music.

>I'm really glad that I can listen to the music or watch a movie without having to interact with a computer I do computer stuff on.

Cool?

@newt
> Then why are you writing all this?
Wasn't I clear enough about it?😂 The role of your machine is confusing to me — you use the same computer for everything in the book, to me it's unusual.
In my Xeon machine I have four identical disks, they are two pairs of disks, which are mirrored arrays: one is ZFS and the other one is Windows Storage Spaces, neither has any music on it. I like listening to the music without having to interact with a computer, I listen to CDs a lot🤷