Self hosting 10TB in S3 on a framework laptop and disks

https://jamesoclaire.com/2025/10/05/self-hosting-10tb-in-s3-on-a-framework-laptop-disks/

by ddxv • 10 months ago

269 113 10 months ago

ddxv12• 10 months ago

Just wanted to share a quiet successful self hosting.

myself248• 10 months ago

It's weird to me that "owning a computer that runs stuff" is now "self-hosting", just feels like an odd phrasing. Like there's an assumption that all computers belong to someone else now, so we have to specify that we're using our own.

mlnj2• 10 months ago

Let's not kid ourselves that maintaining 10TB with resiliency handling and other controls built in is something that is trivial. It is only trivial due to the offerings that Cloud computing has made easy.

Self-hosting implies those features without the cloud element and not just buying a computer.

vachina• 10 months ago

We call it self hosting because it is typically hosted by someone else, get it?

mingus88• 10 months ago

Think services

You can own a computer and not run any services at all. Most people do.

Deciding to run your own services, like email, means a lot of work that most people aren’t interested or capable of doing.

It’s the difference between using your computer to consume things or produce things.

layer8• 10 months ago

It’s not clear from the blog post if the S3 is accessible from outside their home. I agree with the parent that purely local services aren’t what typically counts as “self-hosting”.

fpoling• 10 months ago

Does this JBOD consist of SSD? HDDs in that amount can be rather noisy.

ddxv12• 10 months ago

Yeah they are HDs and are surprisingly noisy.

canpan• 10 months ago

Neat. Depending on your use case it might make sense. Still I wonder what they use for backup? For many use cases downtime is acceptable, but data loss is generally not. Did I miss it in the post?

ddxv12• 10 months ago

OP here. There I currently have some things syncd to a cloud S3. The long term plan would be to replicate the setup at another location to take advantage of garage region/nodes, but need to wait for the money for that.

n4bz0r2• 10 months ago

Getting into S3 myself and really curious about what Garage has to offer vs the more mature alternatives like Minio. From what I gather, it kinda works better with small (a few kilobytes) files or something?

photon-torpedo• 10 months ago

Minio recently started removing features from the community version. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136108

znpy3• 10 months ago

How awful. It seems to be a pattern nowadays?

Some former colleagues still using gitlab ce tell me they also removed features from their self-hosted version, particularly from their runners.

chamomeal• 10 months ago

I loved minio until they silently removed 99% of the admin UI to push users towards the paid offering. It just disappeared one day after fetching the new minio images. The only evidence of the change online was discussions by confused users in the GitHub issues

LTL_FTC2• 10 months ago

I have also been considering this for some time. Been comparing MinIO, Garage, and Ceph. MinIO may not be wise given their recent moves, as another commenter noted. Garage seems ok but their git doesn’t show much activity these days so I wonder if it too will be abandoned. Which leaves us with Ceph. May have a higher learning curve but also offers the most flexibility as one can do object as well as block and file. Gonna set up a single node with 9 OSD’s soon and give it a go but always looking for input if anyone would like to provide some.

lxpz• 10 months ago

If I can reassure you about Garage, it's not at all abandoned. We have active work going on to make a GUI for cluster administration, and we have applied for a new round of funding for more low-level work on performance, which should keep us going for the next year or so. Expect some more activity in the near future.

I manage several Garage clusters and will keep maintaining the software to keep these clusters running. But concerning the "low level of activity in the git repo": we originally built Garage for some specific needs, and it fits these needs quite well in its current form. So I'd argue that "low activity" doesn't mean it's not reliable, in fact it's the contrary: low activity means that it works well for us and there isn't a need to change anything.

Of course implementing new features is another deal, I personally have only limited time to spend on implementing features that I don't need myself. But we would always welcome outside contributions of new features from people with specific needs.

sekh60• 10 months ago

I've used Ceph in a home lab setting for 9 years or so now. Since cephadm is has gotten even easier to manage even though it really was never that hard. A few pointers. No SMR drives, they have such bad performance that they can periodically drop out of the cluster. Second, no consumer SSDs/NVMe devices. You need power loss prevention on your drives. Ceph directly writes to the drive, it ignores cache, without PLP you may literally have slower performance than rust.

You also want fast networking, I just use 10Gbps. My nodes each are 6 rust and 1 NVMe drive each, 5 nodes. I colocate my MONs and MDS daemons with my OSDs, each node has 64GB of RAM and I use around 40GB.

Usage is RDB for a three node OpenStack cluster, and CephFS. I have about 424TiB between rust and NVMe raw.

ocharles• 10 months ago

What enclosure houses the JBOD?

Hikikomori• 10 months ago

Don't know about that one but can recommend Terramaster DAS, they don't cheap out on the controller. I have a d4-320 connected to my NUC.

qudat• 10 months ago

Very cool! I replaced my mainboard on my framework and am trying to convert it to a backup for my nas.

Could you talk a little more about your zfs setup? I literally just want it to be a place to send snapshots but I’m worried about the usb connection speed and the accidentally unplugging it and losing data

cgdstnc• 10 months ago

i'd be stressed out while watering those plants.

ellisv• 10 months ago

Plants look very portable

nrp• 10 months ago

The laptop is easy to repair, at least.

scottarthur• 10 months ago

I have an ancient Qnap NAS (2015) which is on borrowed time and I’m trying to figure out what to replace it with. Keep going back and forth between rolling my own with a Jonsbo case vs. a prebuilt like the new Ubiquti boxes. This is an attractive third option of a modest compute box (raspy, NUC, etc.) paired with a JBOD over USB. Can you still use something like TrueNAS with a setup like that?

j452• 10 months ago

Local storage should be like a home appliance, not something we build even though we can.

When things inevitably need attention it’s not about diy.

n4bz0r2• 10 months ago

If you don't mind using m.2 drives, check out Beelink ME Mini. The m.2 drives are going to be limited by the PCIe 3.0 x1 bus [1], but you get a very neat and small appliance-like box that can handle home storage workloads really well. Just keep in mind that you'll need an additional OS drive: TrueNAS will probably wear that eMMC out in a matter of a year or two.

[0] https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-me-mini-n150

[1] https://youtu.be/TkFfTekB3eM?t=1034

igtztorrero• 10 months ago

Amazing, I will try Garage.

What brand of HDD did you use?

UI_at_80x24• 10 months ago

Read up on backblaze hard drive reports. Great source of info

ddxv12• 10 months ago

I went with IronWolf, likely due to price, though interestingly they are 25% more expensive than when I bought them six months ago.

yodon• 10 months ago

Previous discussion of Garage:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41013004

rmoriz2• 10 months ago

With the metadata only on the internal drive, isn't this a SPOF?

Havoc3• 10 months ago

Given that it's JBOD over USB I don't think this is aimed at redundancy

rmoriz2• 10 months ago

I thought zfs is doing the RAID.

ddxv12• 10 months ago

Yeah, this was an effort to get around cloud costs for large amounts of 'low value' data that I have but use in my other home servers for processing. I still sync some smaller result sets to an S3 in the cloud for redundancy as well as for CDN uses.

andix3• 10 months ago

I really don't get it. Do they host it on Amazon S3 or do they self-host it on a NAS?

wiether• 10 months ago

They built an object storage system exposing an S3-compatible API, by using https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

andix3• 10 months ago

Okay, weird to call it S3, if it is just object storage somewhere else. Its like saying "EKS" if you mean Kubernetes, or talking about "self hosting EC2" by installing qemu.

j452• 10 months ago

It’s self hosted, and self hosted nas’ can run the s3 storage protocol locally as well.

andix3• 10 months ago

Yeah, that's pretty standard for object storage to be S3-compatible. I think azure blob is the only one that doesn't support it.

awill2• 10 months ago

>About 5 months ago I made the decision to start self hosting my own S3.

It is eleven nines of durability? No. You didn't build S3. You built a cheapo NAS.

Havoc3• 10 months ago

I think it's pretty obvious he's talking about the protocol not the amazon service...

awill2• 10 months ago

title is 'Self hosting 10TB IN S3.'

Yes, it's obvious, but it's a terrible title. I don't really get the point. It's trivial to have storage however you want an shove the S3 API on top.

Datagenerator• 10 months ago

And won't be charged for ingres, egress or IOPS etc, it's better than bad, it's good. Happy times.

evanreichard• 10 months ago

I love Garage. It just works. I have Garage running on a few older Odroid HC2's, primarily for k8s Velero backup, and it's just set and forget.

rob_c• 10 months ago

10TB, you could just mirror 2 drives with that, seen people serving 10PB at home by this point I'm sorry to say

sandreas2• 10 months ago

I'd rather go with an old Dell T30 and 2x10TB Seagate Exos in ZFS RAID1 mode (Mirror). This thing would make me nervous every day, even with a daily backup in place... While the Dell T30 would also make me nervous, you could at least plug the disks into any other device and are not wiring up everything with some easy to pull out cables ;)

However, garage sounds nice :-) Thanks for posting.

magicalhippo2• 10 months ago

I've been using ZFS for quite a while, and I had a realization some time ago that for a lot of data, I could tolerate a few hours worth of loss.

So instead of a mirror, I've set up two separate one-disk pools, with automatic snapshots of the primary pool every few hours, which are then zfs send/recv to the other pool.

This gives me a lot more flexibility in terms of the disks involved, one could be SSD other spinning rust for example, at the cost of some read speed and potential uptime.

Depending on your needs, you could even have the other disk external, and only connect it every few days.

I also have another mirrored RAID pool for more precious data. However almost all articles on ZFS focus on the RAID aspect, while few talk about the less hardware demanding setup described above.

oarsinsync2• 10 months ago

I opted to use a two disk mirror, and offline the slow disk. Hourly cronjob to online the slow disk, wait, and then offline it again.

Gives me the benefit of automatic fixes in the event of bit rot in any blocks more then an hour old too.

ddxv12• 10 months ago

That's a really cool idea and matches my use case well. I just copy pasted it to another person in this thread who was asking about the ZFS setup.

Your use case perfectly matches mine in that I wouldn't mind much about a few hours of data loss.

I guess the one issue is that it would require more disks, which at the current prices is not cheap. I was suprised how expensive it was when I bought them 6 months ago and was even more suprised when I looked recently and the same drives are even more now.

sandreas2• 10 months ago

Interesting idea... thanks for sharing.

I have two setups.

1.) A mirror with an attached Tasmota Power Plug that I can turn on and off via curl to spin up an USB-Backup-HD:

  curl "$TASMOTA_HOST/cm?cmnd=POWER+ON"
  # preparation and pool imports
  # ...
  # clone the active pool onto usb pool
  zfs send --raw -RI "$BACKUP_FROM_SNAPSHOT" "$BACKUP_UNTIL_SNAPSHOT" | pv | zfs recv -Fdu "$DST_POOL"

2.) A backup server that pulls backup to ensure ransomware has no chance via zsync (https://gitlab.bashclub.org/bashclub/zsync/)

To prevent partial data loss I use zfs-auto-snapshot, zrepl or sanoid, which I configure to snapshot every 15 minutes and keep daily, weekly, montly and yearly snapshots as long as possible.

To clean up my space when having too many snapshots, I wrote my own zfs-tool (https://github.com/sandreas/zfs-tool), where you can do something like this:

  zfs-tool list-snapshots --contains='rpool/home@' --required-space=20G --keep-time="30d"

VTimofeenko5• 10 months ago

If it's just the mainboard and no screen, OP could put it in a dedicated case like the CoolerMaster one:

https://www.coolermaster.com/en-global/products/framework/

ddxv12• 10 months ago

Those are pretty cool. I meant to highlight more, that the laptop has done super well. I can't even tell it's on as I hear no fan / no heat. I guess laptops are pretty good for this as they are great at sipping power when there is a low load.

smileybarry• 10 months ago

Back in 2012 or so, I reused an old netbook (an Asus Eee PC) with an Atom CPU & 1GB of RAM, installed Ubuntu Server, and used it as a home server. It handled the printer, DNS-VPN proxying for streaming, and a few other things admirably for years. (And ironically was resilient to Spectre because its Atom CPU was before Intel added speculative execution)

Eventually, the thing that kicked the bucket was actually the keyboard (and later the fan started making "my car won't start" noises occasionally). Even the horribly-slow HDD (that handled Ubuntu Server surprisingly well) hadn't died yet.

t_mahmood3• 10 months ago

One question, are you keeping it plugged in continuously, or disconnect it, sometimes? Because keeping it 100% will slowly degrade the battery, and during power loss it might fail.

In my country it's possible to have power loss occasionally, so having the battery on good health is important. I'm planning to setup two unused laptops, and a mobile for servers (different purposes) and power management, battery health has been an issue.

VTimofeenko5• 10 months ago

I have the original mainboard (i5, 11th gen) the laptop came with in that coolermaster case. Generally really quiet, but fans have kicked in a few times and it was pretty noticeable. Since it's VESA mountable, I might just move it into the rack at some point and let the rack fans take care of everything.

ludocode• 10 months ago

Here's a link to the case on the Framework marketplace:

https://frame.work/ca/en/products/cooler-master-mainboard-ca...

I put my original mainboard in one of these when I upgraded. It's fantastic. I had it VESA-mounted to the back of a monitor for a while which made a great desktop PC. Now I use it as an HTPC.

jtbaker• 10 months ago

Or a 10” mini rack!! https://deskpi.com/products/deskpi-rackmate-t0-plus-rackmoun...

pcchristie• 10 months ago

I always thought this could be what the Framework Desktop is. They could have made them stackable, so you could have one of these, with a GPU "hat" stacked on, connected via USB4/PCIe/whatever.

j1elo2• 10 months ago

I'd like more ellaboration on the technical side. Not literally how to do the same and what commands to use, but more in the line of how are the ZFS pools configured, or if Garage is opinionated and configures it all by itself. Are there mirrors in there? Or it's just individual pools that sync from some disks to others?

I have 2 USB disks and want to make a cheapo NAS but I always doubt between making a ZFS mirror, making 2 independent pools and use one to backup the other, or just go the alternate route and use SnapRAID and then be able to mix more older HDDs for maximum usage of the hardware I already own.

ddxv12• 10 months ago

My understanding is that Garage is not opinionated and could easily have worked without ZFS. I installed ZFS in Ubuntu, and then later installed Garage.

As for the ZFS setup, I kept it simple and did RAID5/raidz1. I'm no expert in that, and have been starting to think about it again as the pool approaches 33% full.

I saw this comment in another thread here that sounded interesting as well by magicalhippo: "I've been using ZFS for quite a while, and I had a realization some time ago that for a lot of data, I could tolerate a few hours worth of loss. So instead of a mirror, I've set up two separate one-disk pools, with automatic snapshots of the primary pool every few hours, which are then zfs send/recv to the other pool."

This caught my attention as it matches my usecase well. My original idea was that RAID5 would be good incase a HD fails, and that I would replicate the setup at another location, but the overall costs (~$1k USD) are enough that I haven't done that yet.

Forgeties79• 10 months ago

If you know where to look/are a little lucky, you can get an adequate RAID5 going for like $500-800 depending on the storage you need. I grabbed a QNAP 4 bay (no SSD caching) and 4x refurbished enterprise HDD's (14tb/ea) for just under $700 all-in last november if memory serves. Pretty reasonable for a 42tb RAID5 IMO.

throwaway270925• 10 months ago

doubt between making a ZFS mirror, making 2 independent pools

You will gain protection agains bit-rot and self-healing (via scrubs) with a mirror. Also faster reads.

mix more older HDDs

You can do this with ZFS too! As long as you have two HDDs of the same size (or similar size, as to not loose too much to unused space), you can also add them as a mirrored zdev to your existing pool (or make an new one for backups as you wrote). Only the two disks in a mirror need to be of similar size, not all disks in a pool.

OutOfHere2• 10 months ago

Why are you calling it S3? That is a proprietary Amazon cloud technology. Why not call it what is it is, e.g. ZFS, file store, or object store? Let's not dilute terms.

thakoppno• 10 months ago

Garage implements the Amazon S3 API and thus is already compatible with many applications.

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

OutOfHere2• 10 months ago

Yes, it's S3 API compatible, but it's not S3. The originally submitted article title misleads by claiming it's S3. There is no valid excuse.

ddxv12• 10 months ago

That's a good point, it is S3 compatible object storage, not just S3. My experience with AWS S3 has impacted the way I use object storage and since this project is syncd to another S3 compatible object storage using the S3 protocol, in my head I just call it all S3.

tcdent• 10 months ago

Thanks for the lead on Garage S3. Everyone's always recommending minIO and Ceph which are just not fun to work with.

6ak74rfy• 10 months ago

ZFS is RAM hungry, plus doesn't like USB connections (like the article implied). So, I've been eyeing btrfs as a way to setup my NAS drives. Would I miss something in that setup?

irusensei2• 10 months ago

ZFS is not RAM hungry. The only official memory requirements that exist specify 768MB system RAM and thats the whole OS (Solaris 9) minimum requirement. Just like any other file system ZFS will use memory if available and release it when other parts of the system need it.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gitgn/index.ht...

Also ZFS is perfectly happy with USB connections. In fact it's the best type of FS to have if your storage is unreliable due to its self healing capabilities. Not that modern USB is unreliable nowadays and there are plenty of DAS solutions that rely on 3.x USB.

darkteflon2• 10 months ago

I’ve not heard of garage before but it looks quite interesting. I use s3 a lot for work but for homelab backups I’ve always just used borg on borgbase. Now I’m wondering whether I could use garage to pair a local node and AWS glacier for cheap redundancy of a large media library (I’m assuming that ~all of the reading is automatically done from the local node). TFA doesn’t really talk much about the actual experience of using garage - would love to hear more opinions from those who use it for self-hosting.

Edit: Realised you can’t use glacier since storage has to be mounted to the ec2 compute running the garage binary as a filesystem. So doesn’t really make sense as media library backup over just scheduling a periodic borg / restic backup to glacier directly.

ddxv12• 10 months ago

I haven't needed to interact with Garage itself specifically. I've been using Boto3 / awscli / s3cmd / rclone for everything S3 API related and it's worked great. Garage was a few commands to setup, turn on, get API keys setup, and then left to run on it's own for the past 4 months.

So in that sense, I've loved it.

d3Xt3r• 10 months ago

Another alternative is ZeroFS[1], just store your stuff directly to S3.

[1] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS

darkteflon2• 10 months ago

That looks very interesting - will look into it, thanks.

mbreese• 10 months ago

You could still pair to AWS S3 and have an aggressive lifecycle policy to move the data to glacier after a short time window. I had this setup at a previous job for data. After X days it would switch from standard tier to glacier. In your case, X could equal 1.

import• 10 months ago

Nice to see Garage mentioned. I was deciding between S3-compatible self-hosted alternatives and ended up choosing SeaweedFS. It seems to require less manual configuration compared to Garage

cowsandmilk• 10 months ago

What do you use self-hosted S3 for? I feel like all the use cases I can think of would be better served by a network attached file system.

gerdesj• 10 months ago

A fair few things want blob object storage like S3. NFS does not scale to ridiculous levels horizontally or vertically. S3 does things like de-duplication and other funky tricks.

So if you want to use an app that needs S3 then you need to deploy S3 and not NFS.

I run a minio cluster (S3) for Veeam backups at work. I also run multiple NFS for Veeam and VMware datastores.

Tools for the job mate!

ddxv12• 10 months ago

I use a self-hosted s3 compatible object storage for cheap storage of Android apks and logs. I do push various processed items to Digital Ocean Spaces, so having the ability to use rclone / the same functions for both is useful.

alimbada• 10 months ago

The article didn't load for me (HN hug of death) so I was confused too as are many others in this comment thread (and some have been downvoted for simply asking). Just use the correct terminology; if you're in tech you know there's no room or excuse for ambiguity.

krunger• 10 months ago

Not sure that framework adds anything here, I host around the same on a RPi5 and a few disks. Instead of ZFS I use lvm2, it's pretty good on the RPi5. ZFS eats up too much RAM for what I use it for there.

irusensei2• 10 months ago

I do something similar with Minio although I still have most of my stuff on normal file system.

Self hosting 10TB in S3 on a framework laptop and disks

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