https://www.sidn.nl/en/news-and-blogs/cgnat-frustrates-all-ip-address-based-technologies

I'm planning on building a new home server and was thinking about the possibility to use disc spanning to create matching disk sizes for a RAID array. I have 2x2TB drives and 4x4TB drives.

Comparison with RAID 5

4 x 4 TB drives

• 1 RAID array
• 12 TB total

4 x 4 TB drives & 2 x 2 TB drives

• 2 RAID arrays
• 14 TB total

5 x 4* TB drives

• Several 4TB disks and 2 smaller disks spanned to produce a 4 TB block device
• 16 TB total

I'm not actually planning on actually doing this because this setup will probably have all kinds of problems, however I do wonder, what would those problems be?

I'm trying to build a DIY NAS, I already have some (6) 3.5" SATA disks, a Mini-ITX case, and power supply, but I'm still unsure on which motherboard & CPU to get. I think a motherboard + N100 combo is a good option because of the price and power consumption.

I'm currently using a MiniPC with an i5-6500T (4784 passmark) and an external HDD enclosure connected with USB using RAID-1 (software) which uses about 35W. The USB enclosure is limited to 2 slots, and I've heard from here that it can be problematic in combination with RAID. The N100 (5551) boards have a slightly better passmark score but most importantly more expandability (SATA & PCIe) and supposedly a lower power consumption. The i5-6500T has a TDP of 65W, the N100 a TDP of 6W, that doesn't say much but it seems to a lot better when looking at info online. The N100 also apparently has Quicksync support while the i5's support is limited and struggles to encode 1080p (100% CPU usage).

There are 2 main boards I'm considering. The BKHD 1264 and the ASRock N100M. ASRock is a better known brand, but their version only supports DDR4 and 2 SATA ports while the BKHD board supports DDR5, has 6 SATA ports, and has 4 × 2.5G network ports. I've also heard complaints about high temps (90c) with the N100m because it only has passive cooling, while the BKHD board has active cooling and a large heat sink. However, the BKHD board is a bit more expensive (~€150 vs ~€130), but it seems worth it because I won't have to add an external HBA.

What do you think would be the better option?

EDIT 2024-05-26: I ended up getting the ASUS Prime N100I-D D4 because it's significantly cheaper (€95). It does have less SATA ports (1), but I accidentally bought a SATA card so that actually works out pretty well.

I noticed that I only had 5 GiB of free space left today. After quickly deleting some cached files, I tried to figure out what was causing this, but a lot was missing. Every tool gives a different amount of remaining storage space. System Monitor says I'm using 892.2 GiB/2.8 TiB (I don't even have 2.8 TiB of storage though???). Filelight shows 32.4 GiB in total when scanning root, but 594.9 GiB when scanning my home folder.

Meanwhile, ncdu (another tool to view disk usage) shows 2.1 TiB with an apparent size of 130 TiB of disk space!

    1.3 TiB [#############################################] /.snapshots
  578.8 GiB [####################                         ] /home
  204.0 GiB [#######                                      ] /var
   42.5 GiB [#                                            ] /usr
   14.1 GiB [                                             ] /nix
    1.3 GiB [                                             ] /opt
. 434.6 MiB [                                             ] /tmp
  350.4 MiB [                                             ] /boot
   80.8 MiB [                                             ] /root
   23.3 MiB [                                             ] /etc
.   5.5 MiB [                                             ] /run
   88.0 KiB [                                             ] /dev
@   4.0 KiB [                                             ]  lib64
@   4.0 KiB [                                             ]  sbin
@   4.0 KiB [                                             ]  lib
@   4.0 KiB [                                             ]  bin
.   0.0   B [                                             ] /proc
    0.0   B [                                             ] /sys
    0.0   B [                                             ] /srv
    0.0   B [                                             ] /mnt

I assume the /.snapshots folder isn't really that big, and it's just counting it wrong. However, I'm wondering whether this could cause issues with other programs thinking they don't have enough storage space. Steam also seems to follow the inflated amount and refuses to install any games.

I haven't encountered this issue before, I still had about 100 GiB of free space last time I booted my system. Does anyone know what could cause this issue and how to resolve it?

EDIT 2024-04-06:

snapper ls only shows 12 snapshots, 10 of them taken in the past 2 days before and after zypper transactions. There aren't any older snapshots, so I assume they get cleaned up automatically. It seems like snapshots aren't the culprit.

I also ran btrfs balance start --full-balance --bg / and that netted me an additional 30 GiB's of free space, and it's only at 25% yet.

EDIT 2024-04-07: It seems like Docker is the problem.

I ran the docker system prune command and it reclaimed 167 GB!

https://github.com/flathub/com.authy.Authy/blob/master/com.authy.Authy.yaml#L42