Help me figure out a storage solution

[Nimblor]

I'm looking to build a storage thing of about 40Tb or more for home use. I am not really interested in shucking drives if it can be avoided and my budget is under $1000 for drives, cables, and HBA. I am planning on using 4 older 4tb green drives in a pool of some kind too. The files are mainly media so backups are not critical beyond os/system stuff.

I am still open on the OS and have not made a decision yet. Trying to decide between unraid and truenas scale but maybe open media vault. The more I read about these options the less I feel able to decide. But I would like to get the drives and start moving forward.

10tb drives seem to be a good price point. There are a lot of refurb 10tb sas drives on ebay but I am open with options. My case can hold 8 3.5 drives.

 

[Railgun]

You don’t need scale. Vanilla tuenas is fine. I’m runnnig a couple truenas boxes, one VM, one on bare metal with ~75TB on one and 50TB on another and currently building another VM for 60TB.

The question is what do you need it to do?

Ignore my sig as that’s now outdated.

 

[Jess_Bullet]

I use the Gmail Documents feature. Very handy.

 

[Nimblor]

I need it to be a nas, share files with my other PCs, run plex and a few other apps and that is about it. I was looking at the water panther 10tb sas drives and thinking about a sas3 HBA.

 

[Janus67]

I have run FreeNAS, OMV, and unRAID. Currently have a FreeNAS box as a VM on an ESXi server and I recently built a box a few months ago with unRAID. So far I'm liking the flexibility and the plugins for unRAID. But if you don't plan on using any of that, and just want a storage machine, then any should be fine. ZFS is really good for data storage and can help prevent bitrot and such using ECC memory with its checks.

 

[Nimblor]

truenas on a vm seems like a popular option. I have been testing out proxmox on an old laptop and it seems pretty intuitive. My only concern about unraid is that it seems like it is not very fast. I don't even know if that would be an issue though.
Also, I am going to be limited to 32gb ram for this machine.

 

[The_Jizzler]

I'll put a plug in for OMV. Works well. Haven't used it in a few years but for me it was much more intuitive than what FreeNAS became. I started with FreeNAS back when the original dev (Volker)was still working on it. He decided to split off and created OMV. ZFS never really appealed to me for home use, and unless you are running heavy workloads with 10gb Ethernet in your house, what is ZFS getting you a much simpler RAID setup isn't?

 

[Janus67]

FWIW the only reason I ran TrueNAS/FreeNAS on a VM was that I was using the same server for other VMs and didn't want to build a dedicated FreeNAS/TrueNAS box then. If all you want is a dedicated storage box, running it in a VM is unnecessary and needlessly complicated. FWIW I don't have any issues with speed on my unRAID box (running 8x12TB drives in an effective RAID6/2 parity + an nvme cache drive).

 

[Nimblor]

That is looking like the best option. Thanks for all of the discussion and help. Any good ideas on how to transfer 20tb to the nas?

 

[The_Jizzler]

Robocopy will get it copied

 

[Railgun]

Within the truenas community, the thought is of you’re going to run other VMs, then Scale may be the answer. Run the NAS on bare metal given the performance advantages. For my part, I’m currently getting line rate for sequential transfers on 10Gb with it in a VM, but my NAS is large by comparison. I’m going to bump to 25Gb shortly and will test VM vs BM a bit but that’s neither here nor there.
If you want to run more VMs beyond what Truenas can do already in its jails, maybe Scale works for you. But it’s new, and don’t know how well it has feature parity with other hypervisors.