NAS Recommendations

[freakdiablo]

Something that pops up here and again. Looking for a NAS recommendation. Speed isn't critical, as most of my intended devices will be transmitting over wifi and that will probably be the bottleneck.

Right now, I'm using 4x6TB WD Black Spinners in a cheap MP DAS enclosure, RAID5. Actually did pretty good in two moves. But I'm down to maybe 1.5TB useable free and want something accessible to all network devices.

So after consideration, I'm thinking a 4x12TB RAID5 NAS. Samba plus Linux equivalent compatibility. Doesn't need any Plex or conversion capability.

Just reliability. This WILL be my onsite backup, let's put it that way.

Any suggestions?

 

[mackerel]

I quite like my ancient HP Microserver (old all black ones), but they are rather ancient now. Only 4 bays and not a lot of CPU. Probably not enough to do software raid 5 beyond gigabit speeds. They work no fuss. Are quite cheap used but again with age might not be best for forward looking reliability. Didn't like the newer models. I also had a Gen 8 I think, the silver front ones. These had more "server" features on them which I disliked.

 

[Railgun]

Roll your own with TrueNAS/zfs.

If you think the capacity suits, roll with it. If you want expandability, look for something bigger. If you want something that's easier to expand capacity down the road, look at mirrors, not RAIDx. Swap a disk, resilver, swap the other, and voila, expanded capacity on that vdev.

You don't need a lot of CPU per se, especially with a small amount of disks and not worrying about ultimate throughput.

Going from 4x6 R5 to 4x12 R10 (effectively) will get you an additional 6TB. Less CPU intensive, faster resilver. Probably on par with throughput to a certain extent.

 

[don256us]

UNRAID!!!!! Use an old computer and various HDDs that you already own. UNRAID does NOT require that all of your drives be the same size. The only requirement is that the Parity drive be greater than or equal to the largest drive in the array. For example, I have a 500 GB SSD (STATA) as my cache drive and a mix of 8 and 4TB drives. Because my largest drive is 8TB, my parity drive must be at least 8TB. I have been swapping out my 4TB drives as needed. UNRAID has an active community and you can install various dockers like the Folding @ Home docker and what not. You can even create a Virtual Windows instance on the machine but I didn't get that working myself. The point is that you can do a lot with an UNRAID server.

 

[freakdiablo]

UNRAID!!!!! Use an old computer and various HDDs that you already own. UNRAID does NOT require that all of your drives be the same size. The only requirement is that the Parity drive be greater than or equal to the largest drive in the array. For example, I have a 500 GB SSD (STATA) as my cache drive and a mix of 8 and 4TB drives. Because my largest drive is 8TB, my parity drive must be at least 8TB. I have been swapping out my 4TB drives as needed. UNRAID has an active community and you can install various dockers like the Folding @ Home docker and what not. You can even create a Virtual Windows instance on the machine but I didn't get that working myself. The point is that you can do a lot with an UNRAID server.

Ok, full admission. I actually have an old AM1 build in a 4U rack somewhere around here. Was going to do just that - FreeNAS build and all that.

But I'm done with that fudging and cludging. I just want a 4x bay Nas enclosure, RAID 5. I want the s2peeed simple option. I'm DONE F*ing with every little thing I do. I don't need it.

I want simple. Gimme Simple.

 

[Railgun]

TrueNAS can literally be that simple. The advantage is that it's free, and you already have the HW. Set and forget. I've not mucked about with settings since it was initially built. I even split the HW; added a second HBA and moved half my disks over without impacting anything.

To each their own, but if you're already familiar with it, it's a great option. And now you have two flavors of it with FreeBSD with TrueNAS Core or a Debian based Linux with Scale. I use the latter now, not that you need to get under the hood really.

 

[infinitevalence]

The difference between Unraid, TrueNAS, are generally around how the drives are handled for storage. Unraid lets you mix and match drive size while also giving you the most efficient use of drive space at the cost of reliability.

TrueNAS and derivatives use the ZFS file system so it really requires drives to be the same type/size and is expecting to have redundancy. It is also more challenging to add additional drives in the future because ZFS is not really designed to expand its storage pools.

From an interface level they are both similar and easy enough to work with. My vote would be for TrueNAS and 4 drives as the base level. More ram is also better, but it will run on 16gb.

 

[mackerel]

Unraid lets you mix and match drive size while also giving you the most efficient use of drive space at the cost of reliability.

What do you mean by reliability? You can choose how many disks you can have fail with Unraid while still having all data accessible, so it is very flexible and up to the user how much redundancy that want to apply. The only strength ZFS might have over that is the self healing ability for possible bit rot, but I've not used it and don't understand its cost implications.

Unraid's biggest weakness is performance. If you want massive transfer numbers, it wouldn't be my first choice.

 

[infinitevalence]

I like old Super Micro servers for stuff like this since you can get 1U and 2U that will take standard ATX motherboards.

https://www.theserverstore.com/supermicro-1u-server-cse-815tq-600cb-w-x9dri-ln4f the motherboard/cpus/ram in something like this are worthless but it will take an ATX/mATX board and give you 4x drive bays.

SuperMicro SAS3 2U Server W/ X10DRH-IT-SV-X10DRH-IT-2U

www.theserverstore.com

SuperMicro SuperStorage 6028R-E1CR16T 2U Server W/ X10DRH-CT

www.theserverstore.com

The 2RU's are the sweet spot, but are unfortunately all out of stock at this vendor. Again many take standard ATX boards and add redundant power along with 8-12 3.5" drive bays. They make awesome NAS/Home servers and replacement parts are cheap and plentiful on ebay.

Post magically merged: Dec 16, 2024

What do you mean by reliability? You can choose how many disks you can have fail with Unraid while still having all data accessible, so it is very flexible and up to the user how much redundancy that want to apply. The only strength ZFS might have over that is the self healing ability for possible bit rot, but I've not used it and don't understand its cost implications.

Unraid's biggest weakness is performance. If you want massive transfer numbers, it wouldn't be my first choice.

ZFS can do things like snapshots, and you can create offsite targets for backups. It also scrubs all the data so bits are refreshed and you dont risk online bitrot. Unraid has specific requirements for the sizing of the spare disks based on the sizes of the disks already in the array, but generally you only get 1 or 2 spares. Its performance is also limited to the disk the content is served from because its not striped parity like ZFS, so you cant really get performance equal or better than a single drive like you can with a tuned ZFS system.

 

[mackerel]

Unraid has specific requirements for the sizing of the spare disks based on the sizes of the disks already in the array, but generally you only get 1 or 2 spares.

The requirement is the individual data disks have to be same or smaller size than parity disks. Usually if creating an array you'd pick all drives to be same capacity, or some could be slightly smaller. If you later want to go beyond the parity drive capacity, there is some disk juggling to do but it is possible. However for routine capacity expansion you add more disks as opposed to replace existing with bigger. You can add as many parity disks as you like, although it only makes sense so far. A feature of Unraid is that even in the unlikely event you have more disks fail than you can fully recover from, the data on the remaining drives can still be fully accessible. Best to avoid ever being in that situation, but still nice to have as an option.

Its performance is also limited to the disk the content is served from because its not striped parity like ZFS, so you cant really get performance equal or better than a single drive like you can with a tuned ZFS system.

I did say that perf is not the biggest thing for Unraid, but for light usage and/or backups, it is plenty enough. A single disk is already faster than GbE and you can always add cache to help with writes.

BTW the main reason I went with Unraid is that it is the first NAS software I got running easily in my Windows network. I did try the others in the past. While the disk part wasn't too bad, adding Windows shares was pain.

 

[Slayer2003]

Ok, full admission. I actually have an old AM1 build in a 4U rack somewhere around here. Was going to do just that - FreeNAS build and all that.

But I'm done with that fudging and cludging. I just want a 4x bay Nas enclosure, RAID 5. I want the s2peeed simple option. I'm DONE F*ing with every little thing I do. I don't need it.

I want simple. Gimme Simple.

I've done the basic Ubuntu NAS for what feels like forever, and two years ago decided to build a baller setup for TrueNAS Scale. It handles my storage, Plex, VMs, and everything else I will ever decide to throw at it, and has a ton of expand-ability.

My roommate took the path that I wish i had now taken, and threw some drives in a Synology DiscStation. He had his NAS up and running, with Plex, VM and container support, in a few hours. I've been futzing with TrueNAS scale for MONTHS and it still isn't running how I'd like it. Especially with this last major update to the kernel version, it just WILL NOT recognize my RAID-1 SSDs anymore for OS drives, only using one of them even after a complete wipe and rebuild. It's a known issue in the community and until it's fixed i question it's stability.

Desktop NAS boxes aren't what they used to be, they are full-fledged mini PCs that come in a wide range of flavors and price points for that matter to suit what you need. I would absolutely recommend Synology or Terramaster for a setup if you are looking to just slap some drives in a box and be done with it. Not everyone has time to spend a weekend or more troubleshooting a home built NAS.