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Just dropping in here another vote for Unraid. It's worth every penny of the miserly amount you pay. I've been using it for about six years now and it's never skipped a beat. It's rock solid and easy to use.
 
Echo what @Avalon and others have said: UnRAID!

Main box: 3x 12TB data and 1 for parity. Drives spend most of their time spun down, only firing up when something is playing from them.

Second licence is on a low level CPU with a few 6TB drives and used as a backup target for Time Machine and Veeam.

Anything critical (photos) is also backed up to cloud and optical disc.

UnRAID is just so good, really.
 
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Thanks again for all the advice guys,
I'm currently in the process of running checks over all the disks prior to building the new server, via a combo of disc sector scan, and also running ShredOS over them all to make sure they complete no errors or incredibly slow.

One of the newer drives ironically is potentially failing the SHREDOS test, as the rest of the disks all sustained 100MBps+, whilst one of the newest of the 8 drives is actually only hitting around ~80MBps, so this one may get relegated or at least retested solo incase its a bad cable etc, even if it doesn't error, if it has considerably slower performance, I cannot see that being good even as a parity drive? (correct me if I'm wrong as if it has a use - great!)

I am weighing up the options of trying to find a cheap 8 way SAS card to connect the 8 WD Red SATA drives (seems to be ~40-50 atm with cables from Europe, as reading a lot of stories of fake out of China), and potentially throw in a small pool of SATA SSDs as cache or just a speed pool. I assume UnRAID and most of the modern Linux NAS OS are TRIM aware (as long as I use the Intel 3/6Gbps controller for those).

OS would just be installed on a USB stick, the machine is going to have 24GB of RAM, so hoping that'll be plenty even with a USB install; I know when I used OMV previously it worked fine, and the system I'm overhauling seems to be the same :)
 
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Echo all the above about UnRAID. Been using it for 10+ years now.

I would recommend swapping all your 8x4TB drives for 4x10TB drives.

I did this a few years ago and there was power and performance benefits across the board.

Also if you’re concerned about write speeds, install the turbo write plugin. This basically changes the way UnRAID writes to disks so you get effectively full disk speed, but does require all disks to be spun up, but once they go to sleep it reverts back to the “slower” but less spun up drives method.
 
May well do that in the future, but right now I'm working on the budget I can get allocated from the family and a bit of my own, and limits to how much I can throw :)
 
Yet another happy unRAID user here, absolutely would recommend..

It's so well supported and has good forums with good tutorials for a lot of stuff.

Don't worry about performance, even natively writing to the array will saturate a Gbe connection, and I can easily saturate a 2.5gbe if you just use the standard cache feature (I have 2 x NVME for that in RAID 1).

The next release in beta dies have zfs support natively, but I like the theoretically slower but hugely flexible normal file system, its amazing for home use.
 
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The machine I'm working with does not have NVME (unless I got a PCI-E card, which could be hit and miss due to lack of BIOS support), but the plans I'm currently working on are:

3570K
Z77X-D3H (https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z77X-D3H-rev-10/sp#sp)
24GB DDR3 1600 (its been memtested for literal days with no errors so I'm comfortable, even if its officially 1333MHz RAM, hoping UNRAID will do something useful with the volume of memory...)
8x WD Reds 3TB via a HBA card [any recommendations on a cool running HBA card based on current pricing as they seem to be £50 in many cases unless out of China]?
1x 4TB Toshiba 7200RPM as Parity for above connected to Intel PCH 3Gbps

It'll be on a Corsair 550W power supply which already has 7x SATA connectors, and then using a few extra MOLEX:SATA adaptors, should be enough :)

The GBE LAN is apparently Atheros, if you think that'll cause issues, let me know.

If I go for the 12 drive Unraid license, I'd be in with 1 to spare after adding 2x SSD [this has been temporarily delayed] (I'm assuming parity, and cache drives are counted towards the limit) and in future if I can consolidate drives, then that can be done :)

I have hotswap bay and the ODD connected to the less reliable 6GBps Marvel controller as that way anything connected there would literally be transient and not critical.
 
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I've been testing the server for the last few weeks, giving it soak/run testing etc. One of the 8 WD Reds I wasn't happy with from the get go so it never made it into the machine.
Unfortunately it looks like another one might be on the way out as I got a whole heap of udma CRC errors overnight during the scheduled parity check, and that drive has been disabled by unraid, so I'll have to look at that today. Also possible a bad cable connection or a bad SAS cable. Yay. Fun. Also starting to think I should have stuck stickers with the serials on the back of the drives to make finding them later easier!

Liking Unraid so far, it's explanatory enough that someone with decent computer knowledge can make it through, although I kinda wish some of the 'this has happened, we suggest doing this' was build more into the OS than going and reading the manual etc :)

I was running one of the reds as a parity drive so that one will likely get sacrificed to the array, assuming the drive with the errors has indeed failed and it's not just a slightly iffy connection.
 
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The drive is now behaving and passes smart tests ok etc, apart from those crc errors it got within a short space of time. I've recheck all the connections and seating.

That particular HBA cable was a cheap one so I'm rebuilding the array now, but have ordered a replacement cable to rule that out.
 
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