Setting up a home NAS - Some questions

[iviv]

Hi all,

in a bid to clear some of the hard drives out of my current case in addition to wanting to set up a plex server, I've decided to use some old hardware I had lying around to set up a freeNAS box. Generally, this seems simple enough, to set up, my main questions are as follows:

Firstly, is FreeNAS the right thing to use? I know there are alternatives such as XigmaNAS, but I figured I would go with FreeNAS since it was the bigger and better known project. They both seem to offer the same thing for the level of usage I would be looking at.

Second, when it comes to storage, am I right in thinking going with the zfs Raid5 option is the best? It will actually add some redundancy where I don't currently have any. My main question is when it comes to adding the drives to the array. Obviously going from NTFS to ZFS means that they need to be wiped. All the drives are the same size, but with some juggling around I can probably empty three drives worth of data onto various other drives and clouds. Is there any way I would be able to create this Raid5 array using just 3 drives, copy the stuff over onto it from the 4th, and then add that 4th drive to the array? I know it wouldn't make the array very happy when it comes to having to re-stripe the whole thing and so on, but that seems like the best option for me overall if it's possible.

Finally, I'm pretty sure this isn't going to be a bottleneck, but I've got a bog standard sky hub which I'm using as a router/switch. It will only have my PC and the NAS attached to it, so while it's only a bog standard free switch, it should be able to deal with a NAS attached, it's not like I'm going to be hammering it with data 24/7 or anything like that, right?

Thanks in advance for your time!

 

[Bluecube]

Have a look at UnRAID. Yes, you have to pay for it but it’s a one off payment and it’s very good. It’s straightforward to use, you can add drives as you wish, and it will expand very easily with your needs.

 

[ecksmen]

ZFS is highly over rated for home media storage in my opinion. I elected to use pool disks using mhddfs on Ubuntu 18.04, which can present multiple different drive sizes as a single mount point.

For resiliency I used snapraid. This is point in time snapshots, I snap only weekly to an elected parity drive. This means I can loose one drive, and the changes between snaps but recover to the point of the snap if I can replace the drive. If that's not possible (like right now, with elongated delivery times) I still have access to the remaining drives.

I get file integrity from snapraid - I can recovery deleted files from the snapshot.

Files are served using samba.

All drives spin down when not in use, and SMR not an issue.

Worth considering.

 

[Demon]

Hi all,

in a bid to clear some of the hard drives out of my current case in addition to wanting to set up a plex server, I've decided to use some old hardware I had lying around to set up a freeNAS box. Generally, this seems simple enough, to set up, my main questions are as follows:

Firstly, is FreeNAS the right thing to use? I know there are alternatives such as XigmaNAS, but I figured I would go with FreeNAS since it was the bigger and better known project. They both seem to offer the same thing for the level of usage I would be looking at.

Second, when it comes to storage, am I right in thinking going with the zfs Raid5 option is the best? It will actually add some redundancy where I don't currently have any. My main question is when it comes to adding the drives to the array. Obviously going from NTFS to ZFS means that they need to be wiped. All the drives are the same size, but with some juggling around I can probably empty three drives worth of data onto various other drives and clouds. Is there any way I would be able to create this Raid5 array using just 3 drives, copy the stuff over onto it from the 4th, and then add that 4th drive to the array? I know it wouldn't make the array very happy when it comes to having to re-stripe the whole thing and so on, but that seems like the best option for me overall if it's possible.

Finally, I'm pretty sure this isn't going to be a bottleneck, but I've got a bog standard sky hub which I'm using as a router/switch. It will only have my PC and the NAS attached to it, so while it's only a bog standard free switch, it should be able to deal with a NAS attached, it's not like I'm going to be hammering it with data 24/7 or anything like that, right?

Thanks in advance for your time!

As Bluecube mentioned, I'd also recommend unRAID. I moved from NTFS simple disks under MS Server 2016 to unRAID a few months back, the process was easy enough and the flexibility of XFS on unRAID suits a lot of people with how it works. I dismissed it as a clunky paid version of freeNAS but managed to try it last year where I couldn't believe how much it had progressed to the point I rate it above synology/qnap for ease of use (although it is easier in most ways, a tiny knowledge of linux will really help bolster things)

The other side of it is also it's Docker / Plugin system is exemplary, I'm a real convert to docker and having things so easily presented and managed in unRAID makes it point and click simple with only a limited knowledge of the underlying OS required (if at all) and the speed of updates to the dockers is crazy, especially with things like Plex. I've gone from running 4 or 5 services on my NAS to 12 and the way you can cleanly install/uninstall and not worry about polluting your OS works wonders for me!

Horses of courses and all, but definitely worth considering, dropping in your NTFS disks is simple (unassigned drives plugin), my process for migrating my disks over required me freeing up 2 HDD's (1 Parity and the first data drive), then slowly juggled the data across a disk at a time, it took a week in total, but 90% of that was just the NAS clearing/building parity/transferring files between HDD's. I had a mix of 8TB and 4TB HDD's (Ironwolfs and Shucked WD 8TB drives) and the way XFS works, no drive space is lost at all.

 

[iviv]

Hey, thanks for the suggestions and recommendations, especially regarding unRAID. I've had a google around, but a lot of the comparisons are a couple of years old and seem to favour FreeNAS, so I'm guessing development of unRAID has caught up since then.

Being straightforward to use is certainly nice, especially as someone with no unix/linux experience, but what would the £50 actually be getting me that I don't in FreeNAS? I mean, in an ideal world all I would be doing is installing the NAS OS to an SSD, plugging the drives in to create the array, install a VPN, torrent and plex support, and then ideally not have to touch it again unless a drive dies.

 

[sja360]

Hey, thanks for the suggestions and recommendations, especially regarding unRAID. I've had a google around, but a lot of the comparisons are a couple of years old and seem to favour FreeNAS, so I'm guessing development of unRAID has caught up since then.

Being straightforward to use is certainly nice, especially as someone with no unix/linux experience, but what would the £50 actually be getting me that I don't in FreeNAS? I mean, in an ideal world all I would be doing is installing the NAS OS to an SSD, plugging the drives in to create the array, install a VPN, torrent and plex support, and then ideally not have to touch it again unless a drive dies.

You can download a trial of it and see for yourself if it works out for you.

 

[whiskycycle]

Just added my second unRAID server after a year or so, and having Synology boxes, Xpenology and various Windows boxes before that.

unRAID is bloody brilliant, and well worth the time and effort put into testing, learning, and moving to it!

 

[BigT]

I don't think there's anything wrong with FreeNAS at all, and I don't have personal experience, but as someone not that familiar with Linux I have found UnRaid to be terrific. Easy to use WebUI, disk redundancy is very efficient in terms of only needing to lose your biggest drive to parity and their app store, docker interface and now built in wireguard support has been invaluable to me. Well worth you evaluating it I think. Now I have containers for automated downloading, Plex, backup, home automation and all sorts. Never given me any problems. Oh and it'll host VMs too.

Perversely I then learned how to use RClone with it and unlimited GDrive storage so my non-essential media can be stored in the cloud leaving local NAS storage for other things, ultimately saving me money. It's completely transparent to everything on my network (including UnRaid and its dockers like Plex) so I have this sort of hybrid platform.

With regards to your Sky Hub, as long as it has gigabit ports, I don't see it being any problem or bottleneck for you.

 

[crazyDAJT]

Another vote for unraid. The way it handles different size disks mix and match, you can upgrade one at a time is amazing.

docker and VM support is cracking and very easy to set up. I snagged a Asrock ep2c602-4L/D16 setup about 9 months ago and I’m well down the line of having 2 gaming rigs out of it, also handbraking Blu-rays is impressively quick.

 

[Demon]

Hey, thanks for the suggestions and recommendations, especially regarding unRAID. I've had a google around, but a lot of the comparisons are a couple of years old and seem to favour FreeNAS, so I'm guessing development of unRAID has caught up since then.

Being straightforward to use is certainly nice, especially as someone with no unix/linux experience, but what would the £50 actually be getting me that I don't in FreeNAS? I mean, in an ideal world all I would be doing is installing the NAS OS to an SSD, plugging the drives in to create the array, install a VPN, torrent and plex support, and then ideally not have to touch it again unless a drive dies.

The issue with comparisons is that you generally need quantitative metrics to compare, and on that front, FreeNAS at the 'file' level is definitely more performant so will always score higher, but unRAID is more about ignoring the file level performance and looking at the practicalities of what it's offering.

The key benefits I've immediately found are

At the 'services/apps' level:
- The time to setup and install 'services' (such as Plex, VPNs, Reverse Proxy's , Downloaders, Home automation servers etc) is drastically reduced
- All the popular dockers (such as plex) are updated within hours of the update being released at source, this means the 'nag' messages you get with plex telling you there is a new version available are very much minimised (The entire reason I sold my Synology box on!)
- Auto-updating of dockers/plugin's can be fully automatic (you choose which you want manuallly or automatically upgraded) so you don't even have to spend anytime updating things if you prefer immediate updates to the latest
- The Docker/Plugin system is so easy to manage that you will probably get tempted to add a few more things in (I've added Bitwarden, Musicbrainz, Home Assistant, TP Link's EAP controller, Teamspeak server) and have a few more I am dabbling with.
- Having a super easy to setup VM manager has meant I can have some emergency VM's for tools/apps that only run on windows that I only need once in a blue moon).
- An abundance of youtube video's on how to install/setup the plugin/docker etc really help (especially if you ever want to dabble with reverse proxies, or seedboxes, or passing through a GPU to a VM etc)

At the 'file' level:
- Massively importantly, expanding your array with dissimilar sized disks scores hugely.. The only rule is the Parity disk has to be equal to or larger than any other disk in the array, but if you had a load of 8TB drives and suddenly wanted to add a couple of 4TB HDD's due to cost etc, you can with no problems, just pop them in, let the parity build for those and off you go.. - Adding SMB users/shares and maintaining permissions has been refreshingly easy (even easier than windows). Albeit the point/click interface is limited to simple use cases (i.e. define a share, then set global permissions for each SMB user for that entire share) has been childs play..
- The way you can allocate which 'disks' are part of a 'share' is also a nice feature, so I can decide how things 'grow' over time, so certain media folders I'm limiting to certain disks to ensure I never have to juggle data around
- Disaster recovery wise, I prefer the fact XFS just effectively is single disks under the hood, this is why the performance isn't as good as ZFS (FreeNAS) but it does mean you can rip out a disk and read the file that where on it should the worst happen.. If you lost a raid set you can lose absolutely everything..


Coming from Windows Server 2016 to unRAID I can't think of a single negative
Coming from Synology/QNAP to unRAID, the only advantage I can think of is richer 'desktop' style web interface (but for everything else I prefer unRAID)
Coming from freeNAS to unRAID, for me the performance thing isn't an issue (I can saturate my Gigabit network with zero problems) and it's free, but for everything else I prefer unRAID

Of course, if I was running it as as file server only and needed maximum performance (10Gbit Ethernet for example) with a lot of concurrent users (so fast SSD/nVME caching won't reliably work) I'd go with freeNAS.. that's it's strength IMO.. If I wanted a multi-role server for a home with Gigabit and flexibilty of upgrading storage and running apps/services was equally as important, I'd use unRAID (or Synology/QNAP if you can deal with the flaky/tardy app support).

Always horses for courses, unRAID isn't perfect
- My brand new 1660 Super isn't reliable on the NVidia drivers that are available through the unRAID plugin system and I may have to wait until the next 6.9 OS release to get newer ones.
- Whilst you can set it up to be fairly power efficient (you can spin down unused disks, and due to XFS this is actually most of them) if you have it in max performance mode for writing you can get pauses of 10 seconds or so if someone else suddenly writes something to the array..
- Some 'advanced' use cases (such as pasing through the primary gpu to a VM) are getting easier and easier and the simple Web UI makes you think it's 'easy' by just selecting it, but in actual fact it's a bit more involved then that and you end up trouble shoorting what you thought was 'simple'.. I'll caveat that by saying when you search up some common issues, 2 years ago you'll find instructions for how to work around it and find that 80% of the workaround is now baked in to the latest OS release which does show how they listen and respond to these things.

 

[Avalon]

Unraid is generally the default option for local media storage *UNLESS* you have a specific need for high IOPS or specific hardware support (storage.io cards for example), in which case you'd likely use local storage anyway.

 

[iviv]

Thanks again for all the additional replies. The extra drive arrived a couple of days ago, so I'll be getting it up and running this weekend. And the outpouring of support for unRAID has convinced me to give it a try.

Out of interest, how are gigabit speeds for transfers? Like, I know I'm only going to get around 100MB/s which is about 20% of sata3's max speed. For streaming video that's not an issue, but I assume that if I wanted to stick a drive with some games in there, I'm guessing I would be sitting through some long load times?
On a similar note, if I'm transfering files over to the NAS, I assume that would saturate the ethernet, is there a way to prioritise internet traffic vs internal file transfers?

Finally, is it possible to make unRAID show up similar to a local drive, and to assign it a drive letter? Or will it always just show as a network location? I've never really done home networking before.

 

[BigT]

If you’re not worried about having those games parity protected then you can install an SSD as what UnRaid calls an uassigned drive and still share it out like your array.

Mapping a network share to a drive letter on a machine is easy. Reserve or set a static IP on the server. In Windows explorer browse \\serveripaddress and the shares will show up. Right click on one and choose “map network drive” and pick a drive letter.

 

[iviv]

If you’re not worried about having those games parity protected then you can install an SSD as what UnRaid calls an uassigned drive and still share it out like your array.

Mapping a network share to a drive letter on a machine is easy. Reserve or set a static IP on the server. In Windows explorer browse \\serveripaddress and the shares will show up. Right click on one and choose “map network drive” and pick a drive letter.

Thanks. Parity protection wouldn't matter, so yeah, that unassigned drive sounds good. But would the bandwidth limit be noticible? If not, I might do that just to give more space for breathing room in my case.

 

[BigT]

I’m not a gamer so probably not best placed to comment on load times and bandwidth limits and how noticeable the difference might be. Maybe someone else is using it this way and can provide real world experience.