Alternative to Xpenology?

[Randall8686]

Hi All

I would really like an alternative to Xpenology, As much as i love it its always a worry updating it etc and a right pain with boot loaders etc etc.

However I have some issues. The IOS apps are amazing for synology, DS File, DS download and DS Cam are fantastic. I need a NAS solution that has Easy to use apps for the family. A

My must haves are;

some sort of i.p CCTV system for a couple of camera's (That i can view on a iphone away from home) (such as DS Cam)

be a plex server

have some sort of "DS file app"

Run a VM

Now i dont mind paying for it, If synology charged £500 i would bite their arm off for a genuine version but im just not paying thousands for one with enough poke to transcode 4k (my Xeon system does this fine on xpenology)

I tried Free NAS a while back but had no CCTV support not sure if this is still the case but found a real lack of apps to make it user friendly for others.

Look forward to any advice

 

[whiskycycle]

Real Synology box and run Plex (or whatever) off board to do media serving? It's an annoyance to use two boxes, but it's what I've ended up doing and run Plex on an i5-45xx on Windows, with Xpenology doing everything else whilst the required nuggets are saved for a decent 4 bay Synology.

 

[neodude]

UnRaid

 

[Armageus]

https://zoneminder.com is an option for CCTV if you are going for a complete free/open source build. I'm sure there is probably a docker image you could run on top of freenas etc

 

[BigT]

Unraid has a Zoneminder docker container as well as a Plex docker container. It can also run OwnCloud which I think has mobile apps for photo syncing and of course VMs are no problem either. It is a good choice here I think.

 

[Bluecube]

UnRAID here as well especially as you’ve got a Xeon setup. UnRAID has loads of apps to cover just about all eventualities. If there’s anything missing then just spin up a VM and run whatever you want.

 

[Randall8686]

Thanks for all the feedback guys. I did try unraid a while back, but not in a long time. Might just give it another go and try the plex and cctv docker. How do you access the files on your phone with unraid? Is their any apps to browse the file structures like DS file?

 

[BigT]

As it is just a samba share you can use any iOS app that can browse a network. I use an app called FileBrowser but there are loads in the App Store.

 

[StevieP]

Same with Android - I use Solid Explorer and it browsed the file structure no problem!

I love unRAID - I have abosolutely no idea how to use it outside of a Plex Docker and Deluge for the odd torrent file - but coming from a fairly slow Synology NAS its an breeze to work with!

 

[BigT]

Watch Space Invader One’s videos on YouTube. They’re very good for learning about things you can do with Unraid. He not only shows you how to do stuff but also gives lots of context which helps me learn.

 

[Randall8686]

Cheers guys, think I’m set on giving unraid a go. Seems a lot simpler these days with community apps etc.

Seems that’s cache Drive is quite key for dockers etc, so might invest in a sad for this?

 

[Bluecube]

Given the price of the these days, there no reason not to. I have a 250Gb SSD as cache as I run a couple of VMs as well. It really does make for a slicker, smoother experience.

 

[Randall8686]

Hmmm trying to install and getting a message of “this is not a bootable disk please insert a bootable floppy and try again, created the USB twice as per unraid a website

 

[Bluecube]

Try it in a USB2 slot. Have to say that creating a bootable USB has always given me grief, no matter what it’s for.

 

[Randall8686]

sorted it. I found the "auto creator" did not work. Downloading the zip and manually extracting it and then making it bootable worked fine.

Its up and running with parity check done now transferring files to it. I must say its slower at transfer speed than xpenology, I used to max the ethernet out on xpenlogy im now getting after the first couple hundred mb onl 49Mbps transfer speed (just under half that of xpenology) is this just down to the way it uses parity? i am uploading 6tb worth of files at the moment and its going to take a while.

 

[Armageus]

I must say its slower at transfer speed than xpenology, I used to max the ethernet out on xpenlogy im now getting after the first couple hundred mb onl 49Mbps transfer speed (just under half that of xpenology) is this just down to the way it uses parity?

As I understand it, Unraid is just a JBOD with a dedicated parity drive, so in theory you are only ever writing to 2 drives (1 data, 1 parity) hence the lower performance than e.g. a 4 drive RAID5 where you are writing data to all 4 drives (e.g. 3 data strips + 1 parity strip, and so potentially get 3x better write performance).

In order to accelerate Unraid you therefore ideally need an SSD to act as a write cache.
https://lime-technology.com/network-attached-storage/

 

[Bluecube]

If you’re copying a huge amount of data and the speed is an issue then turn off parity before the copy, and turn it back on after the copy.

 

[Randall8686]

For anyone interested i figured out how to get maximum Disk speed in unraid, You need to go to settings, Disk settings, then change "Tunable (md_write_method):" to "reconstruct write" basically what this does is uses all the disks in the array to take the data in. downside when you access even 1 small file on the server regardless of how many disks you have in the system it will spin them all up to grab that data even if the data is not on that disk. however it means that you can absolutely max out your connection speed to the server unless you have several ethernets bonded then will be limited by disk write speed. Its a very good work around that you can change at any point and if transferring lots of data worth tuning on.

it quite literally cut my transfer time in half and settled at a reasonable 110MB/s you can even change the status during a write process and just watch you speed double