Alternative to Xpenology?

Randall8686 · 31 Mar 2018 at 19:30

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

Randall8686 · 1 Apr 2018 at 15:34

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?

Randall8686 · 1 Apr 2018 at 22:19

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?

Randall8686 · 2 Apr 2018 at 19:54

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

Randall8686 · 3 Apr 2018 at 09:06

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.

Randall8686 · 5 Apr 2018 at 16:52

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