Help with NAS

[Matt_Hirst]

As many other people I find myself in a situation where when I've run out of storage space I've just bought another hard drive. When I've upgraded a pc I've just bought a bigger new drive and so on and so forth.

Fast forward to now and I, as a hobby do photography, so storage again has come to the fore along with backups, so I started to build a Truenas server out of an old pc which kinda works but is not the most power efficient and if I am honest I do tend to power it on to do a backup and then power it off.

What I am thinking I want to do; is build a NAS that will stay on permanently, the aim of the NAS is as follows:

* Act as a seperate copy of my photographs and data, maybe longer term it will act as a live storage device where I work directly from it though only after I build another NAS offsite to act as a backup?
* Hold my media library and be able to share this to the various tv in the house. I have an extensive library of movies and whilst I do like to have the originals in their cases I do like the idea of convenience to be able to watch them.
* Be able to act as a storage solution for three apple accounts and my android device - primarily for photos etc
* I don't particuarly like my TrueNas server, it's a bit noisy, more power hungry than a NAS also I found it a bit of a pain to setup, so would probably feel safer with an off the shelf solution especially if it is on 24hrs a day.

My main PC is as follows:

12700K
64gb RAM
1 TB boot NVME
1 TB games NVME
4 TB storage nvme
8 TB photo storage NVME
8 TB WD red pro hard disk, copy of 8TB nvme
1 TB nvme that i use as a cache drive for focus stacking (lots of reads and writes to this drive)
10 GB nic

My current True NAS
3 TB
4 TB
4 TB
8 TB wd red pro
10 GB nic

I have coming 2 * 8 TB WD red pro.

in my cupboard I have all my old hard drives and ssd - mix of drives from 1* 4tb ssd, 1 * 3TB hard disk, 2TB hard disk, numerous 1 TB hard disks (there's also drives going down to MB as I never sold any).

So what to do? I don't have a huge budget, hence probably why I am in the place I am in with all the above.

Current thought process is to get a 4 bay NAS, so would welcome view points on Synology DS925+ or the UGreen 4800 Plus or wait for the 4800 pro assuming a similarish price to the pro? The Synology I believe can be expanded to add additional drives, can the UGreens? also any thoughts on either of the units? Or would you stick with TrueNas and learn / expand that server?

Drive setup in the NAS, I am looking to put all the 8TB wd red drives into the NAS, years ago I used to run raid 10 on some home NAS that I had but now thinking RAID 5 (3 disks plus 1 redundant). In theory I'll have a copy of all the data on my main pc and on the NAS, then I may also have the TrueNas box just to keep as a third copy until the offsite NAS can be procured.

In order to facilitate the swapping of drives into the NAS, can I put the 2 new drives in the NAS and copy the data across, then take my 2 drives (1 from main pc, 1 from TrueNas) and add them in or do I need to copy the existing data somewheer else and then add the 4 drives into the NAS configuree that for storage and then copy the data back across - if so I may have to factor into my costs a large usb Hard disk, or will TrueNas allow me to mix drives in a storage pool could I create a 3TB, 3 TB, 4 TB 4 TB pool? what size would it give? - please note one other reason to go for a NAS is that I am looking for simplicity and ease of use so sorry for the question if it is a stupid one!

So what to do, how would you do this?

Matt

 

[BongoHunter]

Been through something similar myself and decided to build my own NAS as prebuilt didn't seam like good value.

The Synology DS925+ is going to be about £500 and has limited RAM and networking, what spec is your TrueNAS machine, specifically which motherboard/cpu. You might be able to easily add a lot of SATA ports to for a relatively low cost, and then put it in a case like the Silverstone CS380 (or similar).

Unraid might offer the easiest way to throw a large amount of disks into a simple and easy to use/setup DIY NAS.

 

[lsg1r]

You have so many options now for home server/nas software...so I'm in the build your own camp too.

I use unraid (only spins up required disks) and that would be my choice personally but you also have hex os which is essentially an overlay of truenas, zima os and there are likely others too lol..

Your truenas server is going to be as noisy as the hardware in it, my home server is an i5 13500 which I'm currently moving into a Jonsbo n5 due to increasing to 12 drives but even before this the noise was primarily coming from the drives. I'm running unraid purely due to the fact that it only spins up drives as needed etc.

The thing is unless you buy an arm based nas (I wouldn't these days) you're basically buying a mini pc so power draw will be similar to a pc built the same way.

If I was going prebuilt hardward depending on drives needed I'd be looking at a brand that can install a different os like unraid, last I checked Ugreen and terramaster both allowed you to change the os.