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!

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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.