WHS 2011 must go! NAS or Xpenology/unRAID?

Minstadave

Minstadave

Minstadave

Caporegime
Joined
8 Jan 2004
Posts
32,622
Location
Rutland
WHS 2011 has annoyed me for the last time, I need to get rid of it.

I've got a fairly powerful home server with:

Penguin G3258
8GB RAM
2x1TB drives (soon to be upgraded)
1x4TB drives

WHS was providing:
Multiple windows client backups
Network drives
Media serving
Print serving (mac and PC)
Off loading loading long cloud uploads and torrents

I used drive bender to pool my drives and provide redundancy and really liked the software. Unfortunately WHS is junk and it's time to move on.

What would be my best bet to do all the above? A dedicated NAS or keep the current hardware and stick something like Xpenology or unRAID on it?
 
I'd go for Xpenology to be honest, all the good stuff of DSM and no additional outlay. I'm using DSM 6.1 on vsphere 6.5 and it works like a charm... For baremetal you might need to see what drivers are rquired to make it work... Otherwise UnRaid is your next best bet; I just prefer spanning my drives properly rather than splitting files and folders between drives.
 
Can Xpenology and unRAID just be installed as a normal OS? I have no experience of virtualisation.

Does either offer similar functionality to Drive Bender? I like the fact that I can pull or add drives to the pool and choose what is duplicated.
 
Yes they both can. Both run of USB sticks.

Xpenology uses the usb as the replacement bootloader that is on the proper synology units and then the official isntaller downloads to the drives, with each drive having a copy of the OS so you always have a backup.

unRAID installs on a USB and runs from the USB. UnRAID is pretty cool but as I said, it doesn't span drives, just kinda creates the impression of seamless drive storage, where as DSM spans drives with traditional raid or hybrid raid (mixed drives).

If you want to pull a drive without worrying then unRAID is your friend as effectively parity is secured on a dedicated drive rather than striped across multiple drives like RAID does; this means that an unraid drive can be pulled and the files read without it affecting another drive.

Final difference is that unraid costs and xpenology is free.
 
Thanks all. Will unRAID act as a print server for windows machines? Do I configure it with the right windows drivers or do I need to dig out a Linux driver for it too?
 
I don't think it does print serving, although if the system your running it on is VT-X/D enabled then you could install a linux or Windows VM and use that as the print server running of the unRAID machine.
 
Quartz said:
Try Windows Server Essentials.
Click to expand...

Just to update and say thanks.

I've opted to move to Windows Server 2016 Essentials which so far does exactly what I want and touch wood isn't as decrepit and flakey as my experiences with WHS. Meant I could just do a fresh OS install, reinstall drive bender and rebuild my pool. All done in under an hour. Printer sharing is a doddle, didn't even need to install drivers.

Bare metal restores look a lot easier without all the driver hassles.
 
If you want to look towards parity protected storage in Windows you can run drivepool/drivebender with snapraid to give snapshot parity protection... Very robust and simple, will run as a schedule to add new files to the parity etc. This is what is called snapshot parity, i.e. its ondemand and not live.

Flexraid has another product called t-raid which is realtime raid which again uses a dedicated drive for parity and does similar to unraid; it can also not drive pool and instead use another product such as drivepool if you want.. They're developing a product called standards which will be software raid including hybrids like Synology, QNAP etc. The software is ok, interface is not so nice and it can be flakey. Flexraid will be drive speed, t-raid much slower due to real time parity and standards when released should be full drive speed due to spreading parity across all disks.
 
unRAID and use containers/VM's or you could look into ESXi and running some VM's although the 8GB RAm may limit you to only a couple.
 
Steveocee said:
unRAID and use containers/VM's or you could look into ESXi and running some VM's although the 8GB RAm may limit you to only a couple.
Click to expand...

That's a bit high brow for me. I struggled getting around Server 2016s desire to be a domain controller, so virtualisation is beyond me.
 
I have been using Xpenology for years and would highly recommend it however it's not without issues. For my next server upgrade I have been considering moving to unRAID myself. Best thing is to load up xpenology in a VM and try it out, bit less hassle then trying it out with a baremetal isntall, virtualises fairly well, I've even run it virtualised and passed through the physical disks in a system to it fine. Not sure if you can do that with unraid, but there is always the 30 day trial.

Edit: Actually in theory, you could run unraid, then virtualise xpenology ontop of that :p
 
Virtualising unraid is more awkward is it contains the license key on the USB and boot files, creating a virtual hard drive with the latest version is ok but then you still need to pass the USB through to the VM by (directIO or with esxi 6.5, accessing the USB via the host controller).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom