NAS drive (or use a spare computer) advice

[shopper150]

I’m looking to buy a NAS drive very soon.
Alternatively I have a decent spare computer with quite a few spare drive bays.

I’m looking to achieve for a safe repository for my files. I’d like a nice easy interface to use and it would be great to swap drives in and out without much hassle.
I have 4 spare 2.5inch SSD drives that I would use initially and I may add or swap out a couple of these for standard 3.5inch hard drives drives. Ideally I’d like a solution where the drives don’t need to match etc.

Apologies if this is not enough information, but I’m seeking guidance/recommendation and can provide more info if required.

Synology NAS drives looks easy to use?!?

[BigTZ4M]

Synology and QNAP are the two off-the-shelf solutions that blend-ease of-use and features well. I never really hear or read anyone having a bad experience with either. Normally people progress because they want to start to tinker more or it gets too costly to buy the massive enclosures for lots of drives compared to making your own.

If you wish to repurpose an old PC then there are lots of good solutions, most free or low cost. I can only speak for UnRaid, which will need you to invest in some mechanical HDDs for the storage space as it should only use SSDs for cache. As a competent PC builder but life long Windows user, I found it very easy to get into and it is very configurable and extensible. It lets you mix and match hard drive sizes but it's use of parity instead of RAID means it has resilience but if write performance is important then, while the cache helps, it isn't the fastest. Perfectly fine for a backup, download and media server but not for some sort of high IO intensive task.

Other solutions like FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault and TrueNAS exist to put on your PC but I can't comment on them. You could even use plain old Windows and Microsoft Storage Spaces to achieve what you want or be brave and roll your own with Linux and SnapRAID or similar.

[markiii]

unraid on that old PC hardware would do what you want

[shopper150]

Thanks all. I will probably repurpose a PC.
Interesting that SSD's cannot be used with Unraid

[markiii]

ish, they advise against but i've been running one for my music on unraid for years. I don't mind the time taken to wake up a disk when watching a movie but prefer instant access when music streaming

[BigTZ4M]

markiii said:

ish, they advise against but i've been running one for my music on unraid for years. I don't mind the time taken to wake up a disk when watching a movie but prefer instant access when music streaming

Do you use the new UnRaid version's multiple cache pools now for that? I think that's the way I'd do it in a fully supported manner. Make a RAID1 SSD cache pool specifically for music and set your music share to exclusively use the cache.

[sjg]

Moved from an old Microserver (4 drives, drivepool software) to a Synology DS220+. I like it - nice and simple to get everything up and running, did quite a bit of juggling different size drives as I was testing it on old ones before getting a couple of 8TB in there. Plex runs well, other stuff like pihole and unifi management run fine in docker containers. Have a couple of security cameras recording into the Surveilance Station. Came with software to sync folders into my spare OneDrive space which is handy. It's tiny, uses way less power, monitors itself and emails if anything goes wrong.

I could have built my own solution but if you don't want to faff about they're a good way to go.

[sparkyhx]

as good as Synology/QNAP are, its is an expensive option compared with re purposing a PC

[alock]

shopper150 said:

I’m looking to achieve for a safe repository for my files.

This does not exist. Anyone who tells you it does is lying.

The hardest part to get right is the backup. Build a backup process that works for you. Once you've designed your backup, the master storage product should be obvious because it'll be the one that makes the backup easiest.

[markiii]

BigTZ4M said:

markiii said:

ish, they advise against but i've been running one for my music on unraid for years. I don't mind the time taken to wake up a disk when watching a movie but prefer instant access when music streaming

Do you use the new UnRaid version's multiple cache pools now for that? I think that's the way I'd do it in a fully supported manner. Make a RAID1 SSD cache pool specifically for music and set your music share to exclusively use the cache.

i have a raid 1 cache drive setup also with SSD as thats where my apps live. But not really sold on the advantage of having the Music on there rather than in the main array

[markiii]

sparkyhx said:

as good as Synology/QNAP are, its is an expensive option compared with re purposing a PC

its also very expensive when you need bigger drives.

The big drawback to conventional NAS is that all drive sin a raid config have to be the same size. So out of space means replace all drives at the same time and restore from backup

Unraid so long as the Parity Drive(s) are at least as big as the biggest data drive, just use whatever sizes you like

[BigTZ4M]

alock said:

This does not exist. Anyone who tells you it does is lying.

The hardest part to get right is the backup. Build a backup process that works for you. Once you've designed your backup, the master storage product should be obvious because it'll be the one that makes the backup easiest.

This is good advice to heed. Any form of local resiliency to data loss doesn't represent or replace a backup. No point building that 100TB NAS unless you have a way to back it up or are prepared to lose some, no matter what flavour of RAID or parity protection you have. I think my use case is reasonably typical. I've got 76TB on local NAS storage but 72TB I'm prepared to lose because it's just media I can obtain again (faff though it may be). My critical data I care about is <4TB so gets backed up onto an external disk that goes in a safe off site and also to cloud. Fine for me but if you're in the digital asset business and you have TB and TB of critical data my backup strategy wouldn't be practical and would necessitate a different solution all round.

[mikef]

markiii said:

The big drawback to conventional NAS is that all drives in a raid config have to be the same size. So out of space means replace all drives at the same time and restore from backup

That’s not the case with a Synology NAS. Google SHR (Synology Hybrid Raid) which supports different disk sizes

[shopper150]

Point about backups noted.

Are there any alternatives to Unraid that should be considered if going down the repurposing PC route?

[TonyRPH]

For a home NAS using RAID there's no real performance benefit to using SSDs, as any decent cluster of RAID disks will have sufficient performance anyway.

If you use a hardware RAID controller even better still, as a decent one will have caching too - however unless the caching has battery backup a UPS is recommended as well (and I would generally recommend a UPS anyway).

[mikef]

Back to the original question -

A Synology or similar NAS is small, quiet, cool, has a CPU sized for the task in hand and is designed to run headless (without monitor or keyboard attached). A repurposed desktop PC is none of those. If you have one lying around fair enough, but don’t kid yourself that it’s the best answer

[Captain_Morgan]

shopper150 said:

Point about backups noted.

Are there any alternatives to Unraid that should be considered if going down the repurposing PC route?

Truenas core, the rebrand / replacement for free as