Rob_LC

It sounds like a 2 bay consumer NAS with dual 4TB drives would be fine for your needs. You could go cheaper with 3TB drives if the budget is tight. I would look at what devices in your household will connect, and compare features on the lower priced consumer NAS devices to find one that is suitable. If its just windows file sharing you need, most lower end NAS devices will be fine. Remember that Raid is not a backup. If the data is important, you should also be backing it up to another place.

I'll add to this excellent suggestion: - Windows 10 & 2012/2016 Server support for new 2.5GBASET-T and 5GBASE-T cards - unRaid support/drivers for new 2.5GBASET-T and 5GBASE-T cards - affordable 5/8/16 port switches which support the new standard, and actual test results from several brands with 2m, 10m, 100m cabling (try cat5e and cat6). - performance of any consumer NAS that small/medium content creators might use which support the new standards.

Using unRAID you would have 3TB of storage as one drive is dedicated to parity. Each further drive added (3TB) would be available storage. Yes any working SSD can be used for a cache. Its $59 for unRAID basic, and of course there is the free month trial.

Firstly, unRaid is a good choice for home storage if you want to build it yourself and have room for expansion. It boots from a USB stick (use a decent brand 8 or 16GB), and you can try a demo for a few weeks. As per other comments, don't buy two SSD's to start with. One is useful for a write cache drive and storing any small VM/Dockers, but not a requirement. If you do use VM's it improves the performance of virtual disk access a lot. Focus on getting two of the highest capacity drives you can manage to start with. One will be the parity drive, the other your first data drive. Your available space will be the capacity of the data drive. unRaid requires the largest drive in the system to be the parity drive, and then you add as many data disks as you like, and you get the space on those data disks to use. Its not RAID 1 or 5, its more of a JBOD + parity. Its not high performance, its about reliable redundant storage, which makes it great for home use. Any one data drive can fail and your data can be rebuilt from the parity. Even if several drives die, the good data drives are still readable because each file is stored there in its entirety, not split across multiple disks. If the parity drive fails, you replace and rebuild it. If your motherboard dies you can move the disks and USB stick to another pc and get it working there to recover your data, or just read the drive from a host that can read the XFS format. The unRaid forums are quite good on providing advice on system build, parts and compatibility etc. I use a first Gen i3 with 4GB of ram for mine, with 2x 3TB WD drives. When it gets full I'll add a drive.

If those suggestions don't help, look for a SSD toolbox app from the supplier - you don't mention the brand. Do some diagnostics on the drive to make sure its working ok.

Checkout one of these: http://www.bjorn3d.com/2015/12/asustor-as1002t-nas/ It supports both windows and MAC fileshares. Add two 3TB or 4TB drives in Raid 1 (mirror) and you are away.

So you have listed only 1x 3TB drive? Until you have at least two drives you may just want to run Linux server as you say. If you do end up with 2 or more 3TB drives you could change to unRaid or freeNas or whatever then. The SSD would work as a cache/docker storage for unRaid. I don't know much about your case, but I suggest you buy one that can take at least 3 or 4 drives, because these things tend to start small and grow over time. Also make sure there is a fan moving air around the drive area to keep the drives cool. If not, when you work drives hard they get quite hot (50deg C is a bit too hot), and more prone to errors.

unRaid boots from a USB stick, but you can use a small SSD to store your Plex docker, so that the HDD drives can spin down when they are not used. I don't use plex, you should ask over in the unRaid forums or have a read there about how much cpu grunt you need.

My view - spend $59 on unRaid and use standard non ecc memory - freeNAS with ZFS is not really suited to a small home NAS, its for the serious commercial level user. You can run Plex in a docker no problem on unRaid. Try it free for a month on an old pc with a couple of small drives thrown in it. The pc only needs 2GB ram, and to be able to boot from USB (unRaid is on a usb stick) and have a few SATA ports to conenct drives. I would also suggest trying to stretch to at least 3TB drives if you are buying new, like WD Blue ($96) or Red if they are on special. How many of the 2 drive consumer NAS appliances do you think use ECC ram?

I have a small unraid server with a i3-550 and 4GB ram (with 6 SATA ports), so your spec would be fine. If you just use it for raid, it will run on 2GB ram easily. I run a docker with zoneminder recording my security cam, a print redirector to my usb printer and sometimes a Server 2016 test VM in 2GB of ram on top of that, because unRaid can host VM's. For storage I use 2x 3TB drives, giving 3TB storage. If I add one more 3TB, i would have 6TB storage. unRaid uses 1 parity drive, and if any 1 drive fails you don't loose data. The more drives you use, the higher the percentage of the storage is used for storage. Its very suitable for home use and only $59US (trial free for a month). Even better, if you have 4x 4TB disks, you have 1x parity, 3x data which is 12TB of storage. If you were unlucky enough that both the parity and one data disk failed at the same time, the two remaining disks will have valid files remaining - unRaid does not stripe or split the files across disks to improve performance.

Windows 10 preview suggestion How about some early Windows 10 gaming performance tests? Not too in depth until the full release is out, but Windows 10 & DX12 will be here really soon and "when should I upgrade" will be a question that a huge number of us are asking. I would like to see some tests on Win 7 vs Win 10, on Core i3, i5, i7, and just a few of the most popular cards, with a few popular games.

Vessel username: Rob_LC https://www.vessel.com/videos/LCoY5zfFf https://www.vessel.com/videos/PU3Cowbot