Replacing Old Synology with DIY NAS - Need Suggestions

[alcom4x]

I need to replace my aging synology DS414j 4-bay NAS since it has been getting slower with every update it gets due to its meager 600mhz single core arm processor and 256MB ram with a PC I have lying around unusued with the following specs: 

• core i5 6400 
• 16GB DDR4 Ram
• Samsung 850 Evo 250GB SSD
• ASrock H110M-HDV motherboard

now I don't need anything too fancy out of the nas apart from the following:

• Have HDD fault tolerance
• Ability to increase/add more disks or replace current ones with more storage
• File server for 2 people
• Act as a development server for web dev using LEMP (2-3 concurrent users MAX, usually just 1 developing)
• Support external access through ddns or something similar since I don't have a static IP
• DLNA support

 

Streaming and webdev won't be done at the same time. Since I've been using out of the box solutions, I'm not very familiar with the DIY side of storage, however I was looking at either freeNAS or unRaid. Do you think the system is able to support my usecase? And what do you suggest using as an OS?

 

[wojtepanik]

unraid and freeNAS are OS's so you choose one of them, get some tutorial how to configure and proceed with it

 

[alcom4x]

49 minutes ago, wojtepanik said:

unraid and freeNAS are OS's so you choose one of them, get some tutorial how to configure and proceed with it

 

Yes I'm aware of that, what I wanted to know is which one would suit my needs best 

[Turretgaming]

FreeNAS is best and stupid easy

[tom sheinman]

On 3/19/2019 at 3:49 PM, alcom4x said:

Yes I'm aware of that, what I wanted to know is which one would suit my needs best 

 

On 3/19/2019 at 6:13 PM, Turretgaming said:

FreeNAS is best and stupid easy

I think unRAID, I tried freeNAS and it's was very complicated for me. 

unRAID is so much user friendly and easy to use. 

Worth the extra money for sure 

[Razor Blade]

On 3/19/2019 at 9:49 AM, alcom4x said:

Yes I'm aware of that, what I wanted to know is which one would suit my needs best 

If you're wanting to move to something like a ZFS file system, then go with FreeNAS. If you want a flexible hybrid RAID, might want to try Unraid.

 

FreeNAS is not complicated...just run the wizard and you're all set. If you want to run centOS in a docker container or some Linux distro in a VM for the web development, FreeNAS can do that too. Never used Unraid so I can't constructively comment on it.

[imbrock]

6 hours ago, tom sheinman said:

 

I think unRAID, I tried freeNAS and it's was very complicated for me. 

unRAID is so much user friendly and easy to use. 

Worth the extra money for sure 

I second that, I researched both for weeks, spent a few hours playing with freenas and decided to try out unraids free trial. I bought it three days in and have been super happy ever since. Its rock solid, does everything very well, and has me dreaming about a whole bunch of fun projects down the road.

Also its what LTT use which is always a good sign.

[Salacious B Crum]

On 3/21/2019 at 11:54 PM, imbrock said:

I second that, I researched both for weeks, spent a few hours playing with freenas and decided to try out unraids free trial. I bought it three days in and have been super happy ever since. Its rock solid, does everything very well, and has me dreaming about a whole bunch of fun projects down the road.

Also its what LTT use which is always a good sign.

X2 on unRAID been using it for over a year now just bought my second license it will be the cheapest part of the build and is incredibly easy to use and very feature rich, you set it up as a traditional NAS, run dockers and even set up VM's if your into that sort of thing, I run my plex, radarr, sonarr, jackett, ipvanish and deluge on a windows10 VM works like a charm you can even do this in a docker only config as well so there are a ton of options the part I really like is when its time to add more storage you simply add a drive and your done and all that storage is available i.e. no overhead for traditional RAID allocation put a 4TB drive in and you get 4TB of raw storage

[alcom4x]

Thanks all! I finally made the move to unraid and loving it so far although I now have the monumental task of setting it all up how I want it and moving the data back to the disks again. 

[Salacious B Crum]

4 hours ago, alcom4x said:

Thanks all! I finally made the move to unraid and loving it so far although I now have the monumental task of setting it all up how I want it and moving the data back to the disks again. 

Don't forget the incredibly helpful folks on their forum super group of people passionate about all things unRAID

[imbrock]

On 3/29/2019 at 10:06 AM, alcom4x said:

Thanks all! I finally made the move to unraid and loving it so far although I now have the monumental task of setting it all up how I want it and moving the data back to the disks again. 

I super suggest giving this video a run through. It sets up the unraid app store and some other really useful plugins.

After that I highly suggest checking out the unassigned plugins app, it helps with getting media you already have onto the server.

I'll also give you a tip to handle a little bit of jank I've noticed occasionally creeping in. If a docker is not working, check its Edit section, see if any of the directory paths have '/' at the end of them. For some dockers this makes them not function right, and it gets added in automatically for some reason.

[alcom4x]

On 4/7/2019 at 8:16 PM, imbrock said:

I super suggest giving this video a run through. It sets up the unraid app store and some other really useful plugins.

After that I highly suggest checking out the unassigned plugins app, it helps with getting media you already have onto the server.

I'll also give you a tip to handle a little bit of jank I've noticed occasionally creeping in. If a docker is not working, check its Edit section, see if any of the directory paths have '/' at the end of them. For some dockers this makes them not function right, and it gets added in automatically for some reason.

Where you going to post a video there? also thanks for the other pointers! 

 

So far I've had my hiccups with unraid but it seems to be going well. The process of switching over from synology to something unraid is definitely taking longer than I expected - many things that DSM did behind the scenes is now something I have to manually take care of. Not a big deal as I'm learning a lot. My setup is as follows so far: 1x Cache drive ( which I installed after configuring everything due to lack of SATA ports - now got a SATA PCI-E card) 1x parity drive and 3 storage drives for a total of ~6TB storage. 

 

What I'm not sure about is data reliability specifically for these points:

1. What happens if my cache drive (Samsung 850 Evo 250GB) goes bust

2. What happens if my parity drive dies and how to prevent (apart from adding another parity drive)

3. What happens if my USB drive with unraid dies and how to prevent this

 

Also been having trouble setting up nextcloud docker - seems to have trouble connecting to mysql docker set on the same virtual network. and NGINX reverse proxying for external access to my dockers and VMS. I got duckdns docker running and updating IPS to all my domains,  I purchased my own domain and did CNAME pointers to duckdns and installed NGINX reverse proxy docker since I couldn't get letsencrypt docker to connect to the net for some reason despite ports being forwarded on my router (following spaceinvader's guides on YT). So far I got domain1.mydomain.com to show the default NGINX page as below

 

setup the reverse proxies on nginx proxy manager but for some reason I get a 502 bad gateway there as well. 

 

Despite actually monitoring networks and servers for ages for a living, actually _setting up and configuring_ is completely new to me. there's so much to learn! but I digress. 

[Salacious B Crum]

40 minutes ago, alcom4x said:

Where you going to post a video there? also thanks for the other pointers! 

 

So far I've had my hiccups with unraid but it seems to be going well. The process of switching over from synology to something unraid is definitely taking longer than I expected - many things that DSM did behind the scenes is now something I have to manually take care of. Not a big deal as I'm learning a lot. My setup is as follows so far: 1x Cache drive ( which I installed after configuring everything due to lack of SATA ports - now got a SATA PCI-E card) 1x parity drive and 3 storage drives for a total of ~6TB storage. 

 

What I'm not sure about is data reliability specifically for these points:

1. What happens if my cache drive (Samsung 850 Evo 250GB) goes bust With only 1 cache drive if it fails you loose the data as it is not parity protected until you invoke the mover you can create a cache pool then the data can be protected

 

2. What happens if my parity drive dies and how to prevent (apart from adding another parity drive) To prevent failure issues you have the SMART info to monitor and if it fails you simply replace and it will rebuild but be aware that if your drives are old or questionable that a rebuild can actually cause additional failure to any one or more of the drives

 

3. What happens if my USB drive with unraid dies and how to prevent this No real way to prevent it but do realize that 1) your flash drive boots into RAM and from there majority of all actions are within the RAM From Limetech's site: "

• If your USB Flash boot device fails, you can transfer your registration key to a new USB Flash device initially at any time, and subsequently up to once per year."

And as a note if that sata daughter board has as marvell controller be warned that they are known to cause issues in unRAID