NAS Update - What Would You Do?

minutellim · May 9, 2016

I recently built a NAS, and I have been running UnRaid so far with no problems. I generally like it, but for some reason I am having trouble bringing myself to shell out the $60 for something that I can do for free with other platforms. I'm currently out of SATA ports on my motherboard as well, so that needs an HBA card if I'm going to add more drives.

My options are to continue using unRaid and just get an HBA for my motherboard, or I could get a proper motherboard, snag some ECC RAM, and switch over to FreeNAS. For some reason, I just don't like the thought of continuing to use the cheap ASRock board I bought for server use, and I'm really hung up on spending the $60 on unRaid even though I think it's a fantastic product. The only thing I use unRaid for, other than the hard drive pooling, is the virtualization of one Ubuntu VM for hosting my web projects, but I believe I can do that with Jails.

The motherboard/CPU that is currently in the system wouldn't be wasted as I would probably use them to build a programming rig anyway as I'm tired of connecting my laptop to an external monitor and such when I want to work on projects.

Rmusic10891 · May 9, 2016

Obviously it's your money but I wouldn't let having to pay $60 for a piece of software sway your decision. It's a fairly small amount of money given the versatility of Unraid in my opinion. It really comes down to how much storage you have and how easy you want expansion to be. Adding drives is much more involved with FreeNas/ZFS than in unRaid. Also FreeNas is going to want quite a bit more RAM than unraid if you have large storage needs. (FreeNas recommends 1GB of RAM per TB of storage). Unraid doesn't stripe your data across drives which may be of benefit to you.

Electronics Wizardy · May 10, 2016

You can do this in centos with snap raid/md/btrfs depending on your drive config. You can use ovirt to manager vm's. Its more setup, but free.

minutellim · May 10, 2016

21 hours ago, Rmusic10891 said:

Obviously it's your money but I wouldn't let having to pay $60 for a piece of software sway your decision. It's a fairly small amount of money given the versatility of Unraid in my opinion. It really comes down to how much storage you have and how easy you want expansion to be. Adding drives is much more involved with FreeNas/ZFS than in unRaid. Also FreeNas is going to want quite a bit more RAM than unraid if you have large storage needs. (FreeNas recommends 1GB of RAM per TB of storage). Unraid doesn't stripe your data across drives which may be of benefit to you.

I agree. I think unRaid is worth the money. It is a terrific piece of software, especially with the virtualization built in. It's incredibly easy to use, and you can pretty much get it setup and forget that it's even there. My problem comes down to whether or not I think it's right for my use case, and I'm not sure the answer is quite as clear.

9 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can do this in centos with snap raid/md/btrfs depending on your drive config. You can use ovirt to manager vm's. Its more setup, but free.

I've been thinking about trying this. My unRaid trial is going to expire this weekend, so I might go with this option until I decide whether or not I want to go with unRaid or FreeNas.