FreeNAS or UnRaid and hardware options

[Arivera3d]

tiring to keep the price of the build under $800

Need a minimum of 20tb capacity I do have a few WD Purple 4TB Surveillance Hard Disk Drive to use one the build.

Having the system expandable will be nice.

Which OS for nas would be good to use FreeNAS or UnRaid.

I have an i5-6400, Corsair DDR4 2400mhz 8gb, MSI H170I Pro AC or a ThinkServer TS140 model 70A4001MUX

Which system would you use as a base to build off of for a Video Editing NAS? The source file is about 4k with a bit rate of about 100mbs. There will be about 2 people editing off of it and they might have up to 4 people editing off of it.

So which hardware and OS would be good to use for my needs? And thanks in advance for all your input.

[Windows7ge]

This really depends on what you need. unRAID has a much better hypervisor if you decide you need virtualization but if you plan to use 6+ disks an unRAID license will eat $90. As the name implies it doesn't use RAID so you'd have to pay for an SSD read/write cache.

 

FreeNAS is well, free but has a trash hypervisor (Bhyve). It uses ZFS which works pretty well and it's RAID solution gives you a performance bump on the pool like any other. ZFS however isn't the fastest of options. At this time it also lacks single disk addition. You'd have to increase your storage by adding datasets.

 

Hardware wise I'd opt for server gear if you can find a good deal but I don't know about that thinkserver. I'd look for a retired supermicro/dell/hpe server that uses a newer platform/chipset but I guess that really depends on how important it is that the data on the server not be lost (backups should always be kept regardless).

[2FA]

22 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

As the name implies it doesn't use RAID so you'd have to pay for an SSD read/write cache.

It's called cache but it's more like tiered storage. It keeps the data on the SSD until the mover runs, then it gets put on the array so you have to be mindful of the scheduled run time for the mover.

[Mihle]

One benefit of UNraid is that if you for example have 4 data drives and 2 parity, and 3 disks die for some reason, files on the 3 other disks is fine as nothing is striped, only 1 disk worth of data is lost.

[bowrilla]

 Don't change the color of the text. It screws up the dark mode!

 

1. FreeNAS comes free of charge with no hardware limitations
2. FreeNAS comes with ZFS, the basically most advanced and imho (and according to many experts) best file system as of today supporting snapshots, checksum error correction, compression, deduplication, encryption
3. ZFS benefits heavily from memory, 8GB is the bare minimum recommended by FreeNAS, the larger your volume grows, the more memory ZFS needs
4. FreeNAS offers ZFS versions of RAID (they call it RAID-Z) with the option of pure striping (RAID0 equivalent), mirroring (RAID1 equivalent), 1 drive parity (RAID-Z1), 2 drive parity (RAID-Z2) and 3 drive parity (RAID-Z3), unRaid on the other hand offers RAID0, RAID1 and dual parity. 
5. afaik unRaid calls SSD support still "experimental"
6. FreeNAS supports iSCSI services
7. FreeNAS supports LDAP, Active Directory and Kerberos
8. not sure if unRaid closed the gap but FreeNAS offers strong support for cloud backups services like AWS, Google Cloud und Azure
9. FreeNAS comes with real time monitoring
10. unRaid supports familiar container technologies like Docker natively, on FreeNAS you need to run a VM with RanchOS to user Docker
11. FreeNAS (imho) has the superior documentation and ressources available to get you started
12. Since ZFS needs direct hardware/disk access to properly work, you don't want to run it virtualized; if you want to stick with one machine, then FreeNAS has to be your host and you have to virtualize your servers with bhyve (which is absolutely fine and afaik tested support for different OS is ahead of unRaid)

I'm not saying, that unRaid is in any form a bad choice, but it might be the wrong choice if you need certain services. If you want ZFS, you either choose FreeNAS or build your own system (which you should avoid in any case in a production environment unless you really know what you're doing and you really need some services or applications you can't stabily run on FreeNAS or unRaid). To me unRaid is fine for your home solution but in a business/enterprise environment I'd go with FreeNAS because of iSCSI, ZFS, Active Directory, etc.