Expandable Home NAS Solution

[Sayantan Saha]

Hi,

 

I am thinking of building a home NAS. My main requirements are :

1. Data security
2. Expansion

For data security, I was thinking of going with a hardware RAID 5 array. But it is not expandable at at later stage.

 

Will ZFS with RAIDZ solve my problem?

 

Are there any other way to have data security and expansion option?

 

Read/Write speed are not my primary concern.

 

Thanks and Regards,

 

Sayantan

[Vishera]

53 minutes ago, Sayantan Saha said:

Hi,

 

I am thinking of building a home NAS. My main requirements are :

1. Data security
2. Expansion

For data security, I was thinking of going with a hardware RAID 5 array. But it is not expandable at at later stage.

 

Will ZFS with RAIDZ solve my problem?

 

Are there any other way to have data security and expansion option?

 

Read/Write speed are not my primary concern.

 

Thanks and Regards,

 

Sayantan

I was thinking of Unraid,

Linus did some projects with Unraid so i think it's worth looking into.

 

There is a guide of how to add a new drive to an existing Unraid array:

https://wiki.unraid.net/Add_One_or_More_New_Data_Drives

[Nick7]

ZFS is expandable. Also, depending on HDD size, you should probably go RAIDZ2 route.

 

Do keep one thing in mind - no matter how robust you make your storage (NAS), it is no replacement for backup.

[areuz]

If you want to start from a bare minimum (2 disks) then mirrored vdevs (2 drives in raid 1) are the best (and only) choice - also the safest with larger disks due to rebuilding errors.

Only disadvantage is 50% efficiency as opposed to RAIDZ2 with 57% at minimum up to ~70% with more disks and like 10% less transfer speed.

[Sayantan Saha]

11 hours ago, areuz said:

If you want to start from a bare minimum (2 disks) then mirrored vdevs (2 drives in raid 1) are the best (and only) choice - also the safest with larger disks due to rebuilding errors.

Only disadvantage is 50% efficiency as opposed to RAIDZ2 with 57% at minimum up to ~70% with more disks and like 10% less transfer speed.

But raid 1 is not expandable. I won't be able to add more storage later

[Sayantan Saha]

22 hours ago, Vishera said:

I was thinking of Unraid,

Linus did some projects with Unraid so i think it's worth looking into.

 

There is a guide of how to add a new drive to an existing Unraid array:

https://wiki.unraid.net/Add_One_or_More_New_Data_Drives

Thanks for your reply .... This seems to be the best solution

[Vishera]

2 minutes ago, Sayantan Saha said:

Thanks for your reply .... This seems to be the best solution

Glad i helped 

[Nick7]

5 minutes ago, Sayantan Saha said:

But raid 1 is not expandable. I won't be able to add more storage later

RAID1 is not. ZFS pool is. You can have for example 2x2TB drives in a pool.

Then you can expand pool with another mirror of for example 2x6TB drives.

You can even mix (though not really recommended) - for example, 6 drives in RAID5, and than add 2 drives in RAID1 in same pool.

One thing to note - when you add drives to pool, you cannot remove them.

 

This is for ZFS.

[areuz]

On 11/14/2019 at 8:40 AM, Sayantan Saha said:

But raid 1 is not expandable. I won't be able to add more storage later

As nick mentioned, a pool of Raid 1s is what I meant. Here is good post explaining it a bit better (mostly from a reliability standpoint):

https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs-not-raidz/

 

Also, FreeNAS is a free unraid alternative.