Home NAS which Raid Solution

[Stoigeboiii]

I have no way to do an offsite backup as of right now. But I'm making my own nas with a Ryzen 1700 and few hard drives. I'll have about 2 3Tb drives and 4 1TB drives. Then room to upgrade in the future. 

 

I plan to use FreeNAS since its well free. Does anyone have any recommendations for what's the best RAID solution and if I need to buy a raid card or if i can do it in software and if there is a better free (or cheap/no subscription) server/NAS OS?

[Catsrules]

If your using FreeNAS you don't need a raid card, in fact it is recommended you don't have any raid card as that interferes with giving FreeNAS direct access to the drives.

 

[Windows7ge]

With FreeNAS (using ZFS) you don't want to use any hardware RAID controller. ZFS wants direct access to the drives.

 

Unfortunately ZFS is not known for allowing you to mix drives of different capacities. It may be possible though appending vdevs but it'd be messy and I wouldn't recommended it.

 

I can think of 2 (maybe 3) solutions that allow the mixing of drives with different capacities and those would be unRAID, Windows Storage Spaces, and I believe I've been told BTRFS (Rockstor for example) allow it. It should also allow single disk addition which ZFS currently does not.

[Raggou]

I use freenas has always suited my needs well and never needed a raid card 

[ToastyBear]

You might want a RAID card or host bus adapter depending on how many hard drives you want to put in and how many SATA ports your motherboard has.

 

Personally I converted an old mining rig into a NAS but the mining board has only 4 SATA ports so I ended up getting a RAID card. Otherwise I would just use the SATA ports and be done with it.

[jake9000]

One thing to note here is that since you have mixed drive sizes, mirror solutions won't be ideal. You will want to use a parity solution (raid5 or raid6) and have one of the large drives be your parity drive. The smallest parity drive you have indicates the max individual drive size for the whole array.