Home NAS questions.

[Hatchet80]

Hi,

I've been researching for the last few days about building a NAS. My primary questions are as follows; I am going to build it based on uses, but can't find an OS for my uses and needs, and can someone help me figure out which OS I should use? The other question is I would either love a case that tells me if a drive is going bad or if nothing exists....can I configure it to text/email/or audibly screams at me if a drive goes bad?

Other info that is needed, I'm not afraid of research, but can get overwhelmed with conflicting info. I am somewhere between novice to amateur Linux user. Uses for NAS are media streaming of DVDs and Blu-ray, picture storage, backup of important files (preferably done with a scheduler), and we are going to have a surveillance system with 3-5 cameras. HDDs will be added in clumps as expendable capital becomes available. 

 

[Moggy]

Hi Hatchet, please have a look at the topic I just posted, more or less same question

"Best OS software to run a multifunctional media/fileserver PC?"

[AbydosOne]

5 minutes ago, Hatchet80 said:

Hi,

I've been researching for the last few days about building a NAS. My primary questions are as follows; I am going to build it based on uses, but can't find an OS for my uses and needs, and can someone help me figure out which OS I should use? The other question is I would either love a case that tells me if a drive is going bad or if nothing exists....can I configure it to text/email/or audibly screams at me if a drive goes bad?

Other info that is needed, I'm not afraid of research, but can get overwhelmed with conflicting info. I am somewhere between novice to amateur Linux user. Uses for NAS are media streaming of DVDs and Blu-ray, picture storage, backup of important files (preferably done with a scheduler), and we are going to have a surveillance system with 3-5 cameras. HDDs will be added in clumps as expendable capital becomes available. 

What you describe seems like a perfect case for FreeNAS.

• You can configure email notifications for any alerts the OS raises (including many HDD health flags)
• FreeBSD based (kinda Linux-y)
• Streaming of video content using Plex plugin
• File sharing using SMB or AFP
• There are plugins for surveillance camera recording/management
• ZFS (the filesystem used by FreeNAS) uses "vdevs" (i.e. clusters of drives in various types of RAID) that can be grouped together into a pool (to which more vdevs can be added in the future).

It's a pretty mature OS with lots of support available over on their forums. Do note that for best results, server/professional grade hardware is preferred (especially ECC RAM, due to the nature of ZFS).

[Mihle]

unRAID is an alternative to Freenas

You do get less read/write performance than Freenas, it might matter when you have those cameras recording to it, I am not sure tho, someone else might know more about that.

 

unRAID does cost some money while Freenas is free

 

On unRAID, ECC memory and stuff is much less important than FreeNAS and ZFS, something that means that you can get some little bit cheaper hardware

 

unRAID can push notifications to you in different ways for warnings if you want it to. Just note that HDDs can die without showing noticable warnings of it before it does, and then you will only get notification when it's dead. I personally have notifications set up with PushBullet but there are other options.

I haven't had HDDs die or whatever myself yet tho so take it with a grain of salt.

 

It's considered easier to use than Freenas, but might be a negative if you like more challenge/want to learn Linux more?

You can much more easily just add an HDD to it as it's not ZFS but rather JBOD+Parity, aka, data is not striped.

 

There are ofc Plex/Emby/Jellyfin dockers for streaming video.

[The_Ellimist]

Server wise I'm a fan of the HP microservers if you don't want lots and lots of drives.

 

If you go custom use the hardware guide on the freenas forums. Its very good and will get you started with the best supported hardware for the OS. Most items in the guide in the lower end can be had for not much and if you use spinny drives then the old but reliable IBM M1015 is cheap as.

 

One other thing you get going FreeNAS that isn't specifically called out is the scheduling of your smart health checks and scrubs which ensure data integrity. As already highlighted the issues that these show up can be setup to notify you via email. The notifications show up when you log into the UI as well.

 

Un-Raid has a cool advantage of being easily expanded. I've not used it much myself but I do like the feature set. I am concerned about the lack of warnings mentioned in Mihle's post though.

[Hatchet80]

I appreciate all the feedback in this topic! You all are fantastic for providing the information requested, and I will mull over the documented pros and cons with your feedback to try and make the right decision for my household.

[Salacious B Crum]

I can tell you that I used a i7 6700 pre-built and unRAID as my server/plex/docker machine and its been rock solid for several years now the learning curve for unRAID is quite quick and the support forum is one of the best out there