Best filesystem

[drRodneyMcKay]

Hi,

I am planning to repurpuse my old desktop to a NAS/PlexMediaServer. What would be the most costeffective, flexible and reliable filesystem/raid setup?

PS.: i will buy the hdds later, knowing the answer for this question

[drRodneyMcKay]

Shall i raid the the disks (for redundance) and then lvm it?
This seems the most cost effective way to do it?

[Master Disaster]

It depends on what you are storing and if you plan to keep backup.

 

The usual filesystems used on a NAS are BTRFS or ZFS. I'm not going to go to much into these, both will do the job fine, ZFS does require a lot of RAM though (the complexities only really matter at a larger scale than home use).

 

On my NAS I use BTRFS in a RAID0 but I do this knowing there is no redundancy, if it fails I lose everything. I'm happy with this because I have a USB HDD plugged into my NAS and a folder sync Cron Job running every 24 hours to make sure any new data stored on the NAS will be copied over to the USB (at most I lose 24 hours worth of data) so if the RAID fails all my data is still safe. I'm also only using my NAS to store Videos, Music & Application installs, there's stuff I would be pretty annoyed to lose but nothing that would put me at any risk.

 

You have to evaluate your own needs and decide if you want to lose 1/3 to 1/2 of your available space to redundancy or if you can live with possibly losing everything.

 

If you're using it for anything mission critical then use redundancy and do regular back ups.

[drRodneyMcKay]

Aside videos (plex) there are important things too (ie.: family photos) so i would like to have redundancy.
However, in the future, if i want to enlarge the storage. i would not like to buy 4-5 hdds in order to keep the zfs pools/vdevs nice and tidy.

[Master Disaster]

Expansion is always possible even if its not contiguous. There's always the option of just creating a new pool with new drives. Heck you can stick a single drive in and use it to create a new pool if the need arises.

 

My understanding is that RAID5 is the preferred choice for a redundant file server, it offers a good balance of capacity, speed & redundancy.

[Jarsky]

On 7/4/2020 at 8:47 PM, drRodneyMcKay said:

Shall i raid the the disks (for redundance) and then lvm it?
This seems the most cost effective way to do it?

 

You only LVM if you want to use MD, and be able to *easily* extend it. 

The best filesystem? Is the one on the OS you're going to use. 

The best OS? Is the one that has the features to support what you want, within your budget with your hardware. 

 

Since you say you do not want to have to buy multiple drives at a time, then that limits what you can do. 

Your main options for ease of use, flexibility and cost are

 

UnRaid (depending on license cost...how many drives you want...you can start with a Basic and upgrade as you go)

DSM/Xpenology (for Synology NAS, or Xpenology is a port of DSM, but only works on limited range of hardware)

Rockstor (like UnRAID, but uses purely BTRFS)

Hardware RAID (older RAID cards like the 9260-8i can work under many OS's, you can add a disk at a time)

[TehDwonz]

I'm in the process of moving my bare-metal Plex server into a VM. I will be using the same file system once in a VM though, by just passing the HDDs through.

I use Windows/NTFS for Plex, along with a software drive pooling solution (Stablebit Drivepool). This uses normal NTFS and all the files are accessible in the event that disaster strikes and the software is "lost", unlike in Windows Storage Spaces, or RAID. It also means I can just add one drive at a time when needed, or multiple drives. Supports multiple redundancy, as well as a "sort of" read striping for parallel file transfers. Worth checking out at stablebit.com. It's not free, but it's not expensive either. Links up with another bit of software they have called Scanner, that monitors disk health, with data-evacuation options if a drive starts showing errors.