UNRAID vs Xpenology (synology OS)

[boy2litle]

Hi,

 

I want to build a modest NAS (8TB or 12TB, if I will include the 500GB hard drives) from old pretty small capacity HDDs.

 

MY PC PARTS for this NAS build:

 

PROCESOR:
Intel Core i3-2100 3.1 GHz (from DELL VOSTRO D11M)

Alternative: Intel Core i7 860

 

MOTHERBOARD:
MIH61R MB 10097-1 (from DELL, i3 proc.)

Alternative: MICRO-STAR MS-7466 (from HP, i7 proc.)

 

MEMORY:
CRUCIAL 8GB (2X4GB) DDR3 1600 UDIMM CL11

POWER SOURCE:

Corsair RM850, RM Series, 80 Plus Gold Certified, 850 W

Alternative: ATX Switching Power Supply
Model: ATX-500R

 

 

HARD DRIVES

= 500GB =
Seagate ST3500418AS
Seagate ST500DM002
Seagate ST3500312CS
Seagate ST3500312CS
Seagate ST3500312CS
Wester Digital WD5000AADS

= 1000GB =
Seagate S1000DM003

 

= 2000GB =
ST2000DM001
ST2000DM001

= 3000GB =
HGST HUS724030ALA640
Seagate ST3000DM008

 

Question, what should be better to use Xpenology or UNRAID for such a NAS with this PC parts?

This NAS it will be used only for personal use, storing personal files (photos, videos and some movies).

 

Also I'm lost in zfs, unraid, raid 5, shr or beyondraid.

Which one should I use for my situation? I'm considering to 2 HDD redundancy, in case that a maximum of 2 HDDs will fail at the same time.

 

Thanks in advance for your help?

 

 

 

 

[Jarsky]

9 hours ago, boy2litle said:

Question, what should be better to use Xpenology or UNRAID for such a NAS with this PC parts?

Do you think you might ever need support? Xpenology is a unofficial port of DSM to consumer hardware...the most support you'll get for anything beyond standard DSM, is a few groups. UnRAID have an entire community of support. 

 

9 hours ago, boy2litle said:

Also I'm lost in zfs, unraid, raid 5, shr or beyondraid.

Which one should I use for my situation? I'm considering to 2 HDD redundancy, in case that a maximum of 2 HDDs will fail at the same time.

Theres already many many many threads here that explain the difference between the most common, and their advantages/disadvantages

If you want them all in a single pool, then you need to go UnRAID or SHR (Synology Hybrid Raid). 

 

With UnRAID, for a 2 disk redundancy you would need to dedicate your 2 x 3TB to redundancy.  

SHR works differently, in that it'd take your larger disks and split them up based on your smaller disks. So your 1TB, 2TB & 3TB disks would be divided into 500GB chunks same as your 500GB drives. 

 

I think both would give you roughly the same amount of usable space (approx 8TB) with dual redundancy. 

The advantage to both UnRAID and SHR is you can upgrade your smaller disks one at a time to increase your overall pool size. 

 

Keep in mind that UnRAID now offers multiple "cache" pools with its new 6.9.0 release which is about to hit RC1 (Release Candidate 1).

They're currently working on multiple Array support, and are working on native ZFS support as well...so a tonne of features, but UnRAID does have a licensing cost, and the number of drives you have would require a Plus license which is currently $89.

 

You can try both of them for free though to see which you like. 

[BrandonS]

I haven't looked into UNRAID at all, but played with FreeNAS a bit and am now running xPenology on my machine.  One thing you gain from running xPenology is that it is a port from consumer and prosumer machines.  Those machines are known for their OS which is filled with features and has software suites that will work together to get you up and running for what you need.  With that said, I'm not sure what UNRAID offers, but in the case of FreeNAS you could accomplish much of the same; however, it took a lot more faffing about it and wasn't all necessarily a GUI driven process.  With FreeNAS, for a lot of things you would have to use multiple third party suites, get them to play nice, and then they'd work.  In xPenology, there is none of that, it's all there and ready to play nice with itself.

 

I think another plus for xPenology with your setup is looking at the drives you have put together.  So to speak, it's a hodgepodge, it looks like it's a collection of drives you have amassed over time.  With xPenology in your use case, they have a RAID structure called SHR and SHR-2.  These are fairly equivalent to RAID 5 and RAID 6 respectfuly, but with the benefit of being able to take advantage of different drive sizes in the array.  On a RAID 5/6 each drive would utilize only the space equivalent to your smallest drive.  Just know the general recommendation now-a-days is to steer away from RAID 5 (SHR) with a shift to RAID 6 (SHR-2) if you want to use those.  This is mostly due to the use of larger drives these days.  If you lose a drive in a RAID 5 array and have to rebuild your pool with a new drive, the risk of a bad sector on a "good drive" goes up as disk size goes up.  At a certain size of drive that risk goes from a risk to likely to happen.  At that point you would lose all your data during restructuring when you come across the bad sector.  In a RAID 6 array, this bad sector would be equivalent to a second drive down and could be overcome using the additional parity bits the RAID 6 has.  I'd suggest reading into it, but that's a very basic generality.  Also check out this link to play around with RAID arrays; it has Synology's SHR arrays on it so you can compare and see if there is a benefit with your multiple drive sizes.

https://www.synology.com/en-global/support/RAID_calculator

Good luck with your build!

[boy2litle]

7 hours ago, Jarsky said:

Do you think you might ever need support?

@Jarsky Thanks for taking time and reply to my post.

Related to your question, yes, for sure I will look to have support, even though I will have an external USB 3.0, that I will try to mirror this NAS that will build (also I have to find a way to be done automatically).

 

I know that the licence of the UnRAID is not free, if it worth it, for sure I'm looking to pay for it.

My main concern with this build is that it look like, despite what way I will go, I can experience a lot of trouble.

I've tried in the pay Xpenology, just to see how the OS looks and feels and if is user friendly. Only after a few days I lost the connectivity with this test NAS created by me.

On the other hand, Jason, from "Bite My Bytes", a guy with a huge experience in IT and NAS systems, had a few days a lot of troubles with his NAS based on UnRAID, it suddenly stop working, video here.

 

Also, when you build a NAS with UnRAID or Xpenology you should format the drives before, or can you keep the data on them.

This question it might sound stupid, but what if my NAS it will stop working, in order to reinstall the OS, or go migrate from UnRAID to Xpenology, or the other way, or maybe I want to update the existing OS, should I recreate that pool, that UnRAID/SHR? Will it be need it to wipe the HDDs first?

 

I've experienced in the past 2x2TB HDD in RAID 1 worked perfect, till one it stop being seen in Windows. I've fixed the problem, but now I've end up with to HDD seen in Windows and not be able to be in RAID 1, as previously. So I had to transfer the data, recreate the RAID1 and put the data back. Wasted days, not being able to work to wait to transfer the files. That was for only 2TB, imagine for 8, 12 TB or more.

 

So that makes question, have problems, for example my USB pen drive with the OS will stop working, I want to update the OS, or I want to switch from Xpenology to UnRAID, or the orther way around, will I have to recreate my UnRAID, or my SHR, so should I transfer somehow my data somewhere safe, wipe the hard drives and after the UnRAID or SHR is (re)created transfer it back?

7 hours ago, Jarsky said:

The advantage to both UnRAID and SHR is you can upgrade your smaller disks one at a time to increase your overall pool size. 

Because of that I was thinking that should be my only two options, still don't know which one will help me to build a NAS and forget about it, only upgrade the HDDs from the time to time for a larger storage. It will be great to have a video in the future from LTT team about UnRAID vs Xpenology and why not vs FreeNAS.

 

7 hours ago, BrandonS said:

Those machines are known for their OS which is filled with features and has software suites that will work together to get you up and running for what you need. 

That is for me a huge plus, even though, I don't know how stable could be a NAS with Xpenology vs a NAS with UnRAID.

As @Jarsky was suggesting, it seems that a UnRAID is faster, or can rebuild a replaced HDD faster.

Thanks @BrandonS for your reply.

[boy2litle]

7 hours ago, Jarsky said:

Keep in mind that UnRAID now offers multiple "cache" pools with its new 6.9.0 release which is about to hit RC1 (Release Candidate 1).

 

Forgot to mention, I will include in my build an 120GB Kingston SSD (SSDNOW 300 V). I know that is important to have a SDD for cache, not sure at this stage how to:

- determine the right size for this HDD drive

- if should be changed with a large one later on, when the storage on the NAS will increase

- how you should set up this SSD in UnRAID or Xpenology, to be used as a cache drive

 

Hope that you have more answers than me guys.  Thanks in advance for your great help!!!

[Jarsky]

1 hour ago, boy2litle said:

Jason, from "Bite My Bytes", a guy with a huge experience in IT and NAS systems

No he does not have huge experience in IT and NAS. He's an enthusiast that has played around with basics. 

His issue is absolutely nothing to do with UnRAID or it's USB implementation. He has a hardware issue. 

 

1 hour ago, boy2litle said:

Also, at this stage I wasn't able to understand if you are able to create or not a NAS with UnRAID or Xpenology from some drives that have data on them already. 

They are FileSystem on RAID, so no they cannot have data on them already, the drives need to be wiped. 

To use drives with data already on them, youre talking about RAID on FileSystem.  Such systems are SnapRAID, DrivePool and FlexRAID (now gone).....I'm not a fan of these setups personally. 

 

1 hour ago, boy2litle said:

So that makes question, have problems, for example my USB pen drive with the OS will stop working, I want to update the OS, or I want to switch from Xpenology to UnRAID, or the orther way around, will I have to recreate my UnRAID, or my SHR, so should I transfer somehow my data somewhere safe, wipe the hard drives and after the UnRAID or SHR is (re)created transfer it back?

They work completely differently, you cannot switch between them. 

As for USB, UnRAID only keeps its boot files on the USB, once it boots it runs in memory (RAM). Theres very little wear on the USB, but you can also create a backup of your USB and keep it somewhere safe such as backing up to another USB, or uploading to Dropbox or something. 

 

1 hour ago, boy2litle said:

Because of that I was thinking that should be my only two options, still don't know which one will help me to build a NAS and forget about it, only upgrade the HDDs from the time to time for a larger storage. It will be great to have a video in the future from LTT team about UnRAID vs Xpenology and why not vs FreeNAS.

Both your options are good, and both will do what you're after. 

FreeNAS is a completely different beast to what you're after, it's better suited for large deployments. ZFS isn't what you want the flexibility you're after. 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, boy2litle said:

On the other hand, Jason, from "Bite My Bytes", a guy with a huge experience in IT and NAS systems, had a few days a lot of troubles with his NAS based on UnRAID, it suddenly stop working, video here.

That seems to be a hardware issue, and not related to the os

 

59 minutes ago, boy2litle said:

Forgot to mention, I will include in my build an 120GB Kingston SSD (SSDNOW 300 V). I know that is important to have a SDD for cache, not sure at this stage how to:

- determine the right size for this HDD drive

- if should be changed with a large one later on, when the storage on the NAS will increase

- how you should set up this SSD in UnRAID or Xpenology, to be used as a cache drive

What is your goal with the cache? With unraid its writes only, and with a gig network, its not that important(probably 60 vs 100mB/s). Unraid doesn't support a read cache. Xpenology will only run with a read cache( I think), with a single driev

 

1 hour ago, boy2litle said:

I don't know how stable could be a NAS with Xpenology vs a NAS with UnRAID.

Ive used both, and stable is normally about the same, but upgrades on xpenology seems to have more issues.

 

1 hour ago, boy2litle said:

Also, when you build a NAS with UnRAID or Xpenology you should format the drives before, or can you keep the data on them.

They basically all require you to format before adding to the array

 

1 hour ago, boy2litle said:

So that makes question, have problems, for example my USB pen drive with the OS will stop working,

Just get a new usb and copy config from backups, usb has no data on it and you can read the data from the drives on any linux system

 

1 hour ago, boy2litle said:

, will I have to recreate my UnRAID, or my SHR, so should I transfer somehow my data somewhere safe, wipe the hard drives and after the UnRAID or SHR is (re)created transfer it back?

You can recover the array on other systems

But still make backups of the data

 

 

[Salacious B Crum]

On 7/5/2020 at 2:52 PM, Jarsky said:

No he does not have huge experience in IT and NAS. He's an enthusiast that has played around with basics. 

His issue is absolutely nothing to do with UnRAID or it's USB implementation. He has a hardware issue.  

 

HaHa word be true!

[boy2litle]

On 7/5/2020 at 7:53 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

What is your goal with the cache?

@Electronics Wizardy thanks for your reply. I want to boost the reads/writes. Your answer was very helpful.

 

On 7/5/2020 at 7:53 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

That seems to be a hardware issue, and not related to the os

Yes, in that case it looks that was a hardware problem, but I've experienced some situations when I lost my connection with my test Xpenology NAS a while ago. I've reinstalled the Xpenology DSM and it worked. But once I will have the real deal, not a test NAS, I won't be able to that all the time.

 

On 7/5/2020 at 7:53 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Ive used both, and stable is normally about the same, but upgrades on xpenology seems to have more issues.

What kind of issue did you encounter, or that you are aware?

 

On 7/5/2020 at 7:53 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

They basically all require you to format before adding to the array

 

I was afraid about this answer.  That means that you always have to have a spare copy of the NAS somewhere else, on some other NAS or on a external storage, or some external storage.  Speaking of which, my NAS build will have probably a 8TB of storage in the end, and I also own a 8TB external storage, is there a way to mirror automatically this NAS to an external USB HDD?

On 7/5/2020 at 7:53 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Just get a new usb and copy config from backups, usb has no data on it and you can read the data from the drives on any linux system

 

Where are located these config files? Are they not located on the OS files? In my mind, it should be, cause you create the HDD pool in both Xpenology or UnRAID, from the OS, and in there the OS should have a file where it does say how the HDDs are reconfigured. Correct me if I'm wrong. 

[boy2litle]

The last issue that I have, is that I haven't found an answer to this post related to this NAS build. 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, boy2litle said:

What kind of issue did you encounter, or that you are aware?

xpenology doesn't have a great experience,a dn things like updates can havea issues. Once is going its pretty good, but I have had a few weird issues getting it working

 

3 hours ago, boy2litle said:

Where are located these config files? Are they not located on the OS files? In my mind, it should be, cause you create the HDD pool in both Xpenology or UnRAID, from the OS, and in there the OS should have a file where it does say how the HDDs are reconfigured. Correct me if I'm wrong. 

The hdd config is on the data drives themselves, you can get the data from the data drives alone.

 

ON unraid the config is stored on the usb, xpenology stores the os and config on all of the data drives

 

3 hours ago, boy2litle said:

I was afraid about this answer.  That means that you always have to have a spare copy of the NAS somewhere else, on some other NAS or on a external storage, or some external storage.  Speaking of which, my NAS build will have probably a 8TB of storage in the end, and I also own a 8TB external storage, is there a way to mirror automatically this NAS to an external USB HDD?

Normally there is some sort of backup software included with most nas oses to to a automatic copy

 

3 hours ago, boy2litle said:

@Electronics Wizardy thanks for your reply. I want to boost the reads/writes. Your answer was very helpful.

Random or sequentical? What network speed? 

 

A ssd cache doesn't make sense for most home nas usecases.

3 hours ago, boy2litle said:

The last issue that I have, is that I haven't found an answer to this post related to this NAS build. 

sas hbas normally have better software support and less weird issues, and cost about the same, so I don't see a reason to go with the sata cards here.

 

 

[boy2litle]

4 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Random or sequentical? What network speed? 

You've lost me. I'm a newbie, not sure what you mean with "random or sequential". Gigabit network speed.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, boy2litle said:

You've lost me. I'm a newbie, not sure what you mean with "random or sequential". Gigabit network speed.

with a gigabit network, your probably network limiited anyways, so caching won't really help.

 

What area you storing on the nas? Are you just copying files to it or are you doing things like running games off of it?

[boy2litle]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

with a gigabit network, your probably network limiited anyways, so caching won't really help.

 

What area you storing on the nas? Are you just copying files to it or are you doing things like running games off of it?

Only storing files, an maybe file editing (using Photoshop and Illustrator, cause I'm a Graphic Designer) direct on it, occasionally.

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 hours ago, boy2litle said:

Only storing files, an maybe file editing (using Photoshop and Illustrator, cause I'm a Graphic Designer) direct on it, occasionally.

Then I don't think a cache would help much.

[boy2litle]

On 7/7/2020 at 4:37 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

xpenology stores the os and config on all of the data drives

I know that for each 1TB of storage space, you should have 1GB of RAM. Because I'm running Xpenology, that does it mean that if I want to upgrade my motherboard (MIH61R MB 10097-1) and the CPU (Intel Core i3-2100 3.1 GHz) most probably, will my NAS will still run perfectly? 

Will I have to reinstall it from zero?

What will happen with the data on the HDDs, should they be wiped?

 

At the moment my motherboard only supports max 8GB of DDR3 (and I already have 8TB of available storage and planing to upgrade some HDDs) will my NAS still work?

 

[Jarsky]

41 minutes ago, boy2litle said:

I know that for each 1TB of storage space, you should have 1GB of RAM.

No you dont need that. That came about because of ZFS and advanced functions like scrubbing and deduplication and l2arc etc....

41 minutes ago, boy2litle said:

Because I'm running Xpenology, that does it mean that if I want to upgrade my motherboard (MIH61R MB 10097-1) and the CPU (Intel Core i3-2100 3.1 GHz) most probably, will my NAS will still run perfectly? 

Will I have to reinstall it from zero?

Should be fine, as long as Xpenology supports your hardware. Remember its an unofficial port of Synology's DSM, you have community support at best. 

41 minutes ago, boy2litle said:

What will happen with the data on the HDDs, should they be wiped?

No you dont need to wipe your array

 

41 minutes ago, boy2litle said:

At the moment my motherboard only supports max 8GB of DDR3 (and I already have 8TB of available storage and planing to upgrade some HDDs) will my NAS still work?

 

Refer to my first answer, 8GB is plenty of memory for storage. 

[boy2litle]

2 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

8GB is plenty of memory for storage

Even I will change gradually some HDDs and I will reach from 8TB, 64TB of total storage?

What's the maximum amount of total storage that I can have using only 8GB of DDR3 RAM?

Is there a formula/rule based on which you can find out?

[Jarsky]

3 minutes ago, boy2litle said:

Even I will change gradually some HDDs and I will reach from 8TB, 64TB of total storage?

What's the maximum amount of total storage that I can have using only 8GB of DDR3 RAM?

Is there a formula/rule based on which you can find out?

 

You could have 1PB of storage using MDADM (What Xpenology uses) and you wouldnt have any difference in memory utilization.

You dont need more memory...memory becomes more important when you have a large amount of file access and advanced features like in ZFS or ReFS

[boy2litle]

3 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

You could have 1PB of storage using MDADM (What Xpenology uses) and you wouldnt have any difference in memory utilization.

Thanks @Jarsky!!! You just saved me a good couple of hundreds of euros, cause now understand that I just wasted the whole day looking for some parts (Motherboard, CPU and RAM) to upgrade my NAS.

 

Thank you once again. Very helpful your answer.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Jarsky said:

You could have 1PB of storage using MDADM (What Xpenology uses) and you wouldnt have any difference in memory utilization.

You dont need more memory...memory becomes more important when you have a large amount of file access and advanced features like in ZFS or ReF

And you don't need the extra ram for those filesystems either. Very little ram is used for operations, and almost all is disk cache, just like with mdadm or other filesystems. ZFS works fine on very little ram.

[Mihle]

As someone said, you do have to format first time setting each up.

But for example unRAID. If the USB dies and you set up a new one, you do not loose your data, do not need to format.

 

As for cache drive, unRAID does have write cache but not read cache, but on just normal Gbit, the network connection is the limit anyway.

And unRAID itself run from memory.

There is a benefits of running dockers or VMs on the cache/SSD tho, if you will be using that.