TrueNAS or Unraid or Proxmox

[MattWeiler]

I'm really just looking for some advice and guidance from you experts

 

 

About 5 years ago, back in 2016, I setup a simple NAS using a Rosewill 4U RSV-L4500 rack-mounted chassis with 15 x 3.25" internal HDD bays.

Today my NAS is running a Ryzen 3700X and 32 GB or RAM.

Back when I created my NAS, I didn't know about FreeNas (now TrueNas) or Unraid, so I setup a simple Windows 10 installation.

 

Since I built my server, I've given it several responsibilities as:

• Plex Server
• BlueIris
• Home Assistant (running in a VM under VirtualBox)

 

I started with a few 8TB WD Red drives and used Windows Storage Space to manage a simple mirrored raid.

I have since added a decent number of drives, I currently have 13 HDDs installed; 12 are for Plex Server and 1 is for my home security camera footage recorded using BlueIris.

• 8 x 8 TB WD Red/White
• 2 x 10 TB WD Red/White
• 2 x 12 TB WD Red/White
• 1 x 2 TB WD Purple

I shucked most of the above drives from WD external enclosures; some are WD Red labels and some are WD White labels.

 

 

Issues

Storage Capacity

Today I have 47.3 TB of data on those 12 drives with approximately 2 TB of free space.

I know that I shouldn't have the drives so full, but I'm a digital hoarder and frankly ran out of space.

 

I do have the physical space for 2 more HDDs, and since I have 1 cold-spare 8 TB HDD, I've ordered another 8 TB HDD to keep my hoarding going for now.

When I have those 2 additional HDDs installed, I won't have anywhere to add more storage without replacing smaller drives with larger ones.

 

Storage Spaces Pool Size Limit

The other issue here is that Windows Storage Spaces has a limit on the size of a pool to 63 TB.

I'm not there yet, but I'm not that far off.

I could always create 2 pools, 1 for Movies and 1 for TV Shows, but that seems like a hack.

 

I do like Windows Storage Spaces other than the pool size limit and the fact that Microsoft removed the ability to create ReFS partitions, back in the Fall of 2017, from Windows 10 Pro.

TBH, ReFS was one of the main reason that I opted for Windows 10 Pro instead of Home back in 2016 when I started this journey.

 

 

My Long-Term Plan

My long-term plan is to build a new server using the Ryzen 5900X from my current gaming rig when I upgrade my rig to Ryzen 7000 or 8000 sometime next year.

I think that I'll keep my current NAS as a backup server and load the new NAS with WD Red Pro drives (18 or 20 TB) keeping my current drives in the old NAS.

 

But I have some questions about what exactly you guys think that I should do.

 

 

Questions

Should I go with TrueNas, Unraid or Proxmox?

As I understand it:

• TrueNas is considered more stable and allows you to use ZFS which is quite resilient.
• Unraid is a virtualization layer that can be used to run VMs and Docker pods. But it does not support ZFS.
• Proxmox is a very light-weight virtualization layer that can be used to run VMs which could include TrueNas and a Windows instance.

 

BlueIris Wrinkle

Since BlueIris only has a Windows binary, I don't think it'd be feasible to run it on anything but Windows.

 

Plex Wrinkle

Since my Plex Server is currently running on Windows, I don't know if I want to re-install it on a new server as I already have my meta-data setup after correcting a lot of incorrect matches.

From what I've read online, migrating the Plex meta-data from a Windows installation to a Linux/Unix installation is a huge PITA.

As all of the paths to the media are stored in the DB using the Windows "\" back-slash directory separators which Linux/Unix does not accept and expects the "/" forward-slash.

Also, my Windows installation of Plex has been rock solid for 5 years, so I have no complaints there.

 

Ram Disk

I'm also using a RAM disk tool (ImDisk Toolkit) to use 16 GB of RAM as a RAM disk for Plex transcodes.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/

I really don't want to give this up as it saves my SSD from excessive wear.

 

End Result

In the end, I'll need a Windows installation running for BlueIris and possibly my Plex Server installation.

For these reasons, I'm pretty sure that I'll want to run BlueIris and my Plex Server either on the old NAS (still running Windows) or on a virtualized installation of Windows if I go with either Proxmox or Unraid.

Either way, I imagine the new NAS would be just that, a NAS which my Plex Server and BlueIris can access over a network share (SMB share).

 

 

TrueNas Scale vs Core?

As I understand, TrueNas Scale is built on Debian while TrueNas Core is build on FreeBSD.

Are there any other differences worth mentioning?

 

 

Can a TrueNas, Unraid or Proxmox installation be migrated to a different motherboard?

I'm wondering if I play around with these options on a spare last-last gen PC that I have lying around (i5 2500k) today, if in a years time I build a proper modern system for it (Ryzen 7000/8000), can I just move the SSD containing the OS to the new motherboard or do I have to re-install?

Or course also moving other add-on cards and HDDs too.

 

 

Can/should I migrate my Home Assistant VM to Proxmox or Unraid?

Right now my Home Assistant instance is running in a VM under VirtualBox.

I'm not sure if that can be migrated and I really don't want to configure it again from scratch.

 

 

Am I better off just building a JBOD box?

I know that this option would be much cheaper as it doesn't need much in way of internal components.

From what I've read online, I could just build a JBOD box and put all of my drives in there.

This would be nice having all of my drives out of the current case which makes drive servicing really annoying.

 

But the major downsides, that I can see, to this are:

• I would no longer have a 2nd machine to be used as a backup server.
• I would still be stuck with Windows Storage Spaces and it's 63 TB limit.
• If I want to switch off of Windows Storage Spaces, I would still need to buy new HDDs so that I have a temporary place to put my content; thus nuking the cheaper option.

[MattWeiler]

The more I read about the state of each platform, the more I'm leaning towards Unraid.

 

I think I'll build a new server using my current gaming rig (Ryzen 5900X and 64GB of RAM) when I upgrade to Ryzen 7000 or 8000 series next year.

Then my current server will remain as a Windows server mainly to run BlueIris.

I may look into running a Windows VM under Unraid, but initially I think I'll keep the old server mostly as is.

 

For now, I'm going to use my ancient Intel i5 2500K system to test Unraid and TrueNas with a 2.5G NIC that I have coming in the mail.

Whichever platform works with the 2.5G NIC and I just like better I'll go with.

 

 

Pros of Unraid for Me

The main reasons that I think I'll go with Unraid are:

• ability to add drives in piecemeal
• decent ability to run VMs
• changing hardware seems very simple and seamless

 

 

Downsides of using Proxmox

From what I've read, neither Unraid nor TrueNas are recommended to run within a VM; they both prefer running on bare metal.

So Proxmox is out for me.

 

 

Downsides of TrueNas

It seems that TrueNas is in a flux state in that the TrueNas Core is pretty well established but is built on FreeBSD which has not the greatest driver support at least when it comes to 2.5G NICs.

 

While TrueNas Scale is built on Debian Linux, so it has much better driver support, it is very new and I don't want to be having to patch too often and possibly deal with the issues that come with a new product.

I just want my server to run uninterrupted.

 

 

Downsides of Unraid

The main thing that makes me a little weary of Unraid is that it runs from a USB stick.

I know that once it boots, it runs entirely from RAM, but I just with that they'd offer the ability to install to an SSD.

 

Also it's not free, but a 1 time fee isn't too bad since the license can be transferred to a new USB drive if the current drive dies.

 

 

VM Migration

As far as migrating my VirtualBox VMs to Unraid, I found a thread that explains how to do so, I just hope it works

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/52357-import-from-virtualbox/#comment-514994

 

 

Plex Server Migration

I'll also have to see if I'm able to successfully migrate my Plex Server from my current Windows installation to an Unraid installation.

I really don't want to have to have all of the meta-data regenerated.

I had to manually fix a lot of bad matches

 

From what I've read, Plex doesn't officially support migrating between operating system, but I've also read that it's possible.

So that might be a fun thing to try.

If I can get it to work, I might build a tool to help others do the same.

[LIGISTX]

6 minutes ago, MattWeiler said:

Downsides of using Proxmox

From what I've read, neither Unraid nor TrueNas are recommended to run within a VM; they both prefer running on bare metal.

So Proxmox is out for me.

Not exactly true… myself and a few buddies all run truenas core and/or scale under proxmox, and it’s perfectly happy. The key is, you actually need an HBA, not just “recommended”. The reason is you need to pass the entire PCIe device which is the HBA through the hypervisor to the truenas client, that way it does get bare metal access to your drives.

 

8 minutes ago, MattWeiler said:

Downsides of TrueNas

It seems that TrueNas is in a flux state in that the TrueNas Core is pretty well established but is built on FreeBSD which has not the greatest driver support at least when it comes to 2.5G NICs.

 

While TrueNas Scale is built on Debian Linux, so it has much better driver support, it is very new and I don't want to be having to patch too often and possibly deal with the issues that come with a new product.

I just want my server to run uninterrupted.

I have been running core since ~2015 and it’s been great. There are some BSD quirks like 2.5 gigabit driver issues, but you can get a 10GB nic on eBay for pretty cheap… just get a used Intel 10GBE NIC and call it a day. I assume they can work at 2.5? I guess I am actually not fully certain. Or use scale. A buddy of mine is using it, he has had a few self induced issues, but the overall experience has been fine. It’s stable enough for home use. If you can afford the upfront cost of buying all the drives you will need for quite a while, ZFS is the best file system around, bar none. It just isn’t as flexible as unraid as you have stated. 
 

11 minutes ago, MattWeiler said:

Plex Server Migration

The database is just a database. You should be able to move it all without much issue. That said, the folder structure will need to remain the same, so whatever VM Plex lives on will need to see the same folder paths as it currently does…. That likely won’t happen as it will not be a network share as previously it was likely a mounted windows drive (like… D: or Z: etc). I am not certain if you can batch tell Plex to change everything, or if the directory info is actually totally separate for this reason… but, worst case, it’s a 1 time annoyance starting Plex over from scratch. It’s a bit annoyance, but theoretically once you get your NAS set up, you will be good for many, many years to come. 
 

 

[m9x3mos]

5 hours ago, MattWeiler said:

Downsides of using Proxmox

From what I've read, neither Unraid nor TrueNas are recommended to run within a VM; they both prefer running on bare metal.

So Proxmox is out for

On one of my systems I have it running under proxmox without issues and another that is running under hyper v as well. Both have been live for over a year now and I haven't had any issues. One of them is a converted workstation with 2 xeon chips and the other is a consumer 6700k system. 

[MattWeiler]

 

 

5 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Not exactly true… myself and a few buddies all run truenas core and/or scale under proxmox, and it’s perfectly happy. The key is, you actually need an HBA, not just “recommended”. The reason is you need to pass the entire PCIe device which is the HBA through the hypervisor to the truenas client, that way it does get bare metal access to your drives.

 

Thank you.

Do you see much benefit of going with Proxmox as a base if all I want to do is run Plex Server, Home Assistant and maybe a Windows VM?

Or would I likely be better off just going with Unraid or one of the variants of TrueNas native?

 

5 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

I have been running core since ~2015 and it’s been great. There are some BSD quirks like 2.5 gigabit driver issues, but you can get a 10GB nic on eBay for pretty cheap… just get a used Intel 10GBE NIC and call it a day. I assume they can work at 2.5? I guess I am actually not fully certain. Or use scale. A buddy of mine is using it, he has had a few self induced issues, but the overall experience has been fine. It’s stable enough for home use. If you can afford the upfront cost of buying all the drives you will need for quite a while, ZFS is the best file system around, bar none. It just isn’t as flexible as unraid as you have stated. 

I have a few 10g NICs sitting in a box, but their direct attach copper.

I bought them years ago when I had my server next to my PC but now my server is in the basement and it's not feasible to run any new lines.

Not to mention that I'd have to buy a 10g switch with 2 direct attach copper ports and at least 1 10g RJ45 port.

From what I could find, that wasn't very cost effective 

 

I already have CAT 6A cables in my walls so I figure it'd be easier to stick to RJ45.

From what I've seen the 10G RJ45 NICs and switches are just too expensive.

I thought that I'd just go 2.5G for now and then I can always upgrade the NICs and switch at a later date if I really want the faster speed.

My home internet is just 1Gbps so the speed boost is really just when I'm transferring files between local machines.

 

5 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

The database is just a database. You should be able to move it all without much issue. That said, the folder structure will need to remain the same, so whatever VM Plex lives on will need to see the same folder paths as it currently does…. That likely won’t happen as it will not be a network share as previously it was likely a mounted windows drive (like… D: or Z: etc). I am not certain if you can batch tell Plex to change everything, or if the directory info is actually totally separate for this reason… but, worst case, it’s a 1 time annoyance starting Plex over from scratch. It’s a bit annoyance, but theoretically once you get your NAS set up, you will be good for many, many years to come. 

That's a good point.

If the DB is easily readable, it shouldn't be a big deal to write some SQL to update the paths.

I just haven't looked at the Plex DB file yet

But that's a later me problem.

 

40 minutes ago, m9x3mos said:

On one of my systems I have it running under proxmox without issues and another that is running under hyper v as well. Both have been live for over a year now and I haven't had any issues. One of them is a converted workstation with 2 xeon chips and the other is a consumer 6700k system. 

Thanks, so it sounds like it is doable.

[LIGISTX]

2 hours ago, MattWeiler said:

Do you see much benefit of going with Proxmox as a base if all I want to do is run Plex Server, Home Assistant and maybe a Windows VM?

Or would I likely be better off just going with Unraid or one of the variants of TrueNas native?

I’d say this really depends. Personally, yes. I want the flexibility to do more or less anything I want when it comes to VM’s, and I want to separate my NAS from all other VM’s. Proxmox is very stable and well tested (to be fair, so in unraid and truenas core), but if I have to offline my NAS, I don’t wan to bring down my entire homelab (obviously if it’s a hardware fault, it’s all coming down anyways) but software wise at least my NAS isn’t required for literally everything else to be up and running. If this seems like a non-issue to you, no problemo. You can always go to proxmox later if you want… save your truenas or unraid config, format an SSD with proxmox, spin up a VM of whatever NAS OS you had, pass an HBA through to the VM, load the config, and it’ll work just like it was bare metal.

 

2 hours ago, MattWeiler said:

I already have CAT 6A cables in my walls so I figure it'd be easier to stick to RJ45.

No need for a switch, you can run a direct eth cable from PC to NAS for a 10GBE link. I actually plan to use fiber to do it. Lots of ways to skin this cat. But you would only get fast speeds between the single PC and NAS. But for me, that’s fine. Everything else would just ride over 1gbe LAN. 
 

2 hours ago, MattWeiler said:

 

If the DB is easily readable, it shouldn't be a big deal to write some SQL to update the paths.

I just haven't looked at the Plex DB file yet

But that's a later me problem.

If you know SQL, I’m sure this won’t be hard. I guarantee your not the first person to try and do this, lol. 

[MattWeiler]

21 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

I’d say this really depends. Personally, yes. I want the flexibility to do more or less anything I want when it comes to VM’s, and I want to separate my NAS from all other VM’s. Proxmox is very stable and well tested (to be fair, so in unraid and truenas core), but if I have to offline my NAS, I don’t wan to bring down my entire homelab (obviously if it’s a hardware fault, it’s all coming down anyways) but software wise at least my NAS isn’t required for literally everything else to be up and running. If this seems like a non-issue to you, no problemo. You can always go to proxmox later if you want… save your truenas or unraid config, format an SSD with proxmox, spin up a VM of whatever NAS OS you had, pass an HBA through to the VM, load the config, and it’ll work just like it was bare metal.

Thanks, that makes sense.

For me, at least for now, I think I'll go with either TrueNas Core or Unraid on bare metal.

But it's good to know that I can move it all into a VM under Proxmox later if I want to.

 

22 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

No need for a switch, you can run a direct eth cable from PC to NAS for a 10GBE link. I actually plan to use fiber to do it. Lots of ways to skin this cat. But you would only get fast speeds between the single PC and NAS. But for me, that’s fine. Everything else would just ride over 1gbe LAN.

For my setup, I only have 1 CAT 6A RJ45 cable running to my office with my main PC in it, so unless I want to do some crazy connection sharing through my NAS, I don't think that'll work for me.

TBH, the higher speed connection would just be nice for transferring large files which I don't even do that often.

Ideally I'd like to have my new server, my old server and my main PC connected via multi-gig.

 

25 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

If you know SQL, I’m sure this won’t be hard. I guarantee your not the first person to try and do this, lol.

That's reassuring

I'm a software developer, so if I can get it to work, I might create a tool to do it and put it on GitHub.

If I do, I'll update this thread with a link

 

 

Thanks a lot for your insight

[LIGISTX]

5 hours ago, MattWeiler said:

I'm a software developer, so if I can get it to work, I might create a tool to do it and put it on GitHub.

If I do, I'll update this thread with a link

If you do, I’m sure the community would greatly appreciate that. 

[Bawjaws]

Hey Matt. Just stumbled on your thread 6 months later, as I have a very (uncannily!) similar set up with Windows, blue iris, Plex and virtualbox that I'm looking to migrate to some combination of proxmox/unraid/truenas. 

 

What did you decide to do in the end, and how has it been running since? I'm tempted to look at alternatives to blue iris to avoid the need to have a Windows VM running. It seems like such a waste of effort/CPU/ram.

 

Cheers!

[LIGISTX]

11 minutes ago, Bawjaws said:

Hey Matt. Just stumbled on your thread 6 months later, as I have a very (uncannily!) similar set up with Windows, blue iris, Plex and virtualbox that I'm looking to migrate to some combination of proxmox/unraid/truenas. 

 

What did you decide to do in the end, and how has it been running since? I'm tempted to look at alternatives to blue iris to avoid the need to have a Windows VM running. It seems like such a waste of effort/CPU/ram.

 

Cheers!

I’d look into a VM of windows LTSC, or some other version of cut down windows. LTT did a video yesterday (or two days ago?) about a very cut down windows version. I would argue it’s not entirely secure as it has updates and defender turned off, but if you have a NVR setup and firewall it off (which you can do with virtual firewalls under proxmox, like pfsense or opnsense), I see no issue using it for that reason. I used to run a Win 10 LTSC VM on 2 threads and 2 GB of RAM, although it wasn’t acting as an NVR so YMMV. 
 

I recommend proxmox for these situations, and then just get fancy with VM’s and containers. 
 

 

My general advice is simple; use things for what they are best at. Proxmox is intended to be a hypervisor, not a NAS. Truenas (even scale), is a NAS, that can do virtualization, same with unraid. So, best bet, use proxmox as your hypervisor and run whatever NAS OS makes you happy under that, and host things like Plex in docker containers under an ubuntu or similar VM. All of these VM’s would use virtIO vNIC’s so they will be transferring data more or less at RAM speed, so the argument I have seen of “but if I don’t have VM’s mounted with direct access to my RAID array I will lose performance) is totally moot; your limited by drive/array speed way before anything else. 
 

This is also nice from a maintenance perspective. Proxmox almost never needs to be rebooted, so you don’t need to down your entire box just to reboot a VM/appliance/application. 

[jd680]

On 4/26/2023 at 2:30 PM, LIGISTX said:

My general advice is simple; use things for what they are best at. Proxmox is intended to be a hypervisor, not a NAS. Truenas (even scale), is a NAS, that can do virtualization, same with unraid. So, best bet, use proxmox as your hypervisor and run whatever NAS OS makes you happy under that, and host things like Plex in docker containers under an ubuntu or similar VM. All of these VM’s would use virtIO vNIC’s so they will be transferring data more or less at RAM speed, so the argument I have seen of “but if I don’t have VM’s mounted with direct access to my RAID array I will lose performance) is totally moot; your limited by drive/array speed way before anything else. 
 

This is also nice from a maintenance perspective. Proxmox almost never needs to be rebooted, so you don’t need to down your entire box just to reboot a VM/appliance/application. 

Decided to reply instead of making a different thread. I’m getting into homelabbing and have a similar question. Currently have a Windows 11 pc with 6 or 7 drives. About 24 TB in a total of storage. 2 of these drives are for media, including movies, tv shows, and pictures.
 

My thoughts of separation:

-machine for Windows 11, email, web browsing, productivity etc

-movies and tv shows, Plex, etc

-photos and videos, family share, family history photos

-backups 

 

Wondering if a Proxmox server would fit my use case. I could use a Windows 11 VM for my productivity and such. I then envisioned TrueNAS for my photos as it's ZFS supported. Would prefer Raid-Z2 or Z3 due to the paranoia of losing photos. Then my tv shows and movies Unraid or similar for the different drive capacities. I know Unraid now supports ZFS though I'm iffy on trusting it on such a new development of the latest Unraid version. Admittedly when not using my PC I turn mine off. Might be interested in a low-powered Hypervisor machine as an option that stays on and then I can turn on and off others as needed.
 

is my use case unreasonable? What am I missing? If any useful posts, videos, or sources let me know too.

[LIGISTX]

22 minutes ago, jd680 said:

Decided to reply instead of making a different thread. I’m getting into homelabbing and have a similar question. Currently have a Windows 11 pc with 6 or 7 drives. About 24 TB in a total of storage. 2 of these drives are for media, including movies, tv shows, and pictures.
 

My thoughts of separation:

-machine for Windows 11, email, web browsing, productivity etc

-movies and tv shows, Plex, etc

-photos and videos, family share, family history photos

-backups 

 

Wondering if a Proxmox server would fit my use case. I could use a Windows 11 VM for my productivity and such. I then envisioned TrueNAS for my photos as it's ZFS supported. Would prefer Raid-Z2 or Z3 due to the paranoia of losing photos. Then my tv shows and movies Unraid or similar for the different drive capacities. I know Unraid now supports ZFS though I'm iffy on trusting it on such a new development of the latest Unraid version. Admittedly when not using my PC I turn mine off. Might be interested in a low-powered Hypervisor machine as an option that stays on and then I can turn on and off others as needed.
 

is my use case unreasonable? What am I missing? If any useful posts, videos, or sources let me know too.

Don’t split storage up like this, it just doesn’t make any sense. Store all data in one place. 
 

If you have miss matched drives, you basically have to go unraid, and you can’t use ZFS (ZFS is the same, regardless what OS it runs on. So the issue you see on truenas would be there in unraid if using ZFS). Use unraid and use the normal unraid “unraid”, and not ZFS. ZFS is also very difficult to add storage to later on, since you need to build entire new vdevs or upgrade all drives in the current vdev to larger ones. 
 

If you want to segment things out, do that via different datasets and SMB mount points, and you can add user restriction at that level. And then backup critical data like photos to the cloud. Remember, RAID is not a backup. It’s a high availability system…

 

Using your main PC for this is probably not the best idea. It’s totally possible to do, but running your PC as a VM under proxmox probably won’t be as great an experience as you may imagine. If you have literally any old PC laying around, use that for the proxmox setup. Some friend or family member will probably have a machine they don’t need anymore, or look on eBay for ~8 year old workstations like HP Proliant or Dell Optiplex machines being sold for cheap. Literally an i3 would suffice. I ran my homelab on a i3 6100 for years and it was totally fine. That was ESXi as hypervisor, multiple Ubuntu server VM’s, truenas, home assistant, pihole, windows LTSC, and some docker containers. 

[jd680]

9 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

If you have miss matched drives, you basically have to go unraid, and you can’t use ZFS (ZFS is the same, regardless what OS it runs on. So the issue you see on truenas would be there in unraid if using ZFS). Use unraid and use the normal unraid “unraid”, and not ZFS. ZFS is also very difficult to add storage to later on, since you need to build entire new vdevs or upgrade all drives in the current vdev to larger ones. 

I think I’d go Unraid for my media server then. 

 

9 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

If you want to segment things out, do that via different datasets and SMB mount points, and you can add user restriction at that level. And then backup critical data like photos to the cloud. Remember, RAID is not a backup. It’s a high availability system…

Definitely true that Raid isn't backup. Don't know much about SMB mount points and different datasets, recommended reading material, posts, or videos?

 

9 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Using your main PC for this is probably not the best idea. It’s totally possible to do, but running your PC as a VM under proxmox probably won’t be as great an experience as you may imagine. If you have literally any old PC laying around, use that for the proxmox setup. Some friend or family member will probably have a machine they don’t need anymore, or look on eBay for ~8 year old workstations like HP Proliant or Dell Optiplex machines being sold for cheap. Literally an i3 would suffice. I ran my homelab on a i3 6100 for years and it was totally fine. That was ESXi as hypervisor, multiple Ubuntu server VM’s, truenas, home assistant, pihole, windows LTSC, and some docker containers. 

Great idea. Would I buy or find an Optiplex for instance and then get a JBOD to store my media then? Curious next steps if you were me giving my goals. 

[LIGISTX]

4 minutes ago, jd680 said:

Don't know much about SMB mount points and different datasets, recommended reading material, posts, or videos?

Once you start looking into setting up unraid, you will learn about SMB. SMB is how files are shared over the network. Just start googling or searching YouTube videos for unraid setup, unraid SMB, unraid SMB credentials, etc. 

 

5 minutes ago, jd680 said:

Great idea. Would I buy or find an Optiplex for instance and then get a JBOD to store my media then? Curious next steps if you were me giving my goals. 

Depending on how many drives you have, you may just be able to use whatever system you buy. Or you may have to buy a standard ATX case that has a bunch of harddrive mounts in it and transplant everything into that. I run my Supermicro “server” in a Corsair 750D case since it has 10 harddrive bays. Most server mobo’s use standard ATX mounting holes, you’d just have to confirm that for whatever you end up with. 

[MattWeiler]

On 4/26/2023 at 3:09 PM, Bawjaws said:

Hey Matt. Just stumbled on your thread 6 months later, as I have a very (uncannily!) similar set up with Windows, blue iris, Plex and virtualbox that I'm looking to migrate to some combination of proxmox/unraid/truenas. 

 

What did you decide to do in the end, and how has it been running since? I'm tempted to look at alternatives to blue iris to avoid the need to have a Windows VM running. It seems like such a waste of effort/CPU/ram.

 

Cheers!

Sorry, I didn't get a notification about your reply.

 

I ended up building a new server which is running Unraid.

https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/user/MattWeiler/saved/gPrV4D

It's totally overkill, but I had my annual bonus to use

 

The main reason that I went with Unraid is the simplicity of adding more drives to the array.

Right now I have 6 x 20TB WD gold drives in my array, 2 of which are parity drives.

This gives me 80TB of effective storage with 23TB free right now.

Then I have 1 x 20TB WD gold drive on a shelf acting as a cold-spare.

My case has 12 x hot swap 3.5" bays so I can fit 6 more HDDs and if I only add 20TB drives, then I can have a total of 200TB of effective storage.

I don't see myself needing more storage than that

 

I'm using 2 x 1TB Samsung 970 evo M.2 SSDs in a redundant RAID to store all of my application meta-data (includes my Home Assistant VM image, Plex and all of the other Docker containers that I've installed).

 

 

I migrated my Home Assistant VM from VirtualBox to Unraid using the below thread:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/52357-import-from-virtualbox/#comment-514994

I really didn't want to have to start my Home Assistant VM from scratch, so this was perfect.

 

So far I have copied all of my media to my new Unraid array and right now I have 23TB free

But I haven't gotten around to migrating my Plex meta-data over to Unraid, that'll just take a long time and I haven't had the time.

For now, I'm happy that my media is backed-up.

 

I looked at some alternatives to BlueIris and for me at least, none of them have been acceptable.

The camera feed kept dying or they couldn't even get the camera feed in the first place

 

So for now, I still have my old server, running Windows 10, which run my BlueIris installation and my Plex server.

But the Plex server will get migrated to the Unraid server soon.

 

I might look at creating a Windows VM that I'll run on Unraid which will only run BlueIris, but for now I just don't have the time to invest in that.