Help - First DIY NAS w/ Expandable + redundant parity

[averytallbird]

I'm looking for some guidance on how I should go about configuring my first DIY NAS. I'm planning on creating a very large media server to host BD rips and lossless audio. I just ordered the Fractal Design Refine 7 XL for all the HDD bay space, and I was going to use my wife's old gaming rig setup as the basis for the system. I'm wondering about how I could go about setting up the storage drives with redundancy and parity while still being able to expand in the future as I add drives to the system. I'm very much a novice in this area so I was planning on sticking with the already installed Windows. Any help and "simple" solutions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Unraid will work well for this if your don't need to stick with windows. Pretty easy to use, and nice web gui for management. 

 

In windows, storage spaces is probably your best option, but it takes a good amount of tweaking to get it to work well.

[m9x3mos]

12 hours ago, averytallbird said:

I'm looking for some guidance on how I should go about configuring my first DIY NAS. I'm planning on creating a very large media server to host BD rips and lossless audio. I just ordered the Fractal Design Refine 7 XL for all the HDD bay space, and I was going to use my wife's old gaming rig setup as the basis for the system. I'm wondering about how I could go about setting up the storage drives with redundancy and parity while still being able to expand in the future as I add drives to the system. I'm very much a novice in this area so I was planning on sticking with the already installed Windows. Any help and "simple" solutions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks!

I agree with the other reply. If no one needs to actually use the computer as a desktop and this will only act as a server, go with unraid.

That is very easy to setup and manage for that kind of storage and is easy to expand. 

Windows storage spaces can be finicky and doesn't have many of the nice to have features that unraid can do. 

Stay away from truenas as expanding a pool in that array isn't as simple as just popping in another disk. 

With unraid just make your largest disk as the parity drive and you can add drives as you wish in differing sizes as long as they are smaller than your parity drive. 

And if unraid fails at any time, you can boot from Linux and easily read the drives directly to access the data if it is needed.