Ideal OS for Home File Server

[byalexandr]

Hey all,

 

I recently made some upgrades to my home network, mainly building a pfSense box and upgrading my APs and switches from what was previously just an AT&T Arris gateway. I used an HP ProDesk 600 G1 SFF as the router, with a dual GbE Intel NIC thrown in (so far it has been great, no complaints). I liked the desktop so much that I actually ordered another one to use as a file server, as I have a lot of raw video and exported projects that take up a ton of space on my work laptop and I would like to offload them somewhere on the local network.

 

My work has network drives, available by connecting to my company's VPN (I work remotely), but I would like to have my own storage at home so I can also use it for personal files and not worry about others in the organization having access to it. This second ProDesk only has two 3.5" bays, plus the 128GB SSD that it came with, so I am thinking I will just get two high capacity HDDs without any sort of parity drive to maximize the available storage space.

 

The machine came with Windows 10 installed, but I'm not sure it's the best solution for a simple file server and I'd rather use a Linux distro running samba. I have Ubuntu Desktop (20.04 LTS) installed on a USB stick, but I'm wondering if there are some better options out there that are more lightweight, maybe Ubuntu Server or something else that is barebones. At minimum, I would need the ability to shell into the 'server' but a simple GUI would be nice as I'm not a professional with the terminal just yet. Other than that, browsers or any other applications are not at all necessary.

 

I don't intend to run a media server like Plex or anything, it is strictly for file storage for devices connected to the local network. Whatever I end up choosing, the most important thing is that the share shows up in Windows, Mac OS, and Linux devices alike without much setup (if at all) on the client side.

[BondiBlue]

I've used FreeNAS/TrueNAS Core for my home file servers for years. I've currently got two file servers in operation (one running an older release of FreeNAS and the other running a more recent release of TrueNAS Core), and both have been rock solid. The older of my two file servers has been running FreeNAS for years, and the only issues I've ever had were hardware failures (PSU mainly). The software has been perfectly reliable, so that's what I'd personally recommend. I've also had good experiences running some temporary home file servers on Windows Server, though I doubt that's what you're looking for. 

 

TrueNAS doesn't have a local GUI, but that's not a big deal since you'll mainly configure it through a web interface from another computer on the network. The NAS doesn't even need to have a monitor connected. 

 

How much storage are you looking to have in this NAS? A small form factor machine isn't really the best choice for a file server in most cases since you're very limited in terms of how many drives you can install and connect internally. This would be fine if you're just looking for a large amount of storage space, but if you care about the data you'll be storing on this machine for long-term backup then you might want to think about having a system that can hold more drives. It's definitely not required, and you can get away with just two drives for storage (that's how my older NAS is configured - dual 1TB HDDs), but it's something to think about. 

 

Other than that the hardware you've got will have no issues being used as a NAS. It doesn't take much horsepower to saturate a gigabit network connection. 

[byalexandr]

14 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

I've used FreeNAS/TrueNAS Core for my home file servers for years. I've currently got two file servers in operation (one running an older release of FreeNAS and the other running a more recent release of TrueNAS Core), and both have been rock solid. The older of my two file servers has been running FreeNAS for years, and the only issues I've ever had were hardware failures (PSU mainly). The software has been perfectly reliable, so that's what I'd personally recommend. I've also had good experiences running some temporary home file servers on Windows Server, though I doubt that's what you're looking for. 

 

TrueNAS doesn't have a local GUI, but that's not a big deal since you'll mainly configure it through a web interface from another computer on the network. The NAS doesn't even need to have a monitor connected. 

 

How much storage are you looking to have in this NAS? A small form factor machine isn't really the best choice for a file server in most cases since you're very limited in terms of how many drives you can install and connect internally. This would be fine if you're just looking for a large amount of storage space, but if you care about the data you'll be storing on this machine for long-term backup then you might want to think about having a system that can hold more drives. It's definitely not required, and you can get away with just two drives for storage (that's how my older NAS is configured - dual 1TB HDDs), but it's something to think about. 

 

Other than that the hardware you've got will have no issues being used as a NAS. It doesn't take much horsepower to saturate a gigabit network connection. 

I'll take a look at those options.

 

And as far as storage goes, I think around 10-20TB will suffice; I could RAID 1 two large capacity drives if I spend extra money and get two, say, 14TB HDDs. But it really is just to offload raw media and project files, not really for backup as I do keep final exports and such on the company's network and on my own cloud storage accounts (I'd also like to store a few Steam games on there so I don't have to redownload them all the time). Really just depends on how much I want to spend on the drives, two 14TB HDDs is already over $400, and if I can spend say around $200-300 even though I'd sacrifice any redundancy that would still be more reasonable to me. After all the machine itself was like $70 at the end of the day lol.

[Needfuldoer]

I've been happy with TrueNAS Scale. (It's Debian under the hood; TrueNAS Core is FreeBSD.) 

 

Honestly though, if you're just mirroring a couple hard drives, Windows will work just fine.

[byalexandr]

18 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

I've been happy with TrueNAS Scale. (It's Debian under the hood; TrueNAS Core is FreeBSD.) 

 

Honestly though, if you're just mirroring a couple hard drives, Windows will work just fine.

I ended up installing TrueNAS Core, since I'm a little used to BSD at this point as pfSense is also BSD. Installed no problem, logged into the web GUI and was pleasantly surprised with how nice the UI is. I don't have any disks in the pool yet, just the OS installed on the 128GB SSD that the machine came with, but I did order a WD Red 6TB to start off. Will throw another one in there later for a 12TB NAS, which should be fine for the foreseeable future.

[byalexandr]

Another question, how is editing a Premiere Pro project (typically 1080p footage) with the source media on the NAS? Taking into account a Gigabit wired connection and 5400rpm WD Red drives (simple ZFS pool, no parity or striping)?

 

If I could work on video projects without even having the source media on my local machine, that would be fantastic, so long as the source and preview playback is smooth.

[dalekphalm]

On 1/15/2023 at 1:08 PM, byalexandr said:

I ended up installing TrueNAS Core, since I'm a little used to BSD at this point as pfSense is also BSD. Installed no problem, logged into the web GUI and was pleasantly surprised with how nice the UI is. I don't have any disks in the pool yet, just the OS installed on the 128GB SSD that the machine came with, but I did order a WD Red 6TB to start off. Will throw another one in there later for a 12TB NAS, which should be fine for the foreseeable future.

One thing that you REALLY need to research with ZFS is expanding/growing your storage. It's not always a straight forward process. So make sure you understand any limitations in your chosen storage setup.

 

For example, if you start with a single drive, you may not be able to just toss in more drives and grow the storage. You may need to have a temporary storage location, and drives in the pool may be wiped.

 

ZFS did introduce a new RAIDZ Expansion feature (allows adding to a RAIDZ pool one drive at a time and growing it), but it was still in beta last year. I'm not sure if it's been publicly released yet.

 

TL;DR, TrueNAS and ZFS are both great, but do your research and understand how it works.

[byalexandr]

On 1/17/2023 at 2:23 PM, dalekphalm said:

One thing that you REALLY need to research with ZFS is expanding/growing your storage. It's not always a straight forward process. So make sure you understand any limitations in your chosen storage setup.

 

For example, if you start with a single drive, you may not be able to just toss in more drives and grow the storage. You may need to have a temporary storage location, and drives in the pool may be wiped.

 

ZFS did introduce a new RAIDZ Expansion feature (allows adding to a RAIDZ pool one drive at a time and growing it), but it was still in beta last year. I'm not sure if it's been publicly released yet.

 

TL;DR, TrueNAS and ZFS are both great, but do your research and understand how it works.

After creating the pool with just one 6TB WD Red, I may not even expand the pool, at least for a while. I moved a lot of CRAW photos from my camera(s) and several games in my Steam library and still not even close to any real storage utilization lol.

 

I also found out that I will need some specialty hardware from HP to install a second 3.5" drive (as my machine only came with a 2.5" SSD), even though there is another slot for a second 3.5". Overall pretty happy with the performance though, for just a single 5400rpm drive, I get around 100MB/s transfer speeds which is pretty close to saturating the gigabit connection. Don't think I will really play games off of it (probably move the games over to my SSD first) but convenient not to have to redownload stuff all the time.