Which Server OS to use?

[Pan_TorchaYT]

Looking for an OS to run my home NAS, ideally that is free.

Will be used to store files that won't be used very often

So I can be slow

Hardware:

CPU: Xeon E5-2680 V4

Cooler: Silverstone Krypton KR02

Motherboard: AliExpress X99 LGA 2011-3 Motherboard

Ram: 32GB DDR4 2133Mhz ECC AliExpress ram

Boot: Dual Western Digital Green 480GB NVME M.2 SSD

Mass Storage: 4x Seagate Barracuda Compute 8TB (Used), 2x Western Digital Blue 8TB (New), 3x Seagate IronWolf NAS (12TB)

Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB Dx9.0c Graphics card (An old GPU I got a long time ago, will be used just to display out)

Case: Fractal Design XL R2 ATX Case (Used)

Power Supply: Corsair CV650W

Others: Molex to 5x Sata Power x2

4x 3.5" Hard Drive Cage

[RONOTHAN##]

What are you looking to do on this rig? You'll probably end up with recommendations of TrueNAS, but given the super weird HDD collection you might have to go Windows or UnRAID as TrueNAS isn't really designed to take advantage of mixed capacity drive arrays like Windows Storage Spaces or UnRAID's JBOD filesystem do. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

I will warn you that many of those HDDs are SMR and will be very slow in some workloads like raid rebuilds. I'd probably go with something like unraid here as its your best option with mixed disks thats pretty easy to use.

[Pan_TorchaYT]

is unraid free?

I'm looking for something free

Edited October 28, 2023 by Pan_TorchaYT

[Pan_TorchaYT]

I Was thinking to used the 8tb drives in one raid pool and the 12tb drives in another

[Needfuldoer]

2 hours ago, Pan_TorchaYT said:

is unraid free?

I'm looking for something free

It's not free to use forever, they have a tiered pricing model depending on how many storage devices you've got. At least it's a one-shot lifetime purchase, not a recurring subscription model.

 

https://unraid.net/pricing

 

 

You would need a $90 "Plus" license to use all nine of your hard drives.

 

You can do just about everything Unraid does in a regular Linux install manually, but Unraid is much easier to set up by putting a relatively polished interface on top. Either way, you can set up a pretend software RAID out of your mixed drives, dedicating your largest drive to parity.

 

TrueNAS Scale is free, but you would have to get a little creative to optimally use your mixed drives with it because it uses ZFS. (ZFS is a whole rabbit hole, but here's the short version: ZFS pools are built out of "vdevs", which are built out of physical drives. Ideally you want all the drives in a vdev to be the same capacity. A pool can consist of vdevs with different levels of redundancy, but it's only as resilient as its weakest vdev. If you lose one vdev, the whole pool is gone.)

 

5 minutes ago, Pan_TorchaYT said:

I Was thinking to used the 8tb drives in one raid pool and the 12tb drives in another

You can absolutely do that in TueNAS. A server can even have multiple ZFS pools if you want.

 

Either way, I recommend loading up on used server RAM off eBay. You can get registered ECC DDR4 2400 for under a buck a gig in the US, if you shop around. 

 

Disclaimer: I run TrueNAS Scale on my home server and I'm happy with it.

[Blue4130]

3 hours ago, Pan_TorchaYT said:

is unraid free?

I'm looking for something free

If you want free, snapraid is free. It lives on top of an existing OS (Win or Linux) and then lets you pool odd size disks the same way that unraid does.

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 hours ago, Pan_TorchaYT said:

I Was thinking to used the 8tb drives in one raid pool and the 12tb drives in another

The big issue I see are those SMR drives. You really don't want to use those in ZFS or most other raid solutions due to the very poor performance in rebuilds and other operations. You could setup truenas this way though.

[Crunchy Dragon]

12 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

Either way, I recommend loading up on used server RAM off eBay. You can get registered ECC DDR4 2400 for under a buck a gig in the US, if you shop around.

Be aware of lacking ECC support. Not every X99 board supported ECC memory(even with a Xeon installed). Otherwise, I can't argue with that. Would've done it myself if my board supported it.

[Needfuldoer]

36 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Be aware of lacking ECC support. Not every X99 board supported ECC memory(even with a Xeon installed). Otherwise, I can't argue with that. Would've done it myself if my board supported it.

Good catch! I do all my 2011-3 tinkering on servers and workstations; they all support registered ECC.

 

(At least when it comes to cheap used parts. I'm sure you can overclock the snot out of some chips on a good x99 board.)

[Pan_TorchaYT]

8 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Be aware of lacking ECC support. Not every X99 board supported ECC memory(even with a Xeon installed). Otherwise, I can't argue with that. Would've done it myself if my board supported it.

It a aliexpress motherboard that comes with ecc ram and a cpu in a bundle

[Pan_TorchaYT]

Can anyone tell me pros and cons of

Unraid, True Nas scale

I heard that True Nas is linux based which I like for running a minecraft server aswell,

Unraid cost $129 for ulimated drives as my server can go up to 16drives.