Best free OS for a home NAS

[asheenlevrai]

Hi everyone

 

I'd like to build a custom NAS out of spare parts that I have around (4th gen Intel CPU + MB, some DDR3, ironwolf drives, ...).

 

I'll be using the NAS to store files that may be accessed by multiple users simultaneously over SMB.

 - both large and small files (pictures, videos, others...)

 - 1-20 users max

 

Now I wonder what would be the best choice for the OS.

I'm looking for something free, easy to use (intuitive) and manage (GUI!) and that is currently maintained.

 

As I am relatively familiar with DSM (I own several Synology devices) I gave XPenology a try but unfortunately for me, it wasn't as stable as I hoped and the required technical knowledge is above what my brain can understand/remember (I easily forget things when I don't need them for months/years).

 

I will be using a PCIe3.0 x4 sATA adapter (5 ports) since the MB doesn't have enough sATA ports for all my drives.

 

Nice to have:

 - support for 4ports GbE PCIe NIC (to optimize simultaneous access to multiple users)

 - support for Tailscale Free (looks like TrueNAS/FreeNAS is the only free option here)

 

Let me know what you would recommend.

 

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Best,

-a-

[Slottr]

-Moved to Servers, NAS, and Home Lab -

[Needfuldoer]

I've been happy with TrueNAS Scale.

[Zando_]

+1 for TrueNAS, though be sure you're using the same capacity drives (not sure what medley of old drives you're using), and be sure that the PCIe SATA card you use plays nice with ZFS. 

[asheenlevrai]

15 hours ago, Zando_ said:

+1 for TrueNAS, though be sure you're using the same capacity drives (not sure what medley of old drives you're using), and be sure that the PCIe SATA card you use plays nice with ZFS. 

Thanks

 

Can you elaborate a bit about why the drives need to be the same capacity?

Is it "strict", like 2 different brands of 6TB drives won't play well with each other due to slight differences in capacity among drives? Or is it more "general" like I would lose some space building a RAID array with drives that have different capacities (e.g. a RAID5 array over 3 drives with 3TB, 3TB and 4TB for instance)?

 

Also, how can I heck if the PCIe sATA card "plays nice" with ZFS?

What does that mean?

I'm not super familiar with ZFS.

 

Thanks again

[Needfuldoer]

5 minutes ago, asheenlevrai said:

Can you elaborate a bit about why the drives need to be the same capacity?

Is it "strict", like 2 different brands of 6TB drives won't play well with each other due to slight differences in capacity among drives? Or is it more "general" like I would lose some space building a RAID array with drives that have different capacities (e.g. a RAID5 array over 3 drives with 3TB, 3TB and 4TB for instance)?

TrueNAS uses ZFS as its storage filesystem. It can be a real rabbit hole, but here's my understanding at a realistic home server scale:

 

ZFS clusters physical drives into "vdevs", which are then added to "pools". File shares are at the pool level.

 

I believe you can have mixed size drives in a vdev, but they'll all act as though they were the size of the smallest member disk. So for example if you have four 4 TB drives and one 2 TB drive in a RAIDz1 vdev (single-drive parity like RAID 5), that vdev will act like you have five 2 TB drives until you replace the small drive with another 4TB and resilver.

 

There's nothing stopping you from adding each drive individually as its own vdev, but that's an exceptionally bad idea. ZFS acts like a stripe at the pool level, so if you lose a vdev you lose the entire array. You could have a vdev with all your data mirrored across 23 drives and a vdev of one drive by itself, and if that one drive dies you lose all the data on the pool.

 

The upshot is that you can always add an additional vdev later on without rebuilding the array. Just remember to have at least as much redundancy as the original array, so you don't weaken the pool.

 

Solutions like Unraid use the Linux kernel's mdadm software RAID for their storage pool. It won't scale like ZFS, but it will let you use all the space available on drives of mixed capacity. (Synology's appliances use this too, they just brand it "Synology Hybrid RAID".) The only caveat is that the largest drive in the array is used for parity data.

 

14 minutes ago, asheenlevrai said:

Also, how can I heck if the PCIe sATA card "plays nice" with ZFS?

What does that mean?

Basically, whether it has driver support or not.

 

TrueNAS Scale is built on top of Debian, so it has wider hardware support than the BSD-based TrueNAS Core.

 

The common move is to buy a SAS controller that's been flashed into "IT Mode", so it just passes all the connected drives through to the OS without trying to do any fancy hardware RAID. They're a little more expensive than cheapo no-name SATA controllers, but they're server-grade controllers that let you hook up far more hard drives.

[Zando_]

7 hours ago, asheenlevrai said:

Can you elaborate a bit about why the drives need to be the same capacity?

Is it "strict", like 2 different brands of 6TB drives won't play well with each other due to slight differences in capacity among drives? Or is it more "general" like I would lose some space building a RAID array with drives that have different capacities (e.g. a RAID5 array over 3 drives with 3TB, 3TB and 4TB for instance)?

Just general, if you make an array with mismatched drives it'll base the capacity off the smallest drive (the 3TB ones in your example, leaving 1TB on the 4TB drive unused). You can mix OEMs/models fine, I have a 14TB WD and Seagate drive in a mirror array and it hasn't thrown any fits. 

7 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

Basically, whether it has driver support or not.

 

TrueNAS Scale is built on top of Debian, so it has wider hardware support than the BSD-based TrueNAS Core.

 

The common move is to buy a SAS controller that's been flashed into "IT Mode", so it just passes all the connected drives through to the OS without trying to do any fancy hardware RAID. They're a little more expensive than cheapo no-name SATA controllers, but they're server-grade controllers that let you hook up far more hard drives.

^^^ Yep. SATA/SAS card needs to be supported by TrueNAS. Most will be, but I wouldn't trust offbrand/no-name cheapo devices to both be compatible and work reliably. As noted, a used SAS RAID controller flashed to IT-Mode is usually cheaper than a regular HBA, thus why it's a common option. I use an LSI 9223-8i I flashed to IT-Mode myself as it was cheaper (I did need a pre-UEFI board to do this though, the flash process didn't want to work with my UEFI boards). With LSI cards you do need to verify with the seller that the photos are of the actual device you're buying, and then check the serial/authenticity sticker against (easily googleable) databases to ensure they're real, as they are commonly faked cards. Same with Intel NICs if you end up wanting a cheap 10Gb NIC in the future.