DIY NAS Help!

[NervousCheesecake]

I've been using an old Dell Optiplex 3010 as a file server and Plex server for a number of years. I have recently run out of capacity on my 2TB disk. Given that my DVD and BLU-RAY collection isn't getting any smaller I have purchased two (2) 8TB HDD to put in some type of RAID array because I don't really feel like re-ripping my disks in the event of a failure.

My original idea was to use Windows to create a RAID 1 and share the drive over the network and calling it good as I have been doing. I recently learned about Unraid and TrueNAS and wanted some input from the community on whether or not one of these dedicated OS platforms would really offer me any additional benefit.

There are a few questions that I would like to better understand:

1. I have RealVNC installed currently so I am able log into Windows and control my server from outside my network and access the files should I need them while I am not home. Can I still do this with Unraid or TrueNAS?

2. I am willing to purchase another 8TB disk if there is a way to increase the size of the disk and still have some redundancy. Is it possible to set this up where I have 16TB of storage and have redundancy?

3. Is it possible to expand the size of the drive in the future?

4. What benefit does Unraid or TrueNAS offer over using Windows 10?

[Blue4130]

45 minutes ago, NervousCheesecake said:

I've been using an old Dell Optiplex 3010 as a file server and Plex server for a number of years. I have recently run out of capacity on my 2TB disk. Given that my DVD and BLU-RAY collection isn't getting any smaller I have purchased two (2) 8TB HDD to put in some type of RAID array because I don't really feel like re-ripping my disks in the event of a failure.

My original idea was to use Windows to create a RAID 1 and share the drive over the network and calling it good as I have been doing. I recently learned about Unraid and TrueNAS and wanted some input from the community on whether or not one of these dedicated OS platforms would really offer me any additional benefit.

There are a few questions that I would like to better understand:

1. I have RealVNC installed currently so I am able to control my server from outside my network and access the files should I need them while I am not home. Can I still do this with Unraid or TrueNAS?

2. I am willing to purchase another 8TB disk if there is a way to increase the size of the disk and still have some redundancy. Is it possible to set this up where I have 16TB of storage and have redundancy?

3. Is it possible to expand the size of the drive in the future?

4. What benefit does Unraid or TrueNAS offer over using Windows 10?

If you really care about not loosing the data, don't set up the two disks as a RAID, use one disk as a backup that you disconnect and store elsewhere when finished. Raid is just about uptime, not backing up. There are many things that can kill the raid and wipe out all of your data.

[Needfuldoer]

For what you want to do, Windows will get the job done. You can run the machine headless, and connect to it with VNC (I usually recommend TightVNC) or Remote Desktop (if it's running Windows Pro).

 

But like @Blue4130 said, RAID is not a backup in and of itself. RAID is insurance against having to manually restore from your backups.

 

1 hour ago, NervousCheesecake said:

What benefit does Unraid or TrueNAS offer over using Windows 10?

The biggest is ZFS. 

 

ZFS has some incredibly powerful features that aren't as difficult to set up as you might expect, but it requires some planning ahead of time. Because it was designed for datacenters full of huge drive arrays, it doesn't like to grow organically one or two drives at a time. The upshot is, you get features like snapshots (the server keeps old copies of files that get altered or deleted, so you can roll back changes or retrieve them for a configurable amount of time), deduplication (multiple copies of a file only use up one copy's worth of space on disk), and completely transparent file compression (it's free real estate). Some of these won't help your already-compressed video files, but they can be great for documents.

 

Windows can do some of these things with its own features like Volume Shadow Copy and NTFS folder compression.

 

Look up Craft Computing on YouTube if you want to learn more about this stuff. Jeff explains it better than I can. (And if you really want to get into the weeds, Wendell from Level1Techs has some great talks about file servers.)

 

1 hour ago, NervousCheesecake said:

I have RealVNC installed currently so I am able to control my server from outside my network and access the files should I need them while I am not home. Can I still do this with Unraid or TrueNAS?

Please tell me you're running a VPN, not just port forwarding VNC out to the public Internet. That's not very safe.

 

Unraid and TrueNAS don't have a 'desktop' per se. They have web management interfaces. You'd have to connect with a VPN or run a virtual Windows instance to remote into.

 

1 hour ago, NervousCheesecake said:

I am willing to purchase another 8TB disk if there is a way to increase the size of the disk and still have some redundancy. Is it possible to set this up where I have 16TB of storage and have redundancy?

Running your three 8 TB drives in a RAIDz1 (on ZFS) or RAID 5 (on the Intel chipset or in software) will do exactly that, your array will be able to lose any one drive without data loss. However, you'll be working without a net until the array is rebuilt on a good replacement drive. If one of the other drives encounters an error before the array finishes rebuilding, you can lose data. That's why external, offline backups are still important even with RAID.

 

1 hour ago, NervousCheesecake said:

Is it possible to expand the size of the drive in the future?

Unraid has its own way of expanding your storage pool one drive at a time. The highest-capacity drive gets used for parity and your data gets split across the others. 

 

ZFS is more complicated, since the way it works is like building a "RAID of RAIDs". Physical drives get clumped into "vdevs" (each of which can have its own layout and parity level), then vdevs are striped together into the storage pool. A ZFS pool is only as strong as its weakest vdev, because if you lose an entire vdev, you lose the whole pool. Adding a single drive as its own vdev means that one drive will take all the data with it if it dies.

[gentlemanspot]

+1 for TrueNAS 

 

 

The stand out for me was you using VNC I hope you are VPN'ing ofr network security, But you can set up tailscale on Truenas Scale  

 

Tom Lawrence from Lawrence Technology Services has a heap of good videos on Truenas  

https://lawrence.video/truenas

[johnt]

4 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

For what you want to do, Windows will get the job done.

I second this. Keeping it simple is the best solution in my opinion. If you are considering RAID1 for your drives, then I would just forget about RAID altogether. I sync my files between drives every night using FreeFileSync. I have it setup in task scheduler to run at 3am every night, and the software sends me an email of all the items that were transferred. The best part of this method is that you have no headaches of RAID if something happens to one of the drives. Sure there is a gap in duplicating data, but meh... it's a small amount per day.