Posted March 4, 2018 My plan is to build a 60TB NAS using FreeNas as the OS. This seems to give me the widest range of options as far as I can tell. I just heard of UnRaid, and am curious, does it have any advantages over FreeNas? Thank you in advance. I'm hoping to be able to utilize it for much more than just a file server. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 4, 2018 Do you want easy upgradability? Thats the big main features. Big disadvantage is the speed, its much slower as you can only read from one disk at a time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 4, 2018 Author 5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said: Do you want easy upgradability? Thats the big main features. Big disadvantage is the speed, its much slower as you can only read from one disk at a time. Ya,speed rules the day. From my understanding of FreeNas, it's better to acquire all the hardware you'll ever need first, and then build the actual apparatus, which is what I was planning on doing. I want all my friends and family to have access to it, and have the appropriate partitions and jails. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 4, 2018 7 minutes ago, Ripper7620 said: Ya,speed rules the day. From my understanding of FreeNas, it's better to acquire all the hardware you'll ever need first, and then build the actual apparatus, which is what I was planning on doing. I want all my friends and family to have access to it, and have the appropriate partitions and jails. Yea zfs can be a pain to easily expand(should be better soon with raidz expansion. But yea you want freenas here, it will be better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 4, 2018 Author 4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said: Yea zfs can be a pain to easily expand(should be better soon with raidz expansion. But yea you want freenas here, it will be better. Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 4, 2018 What is the use case of the server? With Unraid you can have certain shares go to a specific drive until it is full. This will help split the use between the drives. You can also set up a cache drive to improve write performance. Flexibility is the best part of Unraid, you can easily add or remove drives even if they are different sizes. The only limiting factor is the size of the parity drive. When reading from a drive most can saturate a gigabit connection. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 4, 2018 Author 2 minutes ago, voyager_ said: What is the use case of the server? With Unraid you can have certain shares go to a specific drive until it is full. This will help split the use between the drives. You can also set up a cache drive to improve write performance. Flexibility is the best part of Unraid, you can easily add or remove drives even if they are different sizes. The only limiting factor is the size of the parity drive. When reading from a drive most can saturate a gigabit connection. Thank you for the reply, but without knowing what is possible with FreeNas, I can't say up front what I'll be using it for altogether. I'm hoping to be able to do much more than just using it for a file server. The flexibility of being able to add drives is appealing, but I've decided to do 80-60TB of storage up front, which should be more than I'll need. I'll be making partitions and jails for friends and family to have access to. I'd like everyone who has access to have their own secure partitions, and things like jails for holding games, music, movies, etc, that multiple people can have access to. I'd like to be able to work on a project for awhile, then move it into the NAS, and retrieve it wheneverI'm ready to do more with it. That's the biggest need I have, is to be able to move projects in and out as I need to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 5, 2018 Jails can be a bit of a pain, you'll definitely want to create them manually instead of using the FreeNAS packages. Otherwise I'd recommend using bhyve, which I think the next release will have a GUI for - though it is implemented now. Jails have the issue of getting stuck on old kernels as you update the base o/s - which doesn't sound bad until the port updates and requires the newer kernel. The issue is you have to delete all the jails and recreate them (in my experience). With bhyve that's not an issue, but it does have a little more overhead. Use case will dictate how you create your vdevs and volumes. Pure storage then RaidZ1 or RaidZ2 is fine. Even for light VM usage it's fine. But if you want to attach a type 1 hypervisor like ESXi / KVM to it, you'll want IOPs which you'd want to do striped mirror vdevs (Raid 10 essentially). Since you're shooting for 60TB, you have a lot of flexibility in allocating just a small portion for VMs. I believe myself to be middle of the road for a vm environment, and I'm only using 1.5TB for my VMs, though only about 1.2x compression no dedupe. I would personally (and I have) create a separate volume for virtual machines if you go that route. I believe btrfs is losing ground last I read, and development is slowing. That was as of about 4-5 months ago when I last read up on it. More so since OpenZFS seems to work well with linux as of late. If unRaid decides to switch to ZFS, it's going to be a bit of a nightmare. Last thought, be sure to budget for backup. Figure out which data you don't want to ever lose and how much data that is - and buy a solution. Movies I don't think are worth the money to backup, because they occupy so much space. I'd just uh.. re-rip them ;-). Most people I'd assume are under 10TB worth of personal data they don't want to lose, so a 8TB external, or a couple, would suffice as a second copy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 5, 2018 18 hours ago, Ripper7620 said: My plan is to build a 60TB NAS using FreeNas as the OS. This seems to give me the widest range of options as far as I can tell. I just heard of UnRaid, and am curious, does it have any advantages over FreeNas? Thank you in advance. I'm hoping to be able to utilize it for much more than just a file server. For Plex and data backup freenas is the best but you need one gig of RAM per one tb of storage so that could be why you seem to be getting weird results Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 5, 2018 20 minutes ago, Turretgaming said: For Plex and data backup freenas is the best but you need one gig of RAM per one tb of storage so that could be why you seem to be getting weird results 1gb per tb is just a recommendation, and he hasn't bought anything yet so he isn't getting any weird results? Quite a few people here have 20tb+ on 8gb of ram. On a typical home 1gb network, it will be just fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 5, 2018 9 minutes ago, Mikensan said: 1gb per tb is just a recommendation, and he hasn't bought anything yet so he isn't getting any weird results? Quite a few people here have 20tb+ on 8gb of ram. On a typical home 1gb network, it will be just fine. From what I read I had the impression that he was already tinkering with freenas and he wanted to move to unraid due to weird things. What weird things he didn't say so I assumed it was stability. And if you're making your own home server I assume you use some form of LAG to improve links between multiple users hitting it at once. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 6, 2018 Author Thank you, I haven't built the apparatus yet, but I'm going with 64gb of ECC DDR4, and a Supermicro motherboard. I'm trying to do things by the book so I have as few surprises as possible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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