Building a home NAS

[Mr Technician]

I am intending to build a home server to store all of mine and my family's data (including system images) and have a number of questions regarding this. To begin with, I'm not sure what hard drives to choose (I'm currently looking at either WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf and will either get 2 * 3TB + 3TB parity or 2 * 4TB + 4TB parity.) Are 5400 RPM drives of this standard fast enough to saturate a gigabit network? I also have a few questions about unRAID shares, as I know that unRAID can store data specifically on the drive you select and both drives will appear as one to the end user over SMB. This being said, what are the best share settings to evening split data between the two data drives?

[leadeater]

Both disks mentioned will do the job equally well, get what ever is cheapest or you prefer. As far as unRAID I don't know much about it as I've never used it, there is quite a few people on the forum that does and I'm sure they will chime in when they see this post.

[GDRRiley]

I would run freeNAS with 4tb drives in a raid 5. 5400 will saturate a 1gb but not a 2gb for that you need top end 7200 RPM HDDs like X300, and enterprise grade drives.  

[Mr Technician]

I was thinking of unRAID due to the ease of use and the ability to pass a graphics card through a VM. How would the performance of a raid 5 freeNAS compare to unRAID? What about the whole ECC memory thing?

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, ThatFlashCat said:

I was thinking of unRAID due to the ease of use and the ability to pass a graphics card through a VM. How would the performance of a raid 5 freeNAS compare to unRAID? What about the whole ECC memory thing?

If you want to host VMs unRAID might be a better choice, also I don't think GPU passthrough works at all on FreeNAS?

 

You don't need ECC ram for FreeNAS, it's more a nice to have than a need it.

 

FreeNAS would be better for the file hosting side of things and unRAID will be better at the VM hosting side of things. If you are very likely to be wanting to create VMs I would go with unRAID.

[Mr Technician]

The main reason I'd want to run a VM would be to allow me to use a windows environment on my TV for youtube and amazon prime video as I am using my old server/workstation for that very purpose. I would re-purpose it as a server at least to begin with and might upgrade in the future. Speaking of this, is it easy to transfer an unRAID or freeNAS array to a new system? (Assuming same drives and boot USB).

[voyager_]

Unraid is going to be one of the slower solutions when writing to the array. Reading any of those drives should be able to saturate the network. To overcome the write speed issue in unraid you will want to add a cache drive. I have two 120Gb SSDs acting as mine. A harddrive will still work as the cache. The catch is that data in the cache is unprotected until written to the array. Another benefit is the way data is written to drives, files are not stripped across several drives. Instead it is written completely to that drive. You can configure shares to write to one drive until it has reached a max threshold then it will start to overflow to another drive. You can also have a disable a share from using the cache for storage. I have mine set to do that when creating backups because speed isn't as important.

 

Unraid is also very flexible when it comes to adding drives. You can add what ever size that you want as long as it is smaller than your parity drive. Drives can also be added at anytime and as many at a time as you would like.

[Mr Technician]

I'm leaning toward Freenas at the moment but am a little confused about why deduplication exists. What causes duplication of data?