Nas Operating system

[1988fido]

Hi
my question is what do you recommend to use for building a nas and why ?

I looked into it for long time and did lots of research but still not sure which to chose.
most likely am leaning towards Freenas because i found that finding info about it much easier than the alternatives. ( am very tech savvy person but my networking is sort of rubbish )
so am planning to test on my own at home as centralized storage for my media files etc.. then apply it to my work.

[Windows7ge]

I only have experience with FreeNAS but you might also checkout UnRAID. It has some drive control features freeNAS doesn't plus other things.

 

For the most part though I like freeNAS. Its WebUI is intimidating when you don't know where anything is but once you find your way around it's alright. Lots of features, services, support for virtual machines, data logging, it uses ZFS which is a great software RAID file system, it's basically a enterprise grade serverOS made convenient to use for prosumers.

 

So there's that, UnRAID, also Redhat Linux, they have a server distribution you can check out if you want. These seem the most popular.

[paddy-stone]

Depends on your needs of course, but for simple network shares windws/ubuntu or other desktop build... and freenas for pretty much all use cases.

Windows can be a pain for someone that needs a stable, no-restarts type of OS I have found personally... there are ways of mitigating these problems, but IMO you may as well just go with freenas then, plus it can be faster and less overheads. These are just my results from my admittedly limited testing of course, results can vary greatly because not everyone will have the same equipment and/or needs. I like the expandability of freenas personally, simple enough to use once you get the hang of things with the webGUI, but more advanced users can use CLI to get more out of it and add more functionality/add-ons IIRC. Personally I use the webGUI and it still has plenty to offer for uses.

[LAwLz]

Depends on what you want from your NAS.

If you ask me, for most people it boils down to these three OSes:

• FreeNAS - Use if you want to use ZFS and/or a BSD based distro.
• OpenMediaVault - If you want a GNU/Linux based distro.
• Windows - If you want to run Windows-exclusive software.

 

Side note: From what I understand, FreeNAS does not allow you to add, let's say one more drive and expand your volume. That is a big limiting factor for home use. It is possible to add a bunch of drives, create a VDEV and then add that to your volume, but that adds additional overhead and cost.

This is not a problem on OMV and Windows.

FreeNAS is working on adding support for it, but I don't think anyone knows when that will be ready.

 

Feel free to correct me if I am misunderstanding how ZFS works.

[1988fido]

On 3/19/2018 at 11:55 AM, paddy-stone said:

Depends on your needs of course, but for simple network shares windws/ubuntu or other desktop build... and freenas for pretty much all use cases.

Windows can be a pain for someone that needs a stable, no-restarts type of OS I have found personally... there are ways of mitigating these problems, but IMO you may as well just go with freenas then, plus it can be faster and less overheads. These are just my results from my admittedly limited testing of course, results can vary greatly because not everyone will have the same equipment and/or needs. I like the expandability of freenas personally, simple enough to use once you get the hang of things with the webGUI, but more advanced users can use CLI to get more out of it and add more functionality/add-ons IIRC. Personally I use the webGUI and it still has plenty to offer for uses.

 

On 3/19/2018 at 4:31 PM, LAwLz said:

Depends on what you want from your NAS.

If you ask me, for most people it boils down to these three OSes:

• FreeNAS - Use if you want to use ZFS and/or a BSD based distro.
• OpenMediaVault - If you want a GNU/Linux based distro.
• Windows - If you want to run Windows-exclusive software.

 

Side note: From what I understand, FreeNAS does not allow you to add, let's say one more drive and expand your volume. That is a big limiting factor for home use. It is possible to add a bunch of drives, create a VDEV and then add that to your volume, but that adds additional overhead and cost.

This is not a problem on OMV and Windows.

FreeNAS is working on adding support for it, but I don't think anyone knows when that will be ready.

 

Feel free to correct me if I am misunderstanding how ZFS works.

I will be using it as archive + media storage. i already own 18TB in 2 computers and need to back them up so will need minimum to have 32TB .
must be fast to copy files not going to wait days to copy 18TB , every while will transfer few TB's so my main concern is redundancy and size. will use it to store 4k HDR videos then play them from the network or copy to the machine to work on them , so i am thinking to convert my current pc into a free nas

that is very important to be able to add up storage later i read about ZFS and it seems awesome but issue is i cant buy 18TB right now to back up my current 18 so will need to buy 1~2 drives every month so i will increase capacity as i go , but freenas doesn't allow me to do that ? wt if i use freenas but not zfs still can't add at all ?


the pc specs am thinking to convert into freenas is:
i7 3770k
maximus V formula
16GB ram
gtx 970 ( will sell it and buy 10GBE card )
512SSD samsung evo
18TB of varient HD's capacity , planning to start getting 8TB's nas seagate drives ( bought 1 already so i need 2 more at least )

[Salacious B Crum]

Based on your use case I would give unRAID a serious look as it freely allows you to add drives to the array as needed and since your mostly using it for archiving you will get more bang for your buck per Terabyte, speed well if you go 10GBE then no problem put an ssd cache drive or 2 in and off to the races otherwise you get 100-120MB/s transfers  You assign 1 or 2 parity drives and the rest is all data on the array, there is a caveat in that your largest drive must be the parity all other drives can be any size up to that drives capacity. It offers the ability to run VM's if your into that kinda thing but what's really nice is the apps that you can run such as setting it up as a media server with Plex the price is reasonable the support is great and you can download and install it for free for 30 days and they offer an additional 30 if you ask it gives you plenty of time to run it through its paces, oh and the learning curve is quite short.

[1988fido]

29 minutes ago, mrbilky said:

Based on your use case I would give unRAID a serious look as it freely allows you to add drives to the array as needed and since your mostly using it for archiving you will get more bang for your buck per Terabyte, speed well if you go 10GBE then no problem put an ssd cache drive or 2 in and off to the races otherwise you get 100-120MB/s transfers  You assign 1 or 2 parity drives and the rest is all data on the array, there is a caveat in that your largest drive must be the parity all other drives can be any size up to that drives capacity. It offers the ability to run VM's if your into that kinda thing but what's really nice is the apps that you can run such as setting it up as a media server with Plex the price is reasonable the support is great and you can download and install it for free for 30 days and they offer an additional 30 if you ask it gives you plenty of time to run it through its paces, oh and the learning curve is quite short.

thanks , ye i will try it.
now 1 more advice.

am thinking to build HTPC to run 4k gaming ( but light games such as dmc , gauntlet , trine etc.. ) so am thinking to put 1080 in this rig and buy nas from qnap etc.. or something else

or use the rig as nas and buy completely new gaming htpc wt do u recommend am confused about it for long time.


important question:
once i put raid 5 ( lets say 10 drives ) I can add additional drive normal? without the need to format them? and can add parity drives also not just storage one's so it will go to 20 drives for example ?

[Windows7ge]

On 3/19/2018 at 8:31 AM, LAwLz said:

Feel free to correct me if I am misunderstanding how ZFS works.

I was told similarly about this limitation of ZFS but one workaround is in the event you want to upgrade all the disks you can just pull one disk at a time from the array and resilver it, the repeat this for the rest of them until all new disks are added.

 

Really though if you plan out the array intelligently you shouldn't need to add disks before you upgrade the entire array. Hard drives are so dense and so cheap nowadays.

[Salacious B Crum]

7 hours ago, 1988fido said:

Thanks , ye i will try it.
now 1 more advice.

am thinking to build HTPC to run 4k gaming ( but light games such as dmc , gauntlet , trine etc.. ) so am thinking to put 1080 in this rig and buy nas from qnap etc.. or something else

or use the rig as nas and buy completely new gaming htpc wt do u recommend am confused about it for long time.


important question:
once i put raid 5 ( lets say 10 drives ) I can add additional drive normal? without the need to format them? and can add parity drives also not just storage one's so it will go to 20 drives for example ?

Well I'm no gamer so really can't help there but the beauty of unRAID is that it's not a RAID so taking your 10 drive scenario you could make the largest drive the parity and then the 9 remaining become data drives there is no division of storage size based on typical RAID implementations so 10 10TB drive becomes 1 10TB parity and 9 10TB drives become 90TB of data storage, now my unRAID sever is currently 17TB with a 4TB parity and 2 240GB SSD's for a cache pool this is good as you can achieve better performance with the cache drives then at night while you sleep the system can be set to "move" the data from the cache to the array. To answer your question about adding its quite simple the latest version of unRAID is practically plug and play you assign the drive to the array and follow a few simple steps currently I believe that the maximum is 2 parity drives and 28 data/cache drives

[1988fido]

20 hours ago, mrbilky said:

Well I'm no gamer so really can't help there but the beauty of unRAID is that it's not a RAID so taking your 10 drive scenario you could make the largest drive the parity and then the 9 remaining become data drives there is no division of storage size based on typical RAID implementations so 10 10TB drive becomes 1 10TB parity and 9 10TB drives become 90TB of data storage, now my unRAID sever is currently 17TB with a 4TB parity and 2 240GB SSD's for a cache pool this is good as you can achieve better performance with the cache drives then at night while you sleep the system can be set to "move" the data from the cache to the array. To answer your question about adding its quite simple the latest version of unRAID is practically plug and play you assign the drive to the array and follow a few simple steps currently I believe that the maximum is 2 parity drives and 28 data/cache drives

 cool . ye i will use the computer and the  512ssd as cache