New to Nas / servers

[W0lfie]

Hello!

 

so i'm a complete newbie to this with servers and Nas, but since i want to build my own out of old hardware i have laying around i'm asking here for the best option for my needs.

 

what i'm after is a server/Nas where i can move my 4 Hard dives out of my current case since there's no room for them in my new case and keep the data on them (realizing that this might not be possible) and use this Nas/server to read my data from and work with it, meaning watching movies, editing photos and videos, basically everything except programs and games witch i will have on SSD's witch will go in my new System.

 

Being able to add new drives to the Nas/server in the future if i run out of space without having to wipe all the data that is already on there. Adding drives in different configurations, for example lets say i want to add 3 drives and have 2 of them in a Raid 1 setup and the 3rd just as a stand alone drive.

 

is there anything that will be able to do this or most of it?

 

Thanks for any help on the subjekt.

[Radium_Angel]

Your first problem is moving the drives to a new setup.

Unless you clone the hardware, you're going to break the RAID, and lose the data.

And RAID levels (1, 5, 10, etc) means you pretty much can't change RAID levels on the fly, without reconfiguring all of them

And ideally, the drives should all be the same size and speed of course. Not a hard rule, but an ideal one.

 

[W0lfie]

yeah i suspected that i couldn't move my disks without loosing data. i currently have 3 identical disks WD red 3tb witch 2 of them are in RAID 1. but i could transfer the data on the raid disk to my other 3tb drive since i still have room on that one, then move the RAID to a NAS and copy my data there? or is it better just to buy new drives and copying the data from my computer to the NAS and then add my current HDD's to the nas as separate disks? 

 

But what is the best option when it comes to software? i prefer free but if the difference justify the price then i might consider paying, but lets keep the main focus on free software =) 

[Radium_Angel]

4 hours ago, W0lfie said:

yeah i suspected that i couldn't move my disks without loosing data. i currently have 3 identical disks WD red 3tb witch 2 of them are in RAID 1. but i could transfer the data on the raid disk to my other 3tb drive since i still have room on that one, then move the RAID to a NAS and copy my data there?

Yes, any time you are migrating RAIDs, always have a backup. So yes, move the data to one of your drives, so you have a solid backup, then go to town.

 

4 hours ago, W0lfie said:

But what is the best option when it comes to software? i prefer free but if the difference justify the price then i might consider paying, but lets keep the main focus on free software =) 

Sadly I cannot help with this, as I don't use free RAID solutions (my RAID devices are all dedicated with bespoke software)

I understand FreeNAS is popular, but I have no experience with it