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What is a good OS for a NAS?

grimreeper132
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I need an OS for my NAS which has a core 2 duo CPU, it also has to have a GUI as that makes my life easier in this case than a web GUI. I also have a SAS RAID card in it (with 8X2TB HDDs, which will be in RAID 6 giving 12TB of usable storage.) I have a 32GB SSD for a boot drive and basic programmes etc. I also need to have three partitions on the NAS one of which needs to be encypted and all three need to be divided so only certain users can have access to each partition. 

e.g.

account A only has access to volume 1+2+3

account B only has access to volume 1+2

account C only has access to volume 2+3

(not the actual access that they will have but close enough)

 

 

PC Specs

core 2 duo E6600 (I think)

6GB of RAM 

8400 GS (display adapter)

HP P400 RAID Card

8X2TB HDD

1X32GB SSD

The owner of "too many" computers, called

The Lord of all Toasters (1920X 1080ti 32GB)

The Toasted Controller (i5 4670, R9 380, 24GB)

The Semi Portable Toastie machine (i7 3612QM (was an i3) intel HD 4000 16GB)'

Bread and Butter Pudding (i7 7700HQ, 1050ti, 16GB)

Pinoutbutter Sandwhich (raspberry pi 3 B)

The Portable Slice of Bread (N270, HAHAHA, 2GB)

Muffinator (C2D E6600, Geforce 8400, 6GB, 8X2TB HDD)

Toastbuster (WIP, should be cool)

loaf and let dough (A printer that doesn't print black ink)

The Cheese Toastie (C2D (of some sort), GTX 760, 3GB, win XP gaming machine)

The Toaster (C2D, intel HD, 4GB, 2X1TB NAS)

Matter of Loaf and death (some old shitty AMD laptop)

windybread (4X E5470, intel HD, 32GB ECC) (use coming soon, maybe)

And more, several more

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I realy like freenas. light wait but needs 8GB of ram do. had it runnning on 4GB of ram and took a slide hit in performance. 

http://www.freenas.org

"i reject your reality and substitute my own"

          --- Workstion --- GamePc ---   

"College great Dropout Engineering"

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FreeNAS is a free solution. I personally paid one-time fee for unRAID.

It does not have ZFS, instead uses XFS and Btrfs. Also KVM for VMs and Docker containers (don't know about FreeNAS support there).

HAL9000: AMD Ryzen 9 3900x | Noctua NH-D15 chromax.black | 32 GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200 MHz | Asus X570 Prime Pro | ASUS TUF 3080 Ti | 1 TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus + 1 TB Crucial MX500 + 6 TB WD RED | Corsair HX1000 | be quiet Pure Base 500DX | LG 34UM95 34" 3440x1440

Hydrogen server: Intel i3-10100 | Cryorig M9i | 64 GB Crucial Ballistix 3200MHz DDR4 | Gigabyte B560M-DS3H | 33 TB of storage | Fractal Design Define R5 | unRAID 6.9.2

Carbon server: Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX100 S7p | Xeon E3-1230 v2 | 16 GB DDR3 ECC | 60 GB Corsair SSD & 250 GB Samsung 850 Pro | Intel i340-T4 | ESXi 6.5.1

Big Mac cluster: 2x Raspberry Pi 2 Model B | 1x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B | 2x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

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i will use open media vault with mine that i will build this summer. i chose it over freenas because the arrays are expandable. FreeNAS uses zfs which is not (i know you can add more vdevs but you will have to add more redundancy too)

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Both FreeNAS and unRAID using BTRFS don't recommend using raid cards. As they are both software raid solutions. To do it properly your raid card needs to support jbod mode, passthough, or HBA Mode (basically all the same thing people just call them different names).

 

Unfortunately the HP P400 RAID card does not support this, from what I understand. Now you have some options,

  • if you motherboard had enough ports just use the on board SATA ports.
  • you can buy a new raid card that supports jbod
  • you can just use the current raid card and put each disk into its own raid 0 array. (By the end you should have 8 raid 0 volumes at ~2TB each.)
  • You could just use the raid card's built in raid function and just setup the OS to that. (you do loose functionality software raid would have given you.)
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As you can see FreeNAS is popular and well free... and unRAID is a great paid option, and i think its only 60$  freenas has things like plex apps and other with make it really fun to use. before you deploy any server I recommend creating a virtual system and testing it with your workload to see how you like it. 

I  have GameServer`s And VOIP servers the only price is that you have fun on them. 

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1 hour ago, Catsrules said:

Both FreeNAS and unRAID using BTRFS don't recommend using raid cards. As they are both software raid solutions. To do it properly your raid card needs to support jbod mode, passthough, or HBA Mode (basically all the same thing people just call them different names).

 

Unfortunately the HP P400 RAID card does not support this, from what I understand. Now you have some options,

  • if you motherboard had enough ports just use the on board SATA ports.
  • you can buy a new raid card that supports jbod
  • you can just use the current raid card and put each disk into its own raid 0 array. (By the end you should have 8 raid 0 volumes at ~2TB each.)
  • You could just use the raid card's built in raid function and just setup the OS to that. (you do loose functionality software raid would have given you.)

I as far as I can see can still put partitions on the hardware RAID so yea. As for the OS FreeNAS looks quite good and alot of people are recommending it.

 

2 hours ago, Swealteek said:

I realy like freenas. light wait but needs 8GB of ram do. had it runnning on 4GB of ram and took a slide hit in performance. 

http://www.freenas.org

I think I can get away with 6GB yea I think that it would work fine.

The owner of "too many" computers, called

The Lord of all Toasters (1920X 1080ti 32GB)

The Toasted Controller (i5 4670, R9 380, 24GB)

The Semi Portable Toastie machine (i7 3612QM (was an i3) intel HD 4000 16GB)'

Bread and Butter Pudding (i7 7700HQ, 1050ti, 16GB)

Pinoutbutter Sandwhich (raspberry pi 3 B)

The Portable Slice of Bread (N270, HAHAHA, 2GB)

Muffinator (C2D E6600, Geforce 8400, 6GB, 8X2TB HDD)

Toastbuster (WIP, should be cool)

loaf and let dough (A printer that doesn't print black ink)

The Cheese Toastie (C2D (of some sort), GTX 760, 3GB, win XP gaming machine)

The Toaster (C2D, intel HD, 4GB, 2X1TB NAS)

Matter of Loaf and death (some old shitty AMD laptop)

windybread (4X E5470, intel HD, 32GB ECC) (use coming soon, maybe)

And more, several more

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26 minutes ago, grimreeper132 said:

I think I can get away with 6GB yea I think that it would work fine.

Yeah I would bet you could get away with 6GB. I wouldn't recommend running any VMs or plugging with only 6GB that would probably push it over the limit.

Another thought, if you happen to have a spare 8-16GB USB drive, I would install Freenas on a USB drive instead of the SSD. That way you could use the SSD for caching your data, maybe get a little bit better performance on popular files. 

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6 minutes ago, Technomancer__ said:

i will use open media vault with mine that i will build this summer. i chose it over freenas because the arrays are expandable. FreeNAS uses zfs which is not (i know you can add more vdevs but you will have to add more redundancy too)

Unfortunately the only way to "expand" a zfs pool is to replace all of the drives in the pool with bigger ones. That is a big limitation with ZFS unfortunately :( 

 

I believe this feature is coming,

https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/openzfs-raid-z-online-expansion-project-announcement/

 

Last I heard it might be in FreeNAS 12. So maybe in a year or two.

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5 minutes ago, Catsrules said:

Yeah I would bet you could get away with 6GB. I wouldn't recommend running any VMs or plugging with only 6GB that would probably push it over the limit.

Another thought, if you happen to have a spare 8-16GB USB drive, I would install Freenas on a USB drive instead of the SSD. That way you could use the SSD for caching your data, maybe get a little bit better performance on popular files. 

I do have a flash drive but I would rather have it on a SSD as I don't have great experience with flash drives 

The owner of "too many" computers, called

The Lord of all Toasters (1920X 1080ti 32GB)

The Toasted Controller (i5 4670, R9 380, 24GB)

The Semi Portable Toastie machine (i7 3612QM (was an i3) intel HD 4000 16GB)'

Bread and Butter Pudding (i7 7700HQ, 1050ti, 16GB)

Pinoutbutter Sandwhich (raspberry pi 3 B)

The Portable Slice of Bread (N270, HAHAHA, 2GB)

Muffinator (C2D E6600, Geforce 8400, 6GB, 8X2TB HDD)

Toastbuster (WIP, should be cool)

loaf and let dough (A printer that doesn't print black ink)

The Cheese Toastie (C2D (of some sort), GTX 760, 3GB, win XP gaming machine)

The Toaster (C2D, intel HD, 4GB, 2X1TB NAS)

Matter of Loaf and death (some old shitty AMD laptop)

windybread (4X E5470, intel HD, 32GB ECC) (use coming soon, maybe)

And more, several more

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Just now, Catsrules said:

Unfortunately the only way to "expand" a zfs pool is to replace all of the drives in the pool with bigger ones. That is a big limitation with ZFS unfortunately :( 

 

I believe this feature is coming,

https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/openzfs-raid-z-online-expansion-project-announcement/

 

Last I heard it might be in FreeNAS 12. So maybe in a year or two.

 

3 hours ago, jj9987 said:

FreeNAS is a free solution. I personally paid one-time fee for unRAID.

It does not have ZFS, instead uses XFS and Btrfs. Also KVM for VMs and Docker containers (don't know about FreeNAS support there).

I won't be expanding this NAS in all reality as it will be 12TB which will be fine for now I would imagine

The owner of "too many" computers, called

The Lord of all Toasters (1920X 1080ti 32GB)

The Toasted Controller (i5 4670, R9 380, 24GB)

The Semi Portable Toastie machine (i7 3612QM (was an i3) intel HD 4000 16GB)'

Bread and Butter Pudding (i7 7700HQ, 1050ti, 16GB)

Pinoutbutter Sandwhich (raspberry pi 3 B)

The Portable Slice of Bread (N270, HAHAHA, 2GB)

Muffinator (C2D E6600, Geforce 8400, 6GB, 8X2TB HDD)

Toastbuster (WIP, should be cool)

loaf and let dough (A printer that doesn't print black ink)

The Cheese Toastie (C2D (of some sort), GTX 760, 3GB, win XP gaming machine)

The Toaster (C2D, intel HD, 4GB, 2X1TB NAS)

Matter of Loaf and death (some old shitty AMD laptop)

windybread (4X E5470, intel HD, 32GB ECC) (use coming soon, maybe)

And more, several more

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