Hey again! I’ve progressed in my NAS project and I’ve chosen to go for a DIY NAS. I can’t wait for the parts to arrive!

Now I’m a bit struggling to choose an OS. I am starting with 2x10To HDD + 1To NVMe SSD. I plan to use 1 HDD for parity and to add more disks later.

I plan to use this server purely as a NAS because I will be getting a second more powerful server some time next year. But in the meantime, this NAS is a big upgrade over my rpi 4, so I will run some containers or VMs.

I don’t want to go with TrueNAS as I don’t want to use ZFS (my RAM is limited and I’m not sure I can add drives with different sizes). I’ve read btrfs is the second best for NAS, so I may use this.

Unraid seemed like the perfect fit. But the more I read about it, the more I wonder if I shouldn’t switch to Proxmox.

What I like about Unraid is the ability to add a disk without worrying about the size. I don’t care much about the applications Unraid provides and since docker-compose is not fully supported, I’m afraid I won’t be able to do things I could have done easily with a docker-compose.yml I also like that’s it’s easy to share a folder. What I don’t like about Unraid is the cache system and the mover. I understand why the system works this way but I’m not a fan.

I’ve asked myself if I needed instant parity for all my data and if I should put everything in the array.

The thing is that for some of my data I don’t care about parity. For instance, I’m good with only backing up my application data and to have parity for the backup. For my tv shows I don’t care about parity nor backup while I want both for my photos.

After some more research, I found mergerfs and snapraid. I feel that they are more flexible and fix the cache/mover issue from Unraid. Although I’m not sure if snapraid can run with only 2 disks.

If I go with Proxmox I think I would use OpenMediaVault to setup shares.

Is anyone using something like this? What are your recommendations?

Thanks!

  • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    9 months ago

    “Need” is a strong word. But yes BRTFS RAID 5/6 is unstable but unless you’re only after space efficiency RAID 5/6 shouldn’t be used at all, those shames will put you on the worst position possible if something fails (and also low throughput). When you try to rebuild a RAID 5 with large drives it will probably go into days and you’ll be risking the failure of a second drive and lose everything right there.

    Btw, give a try to Cockpit as well. If you don’t require much of the advances features that Proxmox / Incus offer and just a bunch of VMs then it should be enough.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      “Need” is a strong word. But yes BRTFS RAID 5/6 is unstable but unless you’re only after space efficiency RAID 5/6 shouldn’t be used at all, those shames will put you on the worst position possible if something fails (and also low throughput). When you try to rebuild a RAID 5 with large drives it will probably go into days and you’ll be risking the failure of a second drive and lose everything right there.

      I’ve had a RAID5 for 10+ years, had drives fail and I’ve replaced them. Rebuilds are fine and rare. It’s very unlikely to have two drives fail within a week of each other and I don’t want to only get 1/2 my disk space. RAID6 makes that small chance even smaller. If you’re worried about loss you have backups - RAID is for uptime not recovery.

      You seem to think the way you’ve done things is the one and true right way to do it and that’s not the case.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        9 months ago

        You seem to think the way you’ve done things is the one and true right way to do it and that’s not the case.

        Not at all and I totally agree with what you’ve said. To clarify things, I’m not the only one saying people should stay away from RAID 5/6, even large vendors say that nowadays, and the issue is when a drive fails, if you’ve to run for hours to get a new one rebuild a second hard drive is highly likely to fail on that time - specially if they’ve the same runtime, model etc.

        Obviously that having a real backup will solve the issue, as long as you can retrieve the data from the backup quickly and cheaply enough and that’s not always the case.

        • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          if you’ve to run for hours to get a new one rebuild a second hard drive is highly likely to fail on that time - specially if they’ve the same runtime, model etc.

          If you’re running a 2-disk RAID-1 you have the same problem.

          And I restate - that risk is small. You’re not running a data center where you have thousands of disks to see the effect.

          • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            And I restate - that risk is small. You’re not running a data center where you have thousands of disks to see the effect.

            Fair enough, even though I’ve seen that effect in smaller setups than that.