Hi I just bought this https://www.ebay.ie/itm/HP-DL380e-G8-Storage-Rack-Server-14x-LFF-Intel-Xeon-Six-6-Core-16GB-RAM-2U-Gen8/143094974214?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649 and I am wondering which OS I should use. I want to use it as a general file server, for plex and to rss torrents directly to. I like the redundancy that zfs provides but I hear that btrfs is more flexible with adding drives to the pool.
I plan to add a Quadro K2200 for hardware transcoding.
Any help would be much appreciated
Thanks
Freenas.
Unraid is only good if you like losing data. Seriously though, unraid doesn’t provide any of the benefits that ZFS does.
More importantly, unraid doesn’t use btrfs the way you think. It creates an individual partition for each disk, not a pool. Then it uses it’s proprietary fakeraid software to distribute files across the disks.
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So what if he loses a disk, it isn’t his PhD dissertation or great American novel, we’re talking pirated Supergirl episodes and anime porn here. That said, Unraid works perfectly fine, does offer redundancy, and while ZFS has a number of super-techie advantages in terms of bitrot and such, most people won’t care about any of that stuff.
I haven’t tried unraid but I think I might. I’m not a huge fan of freenas but I’m still using it and it does work… I’m just not a fan. The ideal solution to me would be a roll your own server with zfs support.
Unraid is neat on paper so could be a case of greener grass.
I also want to get into xpenology.
It is.
I’ve used it. Got burned by it.
I think to a certain extent, unraid is for a different purpose. Maybe I’m wrong here, but to me unraid makes sense for someone who wants to virtualize many things on one system. You can do that with freenas too, and I havent had any issues with bhyve, but I would have different expectations for each.
Yeah, that’s their big sell. turnkey passthrough.
Also I believe freenas cant use nvidia cards for plex transcoding because the driver wont work. I dont have any experience to confirm. I remember @freqlabs mentioning something about this.
XPenology I would definitely pass on. Fun to mess around, but not something I would use for my NAS which has to “just work”.
That could be said about a lot of options tbh.
cough
cough
Unraid isn’t free, FreeNAS is, I’d use FreeNAS.
As for the GPU encoding there might be a way to make it work but I’ve not had a chance to try and to my understanding it works best with Intel’s on-cpu media acceleration features.
i gave freenas a try before digging into unraid, i have to say the biggest point for me, is that unraid just works, super simple to setup and have containers and VM running. i have had disk died and never lost data.
definitely unraid is a lot more user friendly and for someone that does not really like to learn anything new but just have a file server running a few commodity containers running. unraid is the way to go.
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the only benefit i know of with unraid is that it does not speed up every drive to write, So it could extended the lifespan of your non parity drives but at the cost of the speed gain you get with striping.
I’ve been using Unraid for some time now and I suspect a bit of FUD going on here.
Unraid supports parity drives so it’s as reliable in that department as you configure it to be. Remember though that parity is not backup. This goes for FreeNAS as well. Always have a separate backup solution no matter which system you go with.
Now, back to the safety of your data on Unraid. Should you lose all of your parity drives and a data drive, you will lose data on both Unraid and FreeNAS. If this happens on FreeNAS, your data is likely gone without backups. With Unraid, you will still have the data that resides on your surviving drives that is accessible by any system capable of reading XFS format.
—>You can’t do this on a traditional RAID.<—
Where some people get into trouble is that you can also set up a cache pool using SSDs with BTRFS. File shares set to utilize the cache pool will benefit from faster file copies but the files reside on the cache until a nightly automated mover script places it on the array (You can configure this behavior).
If you only have 1 cache drive and you copy a file and it sits on the cache, you don’t have parity protection until it is moved to the array and your files are at greater risk until this happens. If this is a concern to you, invest in a second SSD, or set the critical file share to not use the cache (or simply don’t set it up).
There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems but I’d hate for there to be misconceptions on how Unraid works. It’s fairly straightforward when you think about it.
That said, I think it’s important to repeat. Have a separate backup solution no matter what you go with. Neither a RAID nor UnRaid are infallible solutions.
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If you want a HTPC plus file server, then FreeNAS will better service what you want. Running FreeNAS as a VM with an HBA passed through for the purpose that OP wants
I’m curious why you feel that FreeNAS is better for what OP wants?
OP mentioned that he wants:
- A general file server
- Plex
- RSS torrents direct download
Also mentioned a desire for GPU hardware encoding for plex as a possibility.
There’s nothing there that can’t be done with UnRaid very well. As a bonus, Unraid allows for greater flexibility in managing future expansion in your drive array, something that FreeNAS isn’t as good at.
You wan’t several VM’s with GPU or other PCIe passthrough? Unraid can do that. You want to set up various dockers to add services so they are compartmentalized and use up minimal resources? No problem, and it even has a tidy UI for that.
As I said, there are pros and cons to each. I don’t think one is vastly better than the other for the stated purposes as far as features are concerned.
Biggest differences:
- Raid array, vs non raid array (Cache Pool, vs striping for performance)
- Free vs Paid (plus customer support)
- Jails vs Docker containers
- BSD vs Linux
Is there anything I missed?
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no it’s not, I do not want a htpc. i want to watch my content wherever i want, and keep track of it while keeping a backup of my files so I don’t lose anything
Why not try both? FreeNAS is free and Unraid is free to try. I would recommend giving them both a shot and seeing which one you’re more comfortable with. I’ve tried both and Prefer FreeNAS due to it’s robust feature-set. But the beauty of it is you can make that determination yourself.
Oh and don’t forget about your storage controllers. If you intend on using more than 4 of the drive bays in you machine, you’ll likely want to get an HBA (or 2) (flashed to IT mode) to handle the additional drives.
Let us know how it turns out.