I have some spare parts from a recent upgrade, so I’m diving into a self build NAS.
I’ve never installed any NAS OS in the past, so which way do I go?
I also have 8 drives, 4x 4TB 4x 2TB plus a few spare 2.5" SSD’s
Do I RAID or JBOD?
Hardware:
My mobo has 4 SATA ports, so I’d need a new controller with at least 4x more ports. Can anyone recommend a 4+ port controller?
The 4x 4TB drives are old, going on for 5 years and are showing their age. So they’re the likeliest to fail first. So RAID on these could be asking for trouble. Or create a seperate RAID 0 and hope the OS shares the load across them reducing the likelihood of a failure.
I also have multiple ethernet ports on the Mobo and could add more. So multi IO would be nice.
The 4x 2TB are going to be brand new, and the size isn’t an issue. All my data will fit into 8TB with room to spare. So no big deal there.
The RAM isn’t parity ECC. Just standard DDR4. So no fancy filesystems.
Software:
I have used debian for raspberry Pi’s and DietPi for x86, so I’m familiar with it. That means I’d prefer debian for the NAS OS, but it’s NOT essential.
I’d also like to play with things like built in apps (containers), add/remove containers/apps at will, even those that aren’t included with the OS.
There’s probably more I’d like to do in future, especially LAMP stacks, containers, maybe using the current drive (1TB SSD) and OS in a VM so I don’t lose anything.
Given your preference for Debian (not a bad choice in itself, although IMO they made some bad decisions so I don’t use it anymore), using Proxmox as your OS is actually a natural choice.
For your hardware: use plain RAID6 on your 4TB drives. Two drive redundancy but still 8TB of storage. You could add the 2TB drives in another RAID6 as a hot-spare to the original pool. It doesn’t increase your storage capacity, but massively increases redundancy and therefore chances of your data surviving a triple drive failure. To further reduce the risk of failing HDD’s, use the largest SSD as cache for the RAID6. It’ll still write to the drives, but significantly reduces the amount of read- requests to them. One thing:
NEVER.USE.HARDWARE.RAID.PERIOD!
And similarly: RAID is NOT A BACKUP!
On Aliexpress there are PCIe cards with multiple SATA ports (up to 10, IIRC) for not a lot of money. Here’s an example:
You may want a different version or vendor, feel free to hunt around for better deals.
TrueNAS is a great OS for NAS use, but it’s based on BSD, which does things differently then Linux would under the hood. So, effectively you’d be starting from square one and not utilise, nor expand, your Linux knowledge. Your call, really.
You could do TrueNAS Scale, which is Debian based, so you dont have to relearn much.
Their preferred way of interacting with it though, is strictly through their webUI which limits some of the cooler use case you can think of with Linux. They wont prevent you from using the CLI to do stuff you want to do but it will break things.
TrueNAS will work without the ECC but it is certainly nice to have. Mine works fine even without one. The official TrueNAS app repo is sparse, but you can add the community repo TrueCharts.
