Heya! I’m currently using a Synology DS1819+ which has served me really well, but its getting rather slow for my uses. At the time, and over the years, I’ve looked in to building a NAS using custom hardware but I didn’t particularly like any of the available software solutions. With my Synology I like pretty much everything it does, and it makes it really easy so that I don’t have to think about it. I generally like playing with these kinds of things, but I want things that have to be reliable to “just work” in a sense without me having to fix things unexpectedly. What I don’t like however is that Synology uses an old Linux kernel(currently 4.4.180+) and that it’s rather slow (Intel Atom C3538).
So I’m looking for recommendations on what OS to use for a DIY NAS. My main uses are SMB shares, Docker containers, backup destination and webDAV. I’d like easy user management, no need for virtualization since all applications are going to run as containers, easy disk management for things such as scrubbing, automated SMART tests etc. I’m not afraid of the command line, as long as its simple and reliable. I want to set it up and have it run for 5-10 years, barring hardware issues of course.
As for hardware, I have a general idea of what I’m gonna go with:
6-8 18-22TB HDDs in RAID6 (or ZFS equivalent)
2 SSDs RAID1 to run containers on
1-2 SSDs for read cache, cheap and cheerful will do here
Some modern CPU like the Intel i5-13500 + W680 chipset
64GB of ECC RAM (2 DIMMs, future expansion possible to 128GB)
From my own research I came across these options:
UNRAID - No real RAID, Docker but not really for extensive docker-compose use? Perhaps I’m misguided here.
OpenMediaVault - Tried it in a VM, feels a bit too much like a hobby project. Worried abuot long term reliability and stability
TrueNAS Scale - Seemed like the perfect choice at first, but no native docker-compose support and perhaps in the future no Docker support at all?
Debian - Perhaps the best option? Would have to set up everything from scratch though which feels like a bad idea.
Alternatively, I might wait for the DS1823+ and accept the issues above.
“UNRAID - No real RAID, Docker but not really for extensive docker-compose use? Perhaps I’m misguided here.”
it has ZFS via Plugin atm and will get it nativlely in the next releases. It does any VM you could imagine and the last time i checked it does have docker and docker compose via plugin, you can even install portainer and use that to control any docker you optain via “Appstore”
it has ISCSI via Plugin and a great community in a alot of languages
it does Indeed tickle all your Boxes. You dont “need” to use the Unraid array just put one of your cheapest drives to “use” the array and from there you can build your unraid server like Lego.
i run
12TB as Parity
10TB
10TB
8TB
As “unraid array” with XFS <---- Data/Plex/Backup Grave
and a 2 TB NVME for docker
a 1TB NVME for VMs
and 8x2TB SATA SSD’s as ZFS array for all my Games.
12900 non K
Z790 Asus Board
128GB DDR4
10GBit Mellanox
RTX3060 (Game/Gameserver VM)
This sounds fantastic! I’m gonna look in to Unraid as a serious option then and I might wait until it gets it natively. I would love to build this soon, but there’s no real urgency as the current setup is functional.
All the Docker management features sound good, but I’m more comfortable with Docker via CLI and compose is just awesome
You should add proxmox into the mix. Proxmox does zfs natively. Its primary purpose is to run VMs and containers.
You may also run truenas as a VM.
Boot proxmox off of mirrored zfs SSDs, and have that be used for the boot drives for your virtual machines and containers.
install truenas as one of the virtual machines, give truenas your hard drives and one ssd to accelerate them, the ssd can be both the read cache (l2arc) and write (slog). The slog is not really a write cache, it is only used in case of unexpected power failure.
Servethehome and level1techs youtube channels have both done deployment demonstrations on proxmox.
I’ve considered going down that route several times, but in the end I think I don’t want the complexity that stems from it. Though from a technical standpoint it is a great option.
I did spend an hour or so playing around with Unraid in a VM, but I’m gonna need to spend some more time with it to see what’s what.
