Looking for Storage Solution recommendations

[zaraki1311]

Hello, I am looking for a little advice and or recommendations on a storage solution for my home network.

Currently I am running a QNAP ts-1679u-rp with all 16 bays loaded primarily with 4tb drives and a few 8s in raid 6+ hot spare and an nvme cache disk the system is 8-10 years old and the 4tb drives are mostly the same age. It is primarily my media storage for a PLEX vm on a another machine, it also hosts all the backups of my home lab and personal machines and I am starting to run out of space… Originally when I bought the system it was a reasonable price and the expansion unit was also a reasonable price, turns out that is not the case anymore and the expansion unit is more than I paid for the original machine…

Over the past few years I had started replacing failing drives with 8tb to expand the capacity but I have only added maybe 3 drives and I have a 4 bay usb enclosure with 2x8tb and 2x10tb drives so I am technically half way ish to replacing all. So now I am in a situation where I should be expecting some failures in the current NAS hardware wise such as fans, PSU and so on. I have explored a few options to just replace the system and try to make it easier to expand the storage and not break the bank such as setting up truenas or unraid or just buying another QNAP and keep the old QNAP running as a monthly backup for critical stuff.

So where I am looking for some input is what are some good option that are not crazy expensive that will be a it just works solution where expansion will be easier either by not needing to replace 16x drives or that an expansion unit exist that isn’t crazy expensive. rack mount would be preferred but not a requirement, ability to have an ssd cache, 10g sfp+ preferred but not a requirement, it doesn’t need to have a crazy powerful cpu or anything as this is just for storage and not running any applications outside of what is needed to store data.

[risk]

@zaraki1311

truenas or unraid

Have you looked at perfectmediaserver.com with mergerfs and snapraid.

There’s no expectation of drives having same size, you can add/remove upgrade drives as you feel like.

Basically you use the drives, when you run out of space you get an additional drive of whatever is the cheapest $/TB at the time and keep going.

Folks use it the approach with cheap 8th gen or 10th gen Intel chips because they get quick sync for media transcoding.

[Dutch_Master]

An AMD B450 or X470 ATX mainboard with Ryzen 1700 and 32GB RAM would be a good start. Put it in a 24-bay rack mount enclosure and you’re halfway there. Add some HBA’s or simple PCIe-to-SATA adapters and a 400-550W PSU and TrueNAS Core as your OS and you’re basically set for a while. Drives is gonna be a pain, large capacity drives remain in the higher price segment for a while. But for the “money no option” unlimited budget build, the all-SSD 100TB ExaDrive LTT reviewed a while back would be a valid contender (mind: those set you back a cool 40k per drive )

True, you would need a GPU in order for it to boot, but as you’re not transcoding, a simple GT710 is the easiest/cheapest solution. Alternatively, consider the Gigabyte MJ11-EC0 mainboard. It’s Epyc based (so no GPU required), still 8-core/16-thread and comes with the 3151 SoC + cooler already installed. Does cost around 500 USD though, and you still need RAM for it. ECC or non-ECC is fine, so simple DDR4 to save a buck or 2

HTH!