Im going to build my first (i stand corrected, second) NAS and i need help choosing the right software.
I would like to be able to use ZFS because it sounds amazing but i would also like to be able to use hard drives of differing sizes in my NAS.
Right now i have a 6TB seagate drive and i am looking to get a couple 8tb WD elements drives to shuck. I want to combine all of these in the NAS.
Primarily this will be a plex server. But i would like to really play around with this. I would like to have an OS that supports some kind of containerization and it would be a big bonus if i could use a VM on the server for playing games in lan with my primary pc.
I have never used ZFS or RAID before. I understand the dataloss risks of a naively configured array.
I know that unraid supports this but that’s about all i know. Does Proxmox? What about other OS’s? Even if i can do this with unraid, should i?
Alternatively, a good idea for what i can do in the nas with that 6tb hard drive without using it with zfs?
I really i have no idea what NAS OS would be best for me. I dont need a gui a command line is fine. I consider myself an relatively advanced user and i would prefer a OS with more customization rather then less, in other words something for me to grow in to.
Personally, I just use a base install of FreeBSD, however if you want a UI to manage a ZFS pool, then check out FreeNAS, now known as TrueNAS Core as of release 12.
Whatever drive you install TrueNAS Core OS to, you won’t be able to use it for data storage, so a small SSD or even a fast USB thumb drive to boot from would be ideal.
I tend to use plain Linux installs as my NAS OS. Fedora, since 2012, and btrfs.
So if you’re comfortable with the command line I would pick a Linux or BSD with good ZFS support and go from there.
Three drives for ZFS is tricky. Easiest would be to use the 6 TB as a boot and miscellaneous drive and not make it part of any ZFS. Put the 8 TB drives into a mirror vdev.
Or using all three drives in RAID you’d have to make 6 TB partitions and lose 2 TB off each 8 TB drive for a (3x6) 12 TB total. (one drive redundancy).
With the mirrored 8s you’d have 8 TB total plus an unprotected 6. Eh.
Or grab another 6 TB and do two mirrored vdevs 2x6 and 2x8, and put them into one pool.
A pool of a single drive would not give me any of the beautiful data redundancy that ZFS can provide which is a big part of the whole reason i want to be using ZFS.
Yeah, Unraid can do this using ZFS. But i recon if Unraid can do it then so can something else, yet i have yet to find anything else that can without it being sketchy.
Thats kinda what im trying to wrap my head around, why is it that ZFS on Unraid will let me do this but not say FreeNAS or Proxmox? Is there something fundamental about ZFS why mixing and matching drives is bad?
Now this is some exciting advice! Cutting out the middle men and strapping something together myself! I definitely want to try this but i don’t really want to start out with it… i don’t think… At least not without first trying something like FreeNAS to get my feet wet a little.
When i was a kid me and my dad tried to setup some network access storage, we were running either windows 95 or 98 at the time and we could not figure it out. Neither one of us knew much about networking at the time. We never did get any kind of NAS up and running.
Currently i have a raspberry pi 3 as a NAS running on raspian with plex and some other things. Which come to think of it is my first NAS… oops. But even accessing the hd on it is so slow… it just wont cut it.
Pardon my rambling, its getting late
Now that you mention it loosing 4tb on the setup might actually be okay if when i expand my storage in the future i can easily reconfigure my storage array to use the full capacity of my 8tb drives. For example, lets say i have to toss this 6tb drive in a year or two and add another one or two 8tb drives, could i then repartition my array to use the full capacity of the drives without danger?
Another 6tb drive is also not a bad idea. With everything in the same pool it would appear to the system as a single drive right? Im still quite green when it comes to storage arrays
AFAIK, the drive size mixing in Unraid is using built in proprietary array software. It is not applicable to the ZFS in Unraid. Any drive size mixing in Unraid is either not using ZFS or has multiple pools AFAIK.
This is the first i am hearing of this! And it would explain a lot. Can any one else chime in if they know more about this? I tried googling it but did not get an definitive answer
Do you mean the parity setup on Unraid? Where the number and sizes of drives can vary, and be mixed up, and the system just uses the whole of the largest drive for parity?
It always seemed odd to me.
They have a pretty decent wiki tho.
I heard they have a plugin for the zfs toolset, but also heard it gets outdated pretty quickly.
@Adubs does Unraid, iirc. and if not, he won’t mess about letting me know otherwise
I’ve heard Proxmox does zfs, but it also seems to do it in a really odd way that put me right off.
No unraid can’t do anything with ZFS that you can’t do with literally any other distro. That means vdev disks will only be as big as the smallest drive in the vdev. Anything larger results in space wasted on the larger disks.
