I am going from my high power consumption NetApp shelf to a Rosewill 4U chassis. I have 12 2TB SATA WD enterprise drives and a 1.2TB SATA SSD that I want to use for VMs and a cache. I am between going with unraid and FreeNAS. I’m using a supermicro with a 2680 v2, 64gb ECC, and 2 LSi 9217-8i in IT mode. I would like to be able to stream 4k over the network so read speeds are fairly important to me but I’m not doing anything crazy with this NAS. Any pros and cons between the two would be very helpful for my choice.
You probably want freenas unless you’re going to keep your 4k content in cache on unraid.
Unraid is not a raid in any sense of the idea so you only get the throughput of a single disk in terms of speed.
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Freenas is cheaper. Has better support for complex disk arrays, more plugins including Plex, better backup options and easy to port to a new host, will run on a potato and can be hit by a truck but keep swingin.
Unraid is friendlier to VM management, has caching features, more options for device passthrough, is easier to scale / add new disks.
Generally speaking for your situation if suggest testing both on the new hardware with test data and seeing how you go. Pick the one that fits your needs now and in the medium term. Be prepared to migrate your data again in the future.
I’d always recommend people to have flexibility and if you can’t backup and restore your data onto another system in minimal time then your energy needs to go into data resilience rather than upgrades.
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unraid does have a 30 day free trial to figure out if you’re into it or not.
Great! Thank you guys for all the help. I’m waiting for my LSi cards to come in but in the meantime I installed TrueNAS Core.