I aimed for FreeNAS and ZFS while buying my hardware. I think I have that part covered:
Fractal Design Node 804 (10 drive bays)
AsRock B450M-HDV R4.0
AMD Athlon 200GE
Corsair DDR4-2400 (2 x 8Gb)
Dell PERC H310 HBA card
4 x 3TB HGST SAS drives
1 Kingston 128Gb NVME M.2
Due to discounts, rebates, smart shopping etc. total outlay +/- $400
Waiting for the last parts to arrive, I am seized with indecision now about what sort of OS to install.
I have four HD IP cameras to record monitoring my house and property 24x7x365
I have a modest library of BlueRay and DVD I want to share
I would like VPN access to the NAS when I travel
Adding future mismatched drive sizes to expand would be nice
I have run a couple of Synology NAS the last five years, two of which had fatal power supply failures. Not a great confidence builder.
-FreeNAS ZFS seems now to be overkill for my needs, and hardware resource intensive
-Amahi seems a good match, but the file duplication in lieu of RAID is confusing me
-OMV looks and sounds good in function, but install and setup seems more Linux like
-Handful of others seem to be lesser versions of the above choices, mostly
I have run Manjaro on my desktop for the past four years, dual boot to Windows 10 when I absolutely have to. I can do the install and update maintenance for Linux if need be, but I really would like a “set and forget” NAS operating system. (A drop to Linux prompt to run background programs and BOINC would be very nice, though.) Lord knows I have weeks of overdue maintenance out in the yard to get to, in my shortened post-60s workdays.
Any experience, suggestions as to the best way to proceed would be very much appreciated.
I used FreeNAS for several years it is great. I’m currently running Ubuntu with ZFS as my home server. It work very well also. Setup on FreeNAS is easier, whereas there is some CLI config needed for Ubuntu. I have no complaints with either.
I don’t mind a challenging techno install process, so long as I can spend an intensive week or so building, then walk away for a few years and forget about it. Synology are great for that, but lightning surges even on backup blow out their tender power supplies, apparently.
I want to build my own so in the case of catastrophic hardware failure, I can still read and recover disks in a standard Linux box.
From what I can gather, FreeNAS with ZFS works best with same-sized disks in the pool to avoid wasting surplus storage space, and has the standard RAID penalty for a parity disk. I don’t currently understand whether storage can be expanded by adding disks 5, 6, 7, 8 etc.
On the other, simplistic, mindless end … Amahi appears to gobble whatever size disk you plug in and merge them all into a single pool. I read some things it offers about file duplication, not sure if that can be automated and just how secure that would be in recovery situation.
I am pretty fond of the idea when saving, say, a 20GB file the OS looks for the drive with most space to write, rather than striping it across all the disks. It also appears some system will only spin up the single disk needed to read, rather than keep ALL platters spinning ALL the time.
The depth of my ignorance is pretty clear to me, which is why I asked y’all here.
" SnapRAID is instead more similar at a backup solution, and you can restore the state of the last backup. For example, with SnapRAID, if you delete by accident a file, you can easily restore it.
Others advantages over traditional RAID5/6 solutions are:
All your data is hashed to ensure data integrity and to avoid silent corruption.
If the failed disks are too many to allow a recovery, you lose the data only on the failed disks. All the data in the other disks is safe.
If you accidentally delete some files in a disk, you can recover them.
You can start with already filled disks.
The disks can have different sizes.
You can add disks at any time.
It doesn’t lock-in your data. You can stop using SnapRAID at any time without the need to reformat or move data.
To access a file, a single disk needs to spin, saving power and producing less noise.
You can have up to six parity levels compared to the one of RAID5 and the two of RAID6.
Obviously RAID has other advantages, like having a better speed due data striping. What is best for you, depends on your specific use case."
If you want to run Zoneminder on the FreeNAS box for IP camera ingenstion, I’ll let you know that’s going to push the Athlon along with the rest of it’s duties. This also heavily depends on the steam Zoneminder will be getting it’s feeds from (resolution and FPS). Also raw Zoneminder footage, if you are doing 24x7x365 recording vs recording triggered events is going to eat up a lot of space.
For IP camera recording, Synology/Ubiquiti is better about that.
