Shopping for NAS drives, what to look out for?

[ThatGuyB]

@mihawk90

The VM issue is on my main PC where I would have liked to try various different NAS OS’ to see what they offer

Virt-Manager is still the answer, just install libvirt as well and enable libvirtd service with systemctl :

[risk]

@ThatGuyB

However, being just Debian, you can install Portainer, which is an easy GUI to run OCI Containers (docker) on it

So,… Portainer itself usually runs in just another container. It’s independent of the distro you’re using in that way.

You could try it out on your Docker Linux or Docker Windows(WSL2) desktop, and perhaps start off with some nicely documented instructions for nicely packaged containers off of linuxserver.io ; eventually you could move on to other sources of “plugins”, random people’s GitHub repos, and then write and share with others your own Dockerfiles, at some point in the future.

See how Portainer feels for you, and let us know. unRAID might be the right answer for you (with it’s proprietary raid, yuck!) Or maybe just pay more for drives with ZFS, but spend less time
… or maybe start with unRAID and ZFS but move to a more DIY/versatile Linux distro with ZFS in the future.

Theoretically, you could move container setup from one storage distro to another, but if your huge datasets/subvolumes are mapped into your containers, you can’t really move those.

You could actually install your storage distro into a “subvolume” onto your drives that is independent from rest of your data and change the OS that runs on your hardware in the future… I’m not sure how that’ll save you time today - it might make it easier for you to commit to trying something out if you have an easier way out.

[mihawk90]

That is installed already, but for whatever reason my PC thinks Virtualisation is disabled even though I’m pretty sure it used to work and there’s no option in the BIOS I can find. But anyway, that is outside this thread

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Anyway back to the original topic… other then sector size (to a degree) and the recording process, should I look out for anything else?

[2bitmarksman]

@mihawk90

Thing with btrfs is, is there a NAS system that I can just install similar to FreeNAS, but based on btrfs? I would like a couple plugins if possible, mainly a BitTorrent client (probably Deluge), NextCloud (not right away but later on), and Jellyfin (although I know that is not available as a native FreeNAS plugin yet ).

This is screaming Synology to me. Highly recommend the models that support Docker aa this allows you to run basically whatever you fancy with enough RAM.

[mihawk90]

Yeah I was thinking about that for a while but I already have a case from my previous “NAS” (not really a NAS, was really just more of a PC running windows lol), and I also want something to play with

If I were buying something for my parents (which I might at some point to have remote backups for them and for me), I would definitely go Synology or Qnap or whatever though.