Hello all, long-time lurker and first-time call-, uh, writer here. I am planning to build a NAS in the next couple of years for use as a backup location and media storage, and I have a general idea of what kind of hardware I will be running (server-grade board and CPU, ECC RAM, 8-12 drives with at least 3 drives worth of redundancy, redundant PSU, and almost certainly one of those LSI RAID cards flashed to the “just be a go-between for the CPU and the drives” mode.) My question is: Assuming that my main concern is data integrity, and that I do not mind giving up Unraid’s/BTRFS’ ability to seamlessly expand a storage pool, which is the better choice between unraid/BTRFS or TrueNAS/ZFS?
Stay far away from BTRFS if you are going to be running parity and care about data integrity.
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I had read that BTRFS had issues with parity, but I could not find anything more recent than 2017 on it, so I was not sure if that issue had been addressed. I guess it has not. Thank you for your input.
FreeBSD and ZFS but if you need a GUI TrueNAS Core
Be aware that bleeding edge hardware may give you some issues…
I actually build something similar myself recently although I plan to use it for a bit more than just storage…
CPU: Ryzen 9 7900 (non X, 65W TDP)
Motherboard: ASUS ProArt X670E-CREATOR WIFI (one of the very few boards that split PCIe slots into 2x 8x and supports ECC)
Memory: 2x Micron 32GB DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMM 2Rx8 CL40 ( MTC20C2085S1EC48BR same as MTC20C2085S1EC48BA1R according to Crucial customer services)
NVME: Crucial P5 Plus 2TB (they were on sale and just works, decent performance) - If you want something better Solidigm P44 Pro is what you want without breaking the bank
I would highly recommend you to look at 12Gb/s LSI HBA since the older 8Gb/s are EoL. I have a few 8Gb/s HBAs around but I haven’t tested one in this box yet.
If you go with that motherboard, pay attention to that you need 2 EPS12V and a 6-pin PCIe cable in addition to the ATX cable.
I have no idea if TrueNAS works (latest version seems to be based on 13.1) but it runs fine on FreeBSD -CURRENT (soon to be 14.0).
here you will find good information on the topic.
If data integrity is your most important point, then get a Supermicro Server Board and use ZFS on FreeBSD or Solaris.