Home NAS

[routerdork]

I've run my Synology for about 4-5 years and the CPU/RAM can no longer take the abuse. I'm curious what others are using?

I was doing some reading up on them and it seems that most brand name units are very underpowered for the price. The free options seem to have a lot going for them, one of them is actually based on the Synology software.

I'm looking at alternatives like FreeNAS, NAS4Free, OpenMediaVault, and XPEnology running off of something with a bit more horsepower.

[Reggle]

I've tried FreeNAS and it seems to perform quite well for basic file sharing. Other than that I can't really say. Thinking of just using Linux for the next one.

[routerdork]

I've got a couple old PC's with Core 2 Duo's/Quad's sitting in a closet. I'm thinking about loading one up with the different versions and seeing how easy they are to use and which fits my needs best before I do any major hardware shopping.

[Reggle]

If you can, do it. That way you're certain.

[SimonV]

Also running FreeNAS but it's rather basic. My colleagues are raving about Qnap and I must say it does look way more equipped.

[wintermute000]

Qnap is way amazing if you want the gear to do it all for you. Ditto with synology. Dockers and everything. You'll also pay the tax in terms of pitiful cores/RAM per $$$ and be limited to the number of HD slots the chassis comes with.

OTOH, Freenas has ZFS, so that's basically end of argument if you worry about data integrity. mmm snapshots as well.
I also have more slots than any reasonably affordable QNAP/synology - 6 rust platters + 2x SSDs (for iSCSI for homelab). And IPMI. And not a Celeron. LOL
Heck, if your linux fu is strong, you can run SAMBA4 as a full blown domain controller.

Don't forget Freenas does BSD jails. Aside from the usual Plex/transmission/sickbeard/couchpotato etc., I can confirm that phpvirtualbox works fine. So that means any VM.  
I also run plex and bittorrent-sync to my seedbox. Basically handles any/all of my 24x7 requirements. If I specced more RAM on it I could have thrown my lab management servers on it too, but I didn't LOL and not bothering to spend the money on the convenience (of having to boot up and wait for 1 less box when I'm labbing). When I built my Freenas, virtualbox was still a bit dicey so I didn't think about it at the time, regretting it now.

Whatever you do, read the FAQs i.e. ZFS NEEDS ECC RAM (and lots of it), end of story. Otherwise you're running a risk of a single bit flip corrupting your entire array at any point silently. Don't even think about Freenas without ECC, go with openfiler or xpenology etc. (the latter is a ripoff of synology firmware remixed for standard PC hw).


Since you're a geek like the rest of us, highly recommend a Xeon E3 (wait a bit for sky-lake E3s.... 64Gb RAM limit now. Yes) and go to town with at least 32Gb RAM. Pick something that will virtualise - go native linux and just run regular softraid + KVM/ovirt for maximum geek points. Buy a server grade board with lots of SATA3 slots (at least 6), dual NIC and IPMI.

If you have a lot of storage and/or want ZFS, then Freenas, but your virt options is limited to BSD jails/virtualbox. Be careful re: compatibility, BSD is nowhere as nice as linux.
If you want to make it more NAS like, buy a nice big case with lots of 5.25 slots and install hot-swap brackets so you can swap out drives from the front.

[routerdork]

Snapshots got my attention reading through docs yesterday. I like that.

I had to pull out half of my RAM from my R710 (too much power draw for the Energy Smart PS once I added an SSD). So I've got 96GB that just needs a box  I've also got a matched set of Xeon X5500's that came on a DOA SuperMicro board. So if I can find something that will use those that would be awesome. Biggest piece will be finding the right case. I would prefer hot-swap and a minimum of 8 drive bays if I go this route. I had a 4U 24 bay case I threw out several years ago 

Hopefully this weekend I'll have some time to put it on an old system and see how it works out.

[mmcgurty]

I am just going to leave this here in case it interests you.

https://slickdeals.net/f/8539035-synology-8-bay-ds1815-diskless-system-network-storage-850-free-s-h

[routerdork]

I'd love to buy another Synology but I want to do my research on other options first. I started on FreeNAS last night. PITA! Couldn't get the installer to boot. Then once I got it to boot it went through fine. Now the PC it's on though doesn't recognize the USB as a boot device. So BIOS upgrades over the weekend to see if that makes it easier. I will warn anyone doing this, install takes a bit even when it looks like it's doing nothing. Patience.

[routerdork]

So a follow-up on this. I got FreeNAS running on a spare desktop PC and it ran fine for about a week. Now it just croaks when I reboot it. PC pings but nothing from FreeNAS. I ended up finding an older Synology DS409+ with 4x1TB on CraigsList for cheap. So I'm going to use that for my security cameras to take the steady load off my DS411. I'm also now using a VM on my R710 for Plex. So the DS411 is really only serving up the NFS datastore rather than croaking constantly on the transcoding.

FreeNAS would be a great option but I'm not going to mess with getting different hardware for it right now. Though if we get rid of any of these R710's we have sitting at work I might fix one up for a NAS