One of the things that I have spent some time playing with is storage solutions for deployment at home. My primary use for a storage server is to store backups from my other systems, media for streaming in my house, and a general dumping ground for files that need to move around machine to machine.
The obvious solution was to go pickup something from Synology, Qnap, or one of the other vendors who build solutions purpose built for this type of thing and deploy that. However a lot of those solutions were at the time priced more for business use rather than deployment at home. As well I got bit in the past with a Western Digital MyCloud that had somewhat lacklustre firmware updates over time resulting in my decision to go shopping around for something a bit more robust for a solution.
Ruling out a purpose built device means that I’m building my own server and the choice comes down to what software is going to be backing the thing once it’s deployed. The only package that I found at the time that would handle the mix of random drives that I had sitting around at the time was Unraid. Unraid’s method of data protection uses a non-standard type of RAID that uses the largest disk in your array to provide protection in the event of a disk failing in the array. Unraid has a good description of the protection they have in place in their user documentation.
Looking at TrueNAS the ZFS pools that it uses have advantages with from a data resiliency standpoint, from a performance standpoint, as well as the ability to pull off some neat tricks with snapshots. However it doesn’t really handle the mixed pile of disks that I was working with at the time, something that was fairly important since I didn’t want toi go out and buy a pile of new disks when I had plenty sitting around collecting dust.
Another thing that people will probably be quick to point out is that Unraid is not a free solution. When I bought the software it was a single purchase based on the number of drives that you are looking to attach to the server. Pricing is similar now but unless you purchase the “Lifetime” version it doesn’t come with lifetime updates, so that’s something that you should be aware of. From my viewpoint I personally prefer free solutions wherever possible however paying out for Unraid got me up and running quicker than I would have been able to if I was going to try to roll my own solution.
Getting Unraid installed on a USB key is fairly straightforward and once you boot the machine that you are going to use as a storage server from the USB device you just select the drives to add to your array, setup your shares, and you are basically up and running. You can get more stuff running as you start bringing containers into the picture but for basic file services it’s not much more complicated than that. Swapping out drives to increase capacity or when one dies is dead simple, provided that your parity devices are working properly.
I’ve run this Unraid server now for a number of years and it’s done pretty much everything that I have needed for a long while, however there are a couple of things that might be nice to have that TrueNAS does do out of the box. The ability to replicate snapshots between two servers, as well as the ability to upload copies of the data to a cloud storage provider makes backing up things much simpler than what’s in place in my Unraid server right now. And yes, there are a number of plugins and other things that can make this type of function happen on a device running Unraid, but none of them are things that have been baked into Unraid by the developers at this point, so I’m reliant on somebody else maintaining and keeping those plugins updated and functional as Limetech does their thing.
So now to the question of what someone reading this blog should do. That’s kind of going to depend on what you need the storage to do for you and what you happen to have laying around.
If you don’t have a existing system that you can reuse as a server then I would have a look at a pre-built solution like what Ugreen, Synology, or Qnap offer. The pricing on the 2 and 4 bay solutions has dropped over the years to a point where you could potentially get a cheaper system to act as a host but it might not really be worth it given the extra work in stuffing the disks into a used machine that wasn’t meant to take them.
If you have a spare machine sitting around with enough SATA ports and NVME sockets to make a usable server and you are going to be purchasing new drives to work with I would be looking at TrueNAS, if you have a pile of mismatched drives that you want to reuse then I would still go with Unraid as long as the drives that you are working with are large enough to offset the price of the Unraid license that you have to purchase instead of putting that money towards a matching set of drives.