I’m working on building a NAS for a media server and I’m trying to figure out what OS to choose. I’m not apposed to paying for something if it’s worth it, but free and open source is always appreciated. Drive pooling is a must and support for raid would definitely be a pro. On top of that I’d like to run all the arr’s, Plex, Tautulli, and a few other things. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
Thanks, TC370
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I like synology for simplicity. And because I believe it‘s hard to get proper alternatives for synology drive and photos
Is there a legit way to run synology software on a custom nas?
TrueNAS Scale if you want something relatively easy to use with prebuilt applications (see TrueCharts)
Debian with ZFS and Docker would be my recommendation.
I use open media vault at work. It’ll run on a potato.
unraid 100%
I’ve only ever used Windows. Isn’t finding drivers on those other OSes a headache?
Same
Certainly some variation of linux, but there are many of those. For drive pooling, your options are btrfs or zfs. Of those, zfs is the most mature and capable - the only drawback is that once you make a pool you can’t easily change the number of drives in it. A small limitation.
Drive pooling as ZFS does it is a replacement for RAID. You generally don’t need RAID these days, except for fault-tolerant boot drives in high-availability servers.
Ignore the ZFS “1GB per TB” thing. It’s old advice. Use, ZFS does like lots-o-ram because of the way it uses caching. But it doesn’t need that much. Your 16GB plan is plenty. You could probably do it in 8GB.
I’m definitely planning on expanding my drives over time, so it sounds like btrfs is the way to go. Is there a way to bundle that and CasaOS?
Don’t commit too quickly. btrfs has it’s advantages, but it has limitations too - not least of which is that there’s no two-drive redundancy mode, and the raid5 mode has some known bugs - it’s mostly safe. Generally I’d go with ZFS, as would most here.
Thanks for the info!
Some variation of Linux + BTRFS filesystem + Docker is what I use. Lots of good options for free.
Is that something I would have to download and combine, or is there an all in one version of that? I’m very new to this and don’t even know where to begin looking.
Openmediavault combines these with a nice web interface
I use Ubuntu + ZFS.
ZFS is cool because it has built in SMB and NFS file sharing, on top of RAID and data integrity features.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll definitely take a look.
Unraid- if your drives are different sizes. Truenas - if you have lots of ram and like ZFS. CasaOs - If you like pretty things. Proxmox + Open Media Vault - If you want to run vms.
This should be the answer for the other twenty similar questions that is posted to this group every day.
I’m planning on 16gb, is that enough for Truenas? And which version of Truenas? Scale or Core? Thanks for the suggestions!
YES! I use that right now.
CasaOS can mix and match, but it uses mergerFS which doesn’t have the same parity as ZFS/ceph/raid.
Im also a big fan of CasaOS and run it. You should also check out ZimaOS alpha release as it has more raid functionality.
ZFS needs roughly 1GB of ram per TB of storage.
Truenas code is older and runs on BSD. 99% of people will want to run Scale.
