So, I am thinking about getting myself a NAS to host mainly Immich and Plex. Got a couple of questions for the experienced folk;
- Is Synology the best/easiest way to start? If not, what are the closest alternatives?
- What OS should i go for? OMV, Synology’s OS, or UNRAID?
- Mainly gonna host Plex/Jellyfin, and Synology Photos/Immich - not decided quite what solutions to go for.
Appricate any tips :sparkles:
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The most common software choices are TrueNAS and UNRAID.
Depending on your use-case, one is better than the other:
TrueNAS uses ZFS, which is great if you want to be absolutely sure the unreplaceable data on your disks is 100% safe, like your personal photos. UNRAID has a more flexible expansion and more power efficient, but doesn’t prevent any bit flip, which is not really an issue if you only store multimedia for streaming.
If you prefer a hardware solution ready to use, Synology and QNAP are great choices so long you remember to use ZFS (QNAP) or BTRFS (Synology) as filesystem.
Unraid 6.12 and higher has full support for ZFS pools. You can even use ZFS in the Unraid Array itself - allowing you to use many, but not all, of ZFS extended features. Self healing isn’t one of those features, though, it would be incompatible with Unraid’s parity approach to data integrity.
I just changed my cache pool from BTRFS to ZFS with Raid 1 and encryption, it was a breeze.
I generally recommend TrueNAS for projects where speed and security are more important than anything else and Unraid where (hard- and software-)flexibility, power efficiency, ease of use and a very extensive and healthy ecosystem are more pressing concerns.
Oh that’s great to hear. Thank you for sharing.
Do either of them matter in terms of life of the hardisks? My server just had one of its HDDs reach EoL :| Kind of want to buy something that will last a very long time. Also, not familiar with ZFS, but read that Synology uses Butterfs - which always sounds good in my ears, been having a taste of the filesystem with Garuda on my desktop.
Yes, ZFS is commonly known for heavy disk I/O and also huge RAM usage, the rule used to be “1GB of RAM for every TB of disk” but that’s not compulsory.
Meanwhile, about BTRFS, keep in mind that Synology uses a mixed recipe because the RAID code of BTRFS is still green and it’s not considered production ready. Here’s an interesting read about how Synology filled the gaps: https://daltondur.st/syno_btrfs_1/
The only place ZFS seems to use a sizable amount of RAM is for the arc memory cache system which is an really nice feature when you have piles of small file access going on. For me some of the most high access things are the image stores for lemmy and mastodon that combine up to just under 200GB right now but are some crazy high number of files. Letting the system eat up idle ram to not have to pull all those from disk constantly is awesome.
Something kind of unique about UnRaid is the JBOD plus parity array. With this you can keep most disks spun down while only the actively read/written disks need to be spun up. Combine with an SSD cache for your dockers/databases/recent data and UnRaid will put a lot less hours(heat, vibration) on your disks than any raid equivalent system that requires the whole array to be spun up for any disk activity. Performance won’t be as high as comparably sized RAID type arrays, but as bulk network storage for backups, media libraries, etc. it’s still plenty fast enough.
