Hey again! I’ve progressed in my NAS project and I’ve chosen to go for a DIY NAS. I can’t wait for the parts to arrive!
Now I’m a bit struggling to choose an OS. I am starting with 2x10To HDD + 1To NVMe SSD. I plan to use 1 HDD for parity and to add more disks later.
I plan to use this server purely as a NAS because I will be getting a second more powerful server some time next year. But in the meantime, this NAS is a big upgrade over my rpi 4, so I will run some containers or VMs.
I don’t want to go with TrueNAS as I don’t want to use ZFS (my RAM is limited and I’m not sure I can add drives with different sizes). I’ve read btrfs is the second best for NAS, so I may use this.
Unraid seemed like the perfect fit. But the more I read about it, the more I wonder if I shouldn’t switch to Proxmox.
What I like about Unraid is the ability to add a disk without worrying about the size. I don’t care much about the applications Unraid provides and since docker-compose is not fully supported, I’m afraid I won’t be able to do things I could have done easily with a docker-compose.yml I also like that’s it’s easy to share a folder. What I don’t like about Unraid is the cache system and the mover. I understand why the system works this way but I’m not a fan.
I’ve asked myself if I needed instant parity for all my data and if I should put everything in the array.
The thing is that for some of my data I don’t care about parity. For instance, I’m good with only backing up my application data and to have parity for the backup. For my tv shows I don’t care about parity nor backup while I want both for my photos.
After some more research, I found mergerfs and snapraid. I feel that they are more flexible and fix the cache/mover issue from Unraid. Although I’m not sure if snapraid can run with only 2 disks.
If I go with Proxmox I think I would use OpenMediaVault to setup shares.
Is anyone using something like this? What are your recommendations?
Thanks!
I read a 2021 Ars Technica article on BTRFS and it was extensively critical, to put it mildly. Have things changed since then? I’m down with LXD or Incus but I don’t know if that’s the file system for me.
People like to complain a lot about things that aren’t particularly true. The default file system in Fedora and SUSE is BTRFS and I think that speaks volumes, besides others (including me) having been using BTRFS in production for serious stuff for years now. Even Synology is all up for BTRFS: https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/Btrfs
There are also advantages of using LXD/Incus with BTRFS, most likely taking advantage of the sub volume features and snapshots so VMs and containers run faster (each machine gets a sub volume that works like a classic partition and is better / faster than a simple folder with files). Snapshots are also a good feature as you can use them to backup and rollback your base system or the containers/VMs as well.
