Unraid or Other for first server

[OptimusPrime]

I am building my first server. Using WD Red Plus 10TB (not GB) drives. If my priorities are to have a multi-use machine and ensure I can take advantage of my 10Gbe network infrastructure, do you suggest Unraid, or should I consider other systems? I am a hobbyist, not a professional.

 

[JediAcolyte]

I think you might mean 10 TB drives, not 10 GB drives.

 

[OptimusPrime]

@JediAcolyte Yes. And thank you for discretely pointing out my typo via direct message so I could adjust the original post.

Oh, wait...you did not give me that opportunity. Okay then, I won’t fully adjust the original post.

That said, given you took the time to read my post, then provide a reply, would you have feedback to offer regarding my post in terms of TB vs GB?

 

[Spartacus]

While he was a bit sassy you came back swinging yourself Optimus.

Perceived impoliteness of both parties aside, if you want to take advantage of a 10Gb network then unraid might not be the solution for you.
While Unraid can do 10Gb speeds, it can only achieve that with the cache, it's storage is basically at the speed of individual drives so the 10TB drives you noted about 150-200MB/s maximum for the array storage.

Freenas might be better suited for you if you're looking for performance (plus its free), freenas uses a more traditional raid setup achieving increase performance based off the number of drives you use.

If you can expand on your use case of "multi-use machine" and the hardware/number of drives you plan to have we could provide a more accurate OS recommendation might be best for your specific goal.

 

[JediAcolyte]

@OptimusPrime , I apologize, I wasn't intending to be snarky. I I've seen people doing retro builds with PATA drives as odd as that sounds.
In any case, I was interested in your thread because I wanted to see what the community thinks. My limited experience is with unraid and I ca recommend it as a storage server and for limited docker containers. Otherwise, I'm waiting on a final TrueNAS build to try out for a new storage server.

 

[gea]

Some thoughts

Raid
From a pure storage server view, you have the option of realtime raid. This gives realtime data protection of a pool and performance scale with number of disks. Disadvantage is that all disks must run so you need more energy. To extend such a realtime raid Pool, you must usually extent with a same array, ex raid 6/Z2 -> add another raid6/Z2 = Raid 60 or multiple Z2 datapool.

Systems like Unraid use only the disk where current data is located (other can sleep). Protection is like a backup on demand.

Filesystem
Next difference is filesystem. Newer filesystems like btrfs, ReFS or ZFS offer Copy on Write. This allows a crash resistent behaviour where a crash during a write cannot corrupt the filesystem as atomic writes (ex write data + update metadata) are done completely or discarded.

Cache
Another aspect is cache to improve performance. There are two options. One is a cache disk for read/write. This can improve performance over disks but the problem remains that a crash during write can affect filesystem consistency. On steady read/write you fall back to disks (cache full) quite fast.

Systems like ZFS use RAM for read/write cache. This is the fastest option but you should have enough RAM (4-8 GB min, more is faster). To protect the writecache you can use a hardwareraid with cache + BBU or sync write + Slog/ZIL in case of ZFS.

OS
The main options are Unix (Free-BSD, OSX, Solarish), Linux or Windows. Each has its unique advantages like Applications (Windows), or hardware support (Linux) or best ZFS integration (Free-BSD or especially Solarish where ZFS is native/genuine).

SMB
If you mainly want an SMB filer (The Windows sharing protocol), best support is on a Windows server with ntfs permissions and ntfs alike ACL with newest SMB3 options. On Solaris you can use the multithreaded, kernel/ZFS based SMB Server with quite the best integration of Windows ntfs alike permissions, local SMB groups (allows groups in groups) and a perfect integration of ZFS snaps=Windows previous versions. SAMBA, the other SMB server on Linux/Unix has more overal features but is mostly not as fast and not as easy to setup as the Solarish one.

Other storage services
If you need other storage services like FC/iSCSI, NFS or a cloud access ex via S3/minIO, quite the fastest and easiest option for internet sync and share for a local filer, you may look how good they are supported.

Other application
ex photo-tools, add-ons like web/cloudserver or virtualisation options.

Management tool
Based on the OS you can decide for a webbased management tool to make handling easier than via CLI commands. On Free-BSD you can use Free-NAS or XigmaNAS that is needs less resources for itself. On Linux there is for ex OMV and on Solarish NexentaStor CE or my napp-it that supports a range of Solarish distributions and Linux in a base version.

 

[OptimusPrime]

@Spartacus Thank you. With the goal being to have fewer boxes (I only have 15U of space) and also using mostly consumer-level PC hardware, I think I want one machine to:

• serve files to my wife and I (general centralized storage, small amount Premiere Pro work, sometimes video transfers between machines)
• host my onsite backup drive and my rotating offsite drives (I occasionally swap a hard drive to the safety deposit box)
• run a VM for our IP cameras (need to be able to pass QuickSync through to a Windows VM)
• and host a couple of low resource VMs (when I want to try out something new, or visit questionable websites, a MAME emulator, etc.)
• I think I'm learning there are OS that handle this better than Windows, meaning the Host OS happens to be a virtualization platform instead of loading Windows/Linux, then running Hypervisor, VMare, etc on top of it.

Then a second machine handling router/vpn duties. I'll go with a 4U box for the first machine, indifferent on the router/vpn machine so long as it is more quiet than my Brocade.

I currently have a Brocade 6450-48p with the four 10GBe ports activated. I have a dual Gbe card in our 2 desktops, and the existing Blue Iris machine.

@JediAcolyte No worries. What about TrueNAS are you looking forward to seeing?

@gea Thank you for your notes. I am since considering ZFS, but still reading up on it. I back up our files at least once a day and have the offsite drives. Not typically worried about the newer documents, usually more concerned about keeping the vacation and wedding items safe, but if I can determine a well-balanced solution that will let me also reach higher speeds when I want to transfer internally, that would be great.

My single 7200 drive maxes out. I've learned since then that my bottleneck was always the hard drives, not my wired network...but now that I've got the 10Gbe, it would be nice to be able to use more of it.

This not a production environment...just my home. I don't have a server closet (rack is mounted in the laundry room), so the noise and aesthetic qualities have to pass the HWHL approval test.

 

[Spartacus]

So unraid can:
- serve files with nfs or smb shares
- passthrough individual hard drives to VMs for your backup drive tradeout (or mount it individually with the unassigned drives app)
- run vms (or better yet a docker container) for your ip cameras ~ i used unifi video in a container until I upgraded to a UDM Pro
- yep it can host however many vms you have resources for
- if you're wanting it as a true new OS learning opportunity you might consider looking at zfs on linux, unraid, freenas, and the like are pretty flushed out. Theres not alot of learning as 95% of it is just gui interaction.

If you are going to be changing out drives regularly I highly recommend getting a hot swap bay chassis, supermicro makes some pretty solid 4u ones that you can get used pretty cheaply (with 24 drive bays). Then you can put whatever motherboard/cpu/ram/drives you want in it.

For the purposes you notated you could take advantage of the 10g connection by using cache only for the vms/docker/etc, and then backups and camera go on the slow disk data array.

 

[OptimusPrime]

Thanks. I’ll look for some SuperMicro, but it needs to be short depth. I’m looking at the Silverstone RM41-H08, but I’d really prefer to have a case with the HotSwap bays and USB3 for half this price.

SilverStone Technology RM41-H08 4U Rackmount Server Case

 

[JediAcolyte]

@OptimusPrime I'm hoping that they improve AMD support. IXsystems are moving from FreeBSD to a Linux base which I've read will be better but is beyond my knowledge and they are talking about "OpenZFS 2.0". I don't know much about this except its supposed to allow encryption after pools are created. If anyone has a good article/wiki on it I'd love to read it.