I know this is my sound like a loaded threat title, but I am really at a crossing roads here and need to make a decision pretty quickly.
Let me provide a little history here.
I had a home lab disaster recently. In short, I had two internal drives in my laptop, both SSD's. My second SSD drive which held a lot of my VM's, up and died after two months of using it (still trying to figure out what happened and im still shocked.) On top of that, when I went to restore my VM's from my backup dive (external drive), that was dead. It was the ultimate double face palm moment.
Fast forward to today. That said, I am need to architect a better solution for storage and backup. It will be critical for my home lab.
What will it be used for:
Items I am thinking about using it for:
-backups. backup backup backup. Reliable backups of my virtual machines.
-Building on backups, I currently run everything from my laptop, but that is going to migrate to a ESXi box I just created. Shuttle box. The caveat here is I am trying to decide if I should just run the VM's on the ESXi box on the local drives, or should I mount them via NFS from the NAS device.
Decisions I am looking at and trying to kick around.
As I started to look for solutions, items like Drobo and Synology were way to pricey. I figured I would build my own.
I first started looking at FreeNAS. Did a lot of research and then bought a few pieces for my NAS (mobo, cpu, memory.) Bought supermicro board, Intel CPU, 8gigs of ECC memory. All for about $280. Still need case and drives and eventually, more RAM.
Those pieces should be delivered this week.
Now, as I was researching this, a friend told me to look at unRAID. I started to read up here learning more about unRAID and now I am looking what route I should go.
Differences so far that I have picked up (bare with me, this is rushed.)
FreeNAS - heavily uses ZFS (and im still learning ins and outs of ZFS). Loves memory.
unRAID - free for 3 drives, more drives has a cost.
Now I know there are differences between the two as far as storage, building out volumes, adding storage etc. that I want to learn more about.
That is pretty much a overview of what I am looking for.
My ultimate goal is to have a very ROCK SOLID STABLE NAS. I put emphasis on that, because I cant have losing VM's like I just did recently.
Performance is good, but not super critical. If i decide to mount some NFS points to the ESXi box, as long as it is pretty good and stable, I should be set.
I appreciate the feedback on this.
Just wanted to hear some suggestions based on my needs that I laid out above. Pros and Cons, things to consider etc.
much appreciated.
Thx
TheCoffeeGuy