ph0ton

1) transcoding 4k is unpossible at your pricebracket, unless perhaps you can get old of some older server gear, but then 2) then becomes a problem. 2) The Fujitsu D3417-b21 s1151 motherboard has excelent power characteristics. If you search on the net, you'll find a guy with 4 x wd reds a pcie ssd and a celeron (i think) at idling at 10W! The board is excelent quality, but unfortunately it's also mAtx which makes it problematic to make as small as you qnap box., Note that the PSU will have a great impact on power usage, and most a quite bad below 100W. Do some research, the 80 plus qualitification is not a good marque for efficiency at low loads. 4) Consider Node 304, Chenbro SR30169, In win ms04-01 for compactness. Supermicro also makes a mini itx case. All are < 20 liters and fairly close to dedicated NAS boxes in size. Consider Node 804, Lian-li PC-M25, Supermicro SC731-300b for mAtx compatibility. Discuss with yourself if you want easy hardware access or compactness - bigger cases are considerably easier to work in, which is nice when a disk fails. Example build: Pentium G4560 ~ 60 eur Gigabyte H270N ~ 150 eur 4 GB ddr 4 ~ 50 eur Node 304 ~ 90 eur Seasonic SSp300SFG ~ 50 eur (SFX, so you'll need a converter like Silverstone's PP08) ~ 400 euroes. Example build mAtx: Pentium G4560 ~ 60 eur Fujitsu D3417-b21 ~ 175 eur (make sure you get the revision which supports kaby lake) 4 GB ddr 4 ~ 50 eur You could also go ECC here. Node 804 ~ 110 eur Seasonic SSp300SFG ~ 50 eur (SFX, so you'll need a converter like Silverstone's PP08) ~440 euroes. The 60-100 eur can be used on a better CPU cooler, fans, 4 GB ram more.

Thank you for the responses. First off, let me appologize for the use of "homemade", it raised eyebrows and it wasn't my intention. I completely agree. A lot of people think that disk redundancy is the same as backup. I have my most valued files backed up to two different off site backups. No file integrety checking though, as I was completely oblivious to this until I started preparing to retire my current Synology NAS. I have never used disk redundancy, but in the coming months I will move my movie collection onto the new server and I don't want to redo rips, if I loose a disk. Not really sure how to respond to this. Maybe read about the cache drive here? https://lime-technology.com/network-attached-storage/ One of the big benefits of unRAID is that all the disks (other than parity) use standard filesystems. You wouldn't want the cache drive to do something weird at the block/sector level. Maybe I'm just surprised that it works well - K.I.S.S I guess . My initial thought was that such a cache would be implemented as a blocklevel write FIFO, since it would reduce time window where the data isn't protected by the array and wouldn't fail if a write is bigger than the cache disk, the write speed would just drop to array speed. I hope you don't take my curiosity for criticism. I do understand this distinction. Snapraid isn't a filesystem either, but it does checksumming as well as parity calculations. I was simply wondering why Unraid doesn't employ a similar scheme. It seems that disk recovery is more important than silent errors: So parity correction over silent error detection. Seems to make sense.

Hi guys, I am researching my options wrt. a home sever. I have read lots of pages about hardware on your (very) friendly forums and tried out Unraid on a small test server, and it seems very straight forward and easy to use. As I understand it, Unraid works by make realtime parity calculations between a data drive and parity drive. A clever share layer is placed on top of the drive partitions, so shares can spand multiple drives. It is also able to use an SSD to give burst write qualities to the array. I was fairly convinced that I was going to use unraid. However, it seems that the old saying "the more I learn, the less I know" seem to have struck me a lot. I have 3 options to choose from: Unraid: + Burn USB & go + Power efficient data access (only partition drive and required data drive spins up during access) + Core docker and VM features for easy server application management + Very active community - No bit rot / silent error protection - Some of the software features seem a little "homemade" (e.g. the cache is working on file level, not on a block/sector level - Please lecture me if I'm wrong ) Debian / Snapraid install: + Debian very well supported. Almost all issues can be googled (I am not intimidated by the commandline as well) + Mature package system + Snapraid seems fairly simple to setup, altough not exactly a turn key solution (you need to some homecooking on some maintenance script to start the ball running). + I can use Open Media vault for the day-to-day management. + Snapraid offers bit rot protection and recovery. - Snapraid is maintained by one man, although his software seems very mature - Snapraid does not offer realtime protection. If a disk fails, and you have deleted a lot of files after the last sync, then you might not be able to recover all data from the failed drive. Freenas: + hugh user base (or that's IxSystems want's you to think) + The user interface seems reasonably easy to use. + Apps and plugins + docker and VMs + ZFS is very advanced, including bit rot protection. - Hugh upfront costs, each raid level requires a specfic set of disks + one GB of ram per TB of disk space - Expanding the array is costly, since vdevs can't be extended with new disks (although pools can). Upgrade is disk in - resilver - repeat - All disks needs to spin, when accessing your pool. - (I was going to write something about the way people talk to each other on the freenas forums, but I deleted it) I am fairly certain that I won't be using Freenas (artillery guns to hit wasps). Snapraid was a favourite, but the file deletion / recover ability is an issue for me when I read it. In both cases it is mostly the bit rot protection which keeps them on the list. I have never experienced bit rot my self, or at least i have never noticed it in my files, e.g. a zip archive which wont unzip. TL;DR: So, my main quetions are: Is bit rot a real thing ? Why doesn't Unraid support checksum correction of silent errors? Is e.g. SMART data monitoring enough? Is it possible to combined snapraid with unraid (e.g. using the unassigned disk plugin to mount a disk for the snapraid parity file)? Sorry for the long post B.R. Kevin