I have repurposed my old system into a storage array and it's currently running TrueNAS Core which fits my needs fine.

 

• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4771 CPU @ 3.50GHz
• ASRock Z87 EXTREME3 mobo (6 SATA ports)
• 32 GB RAM
• 4 x 4 TB Hitachi Deskstar in raid-z1
• 2 x 150 GB Hitachi boot-pool mirror

 

However, I will need to expand the raidz1 pool soon (next six months) as it's 75% full. I don't have any spare SATA ports on my machine so I thought about buying an HBA card and expanding that way.

 

I then thought that I could spend that money on an unraid license and free up two SATA ports by booting off flash drive, which TrueNAS doesn't really support. I haven't tried unraid before and am thinking of trialling it to see how it fairs.

 

I use the Syncthing and Plex plugins on TrueNAS, can I do something similar on Unraid? I also have an AFP share for Apple time machine backups. I also have some Windows SMB shares with some of those encrypted with ZFS.

 

How does the performance compare? Would I need a SSD cache as well with Unraid as it sounds like the filesystem is optimized for writes rather than read performance. Would Unraid meet my requirements above before I go to the trouble of installing it as a trial?

 

Thanks for any tips.

3 hours ago, rosydog said:

sounds like the filesystem is optimized for writes rather than read performance.

Writes are slower due to realtime parity updates. Writes can be cached and written to slower array later.

 

3 hours ago, rosydog said:

Syncthing and Plex plugins

Those and much more. Currently 1293 Apps listed:

https://unraid.net/community/apps

 

Unraid does not currently support ZFS natively but there is a plugin for it.

 

One of the great features of Unraid, you can mix different sized disks in the parity array, so it is easy to get more capacity simply by replacing a disk with a larger one.