Hi all, I was originally thinking of setting a NAS up on FreeNAS, but considering that is an more complex enterprise-level solution, I thought unRAID may be more simple to start off with. The goal is a standalone system for storage. I have a Synology that will be in front, so this system will be chilling most of the time (for now). Support for containers and such will allow for more functionality in the future, I guess. I want to structure the build so that I have 5x8TB with 2x8TB parity to start off with, so arrays of 7 drives. In the future I will add additional 7-drive pools. I believe unRAID, through shares, can pool these 7-drive arrays together so it appears transparent when accessing a shared folder?

 

Currently, my planned build will be a vanilla desktop motherboard (i3/i5) with some HBA cards to provide enough ports to run an assumed 21 drives. In the future, when expanding beyond 21 drives, if I install these drives in another case, under unRAID, will I be able to use an HBA with an external SAS port to connect them together?

 

Thanks all!

Not quite sure what you are asking for?    UnRAID does not have the concept of drive pools.   Instead all drives in unRAID are in a single array protected by 1 or 2 parity drives.   What unRAID has is the concept of “User Shares” which is a network share spanning multiple drives.  You can specify for each share which drives it can use. 

Thanks. I see, so you can only have X drives + 2 parity. I'll have to stick with FreeNAS for multiple arrays, then.