Story:

So I'm currently running CentOS 7 on my home NAS. It was running well for over a year now but I have a UPDATE tick which constantly crashes it which then have to fix. It's also a little unstable after adding numerous repos when I was trying to add a webui for remote VM management.

 

Its finally died after a kernel upgrade weirdly enough and running recovery still wont boot.

 

I'm also using ZFS at the moment for RAIDZ2 setup which is probably unwise on a non ECC RAM setup and a max of 16gb RAM.

 

I'm thinking of switching Distros to one that has native ZFS packages or to RAID6 XFS Array and must have docker support. I looked at FreeNAS but my hardware doesn't support it because of the weird Award BIOS my motherboard has.

 

I run Archlinux on my laptop and it runs well but I'm unsure about using that on a NAS with how bleeding edge it can be sometimes.

 

 

Now:

So that brings me here to unRAID, I've run trials on this before on the same box and it ran well even if I was using a ZFS plugin. This unfortunately forced me to move as unRAID WebGUI was unable to be used properly for this exact reason.

 

I've recently got some external backup drives so that I can properly change my setup after I finish backing everything up.

 

 

What I want to do:

So to start I'm thinking of using a similar setup RAID6 wise but using XFS for it's years of support and stability.

I think this is similar to RAIDZ2 ZFS for 2 fail disks?

1. 2TB WD Red
2. 2TB WD Red
3. 2TB WD Red
4. 2TB WD Red
5. 2TB WD Red
6. 2TB WD Red

 

After this then setting up docker to use these drives for configs.

Does unRAID default to overlay2 and does the /var location point to those drives or do I need a cache drive?

 

I'm using SAMBA shares to share across the Network but I've noticed that unRAID also shares flash and a few others.

I don't want these shared period.

 

I'm also planning on running some VMs for Calibre Ebook Library for my massive collection of fanfiction.

 

Unraid loads everything form USB. So nothing from the OS is stored on your array.

 

You can set a maximum of 2 parity drives (if I remember correct). So similar to raid6/raidz2, though not exactly the same. 

 

You can point your docker config/appdata to whatever share you like. Cache drive is not required, but I would recommend getting a SSD for cache.

 

IIRC you can choose not to share your flash folder