so i decided i need to upgrade my synology running out of storage 

first i looked at bigger disks 4tb to 8tb upgrade that worked out at around £500 (ironwolf drives i just like them) wow that expensive

next i looked at a bigger synology (more bays) £1400 (wow thats even more expensive)

then i started looking at unraid and i found i could build one sell my synology and have enough left over to buy a couple more disk , well almost i had some computer parts lying around doing nothing 

corsair 650 psu

i5 7400 cpu

24gb of ddr4 

so all i needed was 

case (ebay special rack mount server case $49)

motherboard (asus 270z with two nvme slots)

raid card (9220i ebay special)

graphics card (p400 from ebay)

nvme drives (512 amazon offer ones)

 

so of i went purchased all the parts then hit my first hurdle, how the hell to i copy 10tb of data from a synology to a unraid server

the answer borrow 12tb of storage space of a friend then set it running and copy the data across (it seamed to take ages)

then  remove the parity drive from the synology (and pray that one of the other drives didn't fail) sync up the parity drive 

then swap the borrowed drives out for the 4tb iron wolf drives (2 days later all 5 4tb drives in and all data copied across

 

so what have i ended up with 

intell 7700 cpu (managed an upgrade along the way)

z270 motherboard

24 gb ram

20 tb hard drive space (closer to 18 but whos counting)

2x512 cache disks

p200 graphics (nice to have when i need to transcode a video) 

corsair 650 psu

corsair water cooler for cpu 

cheap ebay case (that is actual really good)

intel raid card 

 

and i have to say it is brilliant 

runs my cameras pihole pfsnese windows vm and unifi (plus a few other odds and ends) brilliantly never breaks a sweat (unless you count the time the rouge docker container decided to use all my cpu)

 

best decision i ever made well worth the effort  

great bit of software 

 

 

 

Thanks for posting and welcome!!

I never had the guts to put pfsense in unraid 🙂   glad it's worked out well, agree - it's a great bit of software, and it just keeps getting better.