Is Unraid right for me? Looking for NAS replacement

[ShadowZone]

I currently own an aging Synology DS413 with 4x 3TB WD Red disks. I want to upgrade to something a bit more modern and am currently looking at a DIY option with Unraid as its OS. I never used Unraid, so I have a few questions about that, but first, here are my use cases for a NAS:

 

• Backup for media files: video (mostly .mp4 screengrabs but also 4K files directly from my drone or DSLR), photo (jpeg and Nikon NEF format). Overall, these files already make up more than 4 TB on my current NAS
• General backup (documents etc)
• Family media server (we use a Raspberry Pi4 running Kodi on our living room screen to show our pics/vids)
• Work with media files directly from the NAS for video projects
• Occasional torrent download
• Remote access via web interface and Android apps (DS file, DS get) to retrieve / store files, add torrents to queue / check on queue

 

What I want to achieve is not only larger capacity but also quicker access to my files over the network. My home is 10Gbit ready, so there shouldn't be an issue there with the right NIC in my planned build.

The question is, is Unraid even suited for fast access to network files? I have read conflicting things about this with some people claiming their read speeds dropped when switching to Unraid with the same hardware.

I was also thinking about using an SSD as a cache drive so at least writing to the NAS would be quicker... but then I read that that's not really the purpose of the cache drive, it's more for VMs and stuff like that? Can anyone here clarify please?

 

Regarding hard drives, since I had a great experience with my WD Reds, I would want to stick with the brand but increase overall capacity to 6x 4TB with two drives as parity drives.

 

So my questions mainly are:

1. Is Unraid suited for my use cases? Are there apps that I can use to enable functionality similar to my Synology?
2. Should I curb my expectations regarding speed improvements? Is Unraid more suited for backup rather than fast network accessed files?
3. What's the real purpose of the cache drive? Can I use it to quickly write to the NAS and it then distributes the files to the hard drives?
4.  .... I am sure I forgot something ...

 

Thanks for reading, hope you can help me out here.

 

[trurl]

Unraid IS NOT RAID. There is no striping. Each data disk is an independent filesystem which can be read all by itself on any Linux. Each file is completely contained on a single data disk. Any drive not being currently used can be spun down.

 

Because of this, read speed from the parity array is at the speed of the single disk being read. Write speed is somewhat slower due to parity updates. There are 2 methods for updating parity. Each has tradeoffs. One method is faster but still not as fast as writing to a single disk.

 

But because each disk is independent, Unraid allows different sized disks to be used in the parity array, and allows disks to be easily added for more capacity without rebuilding the whole array.

 

There are several ways to use cache. The original purpose was to speed up writes since parity updates are not involved with cache, with that data moved to the parity array during scheduled idle time. The default is daily in the middle of the night, but that can be configured.

 

With the addition of dockers and VMs, cache is also used for better performance of dockers and VMs, allowing these to run without being impacted by the slower parity writes and also so these won't keep array disks spinning.

 

There can be multiple disks in the cache pool, which also provides for some redundancy with multiple btrfs raid models supported for the cache pool. Most people use SSDs for the cache pool.

 

There are literally hundreds of dockers and plugins available to let your server run many different applications, including torrents.

 

Unraid recently added VPN capability builtin with WireGuard. It will allow you to securely access your server or even your whole LAN remotely.