November 4, 20205 yr Hello, I'm not a user yet, but need some advice. I having been running an OpenZFS zpool on my Mac for the last 6 years. I have been mostly successful, but have suffered a couple of hiccups, which is making me think I should be considering a self contained NAS instead to avoid such problems again, which appear to be because of OS related issues, and bad drives in a 2 disk mirror making things go bad quickly. I just had to restore my zpool from an HFS+ volume. I am now looking at TrueNAS, or Unraid with ZFS (after seeing this is possible via plugin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqaAmVN4J4A). My use cases are: 1. For storing my large photo (and a very small number of videos) collection as the primary disk storage, and having fault tolerance / bit rot protection for that. Ideally here I need decent speed, and for the next 5 years I’m figuring I need approx 6TB storage to cover that use case. I'm currently just under 1.5TB. My computer is an old 2009 Mac Pro. At some point I want to ‘upgrade’ to a new Atom based Mac Mini. 2. I'd like a really easy way of sucking the images from my camera off my SD card, onto the NAS, rename them and copy up to flickr. Not sure if there are plugins that allow this? 3. There’s a growing collection of computers in my house, so I’d like to have an easy method of backing those up by giving access to a NAS over wireless. I would need maybe 4TB storage to cover that. 4. I don’t yet do plex or anything, but the ability to do such things is intriguing to me. However, I get most of my content from online services, and don’t have a movie collection, so it would be just for the odd TV show recording here and there. Very light usage! No idea how much I’d need for that. 2TB? 5. I’m toying with the idea of having a simple surveillance camera setup to record a couple of weeks of video at a time from 2-3 cameras. No idea how much for that, or even if possible with Unraid? 6. I'm toying with running my website and own email off the NAS also, because why not? It costs me $90 a year to host elsewhere (but maybe my electricity bill would go up)? Is something like this possible with Unraid? 7. My son is getting into gaming, would be fun for him to set up a server on the NAS if that's possible (e.g. minecraft, steam) I'm comfortable with command line, and building my own hardware. Question 1 - With regards to networking setup, I really want to have good performance between my Mac Pro and the NAS. So ideally I can connect directly to my mac from the NAS via 1G ethernet, AND separately also connect to the NAS to the router. However: my 2600AC Synology wireless router is upstairs (unfortunately) in the middle of the house for good coverage. My photo editing computer is downstairs in my office. I’m ok with just normal wireless for the other computers in the house to backup, but that photo editing computer needs a direct connect I think. My current Mac only has n capability, not ac. I guess therefore my options for connecting my NAS to the network are: i) put NAS in back of router upstairs. Ethernet over power line from office to router. Wireless to all rest of devices. ii) put NAS in office, plug into my computer via RJ45. Get a wireless mesh expander and plug that into the NAS. Synology sell a mesh hub that connects with my main wireless router. Question 2: For the above use cases, I'm not quite sure how to handle this with making my own build. I was intrigued by the TrueNAS Mini X, which had: - quad core processor - space for 5 drives + 2 SSD for cache (I would probably go with RAIDZ2). I'd probably go with 5x 6TB seagate ironwolf drives - low wattage at idle - 26W? - 16GB RAM - Seems like decent quality hardware Does anyone have any good recommendations for hardware to allow hot swappable drives, similar in form factor to that Mini X? That goes for $899. I'd like to build a similarly specced system for maybe $500-$700 to justify not just going with a TrueNAS MiniX prebuilt. Any pointers? Question 3: I really like the idea of bit rot protection, so is the ZFS plugin option robust, and does it work well with Unraid software? Question 4: compared with my direct attached drives today (2x mirrored disk directly into motherboard), I assume I will be seeing a performance hit over 1GB Ethernet, to a NAS... but how bad? 2x slower? 4x slower? I used to have a Drobo V1, with USB2 and it was incredibly painful to use due to the slow read and write. Thanks for any tips Edited November 4, 20205 yr by robbrown99
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