2y ago

New to NAS - What are the recommended solutions?

So, I am thinking about getting myself a NAS to host mainly Immich and Plex. Got a couple of questions for the experienced folk;

Is Synology the best/easiest way to start? If not, what are the closest alternatives?
What OS should i go for? OMV, Synology's OS, or UNRAID?
Mainly gonna host Plex/Jellyfin, and Synology Photos/Immich - not decided quite what solutions to go for.

Appricate any tips :sparkles:

56 comments

If you want a "setup and forget" type of experience, synology will serve you well, if you can afford it. Of you are more of a tinkerer and see yourself experimenting and upgrading in the future, then I recommend custom built. OMV is a solid OS for a novice, but any Linux distro you fancy most can do the job very well!
I've started my NAS journey with a very humble 1-bay synology. For the last few years I am using a custom built ARM NAS (nanopi m4v2), with 4-bays and running Armbian. All my services run on docker, I have Jellyfin, *arr, bitwarden and several other servicies running very reliably.
- And if you’re not sure how much of tinkering you want to do a Synology with docker support is a good option.
- ^ This. I have an M1 Mac mini running Asahi Linux with a bunch of docker containers and it works great. Run Jellyfin off of a separate stick PC running an Intel Celeron with Ubuntu Mate on it. Basically I just have docker compose files on those two machines and occasionally ssh in from my phone to sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y (on Ubuntu) or sudo pacman -Syu (on Asahi) and then docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

Synology is generally a great option if you can afford the premium.
Unraid is a good alternative for the poor man. Check this list of cases to build in. I personally have a Fractal R5 which can support up to 13 HDD slots.
Unraid is generally a better bang for your buck imo. It's got great support from the community.
- this. Op, look for a used Synology. It Just Works ™️
  
  :)

I have proxmox on bare metal, an HBA card to passthrough to TrueNAS Scale. I've had good luck with this setup.
The HBA card is to passthrough to TrueNAS so it can get direct control of the drives for ZFS. I got mine on eBay.
I'm running proxmox so that I can separate some of my processes (e.g. plex LXC) into a different VM.
- This is a great way to set this up. I'm moving over to this in a few days. I have a temporary setup with ZFS directly on Proxmox with an OMV VM for handling shares bc my B450 motherboard IOMMU groups won't let me pass through my GPU and an HBA to separate VMs (note for OP: if you cannot pass through your HBA to a VM, this setup is not a good idea). I ordered an ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming motherboard as a replacement ($110 on Amazon right now. It's a great deal.) that will have more separate IOMMU groups.
  My old setup was similar but used ESXi instead of Proxmox. I also went nuts and virtualized pfSense on the same PC. It was surprisingly stable, but I'm keeping my gateway on a separate PC from now on.
  
  If you can't pass through your HBA to a VM, feel free to manage ZFS through Proxmox instead (CLI or with something like Cockpit). While TrueNAS is a nice GUI for ZFS, if it's getting in the way you really don't need it.
- I’d love to find out more about this setup. Do you know of any blogs/wikis explaining that? Are you separating the storage from the compute with the HBA card?
  
  This is a fairly common setup and it's not too complex - learning more about Proxmox and TrueNAS/ZFS individually will probably be easiest.
  Usually:
  Proxmox on bare metal
  TrueNAS Core/Scale in a VM
  Pass the HBA PCI card through to TrueNAS and set up your ZFS pool there
  If you run your app stack through Docker, set up a minimal Debian/Alpine host VM (you can technically use Docker under an LXC but experienced people keep saying it causes problems eventually and I'll take their word for it)
  If you run your app stack through LXCs, just set them up through Proxmox normally
  Set up an NFS share through TrueNAS, and connect your app stack to that NFS share
  (Optional): Just run your ZFS pool on Proxmox itself and skip TrueNAS

My Synogy NAS was super easy to set up and has been very solid. Very happy with it. I’m sure there’s other solutions though.
- This was the route I went with when I started, and I've never had cause to regret it. For people near the start of their self-hosting journey, it's the no-hassle, reliable choice.

TrueNAS Scale is a pretty easy to use option (based on Debian) backed by the excellent ZFS file system.
- But ZFS has a learning curve and limits easy backup options... but it's worth it.
  
  Eh... TrueNAS UI basically takes care of any zfs learning curve. The main thing I'd note is that RAID 5 & 6 can't currently be expanded incrementally. So you either need to use mirroring, configure the system upfront to be as big as you expect you'll need for years to come, or use smaller RAID 5 sets of disk (e.g. create 2 raid 5 volumes with 3 disks each instead of 1 RAID 5 volume with 6 disks).
  Not sure what you're referring to as an easy backup option that zfs excludes, but maybe I'm just ignorant 🙂

The most common software choices are TrueNAS and UNRAID.
Depending on your use-case, one is better than the other:
TrueNAS uses ZFS, which is great if you want to be absolutely sure the unreplaceable data on your disks is 100% safe, like your personal photos. UNRAID has a more flexible expansion and more power efficient, but doesn't prevent any bit flip, which is not really an issue if you only store multimedia for streaming.
If you prefer a hardware solution ready to use, Synology and QNAP are great choices so long you remember to use ZFS (QNAP) or BTRFS (Synology) as filesystem.
- Unraid 6.12 and higher has full support for ZFS pools. You can even use ZFS in the Unraid Array itself - allowing you to use many, but not all, of ZFS extended features. Self healing isn't one of those features, though, it would be incompatible with Unraid's parity approach to data integrity.
  I just changed my cache pool from BTRFS to ZFS with Raid 1 and encryption, it was a breeze.
  I generally recommend TrueNAS for projects where speed and security are more important than anything else and Unraid where (hard- and software-)flexibility, power efficiency, ease of use and a very extensive and healthy ecosystem are more pressing concerns.
  
  Oh that's great to hear. Thank you for sharing.
- Do either of them matter in terms of life of the hardisks? My server just had one of its HDDs reach EoL :| Kind of want to buy something that will last a very long time. Also, not familiar with ZFS, but read that Synology uses Butterfs - which always sounds good in my ears, been having a taste of the filesystem with Garuda on my desktop.
  
  Yes, ZFS is commonly known for heavy disk I/O and also huge RAM usage, the rule used to be "1GB of RAM for every TB of disk" but that's not compulsory.
  Meanwhile, about BTRFS, keep in mind that Synology uses a mixed recipe because the RAID code of BTRFS is still green and it's not considered production ready. Here's an interesting read about how Synology filled the gaps: https://daltondur.st/syno_btrfs_1/
  
  Something kind of unique about UnRaid is the JBOD plus parity array. With this you can keep most disks spun down while only the actively read/written disks need to be spun up. Combine with an SSD cache for your dockers/databases/recent data and UnRaid will put a lot less hours(heat, vibration) on your disks than any raid equivalent system that requires the whole array to be spun up for any disk activity. Performance won’t be as high as comparably sized RAID type arrays, but as bulk network storage for backups, media libraries, etc. it’s still plenty fast enough.

Do you have any old hardware that doesn't have a job? That is a great place to start. Take some time try out different solutions (proxmox, unraid, casa OS). Then as you nail down your needs you can better pick hardware.
- Yeah this is what I have been doing so far, loads of spare parts - running Debian atm. So kind of looking for 'the next step' rn.

A NAS serves data to clients; I know this is tilting conventional wisdom on it's head but hear me out: go for the most inexpensive, lowest power storge-only-NAS that you can tolerate, and instead...put your money into your data transport (network) and into your clients..
As much as possible, simplify your life - move processing out of middle tiers, into client tiers.

I've found CasaOS to be the simplest to set up and get going. I tried TrueNAS for a year, but wish I had started with CasaOS.
- How would you rate Casa compared to Open Media Vault?
  
  Haven't tried OMV, but the lesson I learned with TrueNAS is that software designed primarily for NAS has a lot of features I don't care about, and the other apps can be finicky. I'm not storing petabytes of data. CasaOS was the closest I found to "just works".
  There's also Umbrel OS which looks promising, but I've been happy with CasaOS so haven't felt the need to switch.
- CasaOS looks interesting. But i prefer OpenMediaVault for the moment.

I have a qnap. I have had no issues. It runs its own qts OS so no need to figure out what you want to run. Make sure the hardware is x86. Plex runs better on x86.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
ESXi	VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
LXC	Linux Containers
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
Plex	Brand of media server package
RAID	Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
SATA	Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage
SSH	Secure Shell for remote terminal access
k8s	Kubernetes container management package

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I wouldn't recommend a Synology NAS if you intend to stream content with Plex/Jellyfin. It simply lacks the horsepower most of the time. I should just go with a DIY solution, imo. If you just want to through components that you have lying around together, I would go with Unraid. Unraid doesn't really care what you throw at it hardware wise.

Unraid is great. Don't let the FOSS heads say otherwise.
I paid $100 3 years ago, ONCE. Best purchase I've ever made.
I've tried the foss alternatives after getting familiar with unraid, and I still prefer unraid.
- Seconded. But for more details... it's great because you can throw in many different drives of different sizes, unlike RAID servers where every drive has to be the same size. You can also specify however much you want to use as parity (backup) drives.
  It has a nice web interface that you can access from any other PC on your LAN. I also have mine set up with Unraid Connect which allows me to access it from the open web also. It has a strong password and 2FA so I'm not concerned about security.
  It also makes it easy to serve Docker containers and full blown VMs. You can set them up right in the UI, or you can also SSH to it and use it as a normal Linux OS if you're a power user. The web UI also has a button that'll launch a SSH terminal in a separate window too.
  You can just use it as a NAS if you want, but Unraid makes it easy to expand your capabilities if you later feel like it. For example, you are only a few button clicks away from running Jellyfin to provide a nice UI for all your media files that you may be storing on your NAS.

First I chose a Pi now am using a Nuc as a NAS.
Reason for why: The price was too much for a synology + transcode capable CPU as it wasmt clear what type of processor was being used.

I have a QNAP NAS that I love. Can't recommend it enough.
- I got burned pretty bad by QNAP. Their TS-453 Pro had an Intel manufacturing defect that basically caused it to die prematurely and QNAP has basically given up all responsibility for it. I built my own NAS after that experience.
  
  Yep, I had the same with my TS-453, but mine was second hand. Ended up buying a new QNAP NAS and being very happy with it.

ZimaBoard 832 with two 2TB SSDs and OMV is my setup. Pair it with tailscale for availability wherever you go.
I wasn't a fan of Immich. Although I'm trying to replace Google photos soy opinion is a bit skewed.

I use xpenology on my old gaming rig as server (no GPU). And i love it. Had unraid before was also very good but diffrent. My main usage is to store Family Files and Photos and the best software ist Synology fotos for me.

Just throwing out an option, not saying it's the best:
If you are comfortable with Linux (or you want to be come intimately familiar with it), then you can just run your favorite distribution. Running a couple of docker containers can be done on anything easily.
What you're losing is usually the simple configuration GUI and some built-in features such as automatic backups. What you gain is absolute control over everything. That tradeoff is definitely not for everyone, but it's what I picked and I'm quite happy with it.
- Yeah already quite familiar, already got a server but looking for something more premium, but essentially deliver the most easy platforms for the rest of the family to use.

I’m a big fan of unraid but I will admit it’s overkill for a simple media server.
A synology NAS should be plenty powerful enough for most streaming needs so long as you’re willing to let your media transcode first and you’re not streaming to too many devices at once.
I use my unraid NAS to run sonar/radarr/readarr/prowlarr, stable diffusion, myjdownloader, a few vms and at one point even my lemmy instance. But honestly aside from stable diffusion and the VMs a synology NAS should have enough power to run a handful of other apps in addition to plex/jellyfin

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