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:
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Can definitely confirm this. I started with a Proxmox system which had a TrueNAS VM. TrueNAS just used a USB HDD for storage though. Setting everything up and getting the permissions set correctly so I could connect my computers was a pain in the ass though.
Later I bought a synology and it just works. Only thing I would recommend is getting good HDDs. I bought Toshiba MG08 16TB drives and while they work great, they are obnoxiously loud during read and write operations. They are so loud, that even though the NAS is in a separate room I have to shut it off at night.
Meanwhile the Seagate Ironwolf drive I used for TrueNAS was next to my bed for multiple months and was basically silent.
I have Iron wolves and I thought THEY were noisy.
You might have gotten a dud. I’ve got 4 in my NAS and they are silent.
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.
TrueNAS has nice defaults for managing snapshots and the like that make it a bit safer, but yeah, as I said, I run ZFS directly on Proxmox right now.
Oh sorry for some reason I read OMV VM and assumed the ZFS pool was set up there. The Cockpit ZFS Manager extension that I linked has good management of snapshots as well, which may be sufficient depending on how much power you need.
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:
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Proxmox on bare metal
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TrueNAS Core/Scale in a VM
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Pass the HBA PCI card through to TrueNAS and set up your ZFS pool there
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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)
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If you run your app stack through LXCs, just set them up through Proxmox normally
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Set up an NFS share through TrueNAS, and connect your app stack to that NFS share
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(Optional): Just run your ZFS pool on Proxmox itself and skip TrueNAS
I already run proxmox but not TrueNAS. I’m really just confused about the HBA card. Probably a stupid question but why can’t TrueNAS access regular drives connected to SATA?
The main problem is just getting TrueNAS access to the physical disks via IOMMU groups and passthrough. HBA cards are a super easy way to get a dedicated IOMMU group that has all your drives attached, so it’s common for people to use them in these sorts of setups. If you can pull your normal SATA controller down into the TrueNAS VM without messing anything else up on the host layer, it will work the same way as an HBA card for all TrueNAS cares.
(TMK, SATA controller hubs are usually an all-at-once passthrough, so if you have your host system running off some part of this controller it probably won’t work to unhook it from the host and give it to the guest.)
Makes sense, thanks for the info
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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 🙂
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.
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.
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.
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/
The only place ZFS seems to use a sizable amount of RAM is for the arc memory cache system which is an really nice feature when you have piles of small file access going on. For me some of the most high access things are the image stores for lemmy and mastodon that combine up to just under 200GB right now but are some crazy high number of files. Letting the system eat up idle ram to not have to pull all those from disk constantly is awesome.
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.
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.
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.
Do people not like TrueNAS?
It’s fine, but it’s really only good as a NAS. BHyve is a terrible virtualization platform. With something like Open Media Vault you get access to KVM, which is a much better way to run a virt or two on the side.
TrueNAS isn’t just BSD anymore. There’s Scale which is just TrueNAS’s UI and ZFS on top of Debian.
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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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 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.
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.
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
