[noggin]

unRAID user for 7 years. Love it.

[ZwartePiet]

UnRaid works great on a HP Microserver (Gen. 7 for more spindles, Gen. 8 for virtualized workloads). They can handle 4-6 desktop HDDs, only consume ~28 Watts per hour and can be had for a few hundred dollars. However, I got rid of mine for three reasons:

1. The effort involved in "running your own data center" was above the background noise (i.e. noticeable)
   
2. Cost per movie stored was unnecessarily high. Server + USB flash drive + license key + 6x HDDs + cables + mount brackets + electricity = $$$.
   
3. Gigabit ethernet and HDD sequential read/write speeds are really annoying bottle-necks when you're dealing with tens of terabytes of data. Major operations (bulk file transfer, pre-clearing, restoring drives) are measured in hours to days of (background) time. No thank you.
   

Nowadays I just use an Airport Time Capsule, stick to DVD / Youtube-quality 720p and upgrade the internal HDD every few years. Modern HDDs have ~9TB usable, hold around 1500 movies and aren't too ornery to deal with at the router's 80MB/s bottleneck. I back up by transferring files to the Time Capsule and an external HDD simultaneously. It's nice having a simple/cheap system composed of a router/HDD, two Raspberry Pis and a network tuner.

[pe4nut1989]

Hi guys. Right now i have a synology NAS and at some point i'll run out of space on it and since i dont want to bother with buying a new NAS i was thinking if its possible to build a NAS on my own? (in order to have more slots for harddrives). Or build a case with alot of harddrives hooked up to my media center? Can it be done and if so what hardware would i need for it? In the perfect world i would build have a case with some harddrives in it hooked into my chromebox (running openelec) and then let the chromebox upload all my content to a cloud backup but dont know if its possible (without being crazy expensive) to do any of these ideas?

Please, Please, Please consider building yourself an UNRAID rig. You will have to buy a software license that is $59 but it is worth every penny. Since there version 6 release you can do some awesome things with the UNRAID platform. I have used UNRAID for almost 9 years now and it has been really easy to grow my array and even change hardware all while taking care of my data. In fairness I have never used Freenas but I found a decent discussion about the differences here on Reddit. Good luck!

what do you have running for a unraid rig? specs/ and space and docker vm do you have a build thread ?

[KoopaTroopa]

what do you have running for a unraid rig? specs/ and space and docker vm do you have a build thread ?

I know you weren't asking me, but I'll share mine anyway.

Mine is an AMD Sempron (64bit) based box, 2GB RAM

3TB WD Red Parity Drive
plus
4x 2TB
1x 808GB (lol)
3x 1TB
2x 512GB

I'm using some PCI Sata extenders, and my box has the capacity up to 22 physicall HDDs

Current capacity almost 13TB

unRAID is awesome