[CK77]

Hi,

I'm looking for some advise on setting up my own NAS at home. I'm only doing this to get some safety if one of my HD's would ever crash. I know, I know, a NAS and RAID, unRAID,... are no replacement for a backup I'm mainly doing this for my movies/tv shows/music. All my really important files are backed up properly and to the cloud too. I can always get the movies/... back but it takes effort. I'm checking in these forums since i assume a lot of people here will be in the same boat as i am.

I'm not looking for somebody to guide me through the process of setting everything up, i can find tutorials, youtube videos,... to help me with the setup. What i'm after is the right software to use files system and raid config ideas. So the what, not the how.

I'm open to hardware suggestions for upgrades in the future, but for now i don't have any money to change anything HD wise (Corona times and no job).

My current setup is:

Intel NUC 7th Gen Core i3 with 16GB ram
SSD Bootdrive
SSD 2.5 Data Drive
Powered USB3 HUB
2x WD 2TB HD USB3
1x WD 4TB HD USB3

TV is my monitor

Nvidia Shield with Kodi on other TV

I use Win 10 with Emby as media server and Kodi as a front end on the NUC
The 3 External HD's contain my movies and are shared so all my connected devices play direct from them no transcoding going on in emby.
I also run Home Assistant in a Hyper-V VM, just to play around with.

So now come the point where i'm asking for help

I can stick with Windows, it's what i know. My options here are to use something like Storage Spaces or DrivePool to pool my drives together and set some sort of raid1 or raid5 up. I also ran into something called SnapRaid which seems interesting if i understand correctly what it does.

OR

I could go the proper NAS OS route and go with FreeNAS, OMV, unRAID,...

Here I lack knowledge, but i do like tinkering with things and i have plenty of time to learn. 
OMV seems interesting, it allows me to install Emby, Home Assistant, PiHole, and a bunch of other stuff in Docker containers. Never worked with them, but i understand the concept.
I have some spare external HD's to play around with while setting things up, so i would not have to use my 3 in use HD's with media on them.

So does this community have any valuable input about what direction i should take?
What would give me the best experience, best data speeds, what's the safest option?

I hope this word salad makes some sense, thanks for reading and hopefully answering

[tredman]

Had a similar conundrum to you recently. I went with Unraid. Yes you have to pay, but it's a doddle to use, the docker implementation is superb and rebuilding from parity is easy.

[CK77]

Had a similar conundrum to you recently. I went with Unraid. Yes you have to pay, but it's a doddle to use, the docker implementation is superb and rebuilding from parity is easy.

So what i didn't like about Unraid was that it has to run from a USB stick and that it's tricky finding a USB stick that works consistently for it.
I also read/saw on Youtube that the OS kinda ruins the USB stick after a while so you need a new one on a regular basis. Not sure if it's true, but it was on one of the more popular tech channels.

Do they have a 30 day free trial? Just checked, they do.

[mcelliott]

Just bought a QNAP NAS as an upgrade from a Buffalo NAS. Nice and quiet, simple to setup. Unix network shares, really fast and Plex server as well. I love to tinker, but these days I find myself drawn to simple, low power solutions.

[tredman]

Had a similar conundrum to you recently. I went with Unraid. Yes you have to pay, but it's a doddle to use, the docker implementation is superb and rebuilding from parity is easy.

So what i didn't like about Unraid was that it has to run from a USB stick and that it's tricky finding a USB stick that works consistently for it.
I also read/saw on Youtube that the OS kinda ruins the USB stick after a while so you need a new one on a regular basis. Not sure if it's true, but it was on one of the more popular tech channels.

Do they have a 30 day free trial? Just checked, they do.

Yeah, you get three trial periods.

I've had no issues with usb (I got a tiny little cruzer one and put it directly onto the motherboard socket). Not heard of usb problems, it doesn't really do much after boot as unraid runs from RAM. Easy to replace if needed too - as long as you do a backup.

[noggin]

I've been running UNRaid for years from Lexar USB drives (I fitted an internal USB socket on a USB 2.0 header to on of my motherboards so the flash drive sits inside the PC).  I've had no USB flash issues at all in 10+ years of running - though I don't run anything like VMs or Dockers on my unRAID set-up - it's just a file server. (I have two installs - one DIY, which has been migrated twice to different hardware but is still using the original flash drive - now 10 years old!, and an HP Microserver build, now running on the second Microserver I've owned, which has an internal USB socket for this kind of thing)

[Harro]

Had a similar conundrum to you recently. I went with Unraid. Yes you have to pay, but it's a doddle to use, the docker implementation is superb and rebuilding from parity is easy.

So what i didn't like about Unraid was that it has to run from a USB stick and that it's tricky finding a USB stick that works consistently for it.
I also read/saw on Youtube that the OS kinda ruins the USB stick after a while so you need a new one on a regular basis. Not sure if it's true, but it was on one of the more popular tech channels.

Do they have a 30 day free trial? Just checked, they do.

I have been using Unraid for about as long as noggin with no issues on my usb flash.

 I have in the last 2 months upgraded my Unraid with new m/b, cpu and ram, after the upgrade turned on and Unnraid started loading with same config, no loss of dockers , drive configurations , it just works.

Initially on boot Unraid is loaded onto memory and will from that point on run from memory until  you reboot again. 

[tredman]

I've got two setups, both running on HP microservers (an n54l and a gen8). Both run really well, I occasionally spin up a VM on the gen 8 and it works well too.

You can pick up an n40 or n54 for peanuts on ebay and assuming you don't want to do anything CPU intensive they are a really good option