this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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You're crazy and I envy your setup so much.
I'm just starting, with a mere 4 TB storage, but I want to learn how it works before investing more money
That's why unraid was (in my opinion) a good starting point, you can use whatever disks you have regardless of size and speed and pool them all together pretty easily. Stick jellyin or plex or both on it and you have a great starting server.
I'll support this
If your goal is to set up a media server, a few services, and a storage for non-essential files*, it is hard to beat unraid. Free is obviously better, but it has the best support for mismatched drive sizes and, arguably, the highest percentage of "usable" space. Try to wait for a sale (there are quite a few per year) but it is also a lifetime license so...
There are performance implications and I never trust any solution that can only survive two drive failures. Especially when recovery involves heavy reads and writes. Because drives tend to fail in groups and stressing a drive on its last legs is never a good idea.
*: Which, to be fair, should be how any locally stored file is treated. Unless you have it backed up off site in at least one location (preferably two), it is not backed up. Which is why my media collection is YOLO but my (encrypted) documents and personal photos go into a cloud storage bucket on a weekly basis.
I was thinking of YOLOing my media collection too, but at the same time I'm scared of downloading lots of things and then losing everything and having to download everything from scratch again.
Yeah. For me, the vast majority of my media collection are rips of the blu-rays and DVDs I have in a box in the closet. So recovery is just annoying. There are a few somewhat obscure shows (or shows with massively generic or reused names) that I might never be able to find again but... whatever.
But I definitely have a few porn videos I found on DC++ ten (... twenty?) years ago that I have never been able to find again after accidentally deleting the "Special Textures" folder of my Unreal Tournament directory.
Unraid pro is expensive (compared to free DIY linux or Truenas for example) but it is extremely flexible and very easy to get started with.
Their free trial is very flexible though, and once set up and running most people will already be set and happy to pay for the licence.
Anyone not building a proper rackmount server is unlikely to need more than Unraid Plus. Which is 89 USD without a discount. Said discounts vary but are generally 20-30% or straight up 10 dollars, which gets plus down to 60-70 bucks. Unraid Pro I think is where you start getting into discussions of if this is a good decision, but we are looking at 90-110 for that.
Which is not nothing. But Plus undiscounted is about the price of a 4 TB drive. So if you can't afford a license you can't really afford to run a NAS with any degree of recoverability. At which point you are probably better mounting the drives as individual un-RAID'd drives and spreading files across a file system. Because, at that point, you can't recover from any failures anyway and this at least still guarantees access to your remaining files if one or more drives drop.
And if you are going big enough to need more than 12 drives in a single system (and I say this as someone who currently has 16 in his NAS...): That is when you should not be using unraid. Multiple physical servers set up as a ceph array and dealing with a lot of smaller zfs raids of varying sizes is the way to go but... you are losing a lot of storage to parity for something that likely isn't worth that level of redundancy. But you also start getting into a discussion of "what is my time worth" at that point because... Ceph is a mother fucker.
Well my main server is currently at 16 drives plus 2 SSDs, so 18 total counted for the licence, arranged as 12 drive unraid array and 4 drive ZFS, plus an appdata+vm disk and a general cache disk.
I'd like to go with Ceph eventually, because I think it's a solid platform, but multiple nodes and a heavier duty network backbone would be required to do that properly, also the extra disks required to protect a ZFS array of multiple Vdevs, which is safer and faster sure, but the costs are significantly higher than just buying an unraid licence.
I mean, I am doing the same thing. Do as I say, not as I do, and all that jazz.
But the main issue is that, with that many drives, the failure point starts to become the server itself as opposed to just the storage.