octobob@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
A few suggestions:
Going from a 4 bay to a 6 bay is not that big of a jump. Especially if you are already at 95% full, you’re gonna fill up those other two drives quick. I used to have a 4 bay little off-brand NAS I found on eBay. I sold it and upgraded to a 14 bay rosewill 4U rack-mounted chassis. For parts I just repurposed some old PC parts and bought a few open box ones. The chassis is like $139 but I suggest getting better rails as the rosewill ones can be kinda crappy. You’d be amazed how quickly storage can fill up and accumulate, so plan for the future.
I also glanced at the NAS you listed, and it’s $1000. You can build something way more customizable with way more storage capabilities for like 1/3 of the cost of that. Was there a reason you wanted to go with this one? Generally it seems to be selling the software that comes with it, and “AI” which… I’m not sure what the idea of that is with it being a data storage device.
Which brings me to my next point, I would highly suggest unRAID for an operating system. Reason being is you said that the idea of constantly adding to your pool and being flexible with sizes and different types of drives appeals to you. This is unRAID’s bread and butter. Throw one large drive in there as your parity, and whatever other random drives you want (different sizes, brands, whatever) are your pool and they are all protected in case of a failure.
It may be controversial in a FOSS sense, but unRAID does have a one-time license fee. I paid like $80 four years ago. Worth it for how easy and configurable the software is, but it’s still Linux at its core so if you want to get your hands dirty all it takes is one click and you’re in the shell or spinning up VM’s and of course docker for your “core” software. Just don’t overspend on a crazy M.2 SSD for your cache disk or a high capacity one. I promise you don’t need the best one to load Plex thumbnails .001 seconds faster. Whether this is better than the prepackaged Zima OS is up to you.
Lemming007@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Thank you for the comment. I can definitely resonate with running out of space much faster than you anticipate. Part of my plan though is to start integrating much larger drives than the 6 and 8 TB drives I’ve currently got. All of the potential NAS boxes I am looking at can well over 50 TB total capacity and since it took me ~5 years to fill 10 TB I think leveraging larger drives will probably be fine with a smaller bay device. I do think I am going to do some additional research on potentially going for a rack solution. Seems like a big jump but I do agree with your premise. Doesn’t hurt to check so thank you for that.
As for price, yeah it would be cheaper to build my own but I’m honestly just not in the mood for that at this juncture in my home lab development cycle. I imagine the upgrade following the one I am currently mapping out will be DIY, Im just not there yet. As for the ZimaCube, when you compare the other 6 bay machines from the other popular providers the cube is actually cheaper and better spec’d with 2 additional on board NVME slots and PCIe expansion slots. The more I have researched it the last couple days though I can’t find confirmation that they have fixed the issue with Ironwolf drives, so I may end up having to choose something else anyway unfortunately.
A few other people have mentioned Unraid as well so I am doing some additional research into the company. With the ever growing trend of enshitification in tech, which is a primary motivator for me doing this move anyway, I don’t know Unraid is the solution for me. You are definitely right about them being the ideal solution for mirroring SRH capability as far as drives go, and I have no problem paying for good software, so I may end up going for Unraid after I test out some of the other options. Thanks for the vote of confidence on it. Based on what I’ve seen from Zima OS so far, all I know is that isn’t the OS I will be using, lol.
Thanks again for you input. Greatly appreciated.