New to NAS - What are the recommended solutions?

If you want a "setup and forget" type of experience, synology will serve you well, if you can afford it. Of you are more of a tinkerer and see yourself experimenting and upgrading in the future, then I recommend custom built. OMV is a solid OS for a novice, but any Linux distro you fancy most can do the job very well!

I've started my NAS journey with a very humble 1-bay synology. For the last few years I am using a custom built ARM NAS (nanopi m4v2), with 4-bays and running Armbian. All my services run on docker, I have Jellyfin, *arr, bitwarden and several other servicies running very reliably.

And if you’re not sure how much of tinkering you want to do a Synology with docker support is a good option.
^ This. I have an M1 Mac mini running Asahi Linux with a bunch of docker containers and it works great. Run Jellyfin off of a separate stick PC running an Intel Celeron with Ubuntu Mate on it. Basically I just have docker compose files on those two machines and occasionally ssh in from my phone to sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y (on Ubuntu) or sudo pacman -Syu (on Asahi) and then docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

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.
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:
  
  Proxmox on bare metal
  
  TrueNAS Core/Scale in a VM
  
  Pass the HBA PCI card through to TrueNAS and set up your ZFS pool there
  
  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)
  
  If you run your app stack through LXCs, just set them up through Proxmox normally
  
  Set up an NFS share through TrueNAS, and connect your app stack to that NFS share
  
  (Optional): Just run your ZFS pool on Proxmox itself and skip TrueNAS

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.
- Also, you could run Linux off of a real CPU. My experience is that my DS916+ is way underpowered even with 8 GB memory. I use my NAS for actual storage, and an old Intel mainboard w/16GB RAM for actual CPU work.

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.

This was the route I went with when I started, and I've never had cause to regret it. For people near the start of their self-hosting journey, it's the no-hassle, reliable choice.

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 🙂
- I agree with the learning curve (personally I found it worthwhile, but that's subjective).
  
  But how does ZFS limit easy backup options? IMO it only adds options (like zfs send/receive) but any backup solution that works with any other file systems should work just as well with ZFS (potentially better since you can use snapshots to make sure any backup is internally consistent).

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.

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.
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/
- 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.

Do you have any old hardware that doesn't have a job? That is a great place to start. Take some time try out different solutions (proxmox, unraid, casa OS). Then as you nail down your needs you can better pick hardware.

Yeah this is what I have been doing so far, loads of spare parts - running Debian atm. So kind of looking for 'the next step' rn.

I use UNRAID, I didn’t want to pay for a license originally but having the option to mix and match drives and have redundancy is nice.

I also use the built in docker feature to host most of my services.

Unraid is also awesome for places with high energy cost: Unlike with your typical RAID / standard NAS, it allows you to spin down all drives that aren't in active use at a relatively minor write speed performance penalty.

That's pretty ideal for your typical Plex-server where most data is static.

I built a 10HDD + 2SSD Unraid Server that idles at well below 30W and I could have even lowered that further had I been more selective about certain hardware. In a medium to high energy cost country, Unraid's license cost is compensated by energy savings within a year or two.

Mixing & matching older drives means even more savings.

Simple array extension, single or dual parity, powerful cache pool tools and easily the best plugin and docker app store make it just such a cool tool.
- This sounds very good, i like what i am reading and hearing about unraid! And I do live somewhere with very high energy costs..
I run most of my stuff on k8s, but I really enjoy simple docker ecosystem of apps that home assistant supervisor provides. Unraid app approach looks similar, preconfigured and working together. Even thou I don't need fancy nas, I might try unraid just to evaluate apps ecosystem. How to u find their community apps?
- I usually search thru the apps and they install as docker containers, I can edit the configs after the fact, it’s pretty nice. There’s also a terminal so I can run regular docker commands too.

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

[Thread #164 for this sub, first seen 24th Sep 2023, 20:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I've found CasaOS to be the simplest to set up and get going. I tried TrueNAS for a year, but wish I had started with CasaOS.

CasaOS looks interesting. But i prefer OpenMediaVault for the moment.
How would you rate Casa compared to Open Media Vault?
- Haven't tried OMV, but the lesson I learned with TrueNAS is that software designed primarily for NAS has a lot of features I don't care about, and the other apps can be finicky. I'm not storing petabytes of data. CasaOS was the closest I found to "just works".
  
  There's also Umbrel OS which looks promising, but I've been happy with CasaOS so haven't felt the need to switch.

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.
- You're one of the few who mentioned OMV in the thread and I was wondering why, it works great for me as a VM on proxmox... the only gripe I have is that sometimes the GUI decides I've made changes to the configuration and asks me to apply them, only to fail and get stuck with the notification.
- TrueNAS isn't just BSD anymore. There's Scale which is just TrueNAS's UI and ZFS on top of Debian.

First I chose a Pi now am using a Nuc as a NAS.
Reason for why: The price was too much for a synology + transcode capable CPU as it wasmt clear what type of processor was being used.

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.

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.

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 have a QNAP NAS that I love. Can't recommend it enough.

I got burned pretty bad by QNAP. Their TS-453 Pro had an Intel manufacturing defect that basically caused it to die prematurely and QNAP has basically given up all responsibility for it. I built my own NAS after that experience.
- Yep, I had the same with my TS-453, but mine was second hand. Ended up buying a new QNAP NAS and being very happy with it.

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.

ZimaBoard 832 with two 2TB SSDs and OMV is my setup. Pair it with tailscale for availability wherever you go.

I wasn't a fan of Immich. Although I'm trying to replace Google photos soy opinion is a bit skewed.

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