[srle]

I’d urge anyone planning on building or buying a home server to try out Unraid. It’s not free or open source, but it’s only $130 iirc for the unlimited lifetime license and it Just Works^tm.

You install it on a USB stick, and the web interface has you up and running within like 2 minutes. The only hard rule is that your parity drives must be as large as or the same size as your data drives, but other than that you’re completely free to add or remove disks one, two, or ten at a time and all it takes is like 3 button clicks.

The community is large so there’s always someone to help should you run into trouble but in general the whole thing is pretty brainless. Click button, server work.

[nine_k]

The whole point of the exercise is to have a device completely under your control. Closed source need not apply for security / trust reasons.

Otherwise, e.g. Synology produces excellent devices, etc.

[nix23]

>Synology produces excellent devices,

Sorry but had quite the opposite experience even with the professional lines. The only NAS i trust is a Server (at least HP mini server) and ZFS. Stuff like unraid is for Windows mindsets, i don't trust HW-Raid and i especially don't trust Closedsource Software BS for stuff like that, exceptions are Enterprise stuff like EVA's or NetApp and EMC.

[pilsetnieks]

Synology OS is a modified Linux and it uses mdraid for RAID. There is no hardware RAID, and very little closedsource bullshit.

This is how you'd mount a synology array in a Linux server: https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/St... - it's basically two terminal commands after all the preparation stuff.

I believe QNAP uses mdraid as well but I haven't had any experience with those.

[nix23]

>Synology OS is a modified Linux and it uses mdraid for RAID.

Yes and that raid destroyed itself many times which btw never happened to me on a self-installed Linux.

[ValentineC]

> Yes and that raid destroyed itself many times which btw never happened to me on a self-installed Linux.

I'm sorry you've had the misfortune of encountering such problems.

I've been using Synology/Xpenology (a fork of their GPL bootloader) for 8 years, and it's still going great for me.

[nix23]

They where all from that RS -Series i think we had about 15 of them from RS14XX to RS1219 and all of them destroyed their own Raid after around 2 years just like that, no firmware update before that or other things that could trigger such a crash.

[pnutjam]

Opensuse with btrfs is my drug of choice.

Btrfs is on the kernel and just works.

[nix23]

I have to say OpenSuse makes a great job, have tumbleweed on my laptop and it's running great, a really great Distro.

[fomine3]

Unraid is getting popular on some DIY space but I feel that it's hobby-ish product. I astonished that it won't set root password and able to login by default. Write performance is terrible (by design) and "SSD cache mechanism" is made by crappy shell script. I agree that it still worth for some use case.