RanceJustice
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2003
- Messages
- 6,640
I'm in a very similar place actually. Right now I have an ancient (Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM) PC that functions essentially as a SAMBA file server for my local network with a couple of old WD Green 1 or 2 TB drives. Its just running a rather cumbersome old install of Arch Linux that amazingly continues to keep turning on even after every power outage (when my APC was garbage) and the drives haven't gone belly up either. This has survived pretty much for over a decade as my NAS-esq PC, but its more than time for an upgrade. I've managed to pick up around 4-5 8TB shucked helium-type drives (WD Red, WD Gold, HGST He8 white labels?) which will be the basis for my newly upgraded storage box. However, I am trying to decide a route forward.
I have considered buying a QNAP / Synology etc... box, but I'm leaning to putting the guts of my current Haswell-E main machine (sig rig) into an old Obsidian 800D case and making it my new server/NAS PC - unless there's a real reason not to do this? Now that it will have some decent power (8c/16t Haswell-E, 16GB RAM ) it would be nice to expand its usage a bit for "server stuff" (ie I've considered running NextCloud or other self host stuff locally ) if I can properly segregate it from the NAS / local network storage safely ; don't want to spin up NextCloud or run some little server and by means of some vuln or configuration error means I leave a backdoor into my files! Anyway, I've been considering that instead of just running a generalist Linux distro and then setting up SAMBA shares or whatever else manually, to run a storage/NAS/SAN focused distro.
There are less of these than I remember when I looked a few years ago and they tend to fall into two categories. Either BSD-based distros like XigmaNAS (not too familiar with this one) or TrueNAS (new name for the FreeNAS project, which seems to look really well developed and put together. Lots of plug-ins and other things, support for VMs and more) which seem to focus primarily on using ZFS and then Linux-based distros like OpenMediaVault (which seems to be a bit more slimmed down and using more conventional file systems ) and Rockstor (which looked really promising awhile ago, but distrowatch says its defunct? Is it going through some sort of change ? The website itself and releases on github/sourceforge show it within the last month!) which use BTRFS . UnRaid seems to be another major option that is Linux based, but I'm not sure how much of it is open source/libre and how much is proprietary, given it seems to require a purchased key to work past a timed trial. There may be other distros out there, or perhaps a combination (ie something like Qubes with different VMs for different purposes etc).
Much of it comes down to the use of a "normal" file system like EXT4 vs the storage-specialized file systems like ZFS or BTRFS (plus whatever UnRaid is doing) . I'm not up to date on the differences and benefits/detriments between the two storage focused file systems currently but a good comparison may be needed to help make a final selection.
I have considered buying a QNAP / Synology etc... box, but I'm leaning to putting the guts of my current Haswell-E main machine (sig rig) into an old Obsidian 800D case and making it my new server/NAS PC - unless there's a real reason not to do this? Now that it will have some decent power (8c/16t Haswell-E, 16GB RAM ) it would be nice to expand its usage a bit for "server stuff" (ie I've considered running NextCloud or other self host stuff locally ) if I can properly segregate it from the NAS / local network storage safely ; don't want to spin up NextCloud or run some little server and by means of some vuln or configuration error means I leave a backdoor into my files! Anyway, I've been considering that instead of just running a generalist Linux distro and then setting up SAMBA shares or whatever else manually, to run a storage/NAS/SAN focused distro.
There are less of these than I remember when I looked a few years ago and they tend to fall into two categories. Either BSD-based distros like XigmaNAS (not too familiar with this one) or TrueNAS (new name for the FreeNAS project, which seems to look really well developed and put together. Lots of plug-ins and other things, support for VMs and more) which seem to focus primarily on using ZFS and then Linux-based distros like OpenMediaVault (which seems to be a bit more slimmed down and using more conventional file systems ) and Rockstor (which looked really promising awhile ago, but distrowatch says its defunct? Is it going through some sort of change ? The website itself and releases on github/sourceforge show it within the last month!) which use BTRFS . UnRaid seems to be another major option that is Linux based, but I'm not sure how much of it is open source/libre and how much is proprietary, given it seems to require a purchased key to work past a timed trial. There may be other distros out there, or perhaps a combination (ie something like Qubes with different VMs for different purposes etc).
Much of it comes down to the use of a "normal" file system like EXT4 vs the storage-specialized file systems like ZFS or BTRFS (plus whatever UnRaid is doing) . I'm not up to date on the differences and benefits/detriments between the two storage focused file systems currently but a good comparison may be needed to help make a final selection.