Bunch of 2 TB HDDs, best RAID/array solution?

MavericK

MavericK

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Sep 2, 2004
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I've been coming into a lot of 2 TB enterprise drives recently and was thinking of getting an array going. Looking for an inexpensive (sub-$100) solution to build an array, ideally maximizing storage space with a bit of redundancy (RAID 5/6?). This would primarily be for media / general file storage.

I have the ability to get all of the drives into a machine using onboard and a SATA card, if something like software RAID is a good option.

Any suggestions? I have heard of FreeNAS/ZFS but I don't know what's involved in setting that up. I do have a beefy machine (similar to the one in my sig) that I could use, but it wouldn't be dedicated to just being a NAS (I use it for VM lab stuff as well).
 
I have built many NAS systems both FreeNAS and unRAID. For ease of use, unRAID is the way to go. It has a great web UI, lots of community support and setup is a breeze.
 
Lothar said:
I have built many NAS systems both FreeNAS and unRAID. For ease of use, unRAID is the way to go. It has a great web UI, lots of community support and setup is a breeze.
Click to expand...

I will check out unRAID, thanks. I assume that both that and FreeNAS require you to dedicate the whole machine, correct? Since it's an OS itself.
 
MavericK said:
I will check out unRAID, thanks. I assume that both that and FreeNAS require you to dedicate the whole machine, correct? Since it's an OS itself.
Click to expand...

I have not tried running it in a VM. But do use Dockers and VM's in unRAID, they work great.
 
I run FreeNAS as an ESXi 6.5 VM, works great for me so long as you passthrough the controller.
 
I really like my Rockstor NAS setup, but that's mainly because all the drives I have are different sizes. Since you have same size drives a more traditional setup might be the way to go.
 
Thanks for the options, guys. I will consider the above and see what I come up with. My current VMs are just Windows Server test environments so going with the storage OS and then running the VMs from that might make sense.
 
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