Need help chosing the best NAS software for my needs

Wag

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 29, 2006
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I have an old Mediasonic H82-SU3S2 8 bay drive enclosure. I could never quite get it to work correctly with USB 3.0 so on an old mini-PC I built based around a ASRock N3700-ITX embeded motherboard I installed a JMicron PCI-E SATA card and use it with that. Through this controller it's the only way I could get it to mount all 8 drives properly.

What I'm basically doing right now is just using Libreelec installed on the mini-PC as a SMB host. I don't have any real need to back up the data drives (although I'm not against it), so using them as individual drives for Kodi on my local setup is fine. I don't need Plex or anything elegant, I just want to be able to manage them a little better. When transfering files to the drives on my network from my PC I'm typically getting ~100MBs.

Is there any NAS software that will allow me to just import the data I already have on the drives, maybe in single drive mode? I have 8GB of ram on the mini-PC so I should be able to run most NAS software without a problem.
 
I'm not familiar with LibreElec, do you know how it maintains your data? As in, are they just plain xfs, ufs, btrfs, or something similar? I'm guessing it's just a folder on a hard drive in Linux by quick glance but again I don't know the software.

Do you need NAS software or would you be comfortable just setting up a basic Linux/*BSD box with Samba on it? It looks like that's all LibreElec is doing, the help file shows some example samba config files then they also have a GUI. If you can do a command line just about any OS will do with Samba and you're off to the races. If you use some of the distros that have X11 installed as default it technically gives you a GUI, and some of them like OpenSuSE have managers built into their admin panels for SMB and NFS.
 
Libreelec is just a very minimal Kodi install in Linux. I have all my drives formatted in ext4 so it's just serving it up off of those using Kodi's built in Samba server. It's been pretty reliable so far- limited mostly by my hard drive speeds and the Mediasonic bay itself (I wouldn't want to read and write simultaneously to it). I have at times been able to write files to the drive bay >110MBs. There are many GUIs for Kodi you can access remotely, but none of them will give you a GUI- I'd like to get a little more info about activity, uptime, transfer speeds, etc.

I was thinking software like OpenmediaVault might do the job, but I have no idea if I can take 8 pre-formatted hard drives (some in different sizes) and it will allow me to keep all the pre-existing data on them.
 
H82-SU3S2 is an 8 bay JBOD enclosure.
PCIE E-stata controller card is added to mix.
110mb/sec seems like gigabit maxed out, you mentioned SMB but machine is also its client?

1. We want to combine all the drives together into a single volume
2. Want to do so while leaving data in tact

For first item, software or hardware raid would accomplish this. Doing so while leaving the data in tact may be a challenge as in my experience most solutions need destroy existing volume then create new.

OMV does drive pooling, pretty sure drives with data can be imported.
I use windows here, and use storage spaces to pool drives together, run plex server on the box, and stream to clients. Server is in garage so I don't hear it :)
 
Machine is not client- it is just being used as a Samba server running off a Libreelec install. I'm accessing it from other devices, like a couple of Nvidia Shields.

I don't want to combine the drives into a single volume, there is no need for me to put it in a RAID config, I know I'd end up losing the data. I might at some point but for my purposes right now it's unnecessary. I just want to be able to manage what I have better. Is there any NAS software that will allow me to do that without having me reformat the ext4 drives that are already in the bay?

Would NFS be better for single drives rather than SAMBA?
 
NFS vs. samba is going to matter more on your clients, these protos serve clients.
What do you want to do/manage which are unable to do now, or would like to do in future? If you are looking for web UI, then webmin might be worth looking at, or going to a dedicated nas distro like freenas which does MANY things.
When you combining the drives, say with ZFS(or raid), you gain some redundancy and can afford to lose a drive. Right now with a single drive situation if that ONE drive with your fave 80's movies fails then no 80's movies for you. I'd suggest to look at something which has some sort of redundancy.
 
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