I am sorry if this the wrong community to ask in, while I have been on Lemmy for more than a year now, I am still learning my way around, and this seems like a relatively active community in a relevant area.
Right, on to my questions!
I am planning to build a NAS over the summer, at the moment all of my personal photos are stored on a single mechanical 2TB Seagate drive that is about 4 years old.
I have other media on another drive that is older but larger, all in all I expect that I have about 8TB of data that I care about.
I am working as a 365 admin, and have been the main Linux admin at my last place of work, I am also a hobby photographer in my spare time.
Currently, I am looking at using either the N4, the N3 or the N5 from Jonsbo, the N4 is a beautiful case!
I am thinking of running four 6TB drives in a softraid like this:
Linux > MDAM (raid 5) > LVM > ext4
My thinking is that I will probably need to migrate to new drives every X years or so, and with the LVM, I can just add a new external (larger) drive to the VG, and move the LV from the old drives to the external drive, remove the old raid drives from the VG, put in new drives, setup MDAM, add the raid to the VG and move the LV back to the raid.
Am I overthinking this? this NAS will be my main media machine and will probably see a decent ammount of use over the years.
I have thought about setting up OpenMediaVault or TrueNAS as the OS, but having never run them, I wonder if they will be as flexible as I want them to be.
I am currently considering just running Debian and setting this up from the terminal, but I am not a super fan of SMB settings in the terminal, I did consider using cockpit as a web admin tool once it is setup to monitor the system, can I do the SMB config from that?
I am apprehensive about a manual SMB config, as the last time I did it, it was a weird mess for the team who had to use it…
I am more familiar with AMD hardware over Intel, and I am looking at the old AM4 plattfrom, but what I don’t know is how much power a homebuilt NAS will use in standby or when active.
I know about TrueNAS, but have never run it on dedicated hardware, at most I have run it in a Virtualbox to test it out.
Though to be fair I have never worked with MDAM either, but I did work with ext4 and xfs when I was a Linux admin, the ext4 filesystems I ran, was setup in an LVM, but to be fair, it was just VMs and I never had to consider the hypervisors raid as it was another team dealing with that.
It’s pretty good to work with, and it’s got pretty mainstream support because the OS isn’t FreeBSD anymore, and it supports docker. As far as setting up the array you plug in the disks and tell it to make a pool. Pretty easy. Then you can subdivide as needed.
TrueNAS has some built in support for backing up to various clouds via rsync, or you can sync at the pool level to a remote server.