Long time lurker, first time poster. Thanks for all the valuable info that has been shared here by this community! Incoming wall of text, but after a week of research and running through things in my mind all day I figured I would just ask the questions I have rather than make multiple posts as I imagine there are others looking to accomplish the same/similar thing right now. Thanks in advance!!
As I assume most of you are aware, the recent announcements from Plex and Synology are strong indicators of the writing that has been on the wall for some time. I’ve admittedly put off making any switch because things have been working just fine, but I’ve decided I’d rather just make the move now before even more changes happen, and while things like hard drives/NAS’ are still reasonably priced.
Background - I first got into the idea of self hosting when I picked up my first NAS circa 2020. It’s a Synology DS420j - about as entry level as you can get for a 4 bay NAS. I had big aspirations to really get into self hosting at that time, but for a variety of reasons (including the fact that its hard to flex the muscles of a Realtek RTD1296 SoC with 1 GB of RAM) once I got basic backups running and Plex was all set up, I didn’t do much else with the NAS aside from basic file sharing and messing around with some of the apps in Package Center to continue my learning. Well, there’s no time like the present for change and now is that time for me.
I currently have 2x 6TB + 1x 8 TB HDDs (all Ironwolves) in Synology Hybrid Raid (SRH) - with the 4th bay populated with an SSD that the Plex install lives on. I have an additional 8 TB drive at the ready as a hotswap and/or to add to my SRH pool once I upgraded my NAS. I’ve also finally hit 95% of my ~10.5TB pool (mostly Plex media), so this change comes at a somewhat convenient/necessary time anyway. [I plan to repurpose this NAS to be a backup only storage device so I can keep using Hyper Backup]
Current Plan/Quandaries -
- New NAS - I intend to bump up to a 6-bay and while all of the big names have comparable 6 bays options (QNAP, Ausustor, TerraMax, UGreen, etc), but one of the more compelling machines I have found is the ZimaCube Pro. It’s a pretty massive upgrade from what I have, which is exciting, but I’d like to do a little future proofing with this upgrade and I do plan to start leveraging a lot more services including virtualization to take advantage of the power boost. From my research, it seems like there were some bumps initially when the cube was first released (pretty expected from a kickstarter campaign of this magnitude), including an issue with Ironwolf drives, specifically, getting fried. It looks like things are in a much better place now that we are approaching a year since release, but I would be curious if anyone is using the ZimaCube and has any feedback on it, or if there are other solutions I may not be privy to that people recommend. (Of note, I am perfectly aware and capable of building my own, but for this step in my self hosting learning cycle I’d rather just get something premade)
https://shop.zimaspace.com/products/zimacube-pro-personal-cloud?variant=47720546697508
- RAID configuration - Obviously, SRH configured drives are not going to be compatible with ZimaOS, or any other non Synology OS (though I don’t plan to use ZimaOS anyway). I had really like the concept of being flexible with drive size as your storage expanded and you were able to accumulate more drives. There are plenty of good reasons for needing to have the same size drives across an array, but it was still a nice feature that I’d like to continue to utilize if possible. Im thinking a RAIDZ1 config would be good to move to (ZFS is intriguing), but from what I can tell you can’t use non matching drive sizes. Am I just going to have to bite the bullet and get all new drives to populate the new NAS, or is there an option out there that I am not aware of? I plan to begin standardizing my drive size at something much larger as the smaller drives begin failing/getting cycled out, but it doesn’t seem like there is a great solution to have that flexibility outside of the Synology ecosystem. (I am going to have to get large drive to move all my files to anyway before reformatting the current SRH drives so this is already going to be pretty pricey of an upgrade move)
- Operating System - TechHut actually has a really fun series he has been doing recently that is very much in line with what I am wanting to do - getting a new Server/NAS setup to move away from Synology/Plex - and I’ve been pulling some ideas from my project from that series. He’s running Proxmox as the hypervisor and TruNAS/Jellyfin inside of that. As I have never used any of these types of softwares I was just curious if there are any red flags with this configuration that I should be aware of before devoting the time to learns these systems - as a tech enthusiast I am well aware of the enormous learning spike between Synology/Plex type apps and self hosted ones like Promox/TruNAS, hence wanting to make sure there isn’t something stupid I’m missing prior to investing the time.
TechHut Series: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?__goaway_challenge=meta-refresh&__goaway_id=b1b338f21a54a885a60db50c1395bbdb&v=qmSizZUbCOA
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmSizZUbCOA - if you are still using Youtube naked for some reason)
Once I get the initial NAS and media server migrations done, I am sure I will have more questions once I start getting things like the Arr suite, Docker, PiHole, KeyPass, etc., set up, but if you’ve made it this far and have any input/insight to provide to my queries I would be greatly appreciative! This community is awesome :)
A few suggestions:
Going from a 4 bay to a 6 bay is not that big of a jump. Especially if you are already at 95% full, you’re gonna fill up those other two drives quick. I used to have a 4 bay little off-brand NAS I found on eBay. I sold it and upgraded to a 14 bay rosewill 4U rack-mounted chassis. For parts I just repurposed some old PC parts and bought a few open box ones. The chassis is like $139 but I suggest getting better rails as the rosewill ones can be kinda crappy. You’d be amazed how quickly storage can fill up and accumulate, so plan for the future.
I also glanced at the NAS you listed, and it’s $1000. You can build something way more customizable with way more storage capabilities for like 1/3 of the cost of that. Was there a reason you wanted to go with this one? Generally it seems to be selling the software that comes with it, and “AI” which… I’m not sure what the idea of that is with it being a data storage device.
Which brings me to my next point, I would highly suggest unRAID for an operating system. Reason being is you said that the idea of constantly adding to your pool and being flexible with sizes and different types of drives appeals to you. This is unRAID’s bread and butter. Throw one large drive in there as your parity, and whatever other random drives you want (different sizes, brands, whatever) are your pool and they are all protected in case of a failure.
It may be controversial in a FOSS sense, but unRAID does have a one-time license fee. I paid like $80 four years ago. Worth it for how easy and configurable the software is, but it’s still Linux at its core so if you want to get your hands dirty all it takes is one click and you’re in the shell or spinning up VM’s and of course docker for your “core” software. Just don’t overspend on a crazy M.2 SSD for your cache disk or a high capacity one. I promise you don’t need the best one to load Plex thumbnails .001 seconds faster. Whether this is better than the prepackaged Zima OS is up to you.
Thank you for the comment. I can definitely resonate with running out of space much faster than you anticipate. Part of my plan though is to start integrating much larger drives than the 6 and 8 TB drives I’ve currently got. All of the potential NAS boxes I am looking at can well over 50 TB total capacity and since it took me ~5 years to fill 10 TB I think leveraging larger drives will probably be fine with a smaller bay device. I do think I am going to do some additional research on potentially going for a rack solution. Seems like a big jump but I do agree with your premise. Doesn’t hurt to check so thank you for that.
As for price, yeah it would be cheaper to build my own but I’m honestly just not in the mood for that at this juncture in my home lab development cycle. I imagine the upgrade following the one I am currently mapping out will be DIY, Im just not there yet. As for the ZimaCube, when you compare the other 6 bay machines from the other popular providers the cube is actually cheaper and better spec’d with 2 additional on board NVME slots and PCIe expansion slots. The more I have researched it the last couple days though I can’t find confirmation that they have fixed the issue with Ironwolf drives, so I may end up having to choose something else anyway unfortunately.
A few other people have mentioned Unraid as well so I am doing some additional research into the company. With the ever growing trend of enshitification in tech, which is a primary motivator for me doing this move anyway, I don’t know Unraid is the solution for me. You are definitely right about them being the ideal solution for mirroring SRH capability as far as drives go, and I have no problem paying for good software, so I may end up going for Unraid after I test out some of the other options. Thanks for the vote of confidence on it. Based on what I’ve seen from Zima OS so far, all I know is that isn’t the OS I will be using, lol.
Thanks again for you input. Greatly appreciated.