Hey all, I’m looking to begin expanding my storage in my homelab, and I want to have somewhere in the range of 16-32TB redundant storage. I didn’t realize that, when buying a NAS from a company like Synology, you’re also paying for their software.
I’m perfectly comfortable running RAID/UNRAID or something like TrueNAS to serve out my NAS storage. So what options does that leave me with? What are the benefits of a RAID enclosure? They certainly seem to be cheaper options than a pre-built NAS, which is certainly appealing. What NAS storage solution do you use?
Unraid, and TrueNAS are both solid options. You also have Proxmox you can run. It is important to understand though that Unraid and Proxmox are more than just a NAS. They also host VMs and Docker containers. You do have to pay for a license for Unraid though. It is a one time purchase.
The big thing with Unraid compared to the others is that you don’t really have to worry about the size of disks to get the protection of a parity drive. As long as your largest drive in the array is the parity drive you are good.
TrueNAS also has paid options but they do have the free version.
Proxmox is also open source. Which may be something that you like.
Personally I use Unraid. It is solid and I have had zero issues.