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?
It kind of depends on your use case.
If you’re just using it purely for storage to serve up to clients on your network, I’d go with truenas. If you need the performance of raid, I’d also go with truenas.
If you’re trying to build an all-in-one media server, unraid is a great choice. To be honest, though, I don’t like it for much else, and you have to pay for it.
Synologies are a good option if you need a pretty simple solution, but like you said, you’re definitely paying a premium for that simplicity.