NAS / NAS + server? Unraid, Proxmox, Intel, AMD? Looking for guidance.

originalucifer , 5 hours ago

one piece i highly recommend is running your torrent solution in a container with the network set to a gluetun container. no fuss, no muss, vpn'd torrenting.

for the nas piece, im a big fan of the nas device being single purpose. its life should only exist in fileserving. i have several redundant nas devices and then a big ol app server.

my goal is the ron popeil method of 'set it and forget it'

NarrativeBear , 4 hours ago

I personally run truenas on a standalone system to act as my NAS network wide. It never goes offline and is up near 24/7 except when I need to pull a dead drive.

Unraid is my go to right now for self hosting as its learning curve for docker containers is fairly easy. I find I reboot the system from time to time so its not something I use for a daily NAS solution.

Proxmox I run as well on a standalone system. This is my go to for VM instances. Really easy to spin up any OS I would need for any purpose. I run things like home assistant for example on this machine. And its uptime is 24/7.

Each operating system has its advantages, and all three could potentially do the same things. Though I do find a containered approche prevents long periods of downtime if one system goes offline.

sodamnfrolic OP , 4 hours ago

Why do you need both Unraid and TrueNAS? Don’t they do the same thing? What’s the downside to running TrueNAS on VM in Proxmox VS dedicated machine?

NarrativeBear , 3 hours ago

Comes down to personal preferences really. Personally I have been running truenas since the freebsd days and its always been on bare metal. There would be no reason you could not virtualize it, and I have seen it done.

I do run a pfsense virtualized on my proxmox VM machine. It runs great once I figured out all the hardware pass through settings. I do the same with GPU pass through for a retro gaming machine on the same proxmox machine.

The only thing I dont like is that when you reboot your proxmox machine the PCI devices dont retain their mapping ids. So a PCI NIC card I have in the machine causes the pfsense machine not to start.

The one thing to take into account with Unraid vs TrueNAS is the difference between how they do RAID. Unraid always drives of different sizes in its setup, but it does not provide the same redundancy as TrueNAS. Truenas requires disk be the same size inside a vdev, but you can have multiple vdevs in one large pool. One vdev can be 5 drives of 10tb and the other vdev can be 5 drives of 2tb. You can always swap any drive in truenas with a larger drive, but it will only be as big as the smallest disk in the vdev.

bobs_monkey , 4 hours ago

What hardware are you running your truenas setup on? I have an old computer that I’ve had freenas on that finally died.

NarrativeBear , 4 hours ago

Intel Core i5 CPU 750 @ 2.67GHz with 16gb ram 165TB of storage. Motherboard is a Asus Delux 10+ years old. And a 10gb NIC. All inside a fractal Design XL case.

The hardware is by all means not top of the line, but you dont need much for a NAS.

sorghum , 1 hour ago

TrueNAS is switching apps from kubernetes to docker. Might wait till October if wanting to spin up something new. I’ve got to figure out how to migrate my TrueCharts apps or find the equivalent when the time comes to upgrade

sodamnfrolic OP , 4 hours ago

What device do you use for NAS? I’m looking to have a tb of raid 0 ssd cache and if I were to have a dedicated NAS, I would probably go for something with ITX mobo or something like Ugreen Nas with unraid software. Doesn’t the power necessary to have a performant NAS go underutilized then?

originalucifer , 4 hours ago

well, i do try and keep all my data hot in the server.. i am using the devices as redundancy, so no raid anywhere. 24Tb with 3 copies.

ive got a couple of 6-bay readynas i got second hand and a plain ol' ubunutu workstation i crammed with 6 drives and an ssd.

app server runs off 6 local disks(and an ssd for os) which are replicated to the 2 nas as logical (they pull), the workstation gets a drive-for-drive physical

rsync is your friend.

Telodzrum , 4 hours ago

I have been extremely happy with Unraid. It is by far the most beginner-friendly option and there isn’t an easier solution when it comes to expanding capacity. I run my mob client and all of my *arr containers on it. My media server is on a used SFF PC I grabbed for cheap — so QuickSync can run on the bare metal. It’s been a great stack for years.

mspencer712 , 3 hours ago

Married, we both work from home, and we’re in an apartment.

First, all of my weird stuff is not between her work and living room pcs and the internet. Cable modem connects to normal consumer router (openwrt) with four lan ports. Two of those are directly connected to her machines (requiring a 150-ish foot cable for one), and two connect to my stuff. All of my stuff can be down and she still has internet.

Second, no rack mount servers with loud fans, mid tower cases only. Through command line tools I’ve found some of these are in fact capable of a lot of fan noise, but this never happens in normal operation so she’s fine with it.

Separately I’d say, have a plan for what she will need if something happens to you. Precious memories, backups, your utility and service accounts, etc. should remain accessible to her if you’re gone and everything is powered off - but not accessible to a burglar. Ideally label and structure things so a future internet installer can ignore your stuff and set her up with normal consumer internet after your business internet account is shut off.

Also keep in mind if you both switch over so every movie and show you watch only ever comes from Plex (which we both like), in an extended power outage situation all of your media will be inaccessible. It might be good to save a few emergency-entertainment shows to storage you can browse from your phone, usb or iXpand drive you can plug directly into your phone for example.

catloaf , 3 hours ago

I have one mini-ATX server with four drives in RAID 10. I find it easier to manage everything in one device. It runs Proxmox, with Almalinux in a VM that runs my Docker containers. Yes, it’s a layer of inefficiency, but I keep it that way partially because I migrated the VM to Proxmox from ESXi, and partially because I’m not confident in LXC being able to do everything Docker can.

I also run it that way because I have a handful of other VMs.

linearchaos , 4 hours ago

I’m running something surprisingly close to most of what you’re asking for sans the immich which I’m waiting on stability from them first. That warning at the time of their site that says it’s under constant development and not to use it as your primary picture store is a bit worrisome.

Unraid with 2 video cards

• Plex Container (primary video card)
• Plex VM (pass through secondary card handles DVR and backups and it’s also my steam remote provider)
• Home assistant VM (running it in a VM is nicer than a container because of HAOS)
• Jellyfin container
• All the video services pull from the same catalog. I use jellyfin frequently but secondarily, it is my backup in case Plex heads in a direction I don’t like. They’ve already shown some indications I’m not going to like them in the future.
• Deluge+VPN container
• Cloudflare container (first set up is actually a pain in the ass)
• Tailscale plugin
• SearxNG container self-hosted search engine tool
• Pi hole in a container
• Pi hole on a raspberry pi

Plex gets accessed remotely via its own remote capabilities

Jellyfin gets accessed remotely via tailscale

SearXNG is access remotely via cloudflare

I have a secondary Plex server sitting on a raspberry pi with the backup pi hole

I am preparing to set up a peertube. Haven’t had a lot of luck with the container on unraid. I run a fair amount of proxmox at work so I’ll probably just use proxmox for it.

I run a separate dedicated system completely for my cameras. Not running frigate yet but I’ll get around to it eventually using blue iris at the moment.

My unraid gets as much uptime as updates allow. I love being able to just jbod my media discs together and still have some protection with parity.

I find the containerized version of Plex to be more stable than my VM version but that’s probably my own fault as I’m oversubscribing the vm.

Decronym Bot , 4 hours ago (edited 2 minutes ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
ESXi	VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IoT	Internet of Things for device controllers
LTS	Long Term Support software version
LXC	Linux Containers
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NUC	Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
Plex	Brand of media server package
RAID	Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
SMB	Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native
VPN	Virtual Private Network
ZFS	Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
nginx	Popular HTTP server

---

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NuXCOM_90Percent , 4 hours ago (edited 4 hours ago)

A LOT of questions there.

Unraid vs Truenas vs Proxmox+Ceph vs Proxmox+ZFS for NAS: I am not sure if Unraid is ONLY a subscription these days (I think it was going that way?) but for a single machine NAS with a hodgepodge of drives, it is pretty much unbeatable.

That said, it sounds like you are buying dedicated drives. There are a lot of arguments for not having large spinning disk drives (I think general wisdom is 12 TB is the biggest you should go for speed reasons?), but at 3x18 you aren’t going to really be upgrading any time soon. So Truenas or just a ZFS pool in Proxmox seems reasonable. Although, with only three drives you are in a weird spot regarding “raid” options. Seeing as I am already going to antagonize enough people by having an opinion, I’ll let someone else wage the holy war of RAID levels.

I personally run Proxmox+Ceph across three machines (with one specifically set up to use Proxmox+ZFS+Ceph so I can take my essential data with me in an evacuation). It is overkill and Proxmox+ZFS is probably sufficient for your needs. The main difference is that your “NAS” is actually a mount that you expose via SMB and something like Cockpit. Apalrd did a REALLY good video on this that goes step by step and explains everything and it is well worth checking out www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu3t8pcq8O0.

Ceph is always the wrong decision. It is too slow for enterprise and too finicky for home use. That said, I use ceph and love it. Proxmox abstracts away most of the chaos but you still need to understand enough to set up pools and cephfs (at which point it is exactly like the zfs examples above). And I love that I can set redundancy settings for different pools (folders) of data. So my blu ray rips are pretty much YOLO with minimal redundancy. My personal documents have multiple full backups (and then get backed up to a different storage setup entirely). Just understand that you really need at least three nodes (“servers”) for that to make sense. But also? If you are expanding it is very possible to set up the ceph in parallel to your initial ZFS pool (using separate drives/OSDs), copy stuff over, and then cannibalize the old OSDs. Just understand that makes that initial upgrade more expensive because you need to be able to duplicate all of the data you care about.

I know some people want really fancy NASes with twenty million access methods. I want an SMB share that I can see when I am on my local network. So… barebones cockpit exposing an SMB share is nice. And I have syncthing set up to access the same share for the purpose of saves for video games and so forth.

Unraid vs Truenas vs Proxmox for Services: Personally? I prefer to just use Proxmox to set up a crapton of containers/vms. I used Unraid for years but the vast majority of tutorials and wisdom out there are just setting things up via something closer to proxmox. And it is often a struggle to replicate that in the Unraid gui (although I think level1techs have good resources on how to access the real interface which is REALLY good?).

And my general experience is that truenas is mostly a worst of all worlds in every aspect and is really just there if you want something but are afraid of/smart enough not to use proxmox like a sicko.

Processor and Graphics: it really depends on what you are doing. For what you listed? Only frigate will really take advantage and I just bought a Coral accelerator which is a lot cheaper than a GPU and tends to outperform them for the kind of inference that Frigate does. There is an argument for having a proper GPU for transcoding in Plex but… I’ve never seen a point in that.

That said: A buddy of mine does the whole vlogger thing and some day soon we are going to set up a contract for me to sit down and set her up an exporting box (with likely use as a streaming box). But I need to do more research on what she actually needs and how best to handle that and she needs to figure out her budget for both materials and my time (the latter likely just being another case where she pays for my vacation and I am her camera guy for like half of it). But we probably will grab a cheap intel gpu for that.

External access: Don’t do it, that is a great way to get hacked.

That out of the way. My nextcloud is exposed to the outside world via a cloudflare tunnel. It fills me with anxiety but as long as you regularly update everything it is “fine”.

My plex? I have a lifetime plex pass so I just use their services to access it remotely. And I think I pay an annual fee for homeassistant because I genuinely want to support that project.

Everything else? I used to use wireguard (and openvpn before it) but actually switched to tailscale. I like the control that the former provided but much prefer the model where I expose individual services (well, VMs). Because it is nice to have access to my cockpit share when I want to grab a file in a hotel room. There is zero reason that anything needs access to my qbitorrent or calibre or opnsense setup. Let alone even seeing my desktop that I totally forgot to turn off.

But the general idea I use for all my selfhosted services is: The vast majority of interactions should happen when I am at home on my home network. It is a special case if I ever need to access anything remotely and that is where tailscale comes in.

Theoretically you can also do the same via wireguard and subnetting and vlans but I always found that to be a mess to provide access both locally and remotely and the end result is I get lazy. Also, Tailscale is just an app on basically any machine whereas wireguard tends to involve some commands or weird phone interactions.

sodamnfrolic OP , 4 hours ago

I only said 3 drives because supposedly it’s better than 2, which would mean simple mirroring - I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, shouldn’t be hard to get answers there.

Is Cloudflare Tunnels really this problematic? I thought Tunnels and Tailscale would be safe… If I can’t expose those services, I’d rather pay for SaaS alternatives.

Thank you for the other tips.

NuXCOM_90Percent , 4 hours ago

More drives is always better. But you need to understand how you are making it better.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels is a good breakdown of the different RAID levels. Those are slightly different depending on if you are doing “real”/hardware RAID or software raid (e.g. ZFS) but the principle holds true and the rest is just googling the translation (for example, Unraid is effectively RAID4 with some extra magic to better support mismatched drive sizes)

That actually IS an important thing to understand early on. Because, depending on the RAID model you use, it might not be as easy as adding another drive. Have three 8 TB and want to add a 10? That last 2 TB won’t be used until EVERY drive has at least 10 TB. There are ways to set this up in ZFS and Ceph and the like but it can be a headache.

And the issue isn’t the cloudflare tunnel. The issue is that you would have a publicly accessible service running on your network. If you use the cloudflare access control thing (login page before you can access the site) you mitigate a lot of that (while making it obnoxious for anything that uses an app…) but are still at the mercy of cloudflare.

And understand that these are all very popular tools for a reason. So they are also things hackers REALLY care about getting access to. Just look up all the MANY MANY MANY ransomware attacks that QNAP had (and the hilarity of QNAP silently re-enabling online services with firmware updates…). Because using a botnet to just scan a list of domains and subdomains is pretty trivial and more than pays for itself after one person pays the ransom.

As for paying for that? I would NEVER pay for nextcloud. It is fairly shit software that is overkill for what people use it for (file syncing and document server) and dogshit for what it pretends to be (google docs+drive). If I am going that route, I’ll just use Google Docs or might even check out the Proton Docs I pay for alongside my email and VPN.

But for something self hosted where the only data that matters is backed up to a completely different storage setup? I still don’t like it being “exposed” but it is REALLY nice to have a working shopping list and the like when I head to the store.

ahal , 1 hour ago

You can still buy a lifetime subscription for Unraid, it’s just a lot more expensive.

monkeyman512 , 1 hour ago

What my setup will soon be for hardware: Gen 2 AMD epic 16 core CPU, Supermicro motherboard with lots of pcie slots, 128g ram, Intel arc a40 GPU, HBA card attached to a super micro disk shelf

Software: Proxmox for host is, Truenas Scale (just NAS) in VM with HBA card passed into VM, Plex in VM with Intel GPU passed in, 3 VMs for docker swarm (headless Debian)

Other thoughts: Cloud flare will only be helpful for things you want exposed to the internet. If you do that make sure you have a reverse proxy. This is how I expose services for non-tech family.

VPN will be more secure, but can also be more of a pain. I generally only do that for things only I need or only techy savvy people will use.

carloshr , 3 hours ago

I'm a very satisfied proxmox user and I have almost all applications deployed with VM or containers. If you're no a begginer into Linux/nas I think it is the best choice. On the other hand I would totally discard TrueNAS because it is too restrictive and hard to customize.

@sodamnfrolic @selfhosted

iAmTheTot , 4 hours ago

My answer may not be quite as helpful for you, as you said you are a software dev and would probably pick up the more advanced options easier than me.

But for me, I was asking extremely similar questions to you a few months ago (still my only post on Lemmy, lol). I ended up trying unraid, proxmox, and truenas.

I went with unraid and have no regrets. It’s been super easy and I now have the all in one server box I’ve wanted for years.

sodamnfrolic OP , 4 hours ago

One of the things I learned as a dev is not to overcomplicate things - my profession is very guilty of this and it bites us in the ass in the end 100% of the time. I’m slowly learning not to do that, thus, Unraid :) thanks for the info.

Do you have any issues with downtime? Are updates troublesome?

iAmTheTot , 3 hours ago

I haven’t been running it for too long, as I just started putting this together a few months ago and took a while to decide. No issues with downtime though. Updates have been super easy with Unraid so far.

pwet , 43 minutes ago

After years of messing around with cheap and unreliable hardware and complicated setups, I settled to a very stable and simple setup: one huge Dell server with a lot of spare SAS bays and plenty empty memory slots, driven by Proxmox. Within it only 4 VMs: One for pfSense, one for Home Assistant, one for Docker, and one for Ispconfig, as I host for some friends. I ended up using Truenas as it was such a pain to maintain and totally useless for my use case. Proxmox is good enough to run a simple ZFS Nas if you don’t need to manage dozens of shares and users. It’s now so hassle free that I start to become inclined to brake something just for the sake of it.

ripcord , 6 minutes ago

Which model Dell?

Buying few-year old enterprise gear can be a really cost-effective way to get a ton of power and expandability. But the noise, footprint, and power requirements seem pretty niche, even for homelab/selfhost people.

But I’m curious if you’re talking about a full-depth rack system like I’m assuming, or something else.

Personally, I switched to a handful of very small-footprint systems (mostly NUC/SFF PCs, and some laptops). And use cheap jbod enclosures when I need to add external storage.

ahal , 1 hour ago

I’m currently using Unraid for pretty much every thing you listed, and I love it so much. I really appreciate being able to set up almost everything through the web interface. It makes my hobbies feel fun rather than just an extension of my day job.

That said, I bought the licence before they switched to a subscription model. So if I were starting over I might look into free alternatives.

SexualPolytope , 2 hours ago

What I’ve realized in my (very limited) experience in selfhosting, it’s always best to use a general purpose server OS rather than anything geared to a specific usecase, unless that’s the only thing you’re gonna use it for. So, if you want a separate NAS drive, then it’s a good idea to use TrueNAS on it. But on your main server, it’ll be best to use some sort of RHEL downstream distro like AlmaLinux.

zdanger , 4 hours ago

I’ve been running Unraid for over 5 years now and it has been great. I just checked the uptime on it and it’s been running for 146 days, 11 hours, 31 minutes. I should probably check for updates…

I used to run a Threadripper 2950x with 64GB of RAM as my main system and built a new PC when Ryzen 5000 came out and the Threadripper system became the Unraid server. I threw it into a 24-bay, 4U Supermicro CSE-846 with a LSI SAS9211-8I HBA and an extra RTX 3060 I had for hardware transcoding Plex. I have 64TB of storage at the moment with no drive being larger than 8TB. Having 24 bays is nice for that. The server is in a rack in my cellar so sound isn’t an issue for me. I’ve thought about switching to an Epyc setup just to have IPMI built into the motherboard instead of buying a separate KVM device

I have 8 containers and 5 VMs running. I have multiple VLANs setup on my UDM Pro and Juniper switches. A camera VLAN, one for IoT devices for Home Assistant. A Tailscale exit node container is all I use to access the server remotely. I also have a Rustdesk server VM setup for private remote desktop