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Storage OMV or unRAID?

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by silk186, 26 Jan 2019.

  1. silk186

    silk186 Derp

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    I collected an HP Proliant ML110 G7 the other day and I need to figure out what to do with it.
    Specs: Intel Xeon E3-1220@3.10GHz, 16GB, 2x 300GB SAS & x2 250GB SATA, P410

    I want to run a headless server that is upgradable a requires minimal maintenance. I don't need any redundency as important data will be backed up to an external. It would be nice if this was automated. I want to be able to add drives as I can afford to them and would prefer them to appear as a single volume. I want to run Sonarr with either transmission/rturrent with a massive bank of torrents. I will eventually pick up a fire stick so it needs to support PLEX or similar. The most important this is that files are easy to access from my wife's Macbook Pro. She is researching french new wave and is currently using an external drive that disconnects if you touch it. I've tried sharing a folder over win10 but it would require a restart every time it went into sleep mode. Eventually, when I have the storage it would be good to schedule back-up my desktop and the Macbook with revisioning.

    Needs/wants:
    • easy access from Win10/OS
    • low maintenance
    • easy to swap in larger drives
    • supports Sonarr, transmission/rtorrent and PLEX
    • (Eventually) back up OS drive on desktop and Macbook with revisioning
    I have an unused SanDisk Ultra Fit 32GB I can use or pick up a cheap SSD from the marketplace.
    I know I have a few options with FreeNAS, unRAID and OpenMediaVault. I've been doing some light reading but I don't really understand very much from comparisons I see as they are beyond my knowledge.

    I have 3x 3TB DT01ACA300 in my main rig, I will move at least 2 of these over after everything is set up so that I can move everything else into an mITX case.

    I've just noticed that my TP-Link TL-WDR7300 AC2100 doesn't have any free ports. I can attach the wireless ariel to my desktop or pick up a cheap gigabit switch or figure something out between my Virgin hub and wireless router ... nothing is every easy. :wallbash:
    Is something like a TP-Link TL-SG1008D Gigabit Unmanaged Desktop Switch suitable? Would I connect it Virgin HUB (in modem mode) -> wireless router -> switch?

    I have some reading to do, but I am a bit lost and don't know where to start.
     
    Last edited: 26 Jan 2019
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  2. Dr. Coin

    Dr. Coin Multimodder

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    I have not try OMV or Unraid so I cannot speak to or against them.
    I've been running FreeNAS for 2 plus year. After initial setup I have not had to do any maintenance on the system (minus a motherboard failure).
    • FreeNAS will allow you to easy add and replace dives (according to the literature, I've never tried).
    • Just checked the list of support plugin, Sonarr and transmission is there. Not sure about rtorrent.
    • I've been running Plex on my FreeNAS since day 1.
    • Set up a TimeCapsule data set and regularly access windows shared folders from my iMac (with my current setting I do need to use ⌘K in the Finder to connect to server, but it remembers my servers and I just pick from a list).
    I have my OS on a 16 GB SanDisk Ultra Fit drive, with a second flash drive as a redundant unit, I should set a corn job to update the my backup as it is 2 years old now...

    Sorry cannot help with networking...
     
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  3. Mister_Tad

    Mister_Tad Will work for nuts Super Moderator

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    Swap out the entire array, or one at a time?

    AFAIK FreeNAS is fine with the former, but not the latter.
     
  4. silk186

    silk186 Derp

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    replacing one at a time, say switching a 3TB disk for a 6TB disk.
     
  5. silk186

    silk186 Derp

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    That sounds good. I need to learn enough about this in general so that I can understand the difference between my options.
     
  6. Pliqu3011

    Pliqu3011 all flowers in time bend towards the sun

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    YMMV but I've personally not had such a great experience with FreeNAS. Used it for almost 2 years.
    Setting up everything I wanted turned out to be a lot of work. The web interface was a buggy mess and sometimes extremely slow (delays of minutes just to show the list of installed plugins) so you better use ssh 80% of the time, and Plex streams in particular would often break down, something I was never able to solve (though that might've also been caused by the ancient router it was connected to at the time). Getting an old-ish Lexmark to act properly as a network printer was also a major PITA, took me months.

    Once I got it up and running things were mostly fine (bar the Plex problem), and I really liked the FreeBSD jails system behind the scenes making it easy to experiment with plugins yourself without risk of breaking everything. It seems like a really powerful and versatile OS, but aimed at a more enthusiast NAS user than I intended to be. Maybe the user experience improved vastly over the last few versions, I don't know.
    Lots of people really like FreeNAS, so don't let me dissuade you, but definitely do your research beforehand.


    FWIW I'm running Xpenology on my NAS right now and couldn't be happier with it. Less customizable for sure, but the full setup was ludicrously easy compared to FreeNAS, like a few hours instead of multiple days of tinkering and digging through forum guides. Getting that printer to work took maybe 3 minutes (I nearly cried).
    I'm running a bunch of SMB shares with permissions (accessed from Win7, 10 and Linux), NextCloud, Plex, Transmission, Headphones, Sonarr, Radarr, and a VPN connection, all without a hitch. It just works.

    I don't know if swapping drives is supported though, I'd have to look it up. It formats them as ext4, nothing fancy like ZFS in FreeNAS, so I'm pretty sure it won't fail catastrophically... but I can't promise any more than that. :p:
     
    Last edited: 26 Jan 2019
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  7. David

    David μoʍ ɼouმ qᴉq λon ƨbԍuq ϝʁλᴉuმ ϝo ʁԍɑq ϝμᴉƨ

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    I didn't like FreeNAS, personally - too fiddly and frustrating to set up and maintain. It all felt overly complicated, like I was being punished for not being a Linux geek.

    OMV was easier - I ran that for a couple of years but eventually ditched it because the print server was incredibly flaky and would "forget" my printer. It wasn't a huge problem most of the time, but when you need to print off something quickly and end up spending 15 minutes ****ing around with the print server instead, it begins to wear a bit thin. It has likely improved since then, but I don't care any more since I discovered XPEnology.

    XPEnology is stupidly easy to set up, in comparison to FreeNAS and OMV, and basically turns whatever machine you're running it on into a Synology NAS box.running DSM. There are one or two caveats - you have to run updates manually and ignore automatic updating (which will attempt to update direct from Synology and breaks your NAS), and as far as I can tell, you HAVE to run it off a USB stick, MicroSD card or some other flash media. Other than that, it's a breeze - straightforward DSM interface and simple add-on packages, including PLEX.
     
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  8. silk186

    silk186 Derp

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    I have a network printer so I won't have any issues with it, just plug in into the network and it works.
    It seems FreeNAS is not suitable and I should look at unRAID, OMV and XPEnology.
     
  9. dynamis_dk

    dynamis_dk Grr... Grumpy!!

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    I've been running UNRAID for years and it's only been getting better with new releases. Only issue I've had is the parity drive needs to be equal or larger than largest data disk so say you have a 2tb parity and then a 2tb data drive you want to swap to a 6tb - you'd need to swap the parity first but once your setup with a decent size parity you can swap out disks for larger (up to parity size) or add new disks as you can afford / see fit.

    Its got good docker and VM support built in so makes addons such as Sonarr, transmission/rtorrent and PLEX easy to get setup. Mine is setup with Sabnzbd, Sickbeard, game server VM and home assistant all which just purr along nicely without much in the way of needing maintenance. Scheduled full parity check monthly and email/growl notifications for any issues (SMART, parity mismatches etc). Great community for support too.

    I don't have any experience of any of the other NAS solutions so can't really comment on its sutability over those - however I will say I tried unraid first and I've never needed to think about moving off it so that must say something :)
     
  10. silk186

    silk186 Derp

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    This is another option that I'm reading more about. Honestly, I won't have the money for parity until my thesis is accepted and I can start working. In the meantime, I can buy externals when they are on sale and sell my smaller drives to slowly increase my capacity on the cheap. It seems that issue (for me) with a traditional RAID array is that I would need to build and replace an array as a whole. This seems to mean that FreeNAS is not a suitable option.

    "Docker" is something I will have to look into. How does UNRAID, OMV and XPEnology handle plugins or docking.
     
  11. dynamis_dk

    dynamis_dk Grr... Grumpy!!

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    Within UNRAID you can select dockers from the community repo's or officials - plenty of people working on stuff all the time so generally very well updated too. Same for plug-ins, plug-ins tend to be more functionality extras like more commandline tools, backup scripts or things like automated speedtest scheduler. I don't use too many of these as I tend to like dockers. The docks stuff just allows you to point and shares and map resources on your storage to the docker, while keeping them apart if that makes sense. I'm not 100% sure on the pro's/con's of each but my drives are all formatted reiserfs with one being xfs - one good think I like for UNRAID is ever if you have an unrecoverable loss, its only the data on those drives which is lost, not the whole RAID array. That's the main reason I went for it initially.

    Can't say for the rest of them but I find UNRAID to be very good for docker support and ease of use. When I first set it up, there was no docker or VM support and plug-in support wasn't amazing. I started out having to manually install app apps I wanted like Torrent and nzb clients from the commandline - and coming from a Windows background it was a fair learning curve. The latest version 6+ make the whole experience much easier and if you have the skills / will to learn you can tinker as much or little as you like.
     
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  12. Flibblebot

    Flibblebot Smile with me

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    Another vote here for unRAID - I'm a long-time user (since 2009, it would appear ;-) ), and it's never let me down. I've been using it since v4, and it's grown exponentially in that time and become a more and more polished product. I've changed the server a few times over the years, and I just connect up the drives, plug in the USB stick and boom! It's back up and working as though nothing had happened.

    Yes, it costs money to buy a license, but for the product you get, with the extendability and support that you get, that more than makes it very good value for money.
     
  13. silk186

    silk186 Derp

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    I didn't realise that unRAID costs money. That could put a bit of a slant on comparisons.
     
  14. TheStockBroker

    TheStockBroker Modder

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    Unraid user for 3 or 4 years now and extremely happy with it, it's well worth the money - nothing else out there comes close to matching it's feature set and ease-of-use. Dockers and IOMMU completely changed the way I "do IT" at home and much for the better!
     
  15. cobalt6700

    cobalt6700 Minimodder

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    I've just rebuilt my home media server with Unraid. I was running FreeNAS, but as with most of life, when something works you tend to leave it and updates to the box sort of fell by the wayside. Fast forward a couple of years and after a recent Windows update :grr: Windows wouldn't open my shares anymore (confirmed with Ubuntu having no issues at all accessing shares, and a load of fault finding that I wont bore you with).

    I'm running fairly dated hardware (HP Gen7 Microserver) and with the latest FreeNAS recommending 16GB of RAM (which would cost me around £175 right now) I decided to give Unraid a go, £50 is much more manageable.

    The setup was really easy. I flashed a USB stick, plugged it in, fired up Unraid, entered some basic settings and formatted the disks. While that was happening set up some users and some shares. I can recommend setting up a root password as otherwise anyone can access the WebGUI. When the disk's were formatted I started the array.... That was it really :)

    What I've gained is that Unraid seems to be more flexible. I built the new array with my current 2TB disks and copied my data back over. I Then shut down the array again and added a 3TB parity disk, 20 hours later the sync was complete and I had a parity protected array.

    My 2TB disk's are a few years old now and as far as I can tell, I can quite easily drop a drive out and replace it with a 3TB and the array will rebuild it'self and the extra 1TB will be available. AFAIK FreeNAS doesn't work like that as the ZFS file system would require the whole array to be rebuilt.

    TL DR - For me the flexibility of Unraid seems to be the advantage over FreeNAS. Never had an issue with FreeNAS and the ZFS file system is more robust that a parity disk (or so I'm lead to believe)

    Unraid comes with a 30 day + 2 x 15 day extension free trial. That's where I'm at at the moment, thought I would give it a go and see how I got on. So far, so good :)
     
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  16. silk186

    silk186 Derp

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    This is the reason why I'm not in a rush to get started. It seems that unRAID and OMV are the two best options. However, if I find I picked the wrong one it would be very difficult to change. Even more trouble than formatting windows 10, I assume I would need to move my data somewhere else while I redo the server. I think that the only feasible option would be to pay for a month of cloud storage, upload terabytes of data over my crap Virgin 10MBs upload and home for data integrity.

    I've ruled our FreeNAS. While it is powerful it is also supposed to be a lot more complicated and Linux like.I don't want a massive learning curve.
    It is very good if I wanted to run RAID with redundancy but I simply don't have the funds to give up capacity and most of the media is replaceable.
    As RAID is not a backup, all family media will be backed up to a 1TB external, which I will probably figure out how to either make internal or prompt me to connect it for a monthly sync.

    I like the flexibility you mentioned of being able to add parity at a later date.
    The basic licence is "Up to 6 attached storage devices" for $59.
    Plus is $80 for "Up to 12 attached storage devices" or $49 to upgrade.
    Pro is $129 for "Unlimited attached storage devices" but I don't think I will ever go over 12 drives.

    OMV is a free option but I haven't seen any recent comparison and I know but have changed considerably over the past few years.
     
  17. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    \o/
     
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  18. samkiller42

    samkiller42 For i AM Cheesecake!!

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    You get 30 days to trial unRaid, and you can request to extend that, after the trial, it continues to work until you have to reboot the system.

    I did like unRaid, and it'll probably be what i use when i get a server again.

    Sam
     
  19. silk186

    silk186 Derp

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    The 30 day trial is an interesting idea, though if I wanted to try OMV afterwards would I not need to format the drives?
     
  20. Zoon

    Zoon Hunting Wabbits since the 80s

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    With OMV you have the option of each disk for now simply being a disk. When you have the funds for a full RAID set you can add it as a logical RAID set, move your data in, sell your old drives etc.

    If your current drives are NTFS it doesn’t matter what you do as I don’t think unRAID writes NTFS and OMV definitely doesn’t: you’ll need one drive to start and cascade all your data around.

    OMV will read-only NTFS to start the rolling move going.

    Is OMV better than unRAID? I don’t know as I never used the latter. But I have used OMV for over three years and it does what I need it to.
     
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