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?
I use TrueNAS (ZFS) over Unraid because I wanted maximum data reliability. I needed a system with high integrity that I could deploy on multiple computers for backups. Unraid takes less planning and is more forgiving on hardware selection though.
TrueNAS, Unraid, and Synology DSM are all software RAID solutions.