I’ve been self-hosting for 8+ years, mostly Plex + *Arr stack, docker, and some HomeBrew scripts. I got tired of my external drives being a mess and picked up a terra-master NAS (F4-425 PLUS). My original idea was to just use it for storage, but now seeing TOS 6 has a lot of applications it can run on-device, I’m trying to figure out what my best solutions are for two distinct parts: drive setup & applications I migrate from my Mac Mini onto it.
Drive Setup
Do I really need RAID? I’m perfectly fine without my drives pooled into a single drive. Aside from Plex, I’d love to have TimeMachine continue to work (if it’s on the NAS, even better) and that’s its own partition / format in of itself. When I shuck my drives and put them in the NAS, I’ll have 2 good drives and a third that’s likely going to die in the next 6-12 months. My understanding is RAID’s redundancy will take up a lot of free space on the drives and I’m not sure how useful that would be. Can I just run the NAS with multiple drives each operating on their own, like I do now?
Application Setup
Given the NAS has the same RAM of my current server, I’d think it’s a no-brainer to migrate Plex to it and gain the advantages of more power and not having to saturate my LAN by keeping the software + files all on the same NAS. But what about the *arr stack? SabNZBd? I also use some scripts and HomeBrew packages for YT-DLP content as well. Does it even make sense to migrate everything over if I don’t feel the need to decommission my current server? I say this because I run Mastodon, Overseer, and other self hosting containers and think it may be easier to admin them on an actual computer I can tinker on but is now isolated from affecting the NAS. Finally, I’m NOT considering changing the OS at this time as TOS 6 looks to be powerful but beginner-friendly enough for me. I know about TrueNAS and Unraid but don’t feel the need to look at those at this time.
Anyhow, I know this may be a lot to read, but I’d like to get this right before having to re-do my setup three or four times to settle on something that I could’ve known from the start. Info and tips on this setup are appreciated. Thank you.
Sounds like you’re happy with your current setup, so personally I wouldn’t worry about migrating everything, just a couple and see how you like it.
As for raid, it’s a trade off. There are a bunch of different types that offer different benefits at the cost of different capacity loss. Raid 1 will halve your storage, but raid 5 is less, 1/3? I forget the exact math. It depends on how important keeping the data is. For downloaded movies, it might not be super important, if a drive dies, replace and redownload. But if you store precious memories you might be way more interested in redundancy.
I haven’t tried unraid in a long time, but I personally didn’t like it. I just run fedora on my server. 🤷♀️
If you have the ability with the tos6 I would make an os partition and a data partition, that way you could change the os easily without disturbing the data, but again I’m not sure how possible that is without trying it.
RAID is about meeting your needs, not needing one specific option for a server. Striping gets speed, but lacks any fault tolerance. Mirroring is great for failure scenarios, but eats up storage. Striping with parity improves performance (well for reads at least) and provides a degree of fault tolerance, but rebuilding after a disk failure takes a long while (and is single fault tolerant) and writes are a bit slower. Striping with double parity is the previous + an extra drive of tolerance, but writes are even slower. Mirroring plus striping gets you loads of performance, but youre losing half of your storage.
Its also not the same thing as a proper backup. I do RAID for redundancy/fault tolerance, because thats my need/want. I want to be able to have two drives fail on me and keep chugging.
For some work scenarios, I don’t care about the data itself, so striping is what I want for pure unbridled performance. For others, its RAID 10 (stripe+mirror) because I need that redundancy for that scenario.
Do you need raid? I don’t know, what happens when you have a drive fail? Do you care? Do you wait for a new drive to come in and then copy from a backup? Do you have more drives at the ready to swap in?
What is your performance/fault tolerance requirement for what youre running?
That is a nice NAS, when I got my Terramaster F4-420 I immediately upgraded RAM, put a SSD in the hidden 5th slot and installed TrueNAS. Almost overkill since I only need it for some NFS shares now, but in the beginning I was experimenting with iSCSI partitions and that was real fun. Also the firmware back then allowed for full virtualization, so I was running a homelab for testing and education.
Thanks! Yeah, I was JUST about to pull the trigger on it, waited a couple of weeks, and then this “Plus” version came out and on a discount. Was a bit more than I wanted to spend, but worth it to future proof.
If everything you’re running is in a Docker container, you can see if the underlying NAS OS has or can support Docker. If so, you could consider migrating some apps since that kind of migration should be pretty straightforward depending on how you setup your containers.
I have a Synology NAS and I went from managing my containers through Synology apps to just running everything through the command line directly.
More recently I stumbled onto Homepage (https://gethomepage.dev/) to keep an eye on my apps, and I started using the free edition of Portainer (CE, https://github.com/portainer/portainer) to manage my containers. I even have two Portainer containers running on different servers and I can manage them directly from one Portainer instance.
Individually Homepage and Portainer were game changers for me since they solved specific gaps I had in my manual processes.
If you’re in the mood to rethink your entire setup, I would recommend looking into Homepage and / or Portainer.
I progressively migrated containers into Portainer stacks while also putting everything into Homepage, so I just moved along at my own pace.