Long time lurker, first time poster. Thanks for all the valuable info that has been shared here by this community! Incoming wall of text, but after a week of research and running through things in my mind all day I figured I would just ask the questions I have rather than make multiple posts as I imagine there are others looking to accomplish the same/similar thing right now. Thanks in advance!!
As I assume most of you are aware, the recent announcements from Plex and Synology are strong indicators of the writing that has been on the wall for some time. I’ve admittedly put off making any switch because things have been working just fine, but I’ve decided I’d rather just make the move now before even more changes happen, and while things like hard drives/NAS’ are still reasonably priced.
Background - I first got into the idea of self hosting when I picked up my first NAS circa 2020. It’s a Synology DS420j - about as entry level as you can get for a 4 bay NAS. I had big aspirations to really get into self hosting at that time, but for a variety of reasons (including the fact that its hard to flex the muscles of a Realtek RTD1296 SoC with 1 GB of RAM) once I got basic backups running and Plex was all set up, I didn’t do much else with the NAS aside from basic file sharing and messing around with some of the apps in Package Center to continue my learning. Well, there’s no time like the present for change and now is that time for me.
I currently have 2x 6TB + 1x 8 TB HDDs (all Ironwolves) in Synology Hybrid Raid (SRH) - with the 4th bay populated with an SSD that the Plex install lives on. I have an additional 8 TB drive at the ready as a hotswap and/or to add to my SRH pool once I upgraded my NAS. I’ve also finally hit 95% of my ~10.5TB pool (mostly Plex media), so this change comes at a somewhat convenient/necessary time anyway. [I plan to repurpose this NAS to be a backup only storage device so I can keep using Hyper Backup]
Current Plan/Quandaries -
- New NAS - I intend to bump up to a 6-bay and while all of the big names have comparable 6 bays options (QNAP, Ausustor, TerraMax, UGreen, etc), but one of the more compelling machines I have found is the ZimaCube Pro. It’s a pretty massive upgrade from what I have, which is exciting, but I’d like to do a little future proofing with this upgrade and I do plan to start leveraging a lot more services including virtualization to take advantage of the power boost. From my research, it seems like there were some bumps initially when the cube was first released (pretty expected from a kickstarter campaign of this magnitude), including an issue with Ironwolf drives, specifically, getting fried. It looks like things are in a much better place now that we are approaching a year since release, but I would be curious if anyone is using the ZimaCube and has any feedback on it, or if there are other solutions I may not be privy to that people recommend. (Of note, I am perfectly aware and capable of building my own, but for this step in my self hosting learning cycle I’d rather just get something premade)
https://shop.zimaspace.com/products/zimacube-pro-personal-cloud?variant=47720546697508
- RAID configuration - Obviously, SRH configured drives are not going to be compatible with ZimaOS, or any other non Synology OS (though I don’t plan to use ZimaOS anyway). I had really like the concept of being flexible with drive size as your storage expanded and you were able to accumulate more drives. There are plenty of good reasons for needing to have the same size drives across an array, but it was still a nice feature that I’d like to continue to utilize if possible. Im thinking a RAIDZ1 config would be good to move to (ZFS is intriguing), but from what I can tell you can’t use non matching drive sizes. Am I just going to have to bite the bullet and get all new drives to populate the new NAS, or is there an option out there that I am not aware of? I plan to begin standardizing my drive size at something much larger as the smaller drives begin failing/getting cycled out, but it doesn’t seem like there is a great solution to have that flexibility outside of the Synology ecosystem. (I am going to have to get large drive to move all my files to anyway before reformatting the current SRH drives so this is already going to be pretty pricey of an upgrade move)
- Operating System - TechHut actually has a really fun series he has been doing recently that is very much in line with what I am wanting to do - getting a new Server/NAS setup to move away from Synology/Plex - and I’ve been pulling some ideas from my project from that series. He’s running Proxmox as the hypervisor and TruNAS/Jellyfin inside of that. As I have never used any of these types of softwares I was just curious if there are any red flags with this configuration that I should be aware of before devoting the time to learns these systems - as a tech enthusiast I am well aware of the enormous learning spike between Synology/Plex type apps and self hosted ones like Promox/TruNAS, hence wanting to make sure there isn’t something stupid I’m missing prior to investing the time.
TechHut Series: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?__goaway_challenge=meta-refresh&__goaway_id=b1b338f21a54a885a60db50c1395bbdb&v=qmSizZUbCOA
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmSizZUbCOA - if you are still using Youtube naked for some reason)
Once I get the initial NAS and media server migrations done, I am sure I will have more questions once I start getting things like the Arr suite, Docker, PiHole, KeyPass, etc., set up, but if you’ve made it this far and have any input/insight to provide to my queries I would be greatly appreciative! This community is awesome :)
For what it’s worth, Synology Hybrid RAID is just a fancy GUI over linux mdraid, so the drives can be mounted on any Linux system (Synology even have instructions for how to do this on their website). You’ll be SOL mounting them with any kind of third-party NAS GUI that expects their own partition layout though.
Ah, that is good to know and might give me some flexibility with the migration to a new box. I wonder if I’d be able to Proxmox > Ubuntu/Debian VM (I believe I would need a passthrough card based on others comments for this) and then do the data transfer all on the new machine. Old SRH array > Large JBOD disk > Reformat old SRH drives with new drives for vdev/ZFS pool > Copy media back over to new pool > use large JBOD disk in old Synology as a mirror for backups… Hmmm, that is definitely a workflow I am going to explore. Thanks for the info!
A few suggestions:
Going from a 4 bay to a 6 bay is not that big of a jump. Especially if you are already at 95% full, you’re gonna fill up those other two drives quick. I used to have a 4 bay little off-brand NAS I found on eBay. I sold it and upgraded to a 14 bay rosewill 4U rack-mounted chassis. For parts I just repurposed some old PC parts and bought a few open box ones. The chassis is like $139 but I suggest getting better rails as the rosewill ones can be kinda crappy. You’d be amazed how quickly storage can fill up and accumulate, so plan for the future.
I also glanced at the NAS you listed, and it’s $1000. You can build something way more customizable with way more storage capabilities for like 1/3 of the cost of that. Was there a reason you wanted to go with this one? Generally it seems to be selling the software that comes with it, and “AI” which… I’m not sure what the idea of that is with it being a data storage device.
Which brings me to my next point, I would highly suggest unRAID for an operating system. Reason being is you said that the idea of constantly adding to your pool and being flexible with sizes and different types of drives appeals to you. This is unRAID’s bread and butter. Throw one large drive in there as your parity, and whatever other random drives you want (different sizes, brands, whatever) are your pool and they are all protected in case of a failure.
It may be controversial in a FOSS sense, but unRAID does have a one-time license fee. I paid like $80 four years ago. Worth it for how easy and configurable the software is, but it’s still Linux at its core so if you want to get your hands dirty all it takes is one click and you’re in the shell or spinning up VM’s and of course docker for your “core” software. Just don’t overspend on a crazy M.2 SSD for your cache disk or a high capacity one. I promise you don’t need the best one to load Plex thumbnails .001 seconds faster. Whether this is better than the prepackaged Zima OS is up to you.
Thank you for the comment. I can definitely resonate with running out of space much faster than you anticipate. Part of my plan though is to start integrating much larger drives than the 6 and 8 TB drives I’ve currently got. All of the potential NAS boxes I am looking at can well over 50 TB total capacity and since it took me ~5 years to fill 10 TB I think leveraging larger drives will probably be fine with a smaller bay device. I do think I am going to do some additional research on potentially going for a rack solution. Seems like a big jump but I do agree with your premise. Doesn’t hurt to check so thank you for that.
As for price, yeah it would be cheaper to build my own but I’m honestly just not in the mood for that at this juncture in my home lab development cycle. I imagine the upgrade following the one I am currently mapping out will be DIY, Im just not there yet. As for the ZimaCube, when you compare the other 6 bay machines from the other popular providers the cube is actually cheaper and better spec’d with 2 additional on board NVME slots and PCIe expansion slots. The more I have researched it the last couple days though I can’t find confirmation that they have fixed the issue with Ironwolf drives, so I may end up having to choose something else anyway unfortunately.
A few other people have mentioned Unraid as well so I am doing some additional research into the company. With the ever growing trend of enshitification in tech, which is a primary motivator for me doing this move anyway, I don’t know Unraid is the solution for me. You are definitely right about them being the ideal solution for mirroring SRH capability as far as drives go, and I have no problem paying for good software, so I may end up going for Unraid after I test out some of the other options. Thanks for the vote of confidence on it. Based on what I’ve seen from Zima OS so far, all I know is that isn’t the OS I will be using, lol.
Thanks again for you input. Greatly appreciated.
As I assume most of you are aware
I most certainly was not! After some searching, I found an article about Synology’s new restrictions on which hard drives can be used in Synology’s NASs.
A few important notes:
- This is a completely bullshit decision on Synology’s part. Unacceptable, and a total overreach.
- This only applies to new DiskStation/RackStation models, so if you already have yours, you should be fine — as far as I can tell.
- The internet has responded with a “hack” already: https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db?utm_source=syndication&pubDate=20250505
A prediction: This is a scream test. Within a month, Synology will walk this back. They’ll make some excuse about it taking time to test other hard drive brands for compatibility. They’ll claim that they never intended to prevent you from using whatever hard drives you want, that they just needed to make 100% sure everything was perfect first, and that they always had your best interests at heart.
This will all be a lie, of course. The real plan is to measure how loud their biggest customers scream about this change. And then, maybe a year or two from now, they’ll quietly update a user agreement or a warranty document to reduce coverage for NASs that use third-party hard drives. Maybe they’ll add some extra “safety features” to DSM for third-party hard drives (of course with the intention of keeping you safe) that will cause a “minor” performance hit.
I’m sure that if you subscribe to DSM Premium for a reasonable monthly fee, all of your problems will be solved.
Very much agreed, that is exactly why I decided to just move on from them now. The writing is on the wall. Sorry for not including that info by the way! We all know what happens when you assume 😅
if they do backtrack on this then its too late for me cos the damage is already done. ive got myself some new hardware already i wont be buying anything from them again. i wish them the best of luck though
Why wish them the best of luck? I wish their sales to crash and burn.
The thing Synology does which no competitor is yet doing is rock-solid stability.
I have a 10 year old Synology running as well as it did the day I bought it, and I’ve never needed to troubleshoot a single issue on it.
Until a competitor can match that I will still be buying Synology, with the increased drive price the cost I pay for that stability.
I think people underestimate the value of that.
Yeah it honestly sucks what they are doing, otherwise I wouldn’t even be doing this and would be getting a 6 or 8 bay Synology instead. I am just sick of bullshit from these companies and it reeks when you have to buy ‘their’ drives that are literally stickered over Toshiba’s or whatever. Its a bummer, really :/
For #3 officially, nesting TrueNAS in another hypervisor and then using it as a hypervisor is not really recommended, especially with any kind of virtual drives. It could lead to challenges. Virtualizing drives is definitely not recommended and the most stable choice is passing pcie through with a hba card.
Given that, I have a similar setup and I’ve made backups for important data, I passed a pcie data/SAS hba card that I connect any TrueNAS drives to directly instead of a virtualized drive.
https://www.truenas.com/blog/yes-you-can-virtualize-freenas/
Thanks for the reply! I’ll admit, I’m not familiar with HBA cards. So I’ll definitely look into that.
As to the nesting you called out, I could see that being an issue. Would that be the case though if you’re doing basically everything through Proxmox and only using TruNAS for disk management? I’m not sure if you watched his video on the setup, but it at least seemed to be okay. I could be wrong about that though, so I appreciate the input.
I bought an IT Mode flashed hba on eBay for like $40. Fanless, and easy. Make sure it comes with the cables or buy those separately but don’t forget them.
I have been doing some research on those cards and yeah there are some places you can get them fairly cheap. The one thing I have been a bit confused about though is it seems like you can just configure drive passthrough directly in Proxmox to virtualized TrueNAS, and from what I understand that is similar/the same to using a physical HBA card in a PCIe slot. I suspect there is something I am still not understanding with that though, so more research for me, haha! Thanks for the advice on the cables :)
I’ll be honest that I haven’t watched his videos so maybe it ends up stable. TrueNAS basically says in their docs you can end up with weird issues.
If you host it in proxmox directly there’s less overhead, as in it’s not going bare metal > proxmox > TrueNAS > application. You might run into issues but honestly try it and keep a configuration backup if it fails. Pcie passthrough instead of devices for the HBA card and any external graphics cards works the most stable but you won’t be able to “share” those resources.
I personally like docker for most everything I can with a few things hosted within proxmox. I originally started with portainer which gave me a web GUI for docker but honestly docker-compose files are a better approach. So proxmox > debian > docker Proxmox > trueNAS and proxmox > other VMs. This has its own challenges like passing storage from the NAS to jellyfin but works for me.
As for components, I’m stable on an old office desktop computer potato (albeit it does hit some limits with file transfers and transcoding multiple streams). I wouldn’t necessarily recommend going out and buying an equivalent but if you want to mess around, don’t be afraid of not enough resources in a test config.
Understood. I do think Im going to start out with Proxmox and kind of feel things out from there. I am also definitely planning to finally bite the bullet and dive into Docker as a primary driver. I’ve heard lots of good things about it and from a technical standpoint it just makes a ton of sense. Thanks again for the input! :)
You might look at TechHuts previous tutorial on setting this all up from around a year ago where he instead used Cockpit to manage his ZFS pool shares rather than TrueNAS. I followed that one a few months ago with a minor amount of Linux experience and got everything set up on Proxmox quite easily. I do recall some people complaining about having issues with permissions or some such which is why he created this new tutorial, but I didn’t run into those issues for whatever reason.
This new Proxmox build has been rock solid after running everything on flaky laptops, mini PCs, and a Windows-based server build for the past 12+ years and I’ve also used it to now run things like Jellyseer, Immich, Frigate, and more which is awesome, but I did spend a good chunk of money for a lot of new hardware, redundant SSDs, RAM, etc so you may be better off starting with something more basic to tinker and learn with.
I will definitely check that out, thanks! Out of curiosity, since I don’t have the hardware to play with yet, do you know if you are able to use different sized drives with ZFS pools? I’ve seen that there have been some updates over the past year that should make expanding a ZFS pool doable now, do you know if that is the case? Thanks again for the insight :)
AFAIK no you can’t use different sized drives. I have read about the update to allow you to expand existing pools but it hasn’t made its way to the version of ZFS that Proxmox uses, but I hope it does soon.
Previously, I was using SnapRAID which does allow you to use any size drive provided your parity drives are equal or larger to the rest of the drives in the pool so you may check that out. It worked well for me on Windows, is available on Linux, and makes it very easy to expand the pool.
I would caution that if you plan to build a big library over time, to just bite the bullet and get matching drives to start with because I tried mismatched drives purchased over several years (whatever was a good deal when I needed to expand the pool) and it got to the point where it was becoming unmanageable once I hit about 8 drives as SATA ports became limited and HDD capacities on the market increased (why waste a port on a 6TB drive when you could have a 14TB-20TB drive instead?). With this new server build, I just bought several matching 14TB drives from serverpartdeals.com and had to transfer everything from the old SnapRAID pool to my ZFS pool which took about a week with rsync.
Gotcha, thanks! In doing some more research, it looks like you could potential make mirrored vdevs of your smaller disks and then another for your larger drives and add them to the same pool. That may be a workaround to still be able to use ZFS, but I hadn’t heard of SnapRAID so I will definitely check that out, thanks!
You make a good point about just sucking it up and getting all new drives at a much larger capacity though. I am definitely starting to think about that option more closely. Its just obviously expensive as hell when you are also getting a new, much better spec’d, NAS box, haha. Serverpartdeals does have pretty good prices though all things considered so maybe I will bite the bullet and just got for it. Not sure what I’ll end up doing with 4 other perfectly good drives that total 24 TBs though! haha. Although I sure I will find something to do with them, haha. Thanks again for the input and insight. Very much appreciated.
Some advice, TrueNAS isn’t very newbie friendly. Between permissions and their wonky kubernettes setup that no containers actually leverage, it’s not great. It is free, but expect bumps in the road. Unraid and OpenMediaVault are much easier to use. I switched to Unraid, and it’s been amazing, I highly recommend it. It’s nice that you can install random sized drives, they don’t need to match. You can toss in a few ssds for cache, and the docker containers are super easy to setup and maintain. Jellyfin works just fine for instance. OMV has some great offerings too, but lack the docker/VM hosting side. It’s a NAS and nothing else. It’s expected to have proxmox or something hosted elsewhere that uses OMV as storage.
#2 opinion, build your own NAS. Especially if you’ve already built your own Gaming PC, it’s pretty straight forward. Pick a low powered cpu, toss in some ram, a ton of hdds, and maybe some old graphics card you have lying around for transcoding or hosting local AI for kicks. You’ll get a lot more for your money this way.
I love Truenas so much. I’m growing into its capabilities every day.
Thanks for commenting. I had forgotten that Unraid does have the option to mix and match drives ala SRH, which is definitely a big selling point for someone in my current position. I did recall seeing some in the industry express some hesitation with the platform as its not open source and has as good a chance to enshitify their product in the future as any of the other tech companies that have already done so. That caused me to kind of check them off the list since that’s what I am hoping to be getting away from with this migration. I will do some more digging on the company though. I have no problem paying for good software and maybe that ends up being the best route. Thanks again for the insight!
I might be cynical, but moving away from Synology and Plex because of the writing on the wall and then choosing Unraid probably won’t end well.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the love for Unraid even though I don’t use it. It looks nice and newbie-friendly and you can throw all your random disks at it regardless of size. But enshittification will come for Unraid and I personally think that it has already begun.
Yeah, I had mentally kind of crossed Unraid off the list from the things I’d seen around the various tech communities regarding them. Not to mention my main goal with this move anyway. I don’t have a problem paying for good software though, so I’ll at least do some more digging on them to make a more informed decision. I just wish there were other options for mix and match drives for people that have slowly been growing into the hobby! haha :( Thank you for commenting.
Honestly, that’s fair.
TrueNAS uses Docker now, no more k8s for apps.
I have been using open media vault for years, I switched quite recently to trueNAS and I don’t agree with your statement, trueNAS was easier to setup, with encryption, and is easier to maintain. Installing docker compose apps was a learning on omv, but is so simple on trueNAS for there is plenty of apps out of the box (in the store). And yeah, TrueNAS scale doesn’t use kubernetes, it uses docker now.
Thank you for the insight. I do want to at least test TrueNAS out (though I still haven’t decided whether to just run with that or run it inside Proxmox). Are you just using the ‘community edition?’
Yes community edition. If I can recommend do it without proxmox, play with it and then you can decide either way. Good luck!
If I may ask, what do you want to use proxmox for?
Awesome, thanks! I think I am going to get a couple extra disks and use those to test in whichever new NAS I end up getting so I can try out a few different bare metal options before making a firm decision.
I’ve never even used Proxmox, so it honestly came a lot from the TechHut video I referenced. I liked the interface and it seems like a really solid option for managing multiple VMs/services. This is all a new journey for me though so its entirely possible that I am overlooking something and I’ll probably end up modifying plans as I get more experience with various homelabbing tools.
I see, I was on that path not long ago, I finally realized I do not need Proxmox and it would create unnecessary complexity for me. In truenas you can install many services (apps), they use docker under the hood, or you can create your own docker app, its much easier to manage. At least for me. I have installed e. g. Jellyfin, audiobookshelf, adguard, home assistant, nginx proxy manager and eveything without a hitch. And by “installed” i mean I found the app in truenas store, hit install and in user friendly form I just assigned a couple of parameters (like storage location). It can even create a dataset for each app for you and you dont have to deal with acl and similar. (Although I chose to handle the datasets myself to have more control over it).
I really appreciate the info dieTasse! :D I’ve decided that once I decide on/receive the new hardware I am going to just start with TrueNAS Scale straight up and see how that works for me. I’m wanting to learn Docker anyway so this seems like a more direct/effective way to dip my toes there as well. Thanks again!
You are welcome :) And enjoy! Its really fun 😊
Huh, maybe my TrueNAS experience is a little dated. Last I used it, everything was k8s and bo docker-compose at all.
They switched kubernetes for docker in 24.10 so it is quite new. And it works realy well. I didn’t have to tweak one thing, I was impressed.
Nice! Good to know that if Unraid goes downhill I have a good alternative.
Could you explain the bit about Unraid and random disks? Is it for a RAID setup?
UnRAID doesn’t use RAID. So your storage array can be expanded at any time by adding drives and those drives can be any size.
Ah, so its more like mergerFS? Basically a JBOD?
It’s JBOD with parity, yeah.
Synology is great because of the easy backup. But it is limiting your ideas for your new NAS. Leave it in “backup corner” :)
Play with ZFS, see how much flexibility it really has, and when you got that up, then write your first own smb.conf - and the new NAS is done.
For the host, proxmox. There’s nothing else at the moment that makes more sense.
Yeah the Synology box is definitely going to be in the backup corner, and only there. Still running DSM 6.2 even, and that is never getting updated ;) Thanks for the input!
