Truenas or Unraid

[Wolfclaw]

Currently running a Windows Server providing torrent downloads and Plex content and works fine, now starting to think Windows is a unjustified overhead, so here is the plan as I have second box ready for service.

Plex TV Box - Dell T610 12C+HT 32GB 24TB
NIC1/2 2x1Gbps Team 192.168.1.10/255.255.255.0/192.168.1.1 -> WAN
NIC3/4 2x1Gbps Team or 2.5Gbps 10.0.0.10/255.55.255.255 -> Movie Box

Plex Movie/Torrent/VM Box - Dell T620 12C+HT 64GB 24TB
NIC1/2 2x1Gbps Team 192.168.1.11/255.255.255.0/192.168.1.1 -> WAN
NIC3/4 2x1Gbps Team or 2.5Gbps 10.0.0.11/255.55.255.255 -> TV Box

I believe I have to move disks away for raid mode to single disk mode, to allow Truenas/Unraid to control things.
Both boxes will need a share setup for the whole storage pool, as file management will be handled by my local Windows PC, using same account details on both boxes cause issues?
OS on a 120GB SSD or USB, Plex on a 500GB SSD.
Also, if not using raid, can the disks be spun down after say 4 hours of no access, as I expect most access between 6pm-2am and if so, is it a good idea to save electricity or not worth the stress on the drives.
So the big question, Truenas or Unraid.

 

[Tech Junky]

Why not just run a single box to save on admin stuff?

I ran raid for years and just simplified things to a single U.3 drive that hits 6.5GB/s.

As to the OS options the trend lately seems to be going subscription based when all you need is Linux. I run Plex and qbittorrent from the same box and it's also my router/firewall as well.

Bonding nics is fine but, putting in 2.5/5GE means more throughput.

 

[Wolfclaw]

Got the servers dirt cheap, yes one big full fat would have been nice.

 

[ddaenen1]

I vote TrueNAS. I have TN Core up and running for years now and very happy with it. Two 256GB SSD's as mirrored boot pool with 4 2Tb SAS HDD's in zraid1. It is FreeBSD (not that big a jump from Linux) and ZFS. I run Plex and Nextcloud in a jail and it is rock solid. In the world of ZFS, spinning down disks is not recommended - there is numerous of posts on the topic available online.

Also, I do not believe that the router/firewall should be on the same box as your server/NAS though. To me that should always be bare metal as a single device as this is your front facing LAN protection and traffic warden. I run pfSense on a single 1U box which also takes care of Letsencrypt certificates and functions as a reverse proxy for external access to Nextcloud through an FQDN.

 

[coxhaus]

Your Windows server has great software RAID. It is very reliable. If you already own Windows server why pay for something else? I would use Windows server.

Hardware RAID is faster but for home or small business you probably won't need it. Use software RAID and a 10 gig NIC. Almost all the NICs are Windows compatible. Build a faster network.

Dell has great hardware support for Windows server.

 

[Benbrode]

Your Windows server has great software RAID. It is very reliable. If you already own Windows server why pay for something else? I would use Windows server.

Hardware RAID is faster but for home or small business you probably won't need it. Use software RAID and a 10 gig NIC. Almost all the NICs are Windows compatible. Build a faster network.

Dell has great hardware support for Windows server.

completely agree

 

[sfx2000]

Just note that unraid is going towards a subscription business model...

 

[ddaenen1]

Your Windows server has great software RAID. It is very reliable. If you already own Windows server why pay for something else? I would use Windows server.

Hardware RAID is faster but for home or small business you probably won't need it. Use software RAID and a 10 gig NIC. Almost all the NICs are Windows compatible. Build a faster network.

Dell has great hardware support for Windows server.

Because TrueNAS whilst being free is so much better as a NAS and runs on either FreeBSD (Core) or Linux (Scale) which are both rock solid and are much more reliable than Windows and also uses ZFS as a file system with better error handling and correction features than most other file systems.