DIY NAS guidance

D

D C

Level G
I would like some advise from DIY NAS gurus.
I plan to build a DIY NAS system, for archiving my google drive and onedrive locally, and to save steam backups.
I also plan to run some vms, containers for pihole etc.

Should I install truenas/unraid/open media vault directly bare metal or via proxmox?

My main issues being reliability and complications.

I looked up some truenas proxmox guides, they recommended something called ‘LSI’ or ‘HBA’ pcie cards to attach the disks to and pass through the card to the nas vm. I couldn’t find any such cards(not at a reasonable price on Amazon).

Any suggestions or tips? What parts should I pick(old enterprise gear is hard to find).
 
What is your scale? Number of drives, TB of usable storage needed, reliability levels expected etc.
LSI/ HBA/ Raid cards can be partially avoided depending on your answers as motherboards nowadays support the basic raid options.
You might just be better off with a netgear or other commercial unit especially if you want longevity without the hassle.
 
axeman said:
What is your scale? Number of drives, TB of usable storage needed, reliability levels expected etc.
LSI/ HBA/ Raid cards can be partially avoided depending on your answers as motherboards nowadays support the basic raid options.
You might just be better off with a netgear or other commercial unit especially if you want longevity without the hassle.
Click to expand...
Planning to have at least 8 TB. Want to have a bit of fail protection with a parity disk. (Seems like minimum 3 disks x 4TB?)
A ssd for cache(sata/nvme) and another ssd as boot/vm drive.
A nice to have feature would be 2.5g Ethernet.
An extra pcie slot would be a bonus.
(Planning to do a home network upgrade, but not soon).

Not sure about premade nas, they seem to have low end cpus and not sure about the os configurability.
 
axeman said:
What is your scale? Number of drives, TB of usable storage needed, reliability levels expected etc.
LSI/ HBA/ Raid cards can be partially avoided depending on your answers as motherboards nowadays support the basic raid options.
You might just be better off with a netgear or other commercial unit especially if you want longevity without the hassle.
Click to expand...
+1 for this, buy something from netgear,synology etc and put pihole on a cheap pi zero 2.
you may also want to look at nextcloud if you want to replace google drive. can run it in a vm on proxmox.I would recommend looking for raid/hba/sata pcie based cards/controllers on ebay if going the normal pc for nas route with proxmox/exxi .previously aliexpress used to have these for 20$ or so.
Motherboard pass-through and immou etc can be difficult on some motherboards especially commercial motherboards tying up immou passthrough's with some pcie lane's. My b350 gaming motherboard from gigabyte has two pcie sata ports that are raid enabled and are controlled by a different chip yet are somehow interlocked with some lane's etc. passtrhough never worked for me on that board with esxi. A friend of mine had a similar experience with a asrock board from the pro4 series on am4.

You could also buy a cheap(in sata card terms) around 2.5k ish card from amazon.in something with a asmedia or a chipset that has driver support in proxmox but no hardware supported raid thus the cheap price,pass that through to proxmox and then use software raid on it(zfs has its own issues).or passthrough whole controller from proxmox to vm and let vm handle the software raid,so no zfs.
 
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fastapifastdisks said:
+1 for this, buy something from netgear,synology etc and put pihole on a cheap pi zero 2.
you may also want to look at nextcloud if you want to replace google drive. can run it in a vm on proxmox.I would recommend looking for raid/hba/sata pcie based cards/controllers on ebay if going the normal pc for nas route with proxmox/exxi .previously aliexpress used to have these for 20$ or so.
Motherboard pass-through and immou etc can be difficult on some motherboards especially commercial motherboards tying up immou passthrough's with some pcie lane's. My b350 gaming motherboard from gigabyte has two pcie sata ports that are raid enabled and are controlled by a different chip yet are somehow interlocked with some lane's etc. passtrhough never worked for me on that board with esxi. A friend of mine had a similar experience with a asrock board from the pro4 series on am4.

You could also buy a cheap(in sata card terms) around 2.5k ish card from amazon.in something with a asmedia or a chipset that has driver support in proxmox but no hardware supported raid thus the cheap price,pass that through to proxmox and then use software raid on it(zfs has its own issues).or passthrough whole controller from proxmox to vm and let vm handle the software raid,so no zfs.
Click to expand...
Currently have a pi running pihole.

How do you run nextcloud/own cloud and connect to it remotely if you have a NAT internet?
I tried doing that on pi but couldn’t work it out.
Currently using Tailscale to vpn back home to pi. Have not figured out how to use services on top of it.

Motherboard pass through and iommu issues had me worried. Will have to look up proxmox supported card versions and see which ones are available here.

Makes me consider going for ready made nas + intel NUC or something for proxmox/vm needs. But this gets very expensive very quickly.
 
D C said:
Currently have a pi running pihole.

How do you run nextcloud/own cloud and connect to it remotely if you have a NAT internet?
Click to expand...
i got a static ip for 1.7k a year, we needed one for cctv so.
D C said:
I tried doing that on pi but couldn’t work it out.
Currently using Tailscale to vpn back home to pi. Have not figured out how to use services on top of it.
Click to expand...
you just need the set the dns server in the vpn setting to pi on your fone, you can also use ufw on pi to router the requests ending at taliscale to pihole.
D C said:
Motherboard pass through and iommu issues had me worried. Will have to look up proxmox supported card versions and see which ones are available here.
Click to expand...
pcie card passthrough should be easy, no iommu issue in most cases
D C said:
Makes me consider going for ready made nas + intel NUC or something for proxmox/vm needs. But this gets very expensive very quickly.
Click to expand...
you can try using a raspberry pi 4 and usb hdd's(laptop drives in usb cases)lot of people are running nextcloud/openmediavault that way. no raid zero just raid 1 for redundancy.
 
<<step 1>>
If {compactness and aesthetics are a must and money is not a problem};
go for a prebuilt NAS;
else
go DIY NAS;
go to step 2;
endif;

<<step 2>>
If {DIY and ready to tinker and have enough backups}
go proxmox;
else
go FreeNAS
endif;
 
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