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Comment by Ir0nMan | Hacker News Reader

I will take this opportunity to highly recommend UNRAID. You can use an old computer, add in some internal hard drives, and boot it off a USB stick.

Drives can be added or subtracted at any time so the system grows as your data grows and unlike traditional RAID you can mix and match drives of different types and sizes. Because it is not a real RAID implementation you can pull out any data drive in your array and read the files residing on that drive in another system. Data is protected against drive failure by single or dual parity drives and using SSD's for caching is even supported.

For anyone that is mildly technically inclined and enjoys DIY solutions, I would recommend at least checking out UNRAID before purchasing a Synology NAS (or similar).

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Author here! I actually hadn't even heard of Unraid until about a year ago, when some of my beta users were asking for help with their docker setup, and when I asked their host OS, they said "UnRAID".

The community is supportive, templates are created and updated quickly, and there are several youtubers that make great, easy-to-follow videos for care and feeding your server. +1.

Another one to look at is snapraid [1]. Open source, also supports mix of disk sizes, adding/removing, and drives are usable alone. Negatives are it does scheduled (not real-time) parity, and you have to run mergerfs yourself on top of you want a consistent view.

I've been using it for a few years, and it's survived one drive failure (which I replaced with a disk twice the size). I originally had it on a Ubuntu server but have since migrated to running in openmediavault (which does all the setup for you), on a vm within proxmox server.

[1] https://www.snapraid.it/

Author here: I actually added SnapRAID to the article a while back due to some of my beta testers singing its praises. I haven't used it myself, but I'm glad it's saved your data!

Personally I like homebrew better https://blog.haschek.at/2020/the-perfect-file-server.html

Because I don't need web interfaces or more attack surfaces

> If [a disk fails] you should replace the disk as soon as possible.

Yet this setup doesn't notify you of that happening, so you'll have to manually keep an eye out...

Agreed! I built an Unraid box last year and it’s been a great all around computing machine to have around the house. NAS + virtual machines + docker apps, really does it all.

My unraid box I bought from Tom is sitting in my closet has been across the country 3 times now, is about 13 years old, has 14 drives in it now and still runs great. I love it.

The Unraid pricing page has this curious request in bold:

> Please do not use a comcast.net email address to purchase a license key.

Anyone know what the problem with comcast.net email addresses is? I know that in general it is not great to use addresses tied to your ISP for long term things, but that that applies to most ISPs so I’m guessing the issue is something specific to Comcast.

Been a while since i saw it, but i believe that comcast blackholed all their emails at one point (might still do so)

As a side note: we are all adults. What is so hard about stating

> Please do not use a comcast.net email address to purchase a license key, they blackhole our email.

Super simple and short (assuming that explanation from a sibling comment is correct). People are much more likely to oblige/agree when the reason for a rule is stated.

Would you recommend it even over FreeNAS?

Yes, because of the drive flexibility. FreeNAS uses traditional RAID.

FreeNAS uses ZFS. There isn't anthing traditional RAID about it.

You can expand it but not by adding a single disk to a parity set (going from five drives to six), only by adding a set of disks (adding another set of five or a similar combination).

I'm well aware of ZFS and have used it many times. To noobs the world can be separated into "RAID" and "non-RAID" type setups. UNRAID (non-RAID) offers much more drive flexibility which makes it cheaper to start and add to over time compared to ZFS.

You have obviously no clue what FreeBSD/FreeNAS and ZFS is. I always recommend a Battle hardened Filesystem/Volume-manager (ZFS/Lustre in Los Alamos) over some proprietary software.

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