Question Storage solutions for home server?

[Hendrickson]

Here is the situation. I'm looking for a better storage setup for my home server. I'm currently just using a software RAID 1 setup in one of my PCs as network storage, but I'm looking for a solution that isn't going to cost a ton, but will give me better performance than running a software raid5/6 setup, and will also not require me to keep one of my gaming PCs booted all the time.

None of the data I'm storing is super critical, but I don't want to have a drive failure destroy it all either. My total space needs are currently only about 6TB, but idealy I'd like something that isn't a huge pain to expand.

I already have the server, and I'm running several VMs on it for a minecraft server, Plex server, etc. I'd also like to run a Steam Cache server just for fun. I was looking at throwing a hardware raid card into it, and running raid 5 or 6, but everybody seems pretty down on raid 5 and 6 lately. I tried software raid 5, and the performance is awful. I'm assuming I need a hardware solution, so that the storage can be shared over several VMs if it's going to be housed in the same physical box as my server (which I would like it to be).

I wont use a proprietary hardware solution (synology etc.). I've have 2 bad experiences with Synology and with a WD Mycloud that have soured me on it.

I don't really know anything about Freenas/ZFS, or how that would work if I'm trying to run it in a VM, and also have the storage accessable to the other VMs. I'm a newbie at stuff like this, but I'm willing to learn if it's a good solution.


Hit my up with some ideas.

 

[mxnerd]

Raid 5/6 is never meant for writing performance or backup. It's for reading speed and up time.

You can try UnRAID.

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[gea]

If you already virtualize, a virtualized ZFS NAS may be ideal as it offers realtime dataprotection in a state of the art manner. You should use ESXi as base and should have a HBA (LSI chipset) in pass-through mode for a barebone alike performance. You can start wirh a simple mirror and extend later.

I published such a solution 10 years ago with a Solarish based ZFS OS where ZFS is native and called it All in One. OmniOS (a free enterprise class Solaris fork) may be ideal as it has the lowest resource demands for ZFS, see https://omniosce.org/

More 5.c from https://napp-it.org/manuals/index_en.html

 

[Hendrickson]

If you already virtualize, a virtualized ZFS NAS may be ideal as it offers realtime dataprotection in a state of the art manner. You should use ESXi as base and should have a HBA (LSI chipset) in pass-through mode for a barebone alike performance. You can start wirh a simple mirror and extend later.

I published such a solution 10 years ago with a Solarish based ZFS OS where ZFS is native and called it All in One. OmniOS (a free enterprise class Solaris fork) may be ideal as it has the lowest resource demands for ZFS, see https://omniosce.org/

More 5.c from https://napp-it.org/manuals/index_en.html

This looks interesting. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Pretty much everything is some variety of "software" RAID, so don't listen to anybody who dismisses X or Y product on that basis alone.

I've done (professionally and personally) all that VMware, PCI passthroughs, and all that other crap, and frankly it's annoying. Not hard, not bad, not unreliable, just... obnoxious. For home use, I'm much happier with a a bare-metal Linux system with mdadm managing my RAID array, providing file and backup services to our gaggle of laptops, and providing storage for my VMs running in KVM. It's plenty reliable. Sure, it violates some audit/ISO 9000/industry BS rule to have my storage server also be my hypervisor, but I got approval from the CEO, CTO, CFO, and Janitor, who are all also me.

RAID 5/6 does have pretty crap write speeds, but it may be good enough - make sure you're basing your decision on your actual workload and its read/write/IOPS needs, not just running a benchmark. Getting full storage use out of all but one (or 2) of your disks is good cost/efficiency and is IMO the main reason parity RAID is appealing.

If you use a more complex softraid solution (like ZFS) or a enterprise-grade dedicated hardware solution (like a Dell PERC controller) you can throw an SSD (or a mirrored pair of SSDs) in front of a RAID5/6 array and basically take care of the performance problem. (SSDs give you basically all the IOPS. All of them.)

Your other (simple) option would be a RAID-10 (softRAID or hardware), which has the advantage of being something any OS can do out of the box with no additional hardware. It's got way better write performance than 5/6, but the "more spindles => more IOPS" rule applies.

Finally, considering your relatively modest storage needs (only 6TB), have you considered just using a RAID-5/6 for static data (Plex and the Steam cache) and then using a couple SSDs for your more "active" data with larger client loads (like your MineCraft server?) and just managing them manually?