To NAS or not to NAS…

So for a while now I have known that I need a NAS at home. Up until now we have had our files stored in various cloud services but with the ever increasing monthly or annual fees for this, the clock was always ticking. That’s also taking into account the fact that your files are on someone else's server, which is never at the end of the day the best call, at least depending on the level of risk vs convenience that you’re willing to accept.

Now the thing that always kept me from going to a NAS was the price, Synology, QNAP and all of the others, don’t really fall into the affordable category, especially if you want a decent size array with some level of protection. So basically I kept putting it off but was then stuck in an endless loop of paying for cloud services because I couldn’t afford something local but if I cancel the cloud, then I need to put the files somewhere and catch 22.

I finally got a break in this endless circle though or at least I hope. I had an old PC desktop lying in the corner not really doing much of anything, its got an i7 3770 or something like that, it has 20GB of RAM and I had a few 2TB and 4TB disks lying around, so the only thing it needed was a new power supply. Luckily it was Christmas, so after wishing really hard, Santa brought me a replacement power supply.

Today was the day that I finally got around to installing and setting everything up. The power supply installation was a breeze, I used the opportunity to replace the thermal paste on the CPU and install a quieter CPU fan. Plugged in 2x 2TB disks, as well as 2x 4TB disks and a 80 Intel SSD to use as the system drive. So far so good and it posted first time, I was feeling lucky :)

Now what system do we put on there? I’d been doing some research prior to this and came down to TrueNAS and UNRaid. In the end I chose TrueNAS basically because it was free at the end of the day. I downloaded the ISO file, dropped it onto my Ventoy disk and proceeded to boot from it.

TrueNAS

This was where things started to get a little more complicated, Ventoy booted, as always, let me select TrueNAS, TrueNAS booted, I chose option 1, install TrueNAS a bunch of text whooshed by (Linux after all) and then a black screen. I could hear the system/disks going, so something was going on but I couldn’t see anything. I left it running for a while, spent an hour with my son helping him with his math homework/prep and came back to it. Still nothing.

I tried connecting a different monitor, same problem, all boots ok but then black screen. Tried Googling, found lots of posts about people with similar issues, depending on whether it was the core version, scale version, booted from USB, booted from Ventoy and so on. There were solutions galore from editing Grub, Bios, graphic settings and so on. I made an attempt to try to resolve it by changing BIOS settings and installing a GPU I had but none of it resolved the issue.

At this stage, I’m thinking it’s Christmas, I’m supposed to be enjoying myself, i.e. playing Space Marine 2 or something and not trouble-shooting IT problems. I’d noticed while booting numerous times that I had EasyNAS on the Ventoy as well, so I though, why not give that a try.

EasyNAS

EasyNAS was true to its name initially, it booted up first try, ran through the installer, I selected the various languages, keyboards, installation/startup disk and we were off to the races. It initially got me post installation as it dropped me at a menu to install it, start stop services etc, so for a second I thought it hadn’t worked until I realised that I now needed to configure it from the webpage.

I connected via my iPad, got to the dashboard and all was good, I could see my disks etc but now I needed to create the array and the volumes.

I went over to volumes to set up the first one but it wouldn’t let me as I didn’t have a file system. Ok then. So I went to file systems and created a file system for my 2x 4TB disks. Or at least I tried, it failed. I tried again, it failed again.

Ok. Now what, let’s try the 2TB disks. I set up a file system with those, RAID 1 and it worked like a charm. Tried with the 4TB disks again, nothing, errored out. So then I tried creating a file system compromised of a single 4TB disk, one worked, the other didn’t. Brilliant, it looks like a bad drive. Did a few tests, determined the drive was bad and so took it out. Bit of a shame as that’s 4TB gone. Still got 8TB to play with though.

I went through the process of setting up the File systems and volumes again, all worked out fine. Now I just needed to work out how to set up shares. So I went into users, set up accounts for my family and then looked for a way to add shares.

Initially I couldn’t find anything, then I noticed add-ons, there it looked like were the things I needed, Samba shares, APS shares, NFS and so on. So I tried to install them. “Error, unable to install add-on”. Ok, try another one, “Error, unable to install add-on”. sigh

Ok, let’s try FTP, that worked. Not that I can imagine my family FTPing in to look at photos but at least something. Tried Samba again. Nada. Ok lets reboot and see what happens after that.

Nothing because now the system is complaining it can’t find a boot disk. What? Ok, into BIOS we go, SSD is set to boot, yes it is, change boot to legacy, try again. Nope, not having it. Put it back how it was, tried again. Nope not going to happen. Tried going to the boot menu and choosing the disk from there, booted immediately.

Grr.

Ok deal with that later, back to adding - try to install Samba again. Error. Try NFS. Worked! Hooray, let’s try mapping it. You don’t have permissions. Bloody hell, check permissions, yes I do have permission, correct account and password. No, no you really don’t have permission and I’m not installing any other addons.

bigger sigh

UNRaid.

Out of frustration I went to the UNRaid site and downloaded their installer. Put it onto a USB disk, stuck it in the PC. Refused to boot from it. In fairness, Unraid during the download warned me I might need to run a script to make it bootable. Plugged the USB back into the Mac, ran the script, confirmed it with my admin password and a few seconds later it was ready. A couple of minutes after that and I was booted into UNRaid.

One thing that caught me off guard a little was that you have to set a parity drive, which is fine but it has to be the largest drive that you have, which in my case is the 4TB, so in terms of actual storage, I have the 2x 2TB, so I’m “down” to 4TB. I set the 80GB SSD to be used as a cache disk, which should hopefully help with transfers.

I haven’t managed to get any further than that so far, as it’s running a parity-sync which should finish in 6 hours…

Let’s see what happens once it’s done.