I tend to go overkill when it comes to home networking and server infrastructure. I’m considering replacing my QNap, with what I assert is the world’s worst software, with a homebrew and unRAID.
I’m just wondering if anyone has any experience doing this or not. For a few years I ran a raid 5 array on an old gaming PC, and then I swapped to qnap for “what if there is a fire, how do I grab and run with a computer that can act as an anchor for a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier”. That’s worked for the last 5 years, sort of, but I swear they make everything 10x harder than it has any right to be.
I was considering 4 x 10tb hdds and 3x2TB Evo 990 Pros, in a cache pool and/or 2x2TB in an SSD pool for docker containers and 1 2TB for the cache pool. I’m just not entirely sure where unRAID itself ends up going; the cache pool?
Aside from that question, any other “gotchas” that you’ve experienced? Any comparisons with qnap would be greatly appreciated, too.
Yeah, I got a cheap ali-express mini-itx of some sort about a decade ago and ran pfsense on it for like 7 years straight, with my only issue being pfBlockerNG causing a catastrophic failure after I installed it. this was my first trial-by-fire of administering a bsd machine on the command line and it was so stressful because I was trying to undo it without any internet at all. I still never got it working in the end and just gave up and ran pihole on a container instead.
I ended up switching to opnsense when I got > 1gbps internet and wanted to make sure my router could handle it - got one of the opsense appliances with sfp+ and ran 10gb fiber to my switch and 2.5gbps ethernet to my modem. It’s been super nice actually!