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First time setting up a NAS
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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UnRAID is likely the solution for you. It’s not raid, it’s JBOD (Just a bunch of disks) with a separate parity drive to give you fault tolerance in case a single drive fails. You can use any combination of drive sizes and models and expand over time. Only rule is the largest drive has to be your parity drive.
It’s got a lot of other things going for it that make it an especially good “First NAS” solution.
Ah JBOD is new to me, I'll have to look into it. Is there a free or FOSS recommended alternative to UnRAID?
unraid is great but on a little 4 bay mini nas with limited expandability you don't get much advantage for the money, it's better for larger arrays and lots of mixed disk sizes, and on systems where you can put in lots of SSDs to make a decently fast caching setup die to unraid slower non-striped array architecture.
On a 4 bay mini-NAS I'd go with the free truenas option and just make it a RaidZ1 of 4 disks.
For a beginner, OMV might be simpler, and for paid options, HexOS is probably more beginner friendly than raw TrueNas.
A free alternative to Unraid is Snapraid, but thats more of a roll-your-own solution, not an OS you can just install.
+1 for Unraid, as it’s what I use, but truenas I believe has array options which support your plans no problem. It’ll do a similar software raid solution which allows you to modify the drive pool later on.