Now if I build one myself something I’ve never done is it easy to just move my storage over and not lose any data and be able to access it?
No can't just plug the HDDs into the new machine like you would when switching to another synology. You'll have to copy the data to your new machine.
That's not exactly true, synology doesn’t do anything you can’t access from an off the shelf linux (it's your usual mdraid and btrfs). But you better know what you’re doing if you go that route.
I created an Xpenology VM inside my new Unraid server and copied my files with 10Gbps internally.
Correct. Youll need to have a new disk array up and running to copy all your data to first on the new NAS.
Okay then I’d have to buy 4 more 12TB drives to transfer it all over. Good to know.
Since you are looking to build up to 12 bays, what you can do is buy that 4x 12TB drive set now, transfer everything over to the new system, then add the old 12TB drives into the array one-by-one expanding it to an 8x 12TB array. This ensures no data loss, nor wasted drives.
Edit: Also with 8 drives, consider using RAID 6 instead of RAID 5. It's almost the same thing, it just has two redundancy drives instead of one. Depending on how full your current RAID is, you may or may not need to start the new array with 5x 12TB drives instead of 4 due to the lower capacity when using RAID 6.
Yeah that makes sense. Do you have any recommendations on a DIY or non synology specific system?
Not the person you responded to, but personally I just went Truenas scale on baremetal and it worked really well. Currently they also work with docker so setting up additional apps is really easy as well.
For DIY, just about any setup would work fine as long as you put it in a case with lots of bays. Throw 2 or 3 of these in there* and you now have however many ports are on the motherboard (probably 2 or 4) plus 8-12 more ports available via the cards.
*I'm not recommending that specific card, just something that gives you SATA ports on a PCI-E card. Just pay attention to bandwidth bottlenecks on the cards. Here is a table of PCI-E speeds.
Followup; Not as cheap but there are M.2 to SATA cards available too, if your mb has no empty PCIe but do have empty M.2 available.
Might also look at larger drives. When I compared 3.5'' drives then the 24TB is cheaper per terabyte than both 16TB and 12TB. The ones I compared are listed below:
Seagate Exos X24 Harddisk ST24000NM002H 24TB 3.5" Serial Attached SCSI 2
Seagate Exos X24 Harddisk ST16000NM001H 16TB 3.5" Serial ATA-600 7200rpm
Seagate IronWolf Harddisk ST12000VN0008 12TB 3.5" SATA-600 7200rpm
Ah I’ll have to see then. HD isn’t that much of an issue to get. Really the hardware and software to run a new NAS will be the most difficult thing for me. Since it isn’t my expertise and I’m still learning.
For DIY consider a setup that supports ECC RAM to help prevent corruption. Any good server motherboard should do.
Unraid is pretty easy to get going on. That's probably the direction I would take in your situation.
Also, if you're not doing 3-2-1 backup now might be a good time to consider an off-site backup plan. That 4-bay Synology at a friend's house with a VPN path would be an option for critical data. You could give them some partitioned space on there and on your new NAS to compensate for the power usage. Setup Borg or Restic and it'll be encrypted on the remote NAS, and benefit from incremental and dedupe to minimize bandwidth usage.
Just a few considerations:
For a 12 bay NAS I would strongly consider ZFS - which makes ECC more or less a must.
Mainboard wise the CWK AMD Board is worth a consideration, and so is the Asrock Live Mixer B850 if you want ECC on AMD5
A popular build option is using a cheap used or "Chinese" host-build controller as SATA ports are hard to get these days.
I would personally look at using Proxmox and then TrueNAS as an NAS OS and simply passthrough the HBA.
Another alternative would be using a Zimbra Board and use their expansion options - but that comes with downsides in terms of CPU power and no ECC.
For Plex it might be favourable to use a CPU with a built-in GPU for transcoding. Intel is slightly better here, but has other downsides, especially if you want ECC
Get a Geekworm PiKvm, a original PiKVM, a NanoPi oder JetKVM...or something like that. it's worth it.
If you don't feel like self-building anymore have a look at the Ugreen. They come without the "only approved HDDs" Synology bullshit, allow you to install your own OS and are fairly capable. But sadly they do not support ECC. (And they aren't really cheaper than self building at least not in central Europe.)
Self building is absolutely possible and we are here to help you.
Thank you for all the info. I am running plex off an intel nuc my NAS is just storing all the files for it. So cpu for the actual NAS can be either or tbh.
And I think I’m going to self build and search more on here for what other people did and for any more questions I may have!
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