think i want a NAS but I'm unsure if freenas is for me and what my best options are

[dude1]

Im a computer junkie with a major digital hoarding issue, on top of that i run a home based computer repair business that more often then not lately has been data recovery jobs.
so i image a lot of clients computers with acronis, clonezilla or deepspar depending on the situation.

Anyway, currently I have shelves of labeled hard drives 4 hard drive"Toaster style usb3 adapters" as well as seven externals that I use and growing because I'm already out of space
(this year alone I've gone through 7tb)

For a long time this organizational system has bothered me ideally I'd like to consolidate all my data into big drives and to have one box
Unfortunately finding NAS's with more than four bays is harder than I expected and finding ones that are more than eight bays that have sata connectors is also a challenge.
so it makes me think building a nas is my best most affordable option.

Ideally what I'd want is something with redundancy that supports multiple sized hard drives and expansion that way I can move data around clean up a drive and slowly migrate everything into this NAS, while also making i bigger by adding new empty drives as needed/available (like a drobo)

Preferably I'd like at least one machine and have a fast connection to it for work so my imaging can be quicker as network transfers are normally slow for me even with cat6 and gigabit nic's

I was hoping that maybe I could do a combination DAS/NAS via thunderbolt for this but no open NAS platform seems to support that, so unless I'm missing something I think my next best option is a direct network on a secondary nic to a machine with (probably with 10gigabit nics)

alternatively i suppose i can image to a thunderbolt drive then network transfer that image while working on other things but that kinda ruins the idea of one box to rule them all

anyway I'm open to suggestions I don't have a set budget but I'm aiming to be affordable if possible

 

[pirateghost]

Ideally what I'd want is something with redundancy that supports multiple sized hard drives and expansion that way I can move data around clean up a drive and slowly migrate everything into this NAS, while also making i bigger by adding new empty drives as needed/available (like a drobo)

If this is a requirement for your setup, then FreeNAS won't work for you.

 

[dude1]

If this is a requirement for your setup, then FreeNAS won't work for you.

hmm... i was under the impression ZFS allowed resizable disks with redundancy and the capability to add more drives as well as using other sized drives
i could and most likely am wrong, i may be computer literate but am new to NAS's

what are my options then? i was hoping to be able to reuse old drives till they kicked the bucket
it feels weird throwing away so much investment over the years when they still function

 

[danb35]

Ideally what I'd want is something with redundancy that supports multiple sized hard drives and expansion that way I can move data around clean up a drive and slowly migrate everything into this NAS, while also making i bigger by adding new empty drives as needed/available (like a drobo)

To expand on @pirateghost's answer, ZFS (the filesystem used by FreeNAS) doesn't support the drobo-like ability to add individual disks to a RAID array, and reconfigure the array to add the new capacity without any data loss in the array, and while still maintaining redundancy. If you want redundancy for your data, the closest you could come would be adding mirrored pairs of disks as necessary. You can expand your storage pool over time, but if you want redundancy, whatever you add needs to provide redundancy.

Suggest you take a look at @cyberjock's presentation of ZFS basics here.

Also be aware that ZFS, and thus FreeNAS, have some pretty significant hardware requirements. You'd be looking at a modern i3 or Xeon E3 with a minimum of 8 GB of ECC RAM (and you'd likely want 16+ GB).

 

[danb35]

what are my options then? i was hoping to be able to reuse old drives till they kicked the bucket
it feels weird throwing away so much investment over the years when they still function

Depends how you want to do it. Let's suppose you have 4x 1 TB disks and you put them into a RAIDZ2 (comparable to RAID 6) array. This will give you 2 TB of net capacity, and will tolerate the failure of up to two disks without loss of data. But this turns out to not be enough room for you. You have two options to expand your storage pool. The first is to add more redundant storage. If you bought, found, or otherwise acquired 2x 2 TB disks, you could add them as a mirror to your existing array, giving you a new net capacity of 4 TB. If you came up with 4x 2 TB disks, you could add them to your pool as a new RAIDZ2 array, giving you a new total net capacity of 6 TB. The other way to expand is to replace your existing disks. You could replace your 1 TB disks, one at a time, with new 4 TB disks. Once you were done, you'd have a new net capacity of 8 TB. You could replace individual disks at any time, with any amount of time between replacements, but the pool capacity wouldn't increase until they were all replaced.

What you cannot do, ever, under any circumstances, is add disks to an existing RAID group. You can't, for example, add two disks to a four-disk RAIDZ2 volume and turn it into a six-disk RAIDZ2 volume.