I've been self-hosting for 8+ years, mostly Plex + *Arr stack, docker, and some HomeBrew scripts. I got tired of my external drives being a mess and picked up a terra-master NAS (F4-425 PLUS). My original idea was to just use it for storage, but now seeing TOS 6 has a lot of applications it can run on-device, I'm trying to figure out what my best solutions are for two distinct parts: drive setup & applications I migrate from my Mac Mini onto it.
Drive Setup
Do I really need RAID? I'm perfectly fine without my drives pooled into a single drive. Aside from Plex, I'd love to have TimeMachine continue to work (if it's on the NAS, even better) and that's its own partition / format in of itself. When I shuck my drives and put them in the NAS, I'll have 2 good drives and a third that's likely going to die in the next 6-12 months. My understanding is RAID's redundancy will take up a lot of free space on the drives and I'm not sure how useful that would be. Can I just run the NAS with multiple drives each operating on their own, like I do now?
Application Setup
Given the NAS has the same RAM of my current server, I'd think it's a no-brainer to migrate Plex to it and gain the advantages of more power and not having to saturate my LAN by keeping the software + files all on the same NAS. But what about the *arr stack? SabNZBd? I also use some scripts and HomeBrew packages for YT-DLP content as well. Does it even make sense to migrate everything over if I don't feel the need to decommission my current server? I say this because I run Mastodon, Overseer, and other self hosting containers and think it may be easier to admin them on an actual computer I can tinker on but is now isolated from affecting the NAS. Finally, I'm NOT considering changing the OS at this time as TOS 6 looks to be powerful but beginner-friendly enough for me. I know about TrueNAS and Unraid but don't feel the need to look at those at this time.
Anyhow, I know this may be a lot to read, but I'd like to get this right before having to re-do my setup three or four times to settle on something that I could've known from the start. Info and tips on this setup are appreciated. Thank you.
That is a nice NAS, when I got my Terramaster F4-420 I immediately upgraded RAM, put a SSD in the hidden 5th slot and installed TrueNAS. Almost overkill since I only need it for some NFS shares now, but in the beginning I was experimenting with iSCSI partitions and that was real fun. Also the firmware back then allowed for full virtualization, so I was running a homelab for testing and education.
Thanks! Yeah, I was JUST about to pull the trigger on it, waited a couple of weeks, and then this "Plus" version came out and on a discount. Was a bit more than I wanted to spend, but worth it to future proof.