Hi all, I'm currently in the process of provisioning a new NAS for home. It's replacing an older Synology unit that ticks me off in so many ways.
I am looking to hear other's experiences with using OpenBSD as a NAS - specifically in terms of reliability, and for suggestions on how to provision my storage. I have an LSI card (supported by the drivers in OpenBSD) that is currently flashed to IT mode, but it can of course flashed back to the IR firmware which lets it act as a hardware RAID controller. My needs for the NAS are as follows: NFS and Samba share support, reasonable performance, some amount of tolerance to disk failure, reliable and trustworthy software and file system, ability to closely monitor disk/array health. By extension, it should also be as simple as possible. It might be nice to have it be able to host an iSCSI volume, but that's not essential. I don't care about bleeding edge performance, fancy web UIs or any other "shiny" stuff. By my estimates, OpenBSD with softraid volumes should tick all of those boxes. The box will do nothing else besides be a file server. OpenBSD is my preferred OS nowadays, but I am open to something else if it's the best tool for the job. I guess I'm trying to find out if there's any compelling reason why I *shouldn't* use OpenBSD with softraid. (ZFS also scares me, btw. Maybe unjustifiably so, but it seems very complex and I suspect much of the hype comes down to zealotry and fanboyism.) The questions I have are: a) Is softraid reliable enough to support my use-case? Does anyone have anecdotes to encourage/discourage use of softraid for this application? b) Would I be better off using the LSI RAID controller for the arrays? c) Bearing in mind that the provisioning scheme I have in mind is to provision the disks in pairs (forming RAID1 arrays), thus resulting in 3-4 separate volumes (6-8 disks), is there any reason I should *not* use OpenBSD, and look more toward something like TrueNAS or FreeBSD? (Before anyone mentions it - Yes, I have a proper backup system. I do not rely on the redundancy provided by RAID arrays in lieu of a real backup. I have both a local backup and offsite backup.) Thanks in advance.
