Alex has a tip for Alex

Dear Wes and Chris, as a current owner of over 160TB’s of multimedia data I wanted to write in my suggestion to Alejandro for his data needs.

I understand at TechSNAP you are big proponents of ZFS and FreeNAS.  I would agree that if you have the money or the need for that level of redundancy it makes a lot of sense.  Though there are true limitations often being cost and upgrade path when you get into 100TB+ data sets.

I use unRaid, which originally was geared towards home users and their media collections, pro-sumers I guess, I use it for my business every day.

I have a small unRaid sever with about 40TB of SCADA data served up to 5 HMI clients around my plant, with data being pulled from an on-board SQL database running in Docker. It has run flawless for us, while my big server that houses 160TB+ has also run quite well.

If you need easy to manage local storage, with an inexpensive upgrade path, low redundant overhead (two parity drives for 20x 8TB disks in my case)
with or without per drive encryption then I would seriously consider unRaid.

I run my main server off a 4U Supermicro SC-847 which can hold up to 36 3.5" Hdd.  You can purchase new or through eBay if you want to save some money.

I think that there are true benefits to both ZFS and unRaid's parity protection.

Both of which offer great value for local based workloads, I don’t have the need to host online, so I can't speak to those providers.

Just thought you could let Alex know of another option.

Thanks guys.

-Alex M