10-08-2021, 11:11 PM
After suffering a severe data damage from accidentally dropping one of my WD Passport USB drives, I'm now looking for a NAS server for running a few virtual machines and serving as a fail-safe file server for my huge Blu-ray ISO file collection.
I'd like to put the NAS machine up a shelf in the closet, so I'm looking for a 12 bay 2U rack version, running as silent and economical as possible.
I'm a developing application software for Windows, so I'd like to benefit from the NAS' ability to run virtual machines.
In order for the NAS server to run one or two (or three?) Windows 11 VMs while still being able to serve its natural purpose, I'd expect the machine to be equipped with at least 6 CPU cores and 64 GB of RAM.
On the other hand, I need the NAS device to run as a fail-safe file server by using RAID-6, eventually providing 100 TB of data.
Over time, I want to incrementally add new drives to a storage group or replace existing drives by larger ones to increase volume size. All done online, without performing backups first and without being required to shut down the NAS device when I remove/add drives.
From time to time I'd like to hard-reset the NAS device to make sure that any kind of malware that might have slipped into the NAS OS will be wiped. Doing so, I'd still like to keep my VMs and storage groups without taking a backup first, so that I can immediately continue to use both, my VMs and the files stored in those storage groups, right after I re-installed the NAS OS.
Perhaps I can even have the NAS device render Maxon Cinema 4D animations in a VM? It usually takes weeks for these to render. I'd very much outsource this task to the NAS device, so I can continue to use my workstation machines for my other daily tasks. So, if the NAS device would accept a GeForce RTX 3090 and be able to address the GPGPU from a VM that'd be a great advantage. But that would just put the cherry on the cake. (And I don't believe that this is possible at all. - Perhaps that might be an interesting new category for this forum: "rendering 3D raytracing animations in a NAS device")
After doing some research I first thought that the QNAP TS-h1277XU-RP-3700X-128G might have been the right device for me. But reading through the specs I noticed it doesn't support online RAID capacity expansion, which is what I basically need (see animated images in the attachment).
Being a NAS newbie I don't know what to buy. Can someone please recommend a NAS device fulfilling all of my requirements?
Your help is very much appreciated.
I'd like to put the NAS machine up a shelf in the closet, so I'm looking for a 12 bay 2U rack version, running as silent and economical as possible.
I'm a developing application software for Windows, so I'd like to benefit from the NAS' ability to run virtual machines.
In order for the NAS server to run one or two (or three?) Windows 11 VMs while still being able to serve its natural purpose, I'd expect the machine to be equipped with at least 6 CPU cores and 64 GB of RAM.
On the other hand, I need the NAS device to run as a fail-safe file server by using RAID-6, eventually providing 100 TB of data.
Over time, I want to incrementally add new drives to a storage group or replace existing drives by larger ones to increase volume size. All done online, without performing backups first and without being required to shut down the NAS device when I remove/add drives.
From time to time I'd like to hard-reset the NAS device to make sure that any kind of malware that might have slipped into the NAS OS will be wiped. Doing so, I'd still like to keep my VMs and storage groups without taking a backup first, so that I can immediately continue to use both, my VMs and the files stored in those storage groups, right after I re-installed the NAS OS.
Perhaps I can even have the NAS device render Maxon Cinema 4D animations in a VM? It usually takes weeks for these to render. I'd very much outsource this task to the NAS device, so I can continue to use my workstation machines for my other daily tasks. So, if the NAS device would accept a GeForce RTX 3090 and be able to address the GPGPU from a VM that'd be a great advantage. But that would just put the cherry on the cake. (And I don't believe that this is possible at all. - Perhaps that might be an interesting new category for this forum: "rendering 3D raytracing animations in a NAS device")
After doing some research I first thought that the QNAP TS-h1277XU-RP-3700X-128G might have been the right device for me. But reading through the specs I noticed it doesn't support online RAID capacity expansion, which is what I basically need (see animated images in the attachment).
Being a NAS newbie I don't know what to buy. Can someone please recommend a NAS device fulfilling all of my requirements?
Your help is very much appreciated.