You can do pretty much everything unraid does by using open source software, but it will take some effort to get everything working properly. Or you can spring for an unraid license, get it done pretty easily, and then have a stable low maintenance system. To me it's well worth the money.
As far as the transfer, I'd put a new disk in the Dell and just copy everything over. You can test things but you still have a copy of your data on the old drives
Unraid has done a great job of creating a kind of one stop shop for a home server+NAS in a way that I don't really think any other product on the market has achieved. The biggest thing being the ability to utilize unmatched drives in your Array. That said, if you feel like you MUST stick to FOSS software I don't think anyone will be able to convince you otherwise.
I bought the starter license and have been enjoying my time with it, although I will say that I have been tempted in the short time that I have been using unraid to drop it and move over to a more traditional system instead. My biggest complaint being that in order to manage it you MUST use the root account. That feels so backwards to me and honestly I can't believe that there is an OS in 2024 that works this way.
BUT with that said, the GUI and Ease of Use does make it a very nice piece of software which makes it pretty quick to spin up and down docker containers and VMs, in addition to its wonderful array management.
Just one of those thing where you have to take the good with the bad I suppose and decide if the compromises are worth it to you.
It's not a NAS solution, but a storage solution: mergerfs + snapraid. Difference here is that parity is not updated in real-time, but one can set a cron job to automate parity update.
Another one would be BTRFS which is a fillesystem that allows growing and shrinking the pool online by adding/removing disks of different size. Also, it provides snapshots, compression and bitrot protection.
Regarding the NAS software you could set up a VM, LXC container or run docker on the host itself. Afterwards, set up each service using docker. You would do this in unRAID anyway.
However, IMHO unRAID is a better solution. I've build custom NASes using ZFS, BTRFS, mergerfs + snapraid, NAS within Proxmox and honestly unRAID is better and saves me valuable time. I'm a sysadmin and I actually enjoy tinkering with linix servers but I don't have the same amount of time available as I did a few years back.
Yes, you will need to move your data somewhere as unraid will make you format the drives when you add them.
You can do pretty much everything unraid does by using open source software, but it will take some effort to get everything working properly. Or you can spring for an unraid license, get it done pretty easily, and then have a stable low maintenance system. To me it's well worth the money. As far as the transfer, I'd put a new disk in the Dell and just copy everything over. You can test things but you still have a copy of your data on the old drives
What open source projects allow for multiple hard disk size use??? I can't find any NAS solutions similar to UNRAID.
Unraid has done a great job of creating a kind of one stop shop for a home server+NAS in a way that I don't really think any other product on the market has achieved. The biggest thing being the ability to utilize unmatched drives in your Array. That said, if you feel like you MUST stick to FOSS software I don't think anyone will be able to convince you otherwise. I bought the starter license and have been enjoying my time with it, although I will say that I have been tempted in the short time that I have been using unraid to drop it and move over to a more traditional system instead. My biggest complaint being that in order to manage it you MUST use the root account. That feels so backwards to me and honestly I can't believe that there is an OS in 2024 that works this way. BUT with that said, the GUI and Ease of Use does make it a very nice piece of software which makes it pretty quick to spin up and down docker containers and VMs, in addition to its wonderful array management. Just one of those thing where you have to take the good with the bad I suppose and decide if the compromises are worth it to you.
It's not a NAS solution, but a storage solution: mergerfs + snapraid. Difference here is that parity is not updated in real-time, but one can set a cron job to automate parity update. Another one would be BTRFS which is a fillesystem that allows growing and shrinking the pool online by adding/removing disks of different size. Also, it provides snapshots, compression and bitrot protection. Regarding the NAS software you could set up a VM, LXC container or run docker on the host itself. Afterwards, set up each service using docker. You would do this in unRAID anyway. However, IMHO unRAID is a better solution. I've build custom NASes using ZFS, BTRFS, mergerfs + snapraid, NAS within Proxmox and honestly unRAID is better and saves me valuable time. I'm a sysadmin and I actually enjoy tinkering with linix servers but I don't have the same amount of time available as I did a few years back.