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What do you do for home NAS?
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
in General
I've been a Synology fanboi for a long time, but they've implemented some pretty user-hostile policies over the last year. Now they're going to limit hard drives to only those they sell, or so the rumor goes.
So my next refresh will not be with Synology. Some options:
- home-built TrueNAS
- UGREEN I've heard nice things about
- or...?
Anyone have any other recommendations? I'm not running a server rack at home. A couple towers maybe, though the thing I like about Synology solutions is that they don't require a giant PC power supply.
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I used to have a Synology for backing up phone photos, storing important files, and running Emby. But later I figured my cloud drive and Netflix were enough, so I decided to save some power and stop using it.
Not really a true NAS device per se but I bought a Beelink Me Mini recently and I plan to put a few 2-4TB NVMe drives in it and run it with either TrueNAS for an Emby server and as a little home server to run backups to, to replace an old cheap dedi I was using to store backups.
If I wanted something to use for 2.5-3.5" drives in a NAS, personally I'd like to try the UGREEN one. The 2-drive option is pretty affordable at $295, but not as useful. But I would probably never buy a NAS for 2.5-3.5" drives.
I am using a NanoPi with an attached USB external hard-drive.
I use HPE ec200a as my home NAS. Bought on ebay in 2022 for $199. Two 3.5'' HDD slot and one m.2 SSD slot, with maximum 64GB ECC RAM. CPU is Xeon D-1518, weak but enough for a home NAS. I installed TrueNAS Scale on it.
The biggest issue is it's a little bit noisy, so I put it in another room. So far so good.
Just an Old school HP EliteDesk (Storage)(ZimaOS), and another Lenovo M720q tiny(Proxmox, PFsense). If you use only one server and a few devices to access the video/files, DAS is also a great option. NAS is quite expensive; just slap those HDDs into available SATA ports or use PCIE adapters. Then do RAID if supported by the board, or RAID via Software
I recently bought a Terramaster F4 SSD and I run Windows Server on it, mostly because I can. Terramaster’s OS is not bad in my opinion though, and it’s fully web based.
Before that I was using a Dell thin client but that was not ideal (only one SSD) and the ethernet port broke eventually.
If you live where the Jonsbo NAS cases are available give them a look.
I run Unraid on all my NASes.
transparent proxy to bypass gfw
i don’t have a real NAS, instead attaching a hard drive to the router which samba is running. casually I’d like to download some videos for sharing between different tablets.
I don't have a home right now. I still have a Nas - Illmatic CD in a box in storage though.
I built my own in a Fractal Design Node 804 case. I'm running Unraid. Currently just have 2 x 2 TB NVMe SSD and 2 x 20TB HDD.
I'm happy with my garage unraid:
Supermicro X11SSH-F, E3-1240 v6, 64Gb ECC
10Gbit Mellanox
6x Exos 18T X18 (2 parity + 4 data)
2x Ironwolf 6TB ( data ) from the old synology
2x 2T WD Red as cache
Ultimately I decided for Openmediavault with mergerfs and snapraid. I know it's not as professional as ZFS on truenas but it's free, functional, good enough for home use. And as a bonus if I would lose more drives than what snapraid covers the rest of disks are still completely usable separately (the file tree is merged from multiple drives).
I run combination of 18, 20 and 24TB drives - that reminds me of another advantage: I can mix and match drives, easily add more when needed. there is only one requirement: the parity drive has to be as large as the largest data drive. So I plan to fill up the array with couple more 24TB drives. Current usable capacity is something over 100TB. I use it only for my own photos and videos, I do record in 8K/60p RAW so it eats up a lot of space.
I bought new fractal design tower case, reused old MB+CPU and added cheap 6 port SATA expansion card, it works well. There's 2.5Gbps network to my workstation where I edit the video files. I used to have stack of 6 drives inside of that but data needs grew more than available slots.
mix/match drives is the same reason I run unraid, also I like to spin down the HDD when I dont use them (the 2Tb cache helps me alot)
I also spin down my drives. The only downside with mergerfs is that when I try to access some files from standby it wakes up the drives one by one until it finds where it is. Maybe I need to look for some further tuning.
Try FNOS
Currently using a secondhand dell optiplex i got for cheap running proxmox + openmediavault + some other vms.
It does the job and didn't require too much effort to set up.
-
On a side note ... anyone here tried hexos ?
no actual nas here. i run 2 storage boxes, obsoleted older ryzens.. one win10 with 8x8tb and the other debian with 6x10tb. i've got a 3rd now-retired ryzen i'd intended to build out with bigger drives to replace both of those but then i'd have all those 6 & 8tb disks .. sitting on a shelf? probably won't do anything until i start losing the older disks i guess.
Here in my country I found folks doing Xpenology custom builds.
For storing local backups and cloud storage in case of uncertainty
Mini PC Intel Atom x5-Z8350 4G RAM 64G MMC boot drive ($113) running Ubuntu Server with 3x 4TB Toshiba USB 3.0 drives in ZFS pool with raidz1-0. 3D printed a little stand for it and the drives.
Yes, weird but has worked well for me going on 5 years 24/7 no issues. It was cheap, tiny, and very low electric use. I use it for my Plex media server, local backups, and as SMB/CIFS network drive for computers on the LAN.
Truenas scale running on old optiplex
With 1x 8tb hhd and 2x 128gb ssd as cache
0 issues so far, except the 28483 times sata to usb died
Ugreen had good ones, I heard Orico has some too you can check them.
If you're repurposing hardware, go with unraid. If you're going for brand new, get a QNAP on Black Friday.
I have a RPI with an external 16TB drive, working without any problems.
My NAS:
CPU: AMD EPYC 7D12
MB: Supermicro H11SSL-i (ATX)
RAM: 32GB x 4
GPU: NVIDIA Tesla P4 with custom cooling components
HDD: 14T x 4 + 4T x 5
OS: PVE + VMs (Windows,Ubuntu,DSM……)
I think this NAS can meet my needs for the next few years.