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DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

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Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#31

Post by exmadscientist »

jmb99 wrote: post #26
exmadscientist wrote: post #23

Are there any NAS solutions for 3.5" drives, homebrew or purchased, that are slim enough to stash away in a wall enclosure? (This sort of thing: https://www.legrand.us/audio-visual/racks-and-enclosures/in-... , though not that particular model or height.) I'd like to really stash something away and forget about it. Height is the major constraint, you can only be ~3.5" tall. And before anyone says anything about 19" r…

> And before anyone says anything about 19" rack stuff, don't bother. It's close but just doesn't go, especially if it's not the only thing in the enclosure. Do you have to use that particular wall enclosure thing? A 1U chassis at 1.7” of height fits 4 drives (and a 2U at ~3.45” fits 12), and something like a QNAP is low-enough power to not need to worry about cooling too much. If you’re willing to DIY it would not b…

> Do you have to use that particular wall enclosure thing?

It's already there in the wall. All the Cat5e cabling in the house terminates there, so all the network equipment lives in there, which makes me kind of want to also put the NAS in there.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#32

Post by yegle »

Lammy wrote: post #21
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only for deduplication. https://superuser.com/a/993019

I do like to deduplicate my BitTorrent downloads/seeding directory with my media directories so I can edit metadata to my heart's content while still seeding forever without having to incur 2x storage usage. I tune the `recordsize` to 1MiB so it has vastly fewer blocks to keep track of compared to the default 128K, at the cost of any modification wasting very slightly more space. Really not a big deal though when tal…

cross-seed | cross-seed https://www.cross-seed.org/

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#33

Post by firecall »

speff wrote: post #2

Q - assuming the NAS was strictly used as NAS and not as a server with VMs, is there a point in having a large amount of RAM? (large as in >8GB) I'm not sure what the benefit would be since all it's doing is moving information from the drives over to the network.

I am not at all an expert, I can only share my anecdotal unscientific observations!

I'm running a TrueNAS box with 3x cheap shucked Seagate drives.*

The TrueNAS box has 48GB RAM, is using ZFS and is sharing the drives as a Time Machine destination to a couple of Macs in my office.

I can un-confidently say that it feels like the fastest TM device I've ever used!

TrueNAS with ZFS feels faster than Open Media Vault(OMV) did on the same hardware.

I originally setup OMV on this old gaming PC, as OMV is easy. OMV was reliable, but felt slow compared to how I remembered TrueNAS and ZFS feeling the last time I setup a NAS.

So I scrubbed OMV and installed TrueNAS, and purely based on seat-of-pants metrics, ZFS felt faster.

And I can confirm that it soaks up most of the 48GB of RAM!

TrueNAS reports ZFS Cache currently at 36.4 GiB.

I dont know why or how it works, and it's only a Time Machine destination, but there we are those are my metrics and that's what I know LOL

* I don't recommend this. They seem unreliable and report errors all the time. But it's just what I had sitting around :-) I'd hoped by now to be able to afford to stick 3x 4TB/8TB SSDs of some sort in the case, but prices are tracking up on SSDs...

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#34

Post by bscphil »

yegle wrote: post #32
Lammy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do like to deduplicate my BitTorrent downloads/seeding directory with my media directories so I can edit metadata to my heart's content while still seeding forever without having to incur 2x storage usage. I tune the `recordsize` to 1MiB so it has vastly fewer blocks to keep track of compared to the default 128K, at the cost of any modification wasting very slightly more space. Really not a big deal though when tal…

cross-seed | cross-seed https://www.cross-seed.org/

I believe they are saying they literally edit the media files to add / change metadata. Cross-seeding is only possible if the files are kept the same.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#35

Post by no_time »

dbalatero wrote: post #15

I researched a bunch of cases recently and the Jonsbo, while it looked good, came up as having a ton of issues with airflow to cool the drives. Because of this, I ended up buying the Fractal Node 804 case, which seemed to have a better overall quality level and didn't require digging around AliExpress for a vendor.

lol same. All my parts arrived except the 804. The supply chain for these cases appears to be imploding where I live (Hungary). The day after I ordered it either went out of stock or went up by +50% in all webshops that are reputable here.

I’m still a bit torn on whether I made the good call of getting 804 or the 304 wouldve been a enough for a significantly smaller footprint and -2 bays. Hard to tell without seeing them in person lol.

Are you satisfied with it? Any issues that came up since building?

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#36

Post by DeathArrow »

I wonder how many consumer level HDDs in RAID5 will take to saturate a 10Gbps connection. My napkin math says that from 1,250 MB/s we can achieve around 1,150 MB/s due to network overhead so it means about 5 Red Pro/ Ironwolf Pro (reading at about 250–260 MB/s each) in RAID5 to saturate the connection.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#37

Post by mvkel »

Wait. You build a new one every -year-?! How does one establish the reliability of the hardware (particularly the aliexpress motherboard), not to mention data retention, if its maximum life expectancy is 365 days?

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#38

Post by mzhaase »

I would like to point people to the Odroid H4 series of boards. N97 or N355, 2*2.5GbE, 4*SATA, 2 W in idle. Also has extension boards to turn it into a router for example.

The developer hardkernel also publishes all relevant info such as board schematics.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#39

Post by p1necone »

mvkel wrote: post #37

Wait. You build a new one every -year-?! How does one establish the reliability of the hardware (particularly the aliexpress motherboard), not to mention data retention, if its maximum life expectancy is 365 days?

Looks like they built a new NAS, but kept using the same drives. Which given the number of drive bays in the NAS probably make up a large majority of the overall cost in something like this.

Edit: reading comprehension fail - they bought drives earlier, at an unspecified price, but they weren't from the old NAS - I agree, when lifetimes of drives are measures in decades and huge amounts of tbw it seems pretty silly to buy new ones every time.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#40

Post by magicalhippo »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #11
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. More than just the normal page cache on other filesystems?

Yes. Parent's comment matches everything I've heard. 32GB is a common recommendation for home lab setups. I run 32 in my TrueNAS builds (36TB and 60TB).

You can run it with much less. I don't recall the bare minimum but with a bit of tweaking 2GB should be plenty[1].

I recall reading some running it on a 512MB system, but that was a while ago so not sure if you can still go that low.

Performance can suffer though, for example low memory will limit the size of the transaction groups. So for decent performance you will want 8GB or more depending on workloads.

[1]: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Project%20and%20Commu...

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