This is all fine, but price came around same-ish as UGREEN DXP8800, if we're considering price alone.
DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
101–110 of 315 posts
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#102Wait. 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 t…
This is the funniest edit have read in while.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#103Are there any tape based solution which can be used at home? I don't care about time retrieval. It's more for home archival purpose. I have two NAS servers (both based on Synalogy). But I need something where I can back it up and forgot about it till I want to restore the stuff. I am looking at a workflow of say, weekly backup to tape. Update the index. Whenever I want to restore a directory or file, I search the ind…
Tape drives are generally SAS so you will need a controller card
I've got a HP StorageWorks Ultrium 3000 drive (It's LTO-5 format) connected to one (LSI SAS SAS9300-4i), in my NAS/file server (HP Z420 workstation chassis). Don't go lower than LTO-5 as you will want LTFS support.
About £150 all in for the card and drive (including SFF-8643 to SFF-8482 cables etc..) on EBay
Tapes are 1.5TB uncompressed, and about £10/each on Ebay, you'll also want to pick up a cleaning cartridge.
I use this and RDX (1TB cartridges are 2-4 times the price, but drives are a lot cheaper, and SATA/USB3, and you can use them like a disk) for offline backup of stuff at home.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I though raid5 is highly discouraged
I can't remember the details, but was that not specifically for hardware raid controllers? 2000s style. I think for home use with MDADM or raid z2 on zfs it's just gucci. It's cost effective.
Z2 means you'll have two parity disks, like in RAID-6. That should be okay. The trouble with RAID-5 are the rebuild times that rise to multiple days with modern disk sizes. The duration of time you run effectively without redundancy grows uncomfortably large. Especially if you don't have a hot or even cold spare around.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#105Are there any tape based solution which can be used at home? I don't care about time retrieval. It's more for home archival purpose. I have two NAS servers (both based on Synalogy). But I need something where I can back it up and forgot about it till I want to restore the stuff. I am looking at a workflow of say, weekly backup to tape. Update the index. Whenever I want to restore a directory or file, I search the ind…
Tape drives are generally SAS so you will need a controller card I've got a HP StorageWorks Ultrium 3000 drive (It's LTO-5 format) connected to one (LSI SAS SAS9300-4i), in my NAS/file server (HP Z420 workstation chassis). Don't go lower than LTO-5 as you will want LTFS support. About £150 all in for the card and drive (including SFF-8643 to SFF-8482 cables etc..) on EBay Tapes are 1.5TB uncompressed, and about £10/e…
Not OP, but similar situation, trying to figure out tape archiving, already using SAS.
However, is there no open formats? The whole LTO ecosystem of course reeks of enterprise, and I'd expect by now at least one hardware hacker had picked together some off-the-shelf components to build something that is magnitude cheaper to acquire, maintain and upgrade.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#106Built a NAS last winter using the same case. Temps for HDDs used to be in mid-50s C with no fan and about 40 with the stock fan. The case-native backplane thingamajig does not provide any sort of pwm control if the fan is plugged in, so it's either full blast or nothing. I swapped the fan for a Thermalright TL-B12 and the HDDs are now happily chugging along at about 37 with the fan barely perceptible. Hddfancontrol r…
> any sort of pwm control if the fan is plugged in, so it's either full blast or nothing
Got a new network switch that runs somewhat hot (TP-Link) and it's behaving the same way, built-in fan runs either not at all, or at 100% (and noisy at that). Installed OpenWRT on it briefly, before discovering 10Gbe NIC didn't work with OpenWRT, and it had much better fan control. Why is it so hard to just place a basic curve on the fan control based on the hardware temperature? All the sensors and controllers are there apparently, just a software thing...
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
MB and other elements are more concerning than the drives.
For system failure, yes, but not if data retention and recovery is your primary concern. When building a device primarily used for storing personal things, I'd much prefer to save money on the motherboard and risk that failing than skimping on the drives themselves
Eh, cheap motherboards aren't a panacea that can't hurt the rest of the hardware, I personally don't skimp on motherboards, and would much rather skimp on the drives themselves as I have redundancy and 1-2 drives failing wouldn't hurt too much. And data retention is my top priority.
Motherboards have fried connected hardware before, poor grounding/ESD protections, firmware bugs together with aggressive power management, wiring weirdness and power related faults have broken people's drives before.
What I've never heard about is a drive breaking something else in a system, but broken motherboards have taken friends with them more than once.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#108Are there any tape based solution which can be used at home? I don't care about time retrieval. It's more for home archival purpose. I have two NAS servers (both based on Synalogy). But I need something where I can back it up and forgot about it till I want to restore the stuff. I am looking at a workflow of say, weekly backup to tape. Update the index. Whenever I want to restore a directory or file, I search the ind…
If you "back up and forget" there is a good chance you will not be able to restore the tapes when the time comes.
At least with drives you can run regular health checks a corruption scans. Tape is good for large scale but you must have automation that keeps checking the tapes.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#109I appreciate Brian's posts and they've helped me learn to build my own NAS systems, but there's a scammy angle to his articles. All of the merchant links are affiliate links, which he (illegally) does not disclose.[0] He's effectively acting as a sales rep for these brands, but he's presenting himself as an unbiased consumer. The affiliate relationship incentivizes Brian to recommend more expensive equipment and push…
Just skimming over the article, I feel like the blue link coloured word "Topton" has been seared into my retinas.
That aside, as someone who has been building computers for nearly 3 decades, and NAS's for a decade plus, I dislike almost everything about this build.
Spending a lot on the PSU is a good move, but the motherboard is a bad choice for the price when a much more capable socketed board + CPU could be had for around the same price, and the use of no-name SSD and NVMe is an absolute no-no for me.
The impression I got from so many linked mentions of Topton this and Topton that, is that this was mostly done to push that particular brand for a sponsorship or affiliate program.
Youtube has already long gone the way of being untrustworthy for advice on this sort of thing due to sponsorships and affiliates etc, perhaps I should blog my advice and experience that no body pays to influence, in a more generic sense for those who actually need guidance on where to focus when building hardware like PCs and NASs.
I'm not going to suggest that hardware I chose for my "NAS" as it would be universlly bad advice for most people, but there is some generic knowledge to be shared here.
Sometimes it feels just like telling my kids to "learn from my mistakes", does anyone actually want to hear it?
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#110I did something similar last year. Market for mITX NAS boards is pretty bad. I went for ASRock N100DC-ITX – it has 2x SATA ports, but there's also PCIe 3 x4. The main benefits of this board were: * it's not from an obscure Chinese company * integrated power supply – just plug in DC jack, and you're good to go * passive cooling Really hope they make an Intel N150 version.
Question,whats the problem with a motherboard being from an obscure Chinese company?Is it because its harder to find replacements or some other reason. i ask because i recently built my own homelab like 4 months ago and source all my parts from Aliexpress which as way cheaper than any name brand on amazon an they're all relatively obscure. My homelab is running perfectly though so why the apprehension?
I am more worried about them in the long-term. Reviews are usually not as detailed as I'd like them to be (shout out to ServeTheHome – they're doing a great job in terms of that), or they're nearly impossible to find.
For me personally, there are two things I am concerned about:
1. Issues that can only be resolved via BIOS update. Almost all obscure Chinese SBCs won't get any updates, so you're stuck with whatever issues you encounter.
2. In case of hardware failures, there's a 0% chance for RMA. You are not getting a replacement or your money back.