I did some shopping recently, the market is very weird right now. Given the pricing of hardware recently, pre-built NAS now is actually on par pricing wise for DIY.
DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
121–130 of 315 posts
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#122Looking at the Power Consumption section:
How can the total average Wattage be lower than any of the lines it consists of?
Total average power is 66.49W, yet average _Idle_ power is noted as 66.67W.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ah yes, I mixed up raid5 and 6.
I think it's still fine for casual home setups. Depending on data and backup strategy.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#124I 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.
I've had an H3 for a few years and it runs amazing. Very low power usage, small footprint and great stability. I run it with an M.2 ssd for power considerations.
Before that I had a full size NAS with an efficient Fujitsi motherboard, pico-psu, 12V adaptor and spinning HDD's. That required so much extra work for so little power efficiency gains vs the Odroid.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#125Looking at the Power Consumption section: How can the total average Wattage be lower than any of the lines it consists of? Total average power is 66.49W, yet average _Idle_ power is noted as 66.67W.
I think the Total is not the combination of the above listed items. The listed items are just sub categories. See the "Duration" column.
Out of 108h he did a 18h burn in.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#126Very sad that HDDs, SSDs, and RAM are all increasing in price now, but I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool with Seagate Barracudas on sale at $10 / TB [1]. This seems like a pretty decent price even though the Barracudas are rated for 2400 hours per year [2] but this is the same spec that the refurbished Exos drives are rated for. By the way, interesting to see that OP has no qualms about buying cheap Chinese motherboar…
>I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool How much RAM did you install? Did you follow the 1GB per 1TB recommendation for ZFS? (i.e. 96GB of RAM)
That's only for ZFS deduplication which you should never enable unless you have very, very specific use cases.
For normal use, 2GB of RAM for that setup would be fine. But more RAM is more readily available cache, so more is better. It is certainly not even close to a requirement.
There is a lot of old, often repeated ZFS lore which has a kernel of truth but misleads people into thinking it's a requirement.
ECC is better, but not required. More RAM is better, not a requirement. L2ARC is better, not required.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#127No ECC, no remote KVM. HP Microserver remains the only viable option.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the other said already if you have more RAM you can have more cache. Honestly it's not that needed but if you would really use the 10Gbit+ networking then 1 second is ~125M bytes . So depending on your usage you can never even more than 15% utilization or have it almost all if you constantly running something on it ie torrents or using it a SAN/NAS for VM on some other machine. But for a rare occasional home usage…
I won’t be able to sleep having my data just on 1 disk
No matter what you should have an off-site backup as well in case of lightning, flood, fire, virus, etc.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#129No ECC, no remote KVM. HP Microserver remains the only viable option.
Came here to remark about ECC as well.
The remote KVM options from HP and Dell and whatnot are usually so useless they might as well not exist except from remote power up / down, so I don't really care about that.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#130I used to have big HDDs attached to my Thunderbolt dock.
But it was always annoying having to 'eject' them before unplugging the laptop from the dock. Or sometimes overnight they would disconnect themselves and fill up my screen with dozens of "you forgot to eject" notifications. Yes I'm on macOS.
Do NAS avoid this issue? Or you still have to mount/unmount?
Why does there seem to be much more market for NAS than for direct attached external HDD?
Eventually I got a new laptop with bigger SSD, started using BackBlaze for backups, and mostly stopped using the external HDDs.
I always assumed NAS would be slower and even more cumbersome to use. Is that not the case?