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The Cheapest NAS

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Re: The Cheapest NAS

#141

Post by ac29 »

ajkshfkjsh wrote: post #125
senkora wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A NAS is nice for serving local media files to a smart TV. That’s my main use case.

The thing I don't get is, why do I need to drop $1000 on a Synology machine just to do this? Let's say I want to create a setup with 8x18TB drives or something, do I really need to spend $1000 just to make this accessible to a couple clients at once (say a smart TV + another machine in the house)? Right now I have Plex running on a raspberry pi hooked up to an 8tb external HDD. Works fine, but I want to scale up to t…

2 bay Synology NAS' are less than $200, 4 bay are less than $400. Yes, if you need 144TB of storage the NAS unit is going to be more expensive, but the drives themselves are the majority of the cost.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#142

Post by lizknope »

jstanley wrote: post #4

When people set up these NAS's, how are they accessing the files? NFS? SFTP? And how are you accessing it when away from home? A VPN that you're permanently connected to? Is there a good way to do NAT hole-punching? Syncthing kind of does what I want, in that it lets all my computers sync the same files no matter what network they're on, but it insists on always copying all the files ("syncing") whereas I just want t…

I use sshfs. If you can login via ssh then you can mount the remote server through ssh as a local drive.

https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs

For added security I limit my home ssh access to a handful of trusted IPs including my cloud VM. Then I set up an ssh tunnel from my hotel through the cloud VM to home. The cloud VM never sees my password / key

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#143

Post by ComputerGuru »

stragies wrote: post #91
iforgotpassword wrote: post #27

My secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of businesses use them and upgrade on a regular schedule. If you care about power consumption like I do, you can Google "$model energy consumption white paper" which contains very accurate data about idle usage, for example https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy... In one case I had a…

I was under the impression, that for most (popular) chip families, like RockChip, Allwinner, Amlogic, some assorted Broadcoms, .. the Mainline linux kernel support has mostly been sorted for, and it's only the stragglers like Hisilicon, Huawei, Most Broadcom, Qualmcomm where mainline support is not on their priority list?

Does Raspberry Pi fit your definition/mental model of a straggler? It doesn’t have mainline support either!

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#144

Post by starbugs »

dudus wrote: post #113
rovr138 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all strategies and the price point of the unit doesn’t affect it. Need extra drives, buy extra drives. Need extra NAS for backups?, buy an extra NAS. Need an offsite copy?, buy space and get an offsite NAS and drives for an offsite copy. Price point of the unit doesn’t change anything here.

Synology sure provides an expensive but complete package for home office and enthusiasts. Just buy it and be done with it. It's certainly more expensive than DIY it yourself using off the shelf components and things bought out of online classifieds. But for most people that have no interest in tinkering or don't know what to do, just paying the price of a complete solution might be worth it.

> Just buy it and be done with it

Or buy a QNAP and watch it brick itself when you most need it.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#145

Post by vbezhenar »

jstanley wrote: post #4

When people set up these NAS's, how are they accessing the files? NFS? SFTP? And how are you accessing it when away from home? A VPN that you're permanently connected to? Is there a good way to do NAT hole-punching? Syncthing kind of does what I want, in that it lets all my computers sync the same files no matter what network they're on, but it insists on always copying all the files ("syncing") whereas I just want t…

I used samba, it's supported everywhere. I also served files with HTTP server which might be convenient way for some use-cases. I also generated simple HTML-s with which allowed me to easily view movies on my TV without all that nonsense.

My router has public IP so I didn't have any problems reaching it from the outside, so any VPN could work. Another approach is to rent some cheap VPS and use it as a bastion VPN server, connecting both home network and roadwarrior laptop.

No idea about any "integrated" solutions, I prefer simple solutions, so I just used ordinary RHEL with ordinary apache, etc.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#146

Post by kevinkeller »

kstrauser wrote: post #127
bongodongobob wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they barely do anything. It's like like there's 4TB of RAM in there churning away at multiple databases. It's debatable if you even need it in enterprise servers.

You absolutely, positively, 100% need it on anything that carries data you care about. I personally consider it a hard requirement for a NAS. I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere.

> I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere.

If you have disks set up in RAID 1 or RAID 6, would you still lose data though?

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#147

Post by ssl-3 »

yair99dd wrote: post #120
jnovek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so make sure to have backups Can you (or someone) suggest a backup scheme? I have a 28TB NAS. Almost everything I've looked into is expensive or intended more for enterprise tier. Are there options for backup in the "hobbyist" price range?

Check Storj distributed storage. Fraction of aws Storage* $0.004 Per GB/month

For 28TB, that's $1,146.88 per month.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#148

Post by sangnoir »

k8sToGo wrote: post #90
iforgotpassword wrote: post #27

My secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of businesses use them and upgrade on a regular schedule. If you care about power consumption like I do, you can Google "$model energy consumption white paper" which contains very accurate data about idle usage, for example https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy... In one case I had a…

I have a nuc but how do I connect 6 hdds to it?

You can buy a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) enclosure[1], some even support RAID. If your Nuc is multipurpose, you could then run a virtualized TrueNAS guest (BSD or linux) in QEMU and give it control of the DAS block device for ZFS pools. Being able to run a virtual NAS that actually gets security updates on demand is pretty neat - TrueNAS has an excellent API you can use to start/stop services (SMB, SSH, iSCSI, etc) as well as shutdown the vm cleanly.

1. Newer DAS devices connect using USB-C, but USB type-A/e-SATA ones can be found.

Edit: figuring out how to run TrueNAS as a guest OS was a nightmare, the first 5+ page of results will be about TrueNAS as a host.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#149

Post by lifeisstillgood »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #27

My secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of businesses use them and upgrade on a regular schedule. If you care about power consumption like I do, you can Google "$model energy consumption white paper" which contains very accurate data about idle usage, for example https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy... In one case I had a…

Years ago there were auction houses specialising in selling off business recycled PCs and bankrupt stock - it was great fun to go and mooch around and see if there was a real bargain not spotted, but they seemed to vanish under the onslaught of eBay and frankly for second hand tag I struggle to trust ebay

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#150

Post by extesy »

kevinkeller wrote: post #146
kstrauser wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely, positively, 100% need it on anything that carries data you care about. I personally consider it a hard requirement for a NAS. I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere.

> I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere. If you have disks set up in RAID 1 or RAID 6, would you still lose data though?

Absolutely. Imagine you are saving a text file to NAS with a super-secret password to your Bitcoin wallet, for example "password". While it was in memory before it reached disk, one bit was flipped and the file contents became "pastword" which OS happily saved on your RAID. And now you've lost your Bitcoins forever.
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