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DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

blog.briancmoses.com

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Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#171

Post by kotaKat »

Xiol32 wrote: post #96
kotaKat wrote: post #93

While not DIY, I would like to also call out an interesting discovery lately. https://www.ugreen.com/blogs/news/ugreen-makes-strategic-ent... UGREEN has apparently inked deals to drop their DXP2800s into (some) Walmarts, which also included bringing in some 10/12TB Toshiba N300 Pro drives as well to go with them on the shelves. Being a super-rural American, I was a bit surprised to see this on my local shelf as a nea…

I had one of the DXP4800 Plus NASes for about a month before RMAing it. The CPU would immediately hit 100C with even the slightest whiff of load. The entire thing was also unstable and would regularly just lock up without any kernel panic or other error message available, could even get kdump to gather anything (I'd binned their dodgy NAS OS and installed Debian). It also seemed to amplify the noise of the hard drive…

Not gonna lie I dumped their packed-in OS like shipping foam. Turned the watchdog off, installed TrueNAS, not looking back.

I haven't paid attention to temps or noise - it's been suitable in my bedroom corner and it's been running for a month+ now like a trouper.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#172

Post by adrian_b »

progbits wrote: post #108
bhattisatish wrote: post #100

Are 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.

A tape can be checked much faster than a HDD, because its sequential read/write speed is several times higher than that of a HDD.

However, there is little need to check the tapes, because the likelihood of them developing defects during storage is far less than for HDDs.

Much more important than checking the tapes from time to time is to make multiple copies, i.e. to use at least duplicate tapes that are stored in different places.

Periodic reading is strictly necessary only for SSDs, and it is useful for HDDs, because in both cases their controllers will relocate any corrupted blocks. For tapes it is much less useful. There is more risk to damage the tape during an unnecessary reading, e.g. if the mechanism of the tape drive happens to become defective at exactly that moment, than for the tape to become defective during storage.

The LTO cartridges are quite robust and they are guaranteed for 30 years of storage after you write some data on them.

In the past there have existed badly designed tape cartridges, e.g. the quarter-inch cartridges, where the tape itself did not become defective during storage, but certain parts of the cartridge, i.e. a rubber belt, which was necessary to move the tape, disintegrated after several years of storage. Those have disappeared many years ago.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#173

Post by accidc »

m000 wrote: post #164

I've recently gone through building a NAS for home. I read several guides like this, but a lot of them didn't quite match what I had in mind. Following some takeaways from my personal experience: - Finding a low-wattage/high-efficiency ATX/SFX PSU is the hardest part. To achieve the advertised efficiency, your Gold-rated PSU needs at least 20% load. I.e. 100W for a 500W PSU. If you are building for low-power, you wil…

Do you have a preferred/recommendation for a NAS OS?

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#174

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

m000 wrote: post #164

I've recently gone through building a NAS for home. I read several guides like this, but a lot of them didn't quite match what I had in mind. Following some takeaways from my personal experience: - Finding a low-wattage/high-efficiency ATX/SFX PSU is the hardest part. To achieve the advertised efficiency, your Gold-rated PSU needs at least 20% load. I.e. 100W for a 500W PSU. If you are building for low-power, you wil…

> - If you are thinking of ZFS/TrueNAS because of the scrubbing functionality, RAID1 + BTRFS also have scrubbing.

In my experience, BTRFS is to be avoided. It's the only FS that I've lost data to.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#175

Post by mvkel »

briancmoses wrote: post #155
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?

Somebody else shared this, but I'm the blog's author. I think you're asking good questions, but they're not from the point-of-view of the people who actually benefit from these blogs. I've answered the "You build one every year?" question quite a few times over the years. These blogs have a shelf life. After about a year, newer hardware is available that's a better a better value. And after 2-3 years, it starts to ge…

> One guy on the Internet is--and always will be--an anecdote

It seems like you have a specific person in mind as the audience member (yourself?), but the piece could benefit from a wider view. Given your hardware choices, reliability seems to not be a factor at all, but near-term cost (at the expense of long-term cost).

I'm not expecting you to personally test your hardware choices, but make choices based on the aggregate accounts of others, like the rest of us.

I would imagine the mean audience member would want to buy something they can set and forget, which would necessitate the reliable choice. That is wholly different than a person who is excited about tinkering with a brand new NAS each year

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#176

Post by doe88 »

adrian_b wrote: post #166
bhattisatish wrote: post #100

Are 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…

You can buy a tabletop LTO tape drive, a SAS HBA card and an appropriate cable and you can use them with any desktop computer with a free big enough PCIe slot. The problem is that while the tapes are at least 3 times cheaper than HDDs, and you have other additional advantages, e.g. much higher sequential reading/writing speed and much longer storage lifetime of the tape, the tape drives are extremely expensive, at a…

It is a shame drives are so pricy. Just out of curiosity (knowing nothing to this area), what would you consider the minimum 'viable' LTO tape drive?

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#177

Post by adrian_b »

embedding-shape wrote: post #105
mm0lqf wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The LTO cartridges are cheap and the programs that you need for using LTO tape drives are open source.

The only problem is that the LTO tape drives are very expensive. If you want to use 18 TB LTO-9 tapes, the cost per TB is much lower than for HDDs, but you need to store at least a few hundred TB in order to recover the cost of the tape drive.

There is no chance to see less expensive tape drives because there is no competition and it would be extremely difficult for anyone to become a competitor as it is difficult to become able to design and manufacture the mechanical parts of the drive and the reading and writing magnetic heads.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#178

Post by ilkhan4 »

mzhaase wrote: post #38

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.

Yep, I've had mine running for over a year now without issue. It idles at 34w with all 4 drives running. I ended up making a custom "case" for it: https://github.com/cbsmith402/storage-loaf

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#179

Post by adrian_b »

doe88 wrote: post #176
adrian_b wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy a tabletop LTO tape drive, a SAS HBA card and an appropriate cable and you can use them with any desktop computer with a free big enough PCIe slot. The problem is that while the tapes are at least 3 times cheaper than HDDs, and you have other additional advantages, e.g. much higher sequential reading/writing speed and much longer storage lifetime of the tape, the tape drives are extremely expensive, at a…

It is a shame drives are so pricy. Just out of curiosity (knowing nothing to this area), what would you consider the minimum 'viable' LTO tape drive?

I have a Quantum LTO-7 drive (6-TB tapes) bought many years ago for $3000.

Today I would strongly recommend against buying a LTO-7 drive, as it is obsolete and you risk to have a tape collection that will become unreadable in the future for the lack of compatible drives. A LTO drive can read 2 previous generations of tapes, e.g. a LTO-9 drive can read LTO-7 and LTO-8 tapes. LTO-10 drives, when they will appear in a few years, will no longer be able to read LTO-7 tapes.

The current standard is LTO-9 (18-TB tapes). If you write today LTO-9 tapes, they will remain readable by LTO-11 drives, whenever those will appear.

Unfortunately, LTO-9 is a rather new standard and the tape drives, at least for now, are even more expensive.

For instance, looking right now on Newegg, I see a HPE LTO-9 tape drive for $4750.

Perhaps it could be found somewhat cheaper elsewhere, but I doubt that it is possible to find a LTO-9 tape drive anywhere for less than $4500.

If you need to store at least 200 TB of data, you may recover the cost of the tape drive from the difference in price between LTO-9 cartridges and HDDs.

Otherwise, you may choose to use a tape drive for improved peace of mind, because the chances for your data that is in cold storage on tapes to become corrupt are far less than if it were stored on HDDs.

I have stored data for many years on HDDs, but the only thing that has kept me from losing that data was that I have always duplicated the HDDs (and I had content hashes for all files, for corruption detection, as the HDD controller not always reported errors for the corrupted blocks). After many years, almost all HDDs had some corrupted blocks, but the corrupted blocks were not in the same positions on the duplicated HDDs, allowing the recovery of the data.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#180

Post by m000 »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #174
m000 wrote: post #164

I've recently gone through building a NAS for home. I read several guides like this, but a lot of them didn't quite match what I had in mind. Following some takeaways from my personal experience: - Finding a low-wattage/high-efficiency ATX/SFX PSU is the hardest part. To achieve the advertised efficiency, your Gold-rated PSU needs at least 20% load. I.e. 100W for a 500W PSU. If you are building for low-power, you wil…

> - If you are thinking of ZFS/TrueNAS because of the scrubbing functionality, RAID1 + BTRFS also have scrubbing. In my experience, BTRFS is to be avoided. It's the only FS that I've lost data to.

Same here, so I had to overcome this fear. But to be fair, my incident was >10 years back, and I was trying to be fancy (resizing a live FS - IIRC). Btrfs has gone a long way since then, and is even the standard filesystem for Synology NAS boxes.
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