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The Cheapest NAS

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Re: The Cheapest NAS

#181

Post by ranger207 »

superkuh wrote: post #131
transpute wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just put the drives in your computer NAS works with phones, tablets and laptops with egregiously expensive, non-expandable storage. On iOS/iPadOS, use SSH/SFTP to workaround business-model-challenged "Files" client.

A NAS is not magical. It is just a rather limited computer. Anything a NAS can do so can a normal desktop, and it'll do it better. Sharing files over a network is one of these things. Managing the files is way, way, better since you just use your normal desktop file manager rather than some NAS web stuff that'll break due to CA TLS issues in a few years.

Eh, I'm much more likely to accidentally reformat all my drives on my desktop than a NAS. Sure I can just restore from backup but it's just a security blanket to not have to worry about it

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#182

Post by shiggaz »

I found an ex-office HP computer with and i5-4670 on the side of the road and have been thinking about setting it up as a home server. Does anyone have a recommendation for how to set it up as a NAS, VPN, Home Assistant and Plex server?

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#183

Post by Lammy »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #3

Note that it doesn't look like it has ECC, so make sure to have backups. Fancy file systems like ZFS don't remove the need for ECC.

Hate to see this downvoted because I have personally lost files to ZFS on failing non-ECC memory. It was all my most-used stuff too because those were the files I was actually accessing, then it would compare checksum in memory to checksum on disk and decide disk was the one that was wrong. I noticed via audible blips appearing in my FLACs and verified with `flac -t `.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#184

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#185

Post by [deleted] »

projektfu wrote: post #175
Dalewyn wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>DIY it yourself Look, I'm sorry, but you literally asked for this: Hello, I'm from the Department of Redundancy Department with a citation for a "Do It Yourself it yourself". Please pay the fine in internet chuckles, thank you.

if the I or the Y stop working or get corrupted, the redundancy allows you to recover them properly from the spelled out words.

[deleted]

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#186

Post by raihansaputra »

shiggaz wrote: post #182

I found an ex-office HP computer with and i5-4670 on the side of the road and have been thinking about setting it up as a home server. Does anyone have a recommendation for how to set it up as a NAS, VPN, Home Assistant and Plex server?

Home Assistant + plugins/extensions ~might be the easiest. Unsure about the VPN part. If you want to tinker and do some sysadmin work, then go install Proxmox and have separate containers for each as you wish.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#188

Post by markhahn »

cost and power are legitimate motives. I'd probably have started with a rpi-02 though: storage and ethernet over USB is not going to win any races, though it'll compete with what he ended up with...

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#189

Post by whartung »

superkuh wrote: post #79

The entire concept of network attached storage is kind of cargo-cult in the vast majority of personal use cases. Just put the drives in your computer. Fewer abstraction layers, fewer problems, cheaper, faster, less fragile, easier to debug and fix if problems do happen. It's just not as hip or cool sounding as "NAS".

My “NAS” is my late model Intel iMac. I have, like, 5 USB drives hanging off it.

I SyncThing my wife’s laptop to it. I serve a bunch of videos off of it to our AppleTV. All our photos are there.

I have a Time Machine backup of the main system drive (my wife uses TM as well). The whole thing is backed up to BackBlaze, which works great, but I have not had to recover anything yet.

I would like to run ZFS mostly to detect bit rot, but each time I’ve tried it, it pretty much immediately crushed my machine to the point of unresponsiveness, so I’ve given up on that. That was doing trivial stuff, have ZFS manage a single volume. Just terrible.

So now it’s just an ad hoc collection of mismatched USB drives with cables not well organized. My next TODO is to replace the two spinning drives with SSD. Not so much for raw performance, but simply that when those drives spin up, it hangs up the computer. So I’d like SSD for “instant” startup.

Not enough to just jettison the drives, but if opportunity knocks, I’ll swap them out.

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