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The Cheapest NAS

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Re: The Cheapest NAS

#201

Post by Yodel0914 »

Although not quite as cheap, I bought a mini pc (Intel N-95, 8GB, 256GB) for not a whole lot more. It has room for a 4TB SSD in a built-in enclosure, which I mirror to an external 4TB HDD nightly. Important stuff is cloud-synced and manually backed up monthly to a external HDD that lives at work. It also runs Jellyfin, minimserver, syncthing etc.

One of the nice things is that it has a full sync of my cloud storage, so I don't have think about backing up individual devices much any more: I create a file on my laptop, it syncs to cloud storage, then to the minipc. From that point on it's part of the regular nightly/monthly backup routine.

If I hit the 4TB limit it might be a pain, as I'm not sure it'll support an 8TB SSD.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#202

Post by mschuster91 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #114
mschuster91 wrote: post #104

> 100Mb may seem like a joke nowadays, but the main purpose of such a toy NAS for me is to keep a copy of a directory with ~200K small files. Having 1Gb would only marginally improve the syncing speed even if the SBC supported USB 3.0. He's wrong here. The most important thing with small files is latency, and a 1000M network will have significantly less latency than a 100M network. Anyone running TimeMachine over net…

So I am a network dummy, but why would 100M vs 1000M have a difference in latency unless the pipe was saturated?

Even in an otherwise unsaturated link, the ping packet will take 1/10th of the time to be transmitted, as the transmission clock is 10x faster.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#203

Post by iforgotpassword »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #95
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’ve also heard the same advice with Dell/HP SFF PC’s. BTW, your link requires a username/password login.

That's... Odd. I didn't click my own link yesterday after posting, but that was straight from Google and it did load just fine. Now I get the login too. But for completeness sake, another example: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/wp_ESPRIMO_P758_E94.pd...

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#204

Post by beAbU »

As other comments in this thread, I want to echo the value for money that is to be had in refurbished SFF office PCs that come available on the second-hand market.

I picked up an HP ultradesk something or other for dirt cheap a while back. When I got it it turned out to be surplus stock, so not even second hand - was brand new, for maybe 20% the retail price. Dead quiet, and super power efficient. It's not the most powerful CPU, but it's 10th or 11th generation which is perfect for hardware encoding for my media server use case.

It does not have all the hardware for RAID and multiple hard drives and all that, but one NVME boot disk, and one 16TB spinning rust disk is more than enough for my needs. It's media, so I'm not worried about losing any of it.

These boxes are cheap enough that you can get multiple ones responsible for multiple different things in a single "deployment". At one point I had a box for NAS, a box for media server, a box for my CCTV IP cameras and a box running homeassistant. All humming along nicely. Thankfully I was never masochistic enough to try some kubernetes thing orchestrating all the machines together.

This is all obviously for the homelab/personal use case. Would not recommend this for anything more serious. But these machines just work, and they are bog standard X86 PCs, which removes a lot of the hardware config and incompatibility bullshit associated with more niche platforms.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#205

Post by beAbU »

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…

Don't share this information too far and wide, you might drive up the price for these in the second hand market, which will hurt us dirt-cheap-pc-gluts.

I cannot say no to cheap compute for some reason.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#206

Post by meowmeow20 »

My "NAS" and homeserver is an old Lenovo ThinkCentre mini PC with a large SSD inside. My "RAID" is an rclone cloud backup. Might be a bit scuffed but it works really well, at least for me.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#207

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

There's a lot of places the file can get corrupted on its way to your drive. The memory of the NAS itself is only one of those. If you want any certainty you need to verify it after writing, so ECC RAM is not enough. And once you do set up that verification, you don't need the ECC RAM anymore.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#208

Post by prmoustache »

beAbU wrote: post #204

As other comments in this thread, I want to echo the value for money that is to be had in refurbished SFF office PCs that come available on the second-hand market. I picked up an HP ultradesk something or other for dirt cheap a while back. When I got it it turned out to be surplus stock, so not even second hand - was brand new, for maybe 20% the retail price. Dead quiet, and super power efficient. It's not the most p…

I'd rather have 2 devices with a single drive, each having its own copy of the data than one with a RAID 1.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#209

Post by rullopat »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #207
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.

There's a lot of places the file can get corrupted on its way to your drive. The memory of the NAS itself is only one of those. If you want any certainty you need to verify it after writing, so ECC RAM is not enough. And once you do set up that verification, you don't need the ECC RAM anymore.

Can you tell us HOW to setup a NAS so that it doesn't need ECC RAM?

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#210

Post by Dylan16807 »

321launch wrote: post #179

Odroid HC-4 is only $73... and lightyears ahead https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/

It's triple the price so I would hope it's lightyears ahead.

But if you're open to paying that much, well, I was considering that specific board along with some others, then I found an entire 12th gen Intel mini-PC for only 50% more and immediately changed my mind.

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