I'd say the cheapest NAS would be an external HDD plugged in your WiFi router - most of them have at least one USB port nowadays, with some offering advanced features like photo gallery etc.
The Cheapest NAS
231–240 of 308 posts
Re: The Cheapest NAS
#232My 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 bought one of those thin Lenovo clients for about $200 and use it as a home server with Debian, it works great for pretty much everything and is a lot more bang for your buck than raspberry pi or a brand new mini-pc.
The only downside is that it doesn't have space for multiple 2,5/3,5 disks, but that is just personal preference anyway.
Re: The Cheapest NAS
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had non-ECC NAS systems for over 20 years and I've had exactly zero cases where memory corruption was an issue. It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for personal setups.
> It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for personal setups. My personal files are ultimately a lot more important to me and much more irreplaceable than any files at work. I'd never run a NAS without ZFS and ECC.
The "personal files" I really want to keep safe amount to around 500MB of truly important data (pdfs, scanned documents, text files etc) and ~200GB of images and videos.
Both of which are 3-2-1 backed up.
Adding an ECC motherboard to my NAS would cost more than a quarter century of cloud storage for that amount of data.
The rest of my terabytes of data would be inconvenient to lose, but not fatal. In the worst case I'd need to track down a few rare DVDs and re-rip them.
Re: The Cheapest NAS
#234Earlier 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.
I'm not so sure anymore. My synology is now on its third backup application, so doing recovery means you have to hunt down the old client first.
The last one seems to be in Javascript. It's slower than the previous one, eats more RAM and has a few strange bugs. Backing up my smartphone photos is not always reliable.
I used to be happy about them, but since my update to 7, I don't feel I trust my backups anymore. Maybe I have to byte the bullet and do some rsync based scripting instead.
Re: The Cheapest NAS
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also have this magic feature where they can use ECC with non-ECC RAM, at the cost of some capacity.
Where can I read more about this?
From Unraid forum thread[1] there's links to another forum[2] and a wiki page[3]. Not yet sure myself what all of this means, but it looks interesting.
[1] https://forums.unraid.net/topic/167669-odroid-h4-intel-n97-2...
[2] https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?p=384823#p384823
[3] https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h4/hardware/h4_bios_update#bi...
Re: The Cheapest NAS
#236I would question all these Raspberry PI-ish NAS attempts, especially when it includes some power adapters and milling out cases. It all feels so fiddly and sluggish while still being "not that cheap". Storing my important personal data on an USB-drive somewhat feels risky. It probably wouldn't burn a house down, but still... The real benefit is the small form factor and the "low" power consumption. Paying 43 bucks fo…
You are comparing apple and oranges: the SBC used by the author has a consumption of 0.75W idle and 4W Full load
Re: The Cheapest NAS
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also have this magic feature where they can use ECC with non-ECC RAM, at the cost of some capacity.
Where can I read more about this?
In general some of the Intel Atom CPUs intended for embedded applications support the so-called In-Band ECC, where a part of the memory is reserved for storing ECC codes.
Two of the three ODROID H4 variants use the "Intel Processor N97" CPU, which is intended for embedded applications and it appears to support In-Band ECC, even if this is not clearly advertised on Intel Ark (i.e. at other CPUs of the Alder Lake N family, like i3-N305, at ECC Support it says "No", but at N97 it says neither "Yes" nor "No", but it is mentioned that it is intended for embedded applications, not for consumer applications, and the embedded models normally support In-Band ECC).
The ODROID H4 BIOS allows to enable In-Band ECC on ODROID H4 or ODROID H4+ (the latter is slightly more expensive at $139, but it has more I/O, including two 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports and four SATA ports; to the bare board you must add between $10 and $20 for the case, depending on its size, and a few other $ for SATA cables, RTC battery and optionally a cooling fan; you must also buy one 16 GB or 32 GB DDR5-4800 SODIMM, so after adding shipping and taxes a NAS would cost a little more than $200, besides the SSDs or HDDs).
You can see test results with ECC enabled at:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-revie...
Re: The Cheapest NAS
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Depends what you mean by “kernel support”. In general it does not really include decent idle power optimizations even on say raspberry pi.
IDLE power optimizations are pretty low on my list when I look for an SBS/SOC, I must admit.
Do you have a list of remaining, large deficits in Linux power management, because I'm not finding many urgent open issues in that area?
Re: The Cheapest NAS
#239Re: The Cheapest NAS
#240I would question all these Raspberry PI-ish NAS attempts, especially when it includes some power adapters and milling out cases. It all feels so fiddly and sluggish while still being "not that cheap". Storing my important personal data on an USB-drive somewhat feels risky. It probably wouldn't burn a house down, but still... The real benefit is the small form factor and the "low" power consumption. Paying 43 bucks fo…
You are comparing apple and oranges: the SBC used by the author has a consumption of 0.75W idle and 4W Full load
No I don't. The FriendlyElec NanoPI R6C can be brought to 1W Idle including NVMe SSD and 2.5GBe (and REAL transfer rates of >200MB/s). It's more expensive, but totally worth it in my opinion. See https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/ultra-low-powe...
Since it has neither ECC nor support for common Open Source NAS Operating Systems, I still would not buy it as my daily driver. I just don't think that a difference of 5W Idle Power is worth the effort of milling out stuff, using USB-Storage and the additional maintenance effort keeping this system up to date.