raspberry pi + 2 HDDs and a 2 slot bay (~$150).
DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
231–240 of 315 posts
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#232This is all fine, but price came around same-ish as UGREEN DXP8800, if we're considering price alone.
Specs and price of this are perfect, but I want AMD. Guess too picky? Anyone knows of a similar product with AMD CPU?
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a couple recent developments in ZFS dedup that help to partially mitigate the memory issue: fast dedup and the ability to use a special vdev to hold the dedup table if it spills out of RAM. But yes, there's almost no instance where home users should enable it. Even the traditional 5gb/1tb rule can fall over completely on systems with a lot of small files.
I think the asterisk there is that the special vdev requires redundancy and becomes a mandatory part of your pool. Some ZFS discussions suggest that an L2ARC vdev can cache the DDT. Do you know if this is correct?
Yes, that's the reason why a dedup vdev that has lower redundancy than your main pool will fail with "mismatched replication level" unless you use the -f (force) flag.
I'm not sure about whether an L2ARC vdev can offload the DDT, but my guess is no given the built-in logic warning against mismatched replication levels.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the asterisk there is that the special vdev requires redundancy and becomes a mandatory part of your pool. Some ZFS discussions suggest that an L2ARC vdev can cache the DDT. Do you know if this is correct?
Yes, that's the reason why a dedup vdev that has lower redundancy than your main pool will fail with "mismatched replication level" unless you use the -f (force) flag. I'm not sure about whether an L2ARC vdev can offload the DDT, but my guess is no given the built-in logic warning against mismatched replication levels.
Well, the warning makes sense with respect to the dedup vdev since the DDT would actually be stored there. On the other hand, the L2ARC would simply serve as a read cache, similar to the DDT residing in RAM.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#235Holy smokes, the NAS in idle consumes more power than my UNAS Pro with 4x8TB HDD and 2X8TB SSD, as well as a Mac mini M1 with a 2TB Samsung T7 SSD, and my 4 access points and 4 protect cameras combined.
For reference, the UNAS Pro comes with 10G networking, and will deliver roughly 500MB/s from a 4 HDD RAID5 array, and close to 1GB/s from the SSDs (which it never gets a chance to do, as I use them for photos/documents).
My entire "network stack", including firewall, switch, everything POE, hue bridge, tado bridge, Homey Pro, UPS, and whatever else, consumes 96W in total, and does pretty much all my family and I need, at reasonable speeds. Our main storage is in the cloud though, so YMMV.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why this is a problem for some people. It doesn't increase the price or impact your buyer experience in any way, so why do you care? If this blog post introduced you to a product you wanted to buy, why should you have a problem with the author getting a finders fee from the seller ? Just seems mean-spirited.
It impacts the buyer experience. These two statements have a very different impact: 1. I love product X and I won't get paid if you buy it too. 2. I love product X and I will get paid if you buy it too. Money motivates people to claim they love a product or that a product is good, even if not true. It's a problem that has plagued the internet for decades.
I don't think it's this binary.
Influence and power are far more intoxicating currencies than affiliate revenue.
And if someone complained "you're just publishing this helpful thing to become more influential in [community]," well, at some point we need to acknowledge incentives drive all behavior in one way or another.
Refusing the incentive doesn't make one per se virtuous.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#237Holy smokes, the NAS in idle consumes more power than my UNAS Pro with 4x8TB HDD and 2X8TB SSD, as well as a Mac mini M1 with a 2TB Samsung T7 SSD, and my 4 access points and 4 protect cameras combined. For reference, the UNAS Pro comes with 10G networking, and will deliver roughly 500MB/s from a 4 HDD RAID5 array, and close to 1GB/s from the SSDs (which it never gets a chance to do, as I use them for photos/document…
"Our main storage is in the cloud though, so YMMV." AKA you externalized the costs
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#238HDD have to be bought new, as well as anything mechanical (eg fans). But for motherboards, CPU, RAM and SSD, there is great value in buying used enterprise hardware on ebay. It is generally durable hardware that spent a quiet life in a temperature controlled datacentre, server motherboards from 5 years ago are absolute aircraft carriers in term of PCIe lanes and functionalities. Used enterprise SSDs are probably more…
I wouldn't say that being new is an absolute requirement. I recently upgraded my ZFS pool from SATA to SAS HDDs. Since SAS HDDs have much better firmware for early error detection and monitoring, I decided to buy 50% refurbished. Even if I lost half of them, I would still be safe. I also have offsite backups. This setup worked really well for me, and I feel completely confident that my data is safe while not wasting…
I have purchased many refurbished drives and have yet to have any failures from them. (Anecdotal obviously)
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#239Holy smokes, the NAS in idle consumes more power than my UNAS Pro with 4x8TB HDD and 2X8TB SSD, as well as a Mac mini M1 with a 2TB Samsung T7 SSD, and my 4 access points and 4 protect cameras combined. For reference, the UNAS Pro comes with 10G networking, and will deliver roughly 500MB/s from a 4 HDD RAID5 array, and close to 1GB/s from the SSDs (which it never gets a chance to do, as I use them for photos/document…
"Our main storage is in the cloud though, so YMMV." AKA you externalized the costs
Not really.
It's part of the 3-2-1 backup setup, but where other people have their "offsite backup" in the cloud, I keep my working copy there, and have backups at home.
I outsourced operations of it though. I have self hosted for decades, and for the first time in 15-20 years, I'm able to take a vacation and not bring my laptop in case something breaks.
As for main storage, as was probably evident from my comment, I don't have 30TB of cloud storage. We have our important stuff in the cloud, and "everything else" at home, but nothing at home is accessible from the internet unless you're on a VPN.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#240Q - assuming the NAS was strictly used as NAS and not as a server with VMs, is there a point in having a large amount of RAM? (large as in >8GB) I'm not sure what the benefit would be since all it's doing is moving information from the drives over to the network.
People get carried away with their home lab setups. There's a distinct type of person that thinks they need 100tb of storage in their own house. If you're running a NAS for a company that has many users and multi disc access at the same time, sure. But then you're probably then not buying hdds to shuck and cheap components off ebay.
My NAS:
1) A refurbished Dell Wyse 5070 (8GB of RAM) with a cheap 64GB SSD from 2013 2) An 8-bay USB-C hard drive enclosure 3) 4 used 12TB hard drives from eBay, 4 3TB drives from 2010 that still somehow haven’t died. 4) A headless Debian with various Linux ISO trackers / downloaders in Docker / Plex (the CPU, though slow, has decent hardware encoding) 5) No RAID, but an rsync script for important Linux ISOs and important data that runs weekly across different drives. I also have cold storage backup by purchasing “Lot of X number” 500GB hard drives on eBay from time to time which store things like photos, music, etc over two drives each.
The whole setup didn’t cost me much, and is more than enough for what I need it to do.