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The Cheapest NAS

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Re: The Cheapest NAS

#241

Post by MobileVet »

gerdesj wrote: post #162
MobileVet wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. If you enjoy the config and have the time, by all means. If you just want it to work, by a Synology. Mine has been running strong for several years now and has docker images for my unify controller, pi hole and Plex. Took minimal time to setup and none since that day. Love it Edit: And my encrypted cloud backup in Backblaze B2 was equally as easy to setup and costs a whopping $2 a month for every family pic,…

Redundancy and backup are not the same thing. RAID gets you redundancy but if you get pwnd, you get redundantly pwnd! So you backup to elsewhere. Now you have two copies of your data. Cool. Now you probably can recover from a silly mistake from up to a week ago or whatever your retention period is. However, if you don't monitor your backups, you'll never notice certain snags such as ransomware. OK, that might be low…

Good points.

I didn’t actually specify it out, but my third backup is an offline SSD that I plug in every once in a while and store at my office. I only mentioned the RAID for local redundancy reasons.

You are right about the data being corrupted, either maliciously or bitrot. The NAS is not accessible outside my home network, so I think I am ok there.

Bitrot would require snapshots and full backups stored over time, which I could do fairly easily but I am currently not.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#242

Post by dns_snek »

sangnoir wrote: post #148
k8sToGo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a nuc but how do I connect 6 hdds to it?

You can buy a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) enclosure[1], some even support RAID. If your Nuc is multipurpose, you could then run a virtualized TrueNAS guest (BSD or linux) in QEMU and give it control of the DAS block device for ZFS pools. Being able to run a virtual NAS that actually gets security updates on demand is pretty neat - TrueNAS has an excellent API you can use to start/stop services (SMB, SSH, iSCSI, etc…

Isn't running a NAS on top of USB storage very strongly discouraged? TrueNAS cautions against it.

I also want to set up a NAS on a mini-PC with some sort of attached external storage, but I haven't been able to get past this blocker. USB is the only external interface these mini PCs typically support.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#243

Post by dns_snek »

raihansaputra wrote: post #186
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.

Tailscale VPN addon for HomeAssistant is relatively simple to set up. You can use it to access your home network remotely ("site to site networking") or to proxy your network traffic through your home network when you're away ("exit node")

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#244

Post by slowmotiony »

Dalewyn wrote: post #173
dudus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

He did not literally ask for this, actually.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#245

Post by ClumsyPilot »

dudus wrote: post #113
rovr138 wrote: post #99

Earlier 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 don’t like that symbology provides ridiculously small amount of ram - I had one 7 years ago and it had 512 mb of ram, and was chugging. Looking at their website, they still sell a version with 512 mb. That’s a total joke in this day and age.

That being said, there are plenty of companies providing NAS drives at lower price points, with various levels of quality. Generally, they are not worse than a random AMR SBC with a closed source kernel, just like the author here assebled.

I appreciate not everyone wants a mini pc they have to manage, I had a nice setup but now it has died and I can’t find time to deal with it

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#246

Post by ClumsyPilot »

jnovek wrote: post #10
jstanley wrote: post #4

When people set up these NAS's, how are they accessing the files? NFS? SFTP? And how are you accessing it when away from home? A VPN that you're permanently connected to? Is there a good way to do NAT hole-punching? Syncthing kind of does what I want, in that it lets all my computers sync the same files no matter what network they're on, but it insists on always copying all the files ("syncing") whereas I just want t…

Answering your questions in order: - On mine I use NFS and SMB which covers most possible clients. - I use an ssh bastion that I expose via Tailscale to connect to mine remotely. So a VPN but it's wireguard based so it's not too intrusive. I have a gig up, though, YMMV. - My NAS has 28TB of space. I'm still working on backup strategy. So far it just has my Dropbox and some ephemera I don't care about losing on it. -…

Even a router can do that these days, GLiNet routers have USB ports and SSH, you can setup such basic stuff

Most mid range routers allow SSH, and have decent CPU

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#247

Post by red-iron-pine »

firecall wrote: post #170
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…

Here in Australia there are thousands of ex-Lease Dell 7060 SFF and 7060 Micros PCs on aucation sites every week. The Dell's coming off lease now have modern features including Intel 8th Gen CPUs with TPM and USB-C etc...

in my experience those come from mining and other FIFO operations that are shutting down. source: used to de-com those, wipe em, and get them ready for bulk sale to a different group.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#248

Post by zamadatix »

p1necone wrote: post #129
test6554 wrote: post #85

Everyone is an expert at storage as long as everything is working great. It's when stuff fails that you feel like an idiot and wished you had one extra hdd in your RAID array or a secondary NAS you were backing up to or one extra site you offloaded your data to. I don't do cheap any more. But I can see the appeal.

I think this depends on what you're storing though. Business documents, accounting records, family photos - sure you probably want to keep them safe. But if my NAS is just 20TB of pirated movies and TV shows (not that I'm saying it is...) then I'm much more comfortable buying the cheapest drives I can find and seeing how it goes.

For me it's the opposite in a way: I need a proper remote backup of things like business documents and photos because they have to survive an issue with the NAS or my house not just a drive so local copies can go on "whatever" and something like cloud backup makes more sense to meet the reliability mark. Generally it's not tons and tons of terabytes which is great because the backup needs to actually be usable within a reasonable amount of time when I need to pull it.

On the other hand terabytes and terabytes of pirated content is a lot of work but not necessarily worth paying to try and to backup over the internet. I can redownload it if I need but I'd rather not do that because some crap drive or NAS I saved 20 bucks on died and now I need to spend a week rebuilding my entire collection. It doesn't need to be Fort Knox but I'll spring for a proper NAS, drives, and pool redundancy for this content.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#249

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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.

I am not sure this is correct - there could be an error not only in the data, but also in instructions - but flip could cause data to be written to an incorrect location of the hard disk.
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