Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

blog.briancmoses.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 315 posts

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#241

Post by cm2187 »

archagon wrote: post #230
aetherspawn wrote: post #41

Obligatory comment every time one of these threads comes up that Synology, sure, the hardware is a bit dated but… as far as set and forget goes: I’ve run multiple Synology NAS at home, business, etc. and you can literally forget that it’s not someone else’s cloud. It auto updates on Sundays, always comes online again, and you can go for years (in one case, nearly a decade) without even logging into the admin and it j…

Synology also has a bit of a software moat with its BTRFS-backed SHR implementation. You can throw in drives of arbitrary size and it'll automatically maximize the available free space. ZFS can't do that, though AnyRaid should make it possible in the future: https://docs.hexos.com/blog/2025-05-22.html Plus, DSM has a spectacular web interface.

SHR is not exactly rocket science, it is the combination of lvm and mdadm. You can do that yourself on ubuntu.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#242

Post by cm2187 »

Maakuth wrote: post #104
Mashimo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't remember the details, but was that not specifically for hardware raid controllers? 2000s style. I think for home use with MDADM or raid z2 on zfs it's just gucci. It's cost effective.

Z2 means you'll have two parity disks, like in RAID-6. That should be okay. The trouble with RAID-5 are the rebuild times that rise to multiple days with modern disk sizes. The duration of time you run effectively without redundancy grows uncomfortably large. Especially if you don't have a hot or even cold spare around.

Only if you need high availability, which is probably not the case for home use.

If one of your drives fails under RAID5, before you even order a new disk, you should do an incremental backup, so that your backup is up to date. Then it doesn't really matter that the rebuild times take long. And if you have more data coming in, just do more incremental backups during the rebuild time.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#243

Post by archagon »

cm2187 wrote: post #241
archagon wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Synology also has a bit of a software moat with its BTRFS-backed SHR implementation. You can throw in drives of arbitrary size and it'll automatically maximize the available free space. ZFS can't do that, though AnyRaid should make it possible in the future: https://docs.hexos.com/blog/2025-05-22.html Plus, DSM has a spectacular web interface.

SHR is not exactly rocket science, it is the combination of lvm and mdadm. You can do that yourself on ubuntu.

Synology adds some additional logic to automatically recover data from other RAID drives when the BTRFS layer encounters a checksum failure. I don’t think there’s any way to homebrew that part.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#244

Post by mrb »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #235

Holy 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…

"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."

I know that's not true. I say this as someone who measures the power consumption of individual components, and even individual rails with a clamp meter. The OP measures an idle power of 67W. He has 6 x 8TB HDDs. These typically consume 5W idling (not spun down). So the OP's NAS without drives is probably around 37W.

A UNAS Pro without drives reportedly consumes 20W with no drives. Adding 4 x 8TB at 5W per drive, means your UNAS Pro config with drives probably idles at 40W (again, drives not spun down). That means you are 17W under his NAS idle power. So you claim your remaining hardware (Mac mini, 4 APs, 4 cameras) run in under 17W... Yeah that's not possible. 17W is peanuts; it's half the power of a phone's fast charger (~30W).

PS: for the OP, an easy way to further reduce power consumption is to replace your 500W PSU with a smaller one, like 250-300W which is still amply over-specced for your build. Because the typical efficiency curve of a PSU drops sharply at very low loads. For example at idle when your NAS pulls 67W from the wall it's very probable it supplies only ~50W to the internal components, so it's running at 10% load and it's only 50/67 = 75% efficient. The smallest load for which the 80 Plus Gold standard requires a minimum efficiency is 20%. If you downgrade to a 250W PSU you are enforcing a minimum 20% load for which the 80 Plus Gold standard requires minimum 87% efficiency. The load at the wall would thus drop to 50/.87 = 57W thereby saving you 10W.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#245

Post by ihaveone »

AlanYx wrote: post #220
Gud wrote: post #197

My advice, skip the TrueNAS and go straight to FreeBSD. It's a simple operating system to maintain and it requires minimal setup to use as a NAS.

This is what I recommend too, but for those who want something prepackaged, there's also XigmaNAS, basically a lightweight UI layer and basic configuration on top of FreeBSD. Some of the original FreeNAS developers have been working on the project for almost 20 years. It's great for people who just want storage and don't want the heavy features that came with TrueNAS' move to Linux (Kubernetes, etc.) or who want full…

Are you sure it's not called LigmaNAS?

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#246

Post by abrookewood »

zenoprax wrote: post #49
evanjrowley wrote: post #45

I would have chosen the i3-n305 version of that motherboard because it has In-Band ECC (IBECC) support - great for ZFS. IBECC is very underrated feature that doesn't get talked about enough. It may be available for the N150/N355, but I have never seen a confirmation.

Can you explain why ECC is great for ZFS in particular as opposed to any other filesystem? And if the data leaves the NAS to be modified by a regular desktop computer then you lose the ECC assurance anyway, don't you?

ECC is good for every file system. ZFS doesn't NEED ECC, but if you are running ZFS because you care about file integrity, then you're likely to care about memory integrity too.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#247

Post by dijit »

layer8 wrote: post #217
Gud wrote: post #197

My advice, skip the TrueNAS and go straight to FreeBSD. It's a simple operating system to maintain and it requires minimal setup to use as a NAS.

TrueNAS has migrated away from FreeBSD, current versions are now exclusively Linux-based.

Honestly, all the more reason to just run FreeBSD then. Surprisingly simple and still more robust with ZFS (even if Linux has come a long way in the last 10 years).

Incidentally I actually found Truenas to be a solid upgrade from my old vanilla FreeBSD install; the tuned performance defaults made things a lot better for me after I recovered my volume (the USB stick I was using for the OS died).

So, its sad to recommend something else, or obviating it entirely.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#248

Post by abrookewood »

adastra22 wrote: post #55
zenoprax wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why ECC is great for ZFS in particular as opposed to any other filesystem? And if the data leaves the NAS to be modified by a regular desktop computer then you lose the ECC assurance anyway, don't you?

The oversimplified answer is that ZFS’ in-memory structures are not designed to minimize bitflip risk, as some file systems are. Content is hashed when written to memory cache, but it can be a long time before it then gets to disk. Very little validation is done at that point to protect against writing bad data.

What file systems offer in-memory protection?

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#249

Post by magicalhippo »

adastra22 wrote: post #55
zenoprax wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why ECC is great for ZFS in particular as opposed to any other filesystem? And if the data leaves the NAS to be modified by a regular desktop computer then you lose the ECC assurance anyway, don't you?

The oversimplified answer is that ZFS’ in-memory structures are not designed to minimize bitflip risk, as some file systems are. Content is hashed when written to memory cache, but it can be a long time before it then gets to disk. Very little validation is done at that point to protect against writing bad data.

> it can be a long time before it then gets to disk

Well by default the timeout is 5 seconds[1], so not that long.

[1]: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Performance%20and%20T...

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#250

Post by magicalhippo »

m000 wrote: post #194
accidc wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a preferred/recommendation for a NAS OS?

Not really. I was not interested in maintaining an extensive homelab (so that I have separate storage and computing nodes), or buying into a new "software ecosystem" (I would consider buying e.g. a Synology/QNAP box if I did), so I ended up with vanilla Debian. Debian 13 (trixie) got released right on time, so I will be on the latest for a couple of years. From what I tried (TrueNAS, OpenMV, Unraid), Unraid seemed to…

> TrueNAS was very unfriendly towards even the idea of opening a shell [1] and IIRC you couldn't even install debian packages out of the box.

It's meant to be an appliance, so it makes sense in that setting. That said, it does support hosting Docker images, so you don't really need much in the way of installing packages IME.

Post reply on HN