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

The Cheapest NAS

sigwait.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 308 posts

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#261

Post by gosub100 »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #167
gosub100 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they make external HDD chassis that connect via USB. I don't have any experience with them so I can't comment on their reliability, but search for "ORICO 5 Bay USB to SATA Hard Drive Enclosure".

FWIW, I wouldn't recommend Orico. I don't live in the US so my options are somewhat limited but I found a local retailer that carries Orico. I've had five of them in the past five years and four died within 12-18 months. If it was just one, I'd put it down to random bad luck. But with that many failures I assume they are doing something stupid/cheap. Usually they would simply fail to power on but sometimes individual…

I've never tried Orico, that was just the first brand that came up when I searched. I suspect these things are fundamentally unreliable, especially because they are powered by external AC adaptors, meaning there is no real ground between the two switching power sources (one in your PC, the other in the HDD caddy). It's either due to that, or due to the very sensitive signaling along the line, that eventually you get USB disconnects (if you try to run it as an appliance) that wreaks havoc on filesystems, particularly RAID.

The Jonsbo N3 is not comparable. I own one as well (how quiet is yours? I upgraded the rear fan but my CPU fan is noisy), but it's a complete PC case, not an external HDD array.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#262

Post by sandworm101 »

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.

++1 for synology. I've been running their 5-bay model for a few years without any issues. It just works. I have it paired with a synology router which also just works. They both do their jobs transparently enough that I can basically forget they exist.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#263

Post by gh02t »

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.

Have had great success with this myself. Oddly resellers on Amazon seem to be the best source I have found, just search for something like "HP ProDesk" or one of the generic corporate-focused lines from other manufacturers and find one that fits your budget. Maybe filter to 100-300 dollars to get rid of the new stuff. There's also a surprisingly vast selection of recycled commodity servers and similar on there, too.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#264

Post by k8sToGo »

dns_snek wrote: post #242
sangnoir wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You aren’t wrong. USB is not a good way to do this.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#265

Post by __mharrison__ »

kstrauser wrote: post #126
486sx33 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Synology does all that. I run two one at home one at the office, my only complaint is that it’s a bit “idiot proof”… both other times the web based GUIi is great. Also has free software that punches through NAT and dynamic IPs works great (quickconnect.to) I use sftp, media server, primarily

Beefier models (I have a DS923+ with the RAM bumped up to 32GB) can run Docker containers, too. I have all kinds of things running on mine.

Is ram upgradeable on these machines?

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#266

Post by ChuckMcM »

Interesting cheap low power system. My brain connects "NAS" with "Data I value" and there isn't anything in the author's system that is focused on enhancing the data integrity. Not saying that is bad, just saying it's the thing that often makes commercial NAS system both more expensive and more power consumptive. I've got an 8 drive RAID-6 setup as a ZFS pool[1]. More power, last I checked about 50W when idle, close to 150W when "working", but I think at this point I've had failures in nearly every piece that ended up replacing something but never lost any data, never corrupted any files. Replaced the power supply, the mother board, and two drives. I haven't had to replace any memory but I do have an extra stick "spare" because that is the kind of thing that ages out and is hard to replace (it's DDR3 memory but I've had systems with DDR2 so really hard to get DIMMS for).

That said, I do see a lot of value in low power systems like that of the author and run a couple. The way I do the energy calculation though is that I boot them off internal storage (MMC/SD) and then mount a root filesystem from the NAS. That way they don't have any storage power cost directly, they are easy to replace, and the power consumed by my NAS is amortized over a number of systems. giving it some less obvious economics.

[1] It is an iXSystems FreeNAS based system.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#267

Post by kstrauser »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #265
kstrauser wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beefier models (I have a DS923+ with the RAM bumped up to 32GB) can run Docker containers, too. I have all kinds of things running on mine.

Is ram upgradeable on these machines?

Mine is. It ships with a 4GB DIMM and I swapped in 2 16GB DIMMs. Not all models are.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#268

Post by ein0p »

josh64 wrote: post #258
ein0p wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d replace OpenVPN with WireGuard at this point - WireGuard is a lot faster and the client software is pretty good. All of my Apple devices are set up to use VPN 100% of the time automatically if I’m not on home WiFi.

Could you please share how you went about configuring your Apple devices to automatically switch to VPN? Thanks!

When you install WireGuard client, there's "On Demand" option there that you can enable. That option has two additional settings - it can turn WireGuard only for a particular list of SSIDs, or it can _not_ turn it on for a particular list of SSIDs. So you just add the SSID of your home WiFi to the list for which WireGuard will not be turned on. On macOS client there is an identical option. This works really well.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#269

Post by MenhirMike »

magicalhippo wrote: post #213
earleybird wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM deathstar[0] drives in a collection of RS6000's is still too fresh in my memory :-) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar

Lost the first five years of my source code thanks to a Deathstar. Still miffed about it, would have enjoyed looking back at it from time to time. Learned a valuable lesson in backups though...

Same, that was also my lesson that RAID is an availability mechanism, not a data safety/backup one. (Of course, Ransomware would also hammer that point home for many later on)

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#270

Post by bastawhiz »

> The remedy is to turn UAS off via adding usb-storage.quirks=152d:0578:u to the kernel cmdline.

This is the point where I'd have thrown it in the trash and given up. I simply don't know how people have the patience to debug past stuff like this: I get that the point of the project is to be cheap and simple, but this is expensive in time and decidedly not simple.

Post reply on HN