DIY NAS: 2026 Edition • Hacker News Board

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#291

Post by amy_petrik » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 3:45 PM UTC

zeroq wrote: post #258

I wanted to join the NAS club for so long but it was always either bang for buck for prebuilts ($1k for 4 bays, with 4Gb RAM and the CPU is slower than my previous phone?!) or lack of availability for 4+ SATA boards. Last year I had aha moment when I learned about SAS boards. My final build was: - Jonsbo N3 case - ITX PSU - ASRock B550M/ITX - Ryzen 5500GT - LSI 9207-8i - 16GB DDR4 Result - for ~$1k I have 8 bay NAS t…

hello

I like terramaster if you're looking for budget. software is a bit potato (it's all there, and you can install apps, just 7-8/10 polished, not 10/10), hardware build quality is solid

for 10 bays i like asus lockerstore, also two NVMes, times I've bought those, a bit north of 1000

i do not have affiliations or interests with either company, just a data hoarder

that's within the last year so not sure if anything changed in the last few months in light of things

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#292

Post by machomaster » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

else42 wrote: post #225

ls612 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German electricity prices are around €0.38/kwh based on my quick googling which is roughly $0.44/kwh. I pay $0.12-0.13/kwh in the US so I’m at least right factually up to rounding.

Wrong. I pay €0,23/kWh, so do your homework. What exactly is failing in Germany, and why is it important in this context?

Anecdotal evidence is not evidence.

In June 2025 the average electricity prices in Germany were 38.35c/kWh.

https://countryeconomy.com/energy-and-environment/electricit...

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#293

Post by nothrabannosir » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

machomaster wrote: post #290

nothrabannosir wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread is missing an important detail: > undisclosed affiliate links. That's quite controversial, compared to disclosed affiliate links. IMO for good reason.

Why? I understand the need to disclose sponsored content. Or if the manufacturer had veto-power or any say in the content. I even understand that it is good to tell if the product was given for free or the trip was paid, even when they had no say in the content. But I don't understand why anyone would need "I use affiliate links" caveats. This is useless info wasting space and reading time akin to "this website displ…

What is the difference between those scenarios and affiliate links? They are literally the same to me: kickbacks. And I agree they all are allowed, but should be disclosed. Why do you consider affiliate links an exception to that rule?

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#294

Post by adastra22 » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #249

adastra22 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That is a long time from this perspective.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#295

Post by machomaster » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC

mtlynch wrote: post #95

I appreciate Brian's posts and they've helped me learn to build my own NAS systems, but there's a scammy angle to his articles. All of the merchant links are affiliate links, which he (illegally) does not disclose.[0] He's effectively acting as a sales rep for these brands, but he's presenting himself as an unbiased consumer. The affiliate relationship incentivizes Brian to recommend more expensive equipment and push…

> which he (illegally) does not disclose.[0]

"The Guides are intended to give insight into what the FTC thinks about various marketing activities involving endorsements and how Section 5 might apply to those activities. The Guides themselves don’t have the force of law."

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#296

Post by dllu » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

meindnoch wrote: post #81

dllu wrote: post #10

Very sad that HDDs, SSDs, and RAM are all increasing in price now, but I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool with Seagate Barracudas on sale at $10 / TB [1]. This seems like a pretty decent price even though the Barracudas are rated for 2400 hours per year [2] but this is the same spec that the refurbished Exos drives are rated for. By the way, interesting to see that OP has no qualms about buying cheap Chinese motherboar…

>I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool How much RAM did you install? Did you follow the 1GB per 1TB recommendation for ZFS? (i.e. 96GB of RAM)

Mine is a DAS connected to my main workstation [1] that indeed has 96 GB of RAM.

[1] https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2024-04-26-small-form-factor...

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#297

Post by machomaster » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #213

embedding-shape wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, cheap motherboards aren't a panacea that can't hurt the rest of the hardware, I personally don't skimp on motherboards, and would much rather skimp on the drives themselves as I have redundancy and 1-2 drives failing wouldn't hurt too much. And data retention is my top priority. Motherboards have fried connected hardware before, poor grounding/ESD protections, firmware bugs together with aggressive power manageme…

Not sure why you are being downvoted. The MB is a single point of failure in this system, the drives are not. I’ve experienced many drive failures over the years, but never lost data due to RAID. Failing MB or PSU on the other hand has wiped out my entire system.

I have lost data due to errors in bios raid by Intel.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#298

Post by machomaster » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 5:16 PM UTC

some-guy wrote: post #240

aunty_helen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impo…

No Raid? Have you considered using SnapRAID (+ mergerfs if you fancy)? Seems like an ideal use case for the solution.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#299

Post by machomaster » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 5:18 PM UTC

esskay wrote: post #78

> HDD have to be bought new In A DC environment sure. In a home NAS not so much. I'm on Unraid and just throw WD recertified drives of varying sizes at it (plus some shucked external drives when I find them on offer), that's one of its strengths and makes it much cheaper to run.

One can also use SnapRAID + mergerfs.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#300

Post by magicalhippo » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 5:59 PM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #294

magicalhippo wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

That is a long time from this perspective.

There's also a max size, so if you have heavy write traffic it'll flush do disk much earlier. The timeout is just for low-write scenarios.