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

81–90 of 308 posts

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#81

Post by transpute »

jtwaleson wrote: post #76
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'm looking for a machine like this (affordable, small, low power usage) with 64GB memory. If anyone has any recommendations I'm all ears.

Some Lenovo Tiny models, https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thi...

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#82

Post by transpute »

superkuh wrote: post #79

The entire concept of network attached storage is kind of cargo-cult in the vast majority of personal use cases. Just put the drives in your computer. Fewer abstraction layers, fewer problems, cheaper, faster, less fragile, easier to debug and fix if problems do happen. It's just not as hip or cool sounding as "NAS".

> Just put the drives in your computer

NAS works with phones, tablets and laptops with egregiously expensive, non-expandable storage.

On iOS/iPadOS, use SSH/SFTP to workaround business-model-challenged "Files" client.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#83

Post by derekdahmer »

loeg wrote: post #34

The cheapest NAS is usually just taking some old desktop PC and repurposing it headless. :-)

Assuming power is free. Even small wattage differences add up quickly for a server running 24/7 and those older CPUs can be very inefficient.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#84

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

jtwaleson wrote: post #76
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'm looking for a machine like this (affordable, small, low power usage) with 64GB memory. If anyone has any recommendations I'm all ears.

Old business laptops work well

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#85

Post by test6554 »

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.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#87

Post by accrual »

joeyrobert wrote: post #28
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…

Seafile + Samba + OpenVPN is my stack. I use Seafile for a dropbox style file sync on my devices, and Samba for direct access. OpenVPN for remote access on all devices. Works quite well.

Has anyone compared Seafile with Syncthing? I'm quite happy with Syncthing but always interested in trying out new setups.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#88

Post by mmh0000 »

transpute wrote: post #77
mmh0000 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for my anecdote, I had a computer with 3 HDDs in a raid5, it had some of my very early programming projects and other various things which I wish I still had. But, I don't have any longer because something, I'm assuming memory, was silently failing and over 40% of the files were turned into jibberish and random binary bytes. I now use ECC EVERYWHERE now. My laptop, my desktop, my little home server. All ECC. Becau…

Which laptops support ECC?

If you just want to buy something that'll "just work", The Lenovo P16[1], is ECC capable from the factory. Basically anything AMD "should" support ECC, it may need to be turned on in the bios. The problem with "should" is the trail-and-error you'll have to do to find a working combination, though, I personally I've never had many issues getting ECC working.

[1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/th...

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#89

Post by accrual »

ssl-3 wrote: post #64
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…

I use Syncthing to synchronize my smaller datasets between my laptop, my phone, and my NAS. This covers all of my productive and creative scenarios. On the LAN, I just use SMB. It is adequate for my needs. For remotely accessing my collection of Linux ISOs, I use Plex.

This is pretty much my setup as well!

Syncthing for a small collection of files I want available from all my machines - commonly used documents, photos, stuff I want quickly backed up or synced automatically.

Samba for my long term mostly-read rarely-write storage with larger files, ISOs, etc.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#90

Post by k8sToGo »

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 have a nuc but how do I connect 6 hdds to it?
Post reply on HN