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DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

blog.briancmoses.com

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Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#91

Post by enchanted-gian »

StrLght wrote: post #84

I did something similar last year. Market for mITX NAS boards is pretty bad. I went for ASRock N100DC-ITX – it has 2x SATA ports, but there's also PCIe 3 x4. The main benefits of this board were: * it's not from an obscure Chinese company * integrated power supply – just plug in DC jack, and you're good to go * passive cooling Really hope they make an Intel N150 version.

Question,whats the problem with a motherboard being from an obscure Chinese company?Is it because its harder to find replacements or some other reason. i ask because i recently built my own homelab like 4 months ago and source all my parts from Aliexpress which as way cheaper than any name brand on amazon an they're all relatively obscure. My homelab is running perfectly though so why the apprehension?

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#92

Post by t-3 »

gorbachev wrote: post #89
cm2187 wrote: post #71

HDD have to be bought new, as well as anything mechanical (eg fans). But for motherboards, CPU, RAM and SSD, there is great value in buying used enterprise hardware on ebay. It is generally durable hardware that spent a quiet life in a temperature controlled datacentre, server motherboards from 5 years ago are absolute aircraft carriers in term of PCIe lanes and functionalities. Used enterprise SSDs are probably more…

The datahoarder community frequently utilizes used hard drives. That's perfectly fine, if your NAS has redundancy and you can recover from 1 - 2 disk failures, and you're buying the drives from a reputable reseller.

I usually buy used hard drives, but prices are strange for all electronics right now. It's a bad time to buy anything computer-related, but especially used goods which aren't discounted as much as normal are priced higher due to massive inflation (to the point that refurbished drives I bought 5 years ago have a better dollar/GB ratio than refurbs I can buy today).

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#93

Post by kotaKat »

While not DIY, I would like to also call out an interesting discovery lately.

https://www.ugreen.com/blogs/news/ugreen-makes-strategic-ent...

UGREEN has apparently inked deals to drop their DXP2800s into (some) Walmarts, which also included bringing in some 10/12TB Toshiba N300 Pro drives as well to go with them on the shelves. Being a super-rural American, I was a bit surprised to see this on my local shelf as a nearly turnkey solution in an area where there's nothing remotely close to a Best Buy, even.

Even more surprisingly: they've been sold by Walmart below minimum advertised prices at UGREEN a few times normally...

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#94

Post by AlanYx »

kotaKat wrote: post #93

While not DIY, I would like to also call out an interesting discovery lately. https://www.ugreen.com/blogs/news/ugreen-makes-strategic-ent... UGREEN has apparently inked deals to drop their DXP2800s into (some) Walmarts, which also included bringing in some 10/12TB Toshiba N300 Pro drives as well to go with them on the shelves. Being a super-rural American, I was a bit surprised to see this on my local shelf as a nea…

One thing to be aware of is that many (all?) current UGREEN boxes can't support ECC RAM. For anyone looking to use ZFS like the article linked here, that may be an issue, depending on one's view of the debate about whether ECC is necessary with ZFS.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#95

Post by mtlynch »

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 readers to the vendors that pay Brian the most rather than the vendors that are the best for consumers.

I recognize that it's an unfortunate truth that affiliate links are one of the few ways to make money writing non-AI content about computer hardware. I'm fine with affiliate links, but the author should disclose the conflict of interest at the top of the post before getting into the recommendations.

In the interest of full disclosure, I also write about NAS builds on my blog, so I somewhat compete with Brian's posts, but I stopped using affiliate links five years ago because of the conflict of interest.

If you're not familiar with how affiliate relationships create dangerous incentives, I recommend reading the article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] tl;dr - All the top mattress-in-a-box reviewers were just giving favorable reviews to the company that paid the best affiliate rates, even going so far as to retroactively update old reviews if the payout rates changed.

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#96

Post by Xiol32 »

kotaKat wrote: post #93

While not DIY, I would like to also call out an interesting discovery lately. https://www.ugreen.com/blogs/news/ugreen-makes-strategic-ent... UGREEN has apparently inked deals to drop their DXP2800s into (some) Walmarts, which also included bringing in some 10/12TB Toshiba N300 Pro drives as well to go with them on the shelves. Being a super-rural American, I was a bit surprised to see this on my local shelf as a nea…

I had one of the DXP4800 Plus NASes for about a month before RMAing it.

The CPU would immediately hit 100C with even the slightest whiff of load.

The entire thing was also unstable and would regularly just lock up without any kernel panic or other error message available, could even get kdump to gather anything (I'd binned their dodgy NAS OS and installed Debian).

It also seemed to amplify the noise of the hard drives within. Every thunk of a drive head moving around would be audible from a different room. Not sure how they managed to do that, but it's an acoustic nightmare.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#97

Post by zdragnar »

adastra22 wrote: post #53
p1necone wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like they built a new NAS, but kept using the same drives. Which given the number of drive bays in the NAS probably make up a large majority of the overall cost in something like this. Edit: reading comprehension fail - they bought drives earlier, at an unspecified price, but they weren't from the old NAS - I agree, when lifetimes of drives are measures in decades and huge amounts of tbw it seems pretty silly t…

MB and other elements are more concerning than the drives.

For system failure, yes, but not if data retention and recovery is your primary concern.

When building a device primarily used for storing personal things, I'd much prefer to save money on the motherboard and risk that failing than skimping on the drives themselves

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#98

Post by pSYoniK »

imiric wrote: post #63
pSYoniK wrote: post #61

TL;DR - please stop wasting tons of resources putting together new servers every year and turning this into yet another outlet for "I have more money than sense and hopefully I can buy myself into happiness". Just get old random hardware and play around with it and you'll learn so much that you will be able to truly appreciate the difference between consumer and enterprise hardware. This seems awfully wasteful. One o…

It's a bit patronizing to tell people what to do with their money. If you care more about the environment than enjoying technology, then go ahead and do what you suggest. If you want to be really green, how about giving up technology altogether? Go full vegan, abandon all possessions, and all that? Or if you really want to help the planet, have you considered suicide? There's always more you can do. I'd rather enjoy…

It is however very patronising to tell people to "Go full vegan, abandon all possessions, and all that".

It also isn't useful to reduce the conversation and assume that critique directed at the idea of necesarily going out and buying new hardware is a critique against technology or ownership, but, myself included, we do seem to read what we want. You also missed the point I made when I did clearly say voting with your wallet doesn't work. You didnt address the other, more salient point I was getting across, but obviously failed to do so - when starting out, don't worry too much, just get whatever and start learning. Questions will be easier answered when you already have some hardware.

Anyway, enjoy your day

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#99

Post by embedding-shape »

silversmith wrote: post #56
starky wrote: post #54

I think the worry about power consumption is a bit overblown in the article. My NAS has an i5-12600 + Quadro P4000 and uses maybe 50% more power than the one in this article under normal conditions. That works out to maybe $4/month more cost. Given the relatively small delta, I'd encourage picking hardware based on what services you want to run.

Less power, less heat. Less heat, less cooling required. At some point that allows you to go fanless, and that's very beneficial if you have to share a room with the device.

Since this is about NAS, you very likely have a bunch of HDDs connected to it. And if you do, I feel like they'll "out-noise" a lot of cooling solutions as long as the fans are not spinning at max by default.

Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

#100

Post by bhattisatish »

Are there any tape based solution which can be used at home? I don't care about time retrieval. It's more for home archival purpose.

I have two NAS servers (both based on Synalogy). But I need something where I can back it up and forgot about it till I want to restore the stuff. I am looking at a workflow of say, weekly backup to tape. Update the index. Whenever I want to restore a directory or file, I search the index, find the tape and load the same for retrieval.

NAS can be used for continuous backup (aka timemachine and timeshift). And archival at a weekly level.

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