I bought used Buffalo dual bay NAS. It is not great, but does the job. I think I bought it for around $20. + 3TB harddrive I had at home in my old server and later bought cheap cca $80 Toshiba 4TB.
Comment on Self-hosted media server to share with 5+ people?
PatrickYaa@lemmy.one 4 weeks agoSorry, just to get this straight: How much was your NAS? And why is that not factored in the cost for the service?
kokesh@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Xanza@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
In my opinion it doesn’t really make sense to factor that in. A NAS is a multi-purpose device. In this specific example they would be using it as a media server but that’s not its only purpose nor the only purpose it should be used for.
Additionally network attached storage can even be an old computer that you don’t use anymore. It’s extremely difficult to factor the price of a NAS into an anecdotal response like this and be even partially correct.
Some will be free. Some will be $5,000. Some will be $250. It really depends on your needs, what you have, and what you want out of it.
For example I already had a NAS when I set up jellyfin. I run the server on my local computer to give it access to my GPU for transcoding services and all of the files are saved on the network storage.
So anecdotally what I include the price and to what it cost me to set up jellyfin? I already had the NAS, I didn’t have to invest anything… Additionally you don’t need network storage you could set it up on your local PC.
It’s simply a difficult question to answer.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
As an example, I used an old PC and purchased a PCI-E card with a bunch of SATA connections. So the cost was about $30 for the SATA card. The biggest cost was the drives, about $90 per 4TB (x5 because I’m using a ZFS raid setup).
I’m buying 10 more 12TB drives (and 2x 2TB NVME drives) for a future expansion which is when I’ll retire my current gaming PC to be the NAS and donate the current server to whoever needs it. If you buy a dedicated device it’ll be more expensive but you won’t need to install Linux on it or configure it, they’ll usually have easy to use software accessible via a web interface. If you’re comfortable with Linux you can use just about any hardware to get you started.
Like Xanza said, I don’t consider it part of my media server. It’s generic storage that I use for everything. Security system recordings, backups, AI models, self-hosted cloud services like NextCloud, storage for my various syncthing clients, etc.