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sakphul@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

To be honest, even if you say you want to have your own Hardware: I think you would be better of with an off-the-shelf solution from QNAP, Synology or Asustor. They are easy to use and hard to break if you only need them for basic things like file sharing. And it does not look like you require it to do more. Because all your services are already running on a different system/Hardware.

A 4 Bay solution might be overkill for you if currently an 8TB drive looks like enough storage (otherwise you would have already replaced it if you where soon running out of space). So a “cheap” 2-Bay (with 2x12TB drives in RAID1) based solution would be a good starting point to break procrastination. Imho it is always cheaper to go with larger but lesser drives. AS long as you do not plan to use secondhand drives (large drives are hard to get in the secondhand market).

Maybe Asustor is an Option. Their Software is imho good enough for basic file sharing. And with the possibility to run TrueNAS on them you have an “update” Option for the future.

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thirdBreakfast@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I’m a +1 on this. A secondhand Synology set up with some RAID will delay this decision for a few years and give you time to build your expertise on the other aspects without worrying much about data security. It’s a pity that you’re nearly at the limit of 8TB - otherwise I would have suggested a two bay NAS with 2x8TB, but if you’re going to use second hand drives (I do because I’m confident of my backup systems) maybe 4x6TB is better. Bigger drives are harder to come by 2nd hand - and plenty of people will not be comfortable with secondhand spinning rust anyway - if that’s you, then a 2 bay with 2x12TB might be a good choice.

The main downside (according to me) of a Synology is no ZFS, but that didn’t bother me until I was two years in and the owner of three of them.

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victorz@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I’m new to NAS hardware and how it works.

If I buy a NAS, say from Synology, would I be able to just chuck my existing EXT4 HDDs full of data in there and it’ll work? Maybe even one or two with different file systems? I’m not too worried about backups or RAID yet.

What are the limitations of dedicated NAS hardware? Can I also… “store” stuff on there? Like, say, have a “schmorrent” 🏴‍☠️ client save “data” directly to the drives from another computer on the network? Or do all services interacting with the data storage need to run on the NAS hardware?

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- sakphul@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  You cannot use drives that already have data on them in a Synology. They will be “Wiped” during the installation/initialization process. If you can save the data somewhere else you can put it back on the NAS after Installation. I don’t know if this is also the case for QNAP or Asustor.
  
  you can definetly store data, from a Service running on a different machine, to the NAS. This is the whole point of having a NAS. Limitation is network latency and bandwith. But this is no problem for the typical home user use case. If you habe a special use case you propably already know what you need and how to do it.
  
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  - victorz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    Alright, cool, thanks for the heads-up regarding wiping with Synology!
    
    Yeah, I mean, my special case is basically only that I have a lot of data and I don’t really have anywhere to store it temporarily before installing it in a NAS. 😅 So that’s why I want to just plop them in there… But I don’t know what the chest way forward would be to turn my drives into network drives. Just a small drive bay maybe.
    
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- anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  A big point of a NAS in my mind is to run some sort of redundancy, which means you will want to setup a RAID on the drives in the NAS, and that in turn means that my recommendation wouldn’t be to chuck existing drives into the NAS solution but to setup the NAS drives and then copy your data to it.
  
  Dedicated NAS hardware storage is usually accessed over SMB, NFS or SFTP and most software has support for one of those protocols.
  Some services can have hiccups when running against networked storage, f.e. Jellyfin might lose library metadata if the Jellyfin service’s library scan is started and the networked storage is unavailable.
  
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  - victorz@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Thanks for the notes on network storage access protocols!
    
    A big point of a NAS in my mind is to run some sort of redundancy, which means you will want to setup a RAID on the drives in the NAS
    
    Cool, thank you for that as well, and I was aware of that so I thought I would mention that in my previous comment. But I was specifically wondering if I could in fact just chuck them in as-is and it would be able to access the drives? Because like, they’re separate drives, right? How would that work in a non-RAID setup when accessing from another computer? Would they show up as separate drives? Is it at all possible?
    
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    irmadlad@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    I was specifically wondering if I could in fact just chuck them in as-is and it would be able to access the drives? Because like, they’re separate drives, right? How would that work in a non-RAID setup when accessing from another computer? Would they show up as separate drives? Is it at all possible?
    
    I have a shelf of NetGear ReadyNas-4 bay enclosures. They are old as the hills ReadyNas 214 with OS 6.10.3. The first 2 of them are set up as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives) 8 bays x 10 tb drives . They have no RAID setups on them. They all show up as separate drives. Now, you may need to set up permissions to access the drives, but they all act independently of each other. However, in that setup, if a drive fails, well you’re SOL. Some caveats would be that the drives to be inserted into the JBOD NAS setup need to be formatted in a compatible file system such as EXT4 or NTFS
    
    The other 2 ReadyNas-4 bay enclosures are set up as RAID 10. So using RAID 10, you have ~30 tb usable space and 1 10tb drive for redundancy per each ReadyNas unit.
    
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    anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Depends on the operating system of the NAS, but generally the NAS will want to format the drive. Even if you can somehow get it running without a disk format you’re generally in an unsupported configuration.
    
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Bronzie@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I agree.

Separate NAS/storage from server for some redundancy, and flexibility. SMB or NFS for access to files.
It’s also nice paying a premium but letting someone else be responsible for keeping it running.

If you have a distaste for Synology after their recent antics, then go with someone else.

I’d say go with a 4-bay and put two disks in, then you have loads of room to expand in the future. This is mainly because of Jellyfin and how these libraries have a tendency to grow a lot with time.

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