Submitted 2 months ago by mcmodknower@programming.dev to selfhosted@lemmy.world
I want to create a NAS for my family at home. I am already pretty sure about using TrueNAS as software, but the hardware is still open.
What hardware do you recommend for 2TB of usable Storage (+a second drive for mirroring the first one) that is used by 3 people for pictures, videos, and documents?
If you’re set on TrueNAS, then just build a box to do that.
If you want a low power solution, go with Synology or Qnap.
Consider how the NAS will be used. Is it just file storage, or will you want to stream from it?
If just file storage, you can use lighter hardware.
I’m running a 5 year old Dell Small Form Factor desktop as my NAS/media server. It’s power draw is under 12 watts unless I’m converting files. There’s room for 3 data drives (boot drive is M2). It has no problem streaming, unlike my consumer NAS.
It will be used just for file storage. But what exactly do you mean by “lighter hardware”? april said anything more than a raspi, so better than the quad-core Arm Cortex A76 processor @ 2.4GHz from the raspi 5? (ik that truenas is for x86 and not arm)
Just that you don’t need a beast of a machine (with it’s higher cost and power consumption) to just serve files at reasonable performance. If you want to stream video, you’ll need greater performance.
For example, my NAS is ten years old, runs on ARM, with maybe 2gigs of ram. It supposedly can host services and stream video. It can’t. But it’s power draw is about 4 watts at idle.
My newer (5 year old) small form factor desktop has a multi-core Intel cpu, true gigabit network card, a decent video card, with an idle draw of under 12 watts, and peaks at 200w when I’m converting video. It can easily stream videos.
My gaming desktop draws 200w at idle.
My SFF and gaming rig are both overkill for simple file sharing, and both cost 2x to 4x more than the NAS (bought the NAS and SFF second hand). But the NAS can’t really stream video.
Power draw is a massive factor these days, as these devices run 24/7.
RPi is great for it’s incredibly low power draw. The negative of RPi is you still need enclosure, and you’ll have drives that draw power attached to it. In my experience once I’ve built a NAS, RPi doesn’t draw significantly less than my SFF with the same drives installed, as it seems the drives are the greatest consumer. As I mentioned, my SFF with 1TB of storage draws 12 watts, and RPi will draw upwards of 8 watts on its own (my Pi Zero draws 2, but I’d never use it for a NAS). It’s all so close that for me the downside of RPi isn’t worth the difference in power.
I really like my Synology NAS, but if I had to do it again, I would roll my own with one of the Mini-PC’s from Amazon. They’re essentially just as expensive as the Synology hardware and you can make due by installing Rockstor or something similar. You won’t get the same experience as the Synology setup, but IMO it’s not really worth the underpowered hardware. I would much rather have something significantly more powerful like the Mini-PC to be able to run containers on without having to worry about system resources.
Maybe you could pickup a old workstation and drop a few drives in it. It is fairly affordable and would allow you to get your feet wet. For ZFS you really want lots of ram so make sure you get enough.
I planned to use nfs, since it is one of the options of TrueNAS and it works on both windows and linux.
If you are really sure about the disk space requirements you can easily get one of the endless mini PCs with a N100 or a small Intel on it and chuck two NVMe’s in it and let these run as RAID1.
Have a decent backup plan,though.
If you want to roll your own, I’ve had good luck with ASRock Rack motherboards.
I have a UGreen NAS (6800 Pro) and the hardware on it has been great. I added a new system drive and have been running Proxmox since day 1.
The install process would be the same, enter bios, enable boot from other drive, disable UGreen OS drive, and then reboot to install whatever OS you want.
NASCompares did a video review of the UGreen NAS with TrueNAS installed and had nothing but good things to say.
I got mine during the Kickstarter campaign, but I still think they have some good value at retail vs competitors.
I’ve owned QNAP and Synology, the one area that has been an issue has been around the CPU being the bottleneck and slowing down transfers. This was on the lower end models.
I really really would love them…if only they would allow ECC RAM and more RAM in total. Then they would have built a killer device.
I did the opposite and used it as an excuse to upgrade my main PC, with the parts that got replaced being inherited by the new server.
Perhaps an unwise move due to it not being optimised for power savings, and looking at your particular use case it wouldn’t be a smart move.
Depending in where you want to have this NAS, one of the more important factors to consider is how quiet you can make it. If you only have a few HDDs they’re not too loud, but ssds are silent. It can also be worth getting some good fans and making sure you can mount them in a way that doesn’t cause unnecessary vibration to have it be real quiet.
Consider something like the aoostar R1 with Intel N100. Small and low power like a commercial consumer NAS but cheaper and you can chuck whatever OS you want.
For the CPU: I have a AMD Ryzen 5 8600G in my TrueNAS Scale box, I use the integrated graphics for hardware transcoding in Jellyfin. If you don’t need transcoding it’s probably overkill.
For TrueNAS you’ll also want a lot of RAM, as ZFS (the filesystem) gets faster with more ram by using it as a cache. My box has 32 GB, but 16 GB should also work, especially if you’re going with SSD storage.
And don’t go cheap on the power supply, get an efficient one from a good brand (I prefer BeQuiet).
I use my old desktop. It’s totally overkill, but it’s also free since I was going to throw it out instead.
2TB is insanely small for a NAS. At that point, you could honestly just run a Pi 5 with M.2 HAT and a 2TB SSD for something like $200 total. Could always buy a second Pi for mirroring and even locate it in a friend or family member’s house for mirroring and backup.
I use a Pi 4 with 7 TB of external SSDs just fine at home. It also hosts a pi.hole ad blocking server, my 1TBish jellyfin music streaming collection, my network share for kodi, an always-on VPN for my phone and laptops, and a few other small services. I’m sure I could upgrade for better read/write speeds. But everything is performant enough as is, and it’s completely silent and fan-free in my living room by the router. Honestly for most services a Pi with a passive cooler will perform admirably.
2TB is perfectly fine for a NAS. Not everyone needs high capacity
Of course, nothing wrong with it. In fact it makes OP’s quandary a lot easier! I’m looking into something with 20TB or so of capacity myself, and that’s given me an appreciation for how much simpler it is to solve this problem at 2TB.
I personally use a dual core pentium with 16GB of RAM. When I first installed TrueNas (FreeNas back then), I only had 8GB of RAM, but that proved to be not enough to run all the services I wanted, so I would suggest 12-16GB. Depending on the services you want to run any multi-core x86 CPU that allows 16GB of RAM to be used should be adequate. I believe TrueNas recommends ECC RAM, but I don’t think using consumer grade RAM and hardware has caused me any problems. I’m also using an old SSD for the system drive, which I is recommended now (I used to use 2 mirrored USB thumb drives, buy that’s not recommended anymore). Very importantly, make sure the HDD(s) you get are not shingled drives; made that mistake initially, and performance was ridiculously bad.
I couldn’t really tell you about which hardware to get, but its worth considering a 35w CPU as this machine will be on all the time. Also adding a network card, having more bandwidth is really handy for a NAS
I agree with using TrueNAS, I currently have a Fujitsu Futro S920 that can host two mirrored SSDs, it is a cheap build if you don’t have to host any services, you can found details here: pietro.in/en/posts/futro-s920-proxmox/
For more powerful hardware but still staying in a cheap build take a look at an HP 800 G4 mini or a ThinkCentre M910x both can host two NVME disks
april@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Probably just go with SSD storage because 2T is fairly low for hard drives these days. Still a pretty good idea to do a mirror.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 2 months ago
Also have a backup plan.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 2 months ago
HDD has 100x the storage capacity vs SSD. What are you talking about?
tofuwabohu@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
OP asked for 2TB and that’s easily done with SSD these days
Moonrise2473@feddit.it 2 months ago
100x ? Did you sleep for 15 years?
A 2tb SATA SSD has a comparable price to a 4tb SATA SSD.
If it wasn’t for the Al bubble the prices would be even lower
myersguy@lemmy.simpl.website 2 months ago
…What are you talking about?
itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
What decade do you live in? It’s closer to 2-4 nowadays, and 2TB is nothing