Simple NAS hardware for home use?

Submitted ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

Yo.

I’m new to the game. Like 2h fresh. I’m fairly technical, being a millennial and a programmer.

What I want to do, is to have a NAS server I can host movies from and watch them on my phone in my bed - or on my projector.

Extra points if I could host my ebooks and music there and run a torrent client. Extra extra points if I could connect to it from outside my home network (and stream)

I’ve read about about Plex and Jellyfin.

I’m here to ask you about hardware advice.

Will QNAP or Synology be enough for my needs and can I install custom software there? I don’t really want to create hardware from scratch.

Google says yes, but I trust reddit and random articles like I trust a fox not to eat chickens.

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Comments

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muusemuuse@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Skip the NAS. They all suck. Roll your own server out of literally anything. Install jellyfin. Enjoy

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- paequ2@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Same thought! I tried a NAS once and it was just a slower, more locked down version of a regular server I could build myself.
  
  I’m not sure I fully understand the point of a NAS. I guess, is it supposed to be an off-the-shelf server for non technical people?
  
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- sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Make sure you use a filesystem with snapshots, it’ll save a lot of headaches.
  
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upbeatWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Going to throw you off your trail by recommending Stremio + real_debrid/premiumizer/torbox + torrentio for movies and TV shows plus for torrenting. You have to pay for real-debrid/premiumizer/torbox but the other 2 are free.

Calibre for ebook management

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Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yes. Synology will do this fine. They’ve been cunty recently so I recommend QNap.

I recommend adding Tailscale for remote access.

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AtariDump@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Will QNAP or Synology be enough for my needs and can I install custom software there?

Probably? Most likely yes, today. Next week 2 month / year when you decide to run something else or more, not so much.

I don’t really want to create hardware from scratch.

A desktop running NAS like software will work.

From another comment from op

I don’t want to hear the fans

You put a NAS under load and you’re gonna a hear fans.

I want something that turns on and off as necessary.

Run enough things on your NAS and it’ll never have the time to turn off.

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- BCsven@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Fanleas cases, no fan, no noise. www.monsterlabo.com
  
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- ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Thank you.
  
  Next week 2 month / year when you decide to run something else or more, not so much.
  
  Could you maybe give me an example of what that could be? I might be not knowledgeable enough about what I could do with it.
  
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  - alekwithak@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    You said it yourself.
    
    Extra points if I could host my ebooks and music there and run a torrent client. Extra extra points if I could connect to it from outside my home network (and stream)
    
    To start, if you’re using it to torrent your media then you’re going to want it running in the background because you need to see your torrents. Aside from it being the right thing to do, keeping a good ratio is necessary to get into good private trackers. And torrents aren’t great for music, at least not in my experience, so you’ll probably want soulseek as well. That also requires sharing in the background. You could buy a seedbox and torrent through that, but if you were going to go that route you could just do everything you’re trying to do through a seedbox instead of getting a NAS, and it wouldn’t take long for the subscription costs to surpass the costs of self hosting.
    
    So now you’ve got qbittorrent, soulseek, Plex, and Kavita or similar for ebooks. What else could you want over time? Do you want to host audiobooks, too? Comics/manga/magazines? Maybe you want to streamline and automate the downloading process. Maybe your mom can’t stream her favorite show anymore so you decide to share your library with her. Maybe you want to be able to search and download anything from any device anywhere, and maybe you want your mom to be able to as well.
    
    Why stop there. Maybe you want to self host your own file and picture cloud storage as well. Maybe Mom’s, too. Maybe you want to start blocking ads on your network at a DNS level. Maybe you want your phone to use your home network even when you’re out and about. The possibilities increase exponentially once you start getting into self hosting.
    
    I don’t want to hear the fans
    
    That being said I have a good number of the above tasks running on an HP elitedesk mini g9 and it stays pretty quiet. The spinning disks make noise though lol
    
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BCsven@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Silent and fanless: look for a Monsterlabo case. It is all heatsink. Buy a fankess power supply, or buy a PSU that is overrates for the load and fanless under 30% load.

Its the setup I have. I can render video and other work loads and you don’t even know the system is on

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HelloRoot@lemy.lol ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

preferably something with WOL that goes silent and fanless when not in use, or something I can shut down with a button

Recently I saw a Traefik plugin that can send WOL packets to a machine when a service that is hosted there gets a network request. It also shuts down the device when it’s not in use. You can set it up with a low power always on thing, like a rpi. I also have a buddy that set it up in a more diy way without Traefik so it’s definitely something that can be done and will save you a lot of electricity in the long term.

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BombOmOm@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
If you have a desktop, just throw a hard drive or two in it and you have a NAS. Even if you have a laptop, a hard drive in an enclosure will perform this role just fine.

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- ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Thank you, but I don’t want to keep my desktop running. The cooling noise, the electricity. Did I mentioned the fans? They are quiet but I can hear them, I want something that goes silent and wakes up when needed.
  
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  - mbirth@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    There are some passively cooled (i.e. no spinning fan) SFF Desktops (HP, DELL, etc.) or you could get a Raspberry Pi 5 and stick it into a Geekworm case. Power consumption with these devices should hover around 5W, maybe slightly higher under load. The Desktops most probably support WoL. The Raspberry Pi doesn’t.
    
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  - BombOmOm@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    A note on the fans specifically, you can buy quiet fans. In general, the larger the fan, the lower the speed and the quieter it is. You can also setup fan curves so they are only doing anything of note when the computer is pumping out heat (given your statements, that would be basically never).
    
    The electricity usage is a pretty notable thing. Though, if you take the graphics card out of a desktop (use integrated graphics, a dedicated graphics card in a server is just wasted electricity) and set the OS to power saver (this mostly means it won’t boost the CPU to higher clocks), it really won’t use much power. Compared to buying dedicated NAS hardware, you may never recoup the energy costs between the hardware you have and the lower-power hardware you need to buy.
    
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Untrending@feddit.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
So what you can do hardware wise is either any usff pc with 2 drives (used Lenovo’s are fairly popular), or diy build with an Intel n150 board and some drives. Both are usually very silent since they don’t have active cooling. If you spend the money for ssd’s then it’s completely silent.

Wouldn’t go with off the shelf nas, since it’s a trend to move more and more behind subscriptions and you never know how long you’ll have a feature.

For Software: I’d definitely go with jellyfin. Plex is commercializing hard. Remote access is easy and secure with tailscale For ebooks calibre-web Music and torrent i don’t know enough to suggest anything

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habitualcynic@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I got an Aoostar WTR Pro for this exact purpose. I went with jellyfin over plex due to plex enshittification, haven’t had any issues yet. You can find smaller NAS devices if you want. I avoided Synology because something felt off, and now they’re enshittifying too.

I like the people suggesting to build your own, that’s my next plan.

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FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Synology NAS’s are amazing, can’t recommend them enough. Their software is what makes them so good.

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- Ton@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It’s an unpopular opinion, but I agree with you. I’ve been running single disk Synology for a decade or so, replaced the original one about 4 years ago.
  
  The software is pretty sleek and it would fit OPs requirements perfectly. I don’t care for some Intel based PC sucking kWhs of power each day, just to hosts some media.
  
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- non_burglar@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Do not promote these Synology jerks.
  
  Synology’s software is awful. Simply controlling NFS shares is an exercise in insanity, and don’t get me started on ACLs.
  
  Further, synology is a real bastard company currently trying to enshittify hardware (disk) upgrades, among other terrible practices:
  
  reddit.com/…/can_we_still_trust_synology_users_ca…
  
  tomshardware.com/…/synology-requires-self-branded…
  
  Full disclosure, I myself am running an old ds211j for backups. It’s way out of updates, and there isn’t much of a 3rd party image collection for synology hardware, but it works fine and lives in its own locked down subnet.
  
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  - FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    Synology’s software is awful. Simply controlling NFS shares is an exercise in insanity, and don’t get me started on ACLs.
    
    Strange, I’ve had no issue controlling NFS shares or ACLs. Have set up 4 Synology NAS’s, with shares out the wahzoo. No problems. User error maybe?
    
    Further, synology is a real bastard company currently trying to enshittify hardware (disk) upgrades, among other terrible practices:
    
    That disk upgrade thing was a mountain out of a molehill. All they are doing is reserving some of their disk health features for synology branded disks because they’re the only ones they can verify meet their standards for their software.
    
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Godort@lemm.ee ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It really depends on how much you value your time and how good you are with configuration

A QNAP or Synology will work and be pretty simple to configure out of the box. Installing custom software is possible, but can be tricky as they require you to enable sideloading. Both have supported app stores with available apps to do what you’re looking for (QNAP has apps for both torrents and Plex. Not sure about Synology)

However, you will get way more bang for your buck by building one from scratch using something like TrueNAS and the Arr stack, but this can require a fair bit of technical knowledge about configuring containers and securing network services(Especially if you want them to be accessible remotely)

Most people here do selfhosting as a hobby and as a result, the time spent trying new configurations is negligible as it wouldn’t be much of a hobby otherwise.

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scott@lemmy.org ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
My HP Z440 was cheap on eBay and kicks ass. Only weird hitch about it is it won’t boot without some sort of GPU in it so I got a GTX 970 on Facebook for like $20.

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tetris11@lemmy.ml ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I collected this data from another thread that might be useful: lemmy.ml/post/30234916

  | Type   | Name                   | Extra           | User                           |
  |--------+------------------------+-----------------+--------------------------------|
  | MiniPC | ASUS 4-Bay             |                 | Zikeji@programming.dev         |
  | MiniPC | HP Microserver         |                 | wingsfortheirsmiles@feddit.uk  |
  | MiniPC | HP microserver         | Homelab         | JoeKrogan@lemmy.world          |
  | MiniPC | HTPC                   | Nobara          | BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world |
  | MiniPC | ITX NAS                | Unraid          | Skunk@jlai.lu                  |
  | MiniPC | Jonsbo N4 Case         |                 | stoy@lemmy.zip                 |
  | MiniPC | Minisforum X1 pro      | OpenSuSe        | Skunk@jlai.lu                  |
  | MiniPC | ODROID H4+ mini pc     |                 | Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social |
  | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 1B         | Photoframe      | JoeKrogan@lemmy.world          |
  | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 3          | PiHole          | gigachad@sh.itjust.works       |
  | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 3A         |                 | stoy@lemmy.zip                 |
  | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 3B         |                 | stoy@lemmy.zip                 |
  | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 3B         |                 | stoy@lemmy.zip                 |
  | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 3B         | Kodi            | JoeKrogan@lemmy.world          |
  | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 3B         | Kodi            | JoeKrogan@lemmy.world          |
  | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 4          | OpenSuSe/Docker | Skunk@jlai.lu                  |
  | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 5          | RpiOS           | BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world |
  | Server | HP ProLiant DL360 Gen9 |                 | Lucy@feddit.org                |
  | Server | HP Z440 Workstation    |                 | Lucy@feddit.org                |

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catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
What’s the point of using table formatting when you wrap it in a code block

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- tetris11@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I know right, fuck that guy
  
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