Advice Good NAS?

[DaGaffer]

What's considered a decent NAS these days? My old Synology is still working, but it's out of support and I suspect something will go pop soon.

In other news I note another big Torrent site is dead; RARBG closed over the weekend. The same weekend Disney binned over 100 shows off D+ to save money, showing just how reliable streaming services are...

 

[MYstIC G]

Synology or QNAP are the only ones to my mind before you hit DIY territory

 

[Embattle]

I've stuck with Synology products upgrading every so often, last year to a DS1821+ from an 1815+.

 

[old.Osy]

Synology or QNAP are the only ones to my mind before you hit DIY territory

What he said. I would add DIY will however provide you with a number of pros and some cons:

Pros:

1. You choose / build your hardware base, thus depending on the choices you make, you can most definetely ensure better future proofing (and thus decreasing the time period for upgrading / changing the platform).

2. Related to the point above, you can ensure expandability / capacity and not be locked down to a certain number of drives as most ready-made commercial products are (2, 4, 5, 6)

3. Tweaking to your use case - again, since you're the one putting the components together, you can and should build around your use case for the NAS (eg, if you need 10g or more network speed for your NAS, building your own gets you that, as opposed to the regular 1G or max 2.5G currently available for most ready-made products)

4. Software eco-system freedom - There are plenty mature and solid free and paid for OS solutions for your NAS - building your own means you can shift from one to another, depending on your needs, and not be locked down to whatever DSM or Qnap have to offer. Top 3 DIY NAS OSes have large communities and support for most issues / topics, as well as a large plugin / container repository to choose from.

5. Virtualization - DIY means you can also choose your own VM tech, if that's a topic you're interested in.

6. Last but not least, overall COST for building - will be CONSIDERABLY less than ready-made.

Cons:

1. Depending on your choices of the base elements, you may experience a high curve to reaching stability and ease of use. DIY requires quite a lot of technical knowledge, or at least a willingness to research and tinker. Time to deploy will vary based on these elements, and you may run into issues that require TIME to solve / fix.

2. Support and warranty - While the software part is enabled by large communities where common issues are thoroughly documented and explained, making it easy to fix most issues or problems you may encounter, in the case of OSS, the vendor is not obligated to provide support. Similarly, for Hardware issues, you will have to rely on the individual components warranty and support, potentially extending your time to get your box back up and running.

3. Power consumption and environmentals. With ready-made boxes, such as Synology or Qnap, extensive testing and component matching had already taking place, ensuring that power consumption is reduced as much as possible, and that the design of the box is adequate for cooling / performance. DIY, depending on the hardware you use, will generally bring about more power consumption and more effort to ensure smooth sailing from a hardware compatibility perspective. Not always, since you can deploy low power solutions such as RPI / SFF / NUCs which are already providing low power computing, but generally.

There's more to be said here, but these would be my basics.


Edit:

I have had first hand experience with Synology, but I am a DIY enthusiast as you can probably tell. From a software perspective, I did play with DSM (Synology), TrueNas Core and my favourite is UnRaid, which powers my own box at the moment.

 

[Vae]

I went from the old HP microserver to the newer smaller model in 2020 (HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE MicroServer Gen10 Plus Xeon E2224) and run Unraid as the OS on it.

 

[old.Osy]

I went from the old HP microserver to the newer smaller model in 2020 (HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE MicroServer Gen10 Plus Xeon E2224) and run Unraid as the OS on it.

Overpriced tbfh

 

[TdC]

I have a small Xeon based (E3-1225) server I put together maybe 10 years ago. It still works and has a small PCIe HBA that offers SAS to SATA connectivity that has 8 SSD's hanging off of it. I was using it as a linux based small VM cloud to let me do some development work for the then-study.

Given I know how to configure the average linux (or BSD) as a storage provider, is it worth using any of the freely available ISO's that provide such functionality? I reckon going this route would be more for any additional apps they would include, like some kind of extra cloud storage stuff and/or things. Is that correct?

 

[old.Osy]

I have a small Xeon based (E3-1225) server I put together maybe 10 years ago. It still works and has a small PCIe HBA that offers SAS to SATA connectivity that has 8 SSD's hanging off of it. I was using it as a linux based small VM cloud to let me do some development work for the then-study.

Given I know how to configure the average linux (or BSD) as a storage provider, is it worth using any of the freely available ISO's that provide such functionality? I reckon going this route would be more for any additional apps they would include, like some kind of extra cloud storage stuff and/or things. Is that correct?

Sounds like you'd need TrueNas Core

 

[MYstIC G]

I have a small Xeon based (E3-1225) server I put together maybe 10 years ago. It still works and has a small PCIe HBA that offers SAS to SATA connectivity that has 8 SSD's hanging off of it. I was using it as a linux based small VM cloud to let me do some development work for the then-study.

Given I know how to configure the average linux (or BSD) as a storage provider, is it worth using any of the freely available ISO's that provide such functionality? I reckon going this route would be more for any additional apps they would include, like some kind of extra cloud storage stuff and/or things. Is that correct?

TrueNAS or OpenMediaVault take the DIY out of it. TrueNAS Scale is the new flavour of the month but I prefer my Core version as I don't want to deal with k8s. So I run most stuff in jail's and hang docker/Linux stuff off a couple of RPI4 boards with the NAS as storage.

 

[TdC]

got it. cheers guys! I just realized I'd stuck a GPU in the thing as I had to do some neural net stuff at some point. Kinda torn up what I want to do with the box now haha

 

[Deebs]

TrueNAS or OpenMediaVault take the DIY out of it. TrueNAS Scale is the new flavour of the month but I prefer my Core version as I don't want to deal with k8s. So I run most stuff in jail's and hang docker/Linux stuff off a couple of RPI4 boards with the NAS as storage.

This. Got core and scale and fucking hate that kuberwhateverthefuckitistryingtobe.