I am looking into getting a NAS setup at home, but have to consider wanting it to just work and work for my family who are not technically advanced. They use computers fine, but being asked to open a terminal would require letter by letter instructions.
So my question, what is the current recommendation for a simple home NAS for files and video (family trips, etc) storage?
Simplest I’ve found personally is using an old Pc and getting a PCIE sas/SATA expansion card to allow more drives to be added if you need more than the normal data limit. Use windows server 2019 or 2022. The trial periods for these are 180 days that can be renewed another 5 times which gives a long time before you reinstall the OS. Then you share the folder/drive like normal. It’s simplest because it’s still a GUI and windows.
You can also pool drives so that multiple drives appear like a single drive, this is supported in windows itself (I forget the name in settings) or you can look at something like “drivepool”. I use this to have a “main pool” with a few large drives and then a “backup pool” which is mostly old 1tb or larger drives and use a program like “cobain reflector” to automate a backup of the main pool. Nice thing about “drive pool” is, if the server goes down for any reason, I can still pull each drive out and read whatever is on each drive without having to process them back into a “pool”. The files are just natively visible. Feel free to ask for extra info if anyone is interested.
Very true. It runs at good throttled speeds and the biggest power consumers are the hard drives themselves. Not to mention everyone else recommending different OS but no mention of hardware except people recommending synology boxes.
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Simplest I’ve found personally is using an old Pc and getting a PCIE sas/SATA expansion card to allow more drives to be added if you need more than the normal data limit. Use windows server 2019 or 2022. The trial periods for these are 180 days that can be renewed another 5 times which gives a long time before you reinstall the OS. Then you share the folder/drive like normal. It’s simplest because it’s still a GUI and windows.
You can also pool drives so that multiple drives appear like a single drive, this is supported in windows itself (I forget the name in settings) or you can look at something like “drivepool”. I use this to have a “main pool” with a few large drives and then a “backup pool” which is mostly old 1tb or larger drives and use a program like “cobain reflector” to automate a backup of the main pool. Nice thing about “drive pool” is, if the server goes down for any reason, I can still pull each drive out and read whatever is on each drive without having to process them back into a “pool”. The files are just natively visible. Feel free to ask for extra info if anyone is interested.
Watch power consumption though. It matters for a device that runs potentially 24/7
Very true. It runs at good throttled speeds and the biggest power consumers are the hard drives themselves. Not to mention everyone else recommending different OS but no mention of hardware except people recommending synology boxes.
Oh I would recommend Synology too, but since many already did there’s no reason to do this again.