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?
It’ll probably never happen because the unemployment rate for autistic people is 85%. But in an ideal world, I’d love to build my own (if there’s any sugar mommies/daddies out there that feel like spoiling someone 🤔):
edit: motherboard seems out-of-stock, so if this ever becomes a reality, might have to make some adjustments for a different micro itx motherboard (plus compatible cpu of course. no biggie, thanks to the existence of pcpartpicker, compatibility is a breeze!)
Since I can’t see any other reference to it, I want to mention I’m using openmediavault and export smb mounts for my windows computers and NFS for Linux. It is running in a VM in proxmox. Works well enough for me. It is my in house backup destination, and my Plex media files storage (plex is running in a container on the same proxmox host).
Like most and probably every other mentioned solution, accessing the nas/shared storage is not more difficult than just opening windows explorer on windows and selecting the network location, etc. I’m sure it is easy on Mac as well, but I don’t use apple products myself.
2 bays sound like a nice easy introduction to NAS until you pick raid 0 like a fucking animal.
I could have data redundancy or I could have DOUBLE the storage …
Also want to call out the importance of 4-bay vs. 2-bay. With 2-bay you get 1-drive fault tolerance in RAID mode, which is nice. With 4-bay, you can still opt for 1-drive fault tolerance and with SHR you can have 4 drives active (of varying sizes) giving you much more available space and making the upgrade path of storage significantly easier.
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.
When my old NetGear ReadyNAS Duo (2 bays, SPARC, 100Mb NIC) was reaching its EOL I looked into a purpose built server, a mini of some kind (NUC, etc), or a standard QNAP or Synology NAS. Eventually settled on a Synology DS 920+ (4 bays, x86_64, 1Gb NIC).
It’s been rock solid and amazing value for the 2.5 years I’ve had it. It’s running the majority of my Docker containers, Plex Media Server, a Linux VM, and a few other things. It also has its own shell/CLI, which is useful. I don’t use Synology’s “phone home”/remote access stuff, but Synology Drive and Synology Photos are great - they provide the equivalents of Dropbox and Google Photos respectively, and it works across Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android (via VPN when outside the house). No regrets at all.
Dude I’ve gone full circle on this one, and I currently am on the Synology train and life is easy.
It feels like I’ve had a bit of everything at some point. Clarkconnect, Windows Home Server, straight Ubuntu, Unraid, FreeNAS, some garbage on my router…
… Synology stuff is super well designed, easy to use, and widely supported. I spent some time chasing privacy options, but other than that it has been zero hassle and high reliability.
Not often, but often enough…I had some significant problems with version upgrades and would end up having to configure the whole system again from scratch;
My hardware was getting pretty old. While pricing out an upgrade for it, I was surprised to find a more capable Synology for less (DS1821+);
Remote backups. I have had a bazillion different solutions for off-site backups, and none of them have stood the test of time. The last one before Synology was a separate machine running Duplicati, pulling data from TrueNAS, and sending it off to an ODROID-HC2 running Minio. It worked sometimes. Hyper Backup on Synology is an entirely different world of ease and reliability–it has been flawless.
I kind of got tired of TrueNAS as a hobby. I ran into and waited for resolution on bugs, had a bunch of customizations done from the command line that I’d forget about before the next time a version upgrade wouldn’t work and I’d have to start over, and just in general had to keep up my knowledge managing the thing (cruising the forum and subreddit). Synology isn’t as flexible, but I never have to deal with it…and that has been pretty nice.
If those were my requirements then I’d be looking at Synology.
Currently using a Windows PC with Stablebit Drive Pool to pool about 10HDDs into one consolidated pool. Nice way to get a stack of storage and to repurpose an old PC I already had, but for a low effort option Synology would be my pick based on all the reports I’ve heard about it being a top notch option. My PC is fine but when things break you need to be able to troubleshoot a Windows setup, which is fine but maybe not for “mum and dad”.
Just pick a NAS from them that does what you need. Whenever I look at them it seems to be about determine how many drives you need and whether you want a high performance one (to run Plex servers and the like) or a low spec one that just does storage and some less intensive stuff.
I’m running with 2 2 bay Synology ‘j’ models. As the do nothjng more then store data, the js are good enough. When you want to stream of of the NAS units I’d pick more powerful units.
For me, 2 bays was more then enough, as I don’t have that much important data, the 1st is the 215j with 2 2TB disks. They filled up in 5y, so I added a 220j with 4TB disks. Both mirrored and with external USB disk for backup which is 1 TB larger then internal nett storage.
When you need more space then that, more bays and raid 5 is more economical. It depends on storage needs and disk prizes. (Next to budget) It’s good to know you can mirror on a share basis between Synologie nasses. (So you can even think of a multi nas setup)
At work I had a run-in with qnap and couldn’t recover that device easily after power failure, never had that issue with synology, as they use a simple setup that can be accessed in plain Linux as well.
220j is fine for single user streaming. keep in mind the Js can’t run docker so you’re stuck with emby or plex or what I’m doing plain old media server :)
I assume because it’s built on linux you can get up in it’s guts and force it to run whatever you want though.
Main reason I still have the 215j is that it runs the logitech media server. I still need to find a way to use my squeezebox with other software, as Logitech quit supporting the useful stuff they make.
I bought an asustor a while back because I wanted my critical files protected by drive mirroring. I was pleasantly surprised by how nice it was. Not just as a basic NAS, but it also has a really nice ecosystem of apps that can run on it, so for example if you want to run a local nextcloud, you can do that without doing anything on a terminal.
My users interface with my server via plex, smb and Nextcloud.
The guts are pretty complicated but from my users’ point of view it’s pretty simple.
You should think about what services you plan to offer and go from there.
Be aware that none of the off the shelf products have a good reputation for being secure when providing services outside your network which is when you may want stuff like Nextcloud.
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It’ll probably never happen because the unemployment rate for autistic people is 85%. But in an ideal world, I’d love to build my own (if there’s any sugar mommies/daddies out there that feel like spoiling someone 🤔):
Just for funsies I just built it in pcpartpicker https://pcpartpicker.com/user/JoshuaACasey/saved/cqjnpg
edit: motherboard seems out-of-stock, so if this ever becomes a reality, might have to make some adjustments for a different micro itx motherboard (plus compatible cpu of course. no biggie, thanks to the existence of pcpartpicker, compatibility is a breeze!)
Since I can’t see any other reference to it, I want to mention I’m using openmediavault and export smb mounts for my windows computers and NFS for Linux. It is running in a VM in proxmox. Works well enough for me. It is my in house backup destination, and my Plex media files storage (plex is running in a container on the same proxmox host).
Like most and probably every other mentioned solution, accessing the nas/shared storage is not more difficult than just opening windows explorer on windows and selecting the network location, etc. I’m sure it is easy on Mac as well, but I don’t use apple products myself.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
[Thread #4 for this sub, first seen 19th Jul 2023, 05:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
good bot
You missed QNAP
You can’t go wrong with a 2-bay Synology 🤷🏻♂️ yes TrueNAS is more “selfhosted”, but the Synology is way easier.
Agree with the Synology recommendation for a simple starter. Though personally always recommend the 4 bay.
if I had my time again I would go 4 bay first.
2 bays sound like a nice easy introduction to NAS until you pick raid 0 like a fucking animal.
I could have data redundancy or I could have DOUBLE the storage …
Also want to call out the importance of 4-bay vs. 2-bay. With 2-bay you get 1-drive fault tolerance in RAID mode, which is nice. With 4-bay, you can still opt for 1-drive fault tolerance and with SHR you can have 4 drives active (of varying sizes) giving you much more available space and making the upgrade path of storage significantly easier.
Seconded for Synology. I have had zero complaints with mine.
I use a 4-bay Synology. Works great. For video you could use Plex or Jellyfin.
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.
When my old NetGear ReadyNAS Duo (2 bays, SPARC, 100Mb NIC) was reaching its EOL I looked into a purpose built server, a mini of some kind (NUC, etc), or a standard QNAP or Synology NAS. Eventually settled on a Synology DS 920+ (4 bays, x86_64, 1Gb NIC).
It’s been rock solid and amazing value for the 2.5 years I’ve had it. It’s running the majority of my Docker containers, Plex Media Server, a Linux VM, and a few other things. It also has its own shell/CLI, which is useful. I don’t use Synology’s “phone home”/remote access stuff, but Synology Drive and Synology Photos are great - they provide the equivalents of Dropbox and Google Photos respectively, and it works across Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android (via VPN when outside the house). No regrets at all.
TrueNas scale is still really beta, but cool as fuk
Dude I’ve gone full circle on this one, and I currently am on the Synology train and life is easy.
It feels like I’ve had a bit of everything at some point. Clarkconnect, Windows Home Server, straight Ubuntu, Unraid, FreeNAS, some garbage on my router…
… Synology stuff is super well designed, easy to use, and widely supported. I spent some time chasing privacy options, but other than that it has been zero hassle and high reliability.
What made you move away from FreeNAS?
It was a combination of factors, really:
I’ve got an older model WD 4 drive NAS. It works well and is easy to manage. What’s great is how little I need to think about it.
If those were my requirements then I’d be looking at Synology.
Currently using a Windows PC with Stablebit Drive Pool to pool about 10HDDs into one consolidated pool. Nice way to get a stack of storage and to repurpose an old PC I already had, but for a low effort option Synology would be my pick based on all the reports I’ve heard about it being a top notch option. My PC is fine but when things break you need to be able to troubleshoot a Windows setup, which is fine but maybe not for “mum and dad”.
Just pick a NAS from them that does what you need. Whenever I look at them it seems to be about determine how many drives you need and whether you want a high performance one (to run Plex servers and the like) or a low spec one that just does storage and some less intensive stuff.
I’m running with 2 2 bay Synology ‘j’ models. As the do nothjng more then store data, the js are good enough. When you want to stream of of the NAS units I’d pick more powerful units.
For me, 2 bays was more then enough, as I don’t have that much important data, the 1st is the 215j with 2 2TB disks. They filled up in 5y, so I added a 220j with 4TB disks. Both mirrored and with external USB disk for backup which is 1 TB larger then internal nett storage.
When you need more space then that, more bays and raid 5 is more economical. It depends on storage needs and disk prizes. (Next to budget) It’s good to know you can mirror on a share basis between Synologie nasses. (So you can even think of a multi nas setup)
At work I had a run-in with qnap and couldn’t recover that device easily after power failure, never had that issue with synology, as they use a simple setup that can be accessed in plain Linux as well.
220j is fine for single user streaming. keep in mind the Js can’t run docker so you’re stuck with emby or plex or what I’m doing plain old media server :)
I assume because it’s built on linux you can get up in it’s guts and force it to run whatever you want though.
Main reason I still have the 215j is that it runs the logitech media server. I still need to find a way to use my squeezebox with other software, as Logitech quit supporting the useful stuff they make.
Simplest would be off an off the shelf NAS
Yeah it’ll cost more but there’s a support line other than you to call if something goes wrong
Which one specifically I don’t know, the Nas I have I built myself and installed TrueNAS Scale.
I bought an asustor a while back because I wanted my critical files protected by drive mirroring. I was pleasantly surprised by how nice it was. Not just as a basic NAS, but it also has a really nice ecosystem of apps that can run on it, so for example if you want to run a local nextcloud, you can do that without doing anything on a terminal.
My users interface with my server via plex, smb and Nextcloud.
The guts are pretty complicated but from my users’ point of view it’s pretty simple.
You should think about what services you plan to offer and go from there.
Be aware that none of the off the shelf products have a good reputation for being secure when providing services outside your network which is when you may want stuff like Nextcloud.