Please recommend me a cheap but reliable NAS box ...

[gentlegreen]

Sooner rather than later I need to get my collection of hard drives into a networked box and pension-off my ancient PC ...
Assuming I manage to escape this house and am travelling light for a bit, I will need to buy a modern laptop that can drive some external monitors ...

I'm not after anything fast - it's all a bit precarious to be honest and I suppose I will need to start looking at RAID and cloud backup ...
I initially bought my two WD green 2TB drives with that intention and to a certain extent I have one backed-up on the other...
My FLAC'd music collection will need to live on it - probably DIY video - I'm not a movie fan ...

 

[WhyLikeThis]

How much space do you need?

 

[gentlegreen]

How much space do you need?

I'm after an empty box at the moment.
I have 3 2TB drives, plus my old 500 GB

 

[gentlegreen]

I suppose in the first instance I could put them individually into USB caddies

 

[WhyLikeThis]

RAID Calculator - How Much Capacity Do I Need? | Seagate UK

Configure your ideal setup and calculate how much capacity and redundancy you need for storage.

www.seagate.com

This may help work out how much space you’ll get with different RAID configs.

 

[gentlegreen]

Thinking about it, it may be a two stage exercise - in the first instance just a more convenient housing for my existing hard drives ...
The PC is 11 years old now, but tidied-up, a young family member might be grateful of it ... though they all tend to want to play games...

 

[newme]

I've been using a rasp pi quite successfully since the 4 was released. Works for streaming 4k to TV and as a nas lite running libreelec.

 

[gentlegreen]

I've been using a rasp pi quite successfully since the 4 was released. Works for streaming 4k to TV and as a nas lite running libreelec.

How does it talk to the drives ?
USB ?
I have a vague notion I bough a Pi for that reason, but lost the momentum.
A major concern will be not wasting too much electricity ...

 

[newme]

How does it talk to the drives ?
USB ?
I have a vague notion I bough a Pi for that reason, but lost the momentum.
A major concern will be not wasting too much electricity ...

USB, got 2x4tb on it at the moment. 1 mostly sleeps while I use the other since I wanted redundancy. Electric usage is extremely low. It even runs fanless but I put one on just incase.

 

[gentlegreen]

So you just bought some cheap USB / SATA adaptors ?
or caddies ?

 

[kalmatthew]

For an off the shelf solution I'm a fan of qnap. I have a 4 Bay from them I'm very happy with. If you want something a bit more DIY there are loads of enclosures for RPi or similar. But also look out for HP proliant microservers they sell some very nice 4 bay +1 severs in a small form factor

 

[newme]

So you just bought some cheap USB / SATA adaptors ?
or caddies ?

External drives it said at the time,.can't say I bothered keeping up with it since buying other formats of gaming tech after my 3070 laptop

 

[DownwardDog]

In my workshop I use a Pi with Open Media Vault and a 3D printed a case with two 3.5" drive bays. I've got two 4TB drives attached by a powered USB hub. The whole thing probably cost less than 300 AUD.

In the house I've got a QNAP TS-462 with 4 x 2TB which does exactly the same thing and costs 4 times more.

In my experience with this nerdy shit, you either pay with time or money or, occasionally, both.

 

[newme]

In my workshop I use a Pi with Open Media Vault and a 3D printed a case with two 3.5" drive bays. I've got two 4TB drives attached by a powered USB hub. The whole thing probably cost less than 300 AUD.

In the house I've got a QNAP TS-462 with 4 x 2TB which does exactly the same thing and costs 4 times more.

In my experience with this nerdy shit, you either pay with time or money or, occasionally, both.

My setup was cheap and easy once I changed to libreelec over the native os. Messing about with Linux was fine but the occasional power loss corrupted things since its microsd based.

Sure I could have done some image or other but it was simpler to just copy the librelec image and its working again in seconds. Load to Microsd, insert to pi. Attach drives, tada, plus native 4k streaming off it which is driving a 55inch TV easily.

There's plex i considers but can't be bothered to find out about currently since this just works.

 

[gentlegreen]

Poor old PC went to sleep this morning and almost didn't wake up, so I've ordered a laptop.
Hopefully it will force me to clear my desk.
Next I need a USB-C hub to drive my second monitor and some caddies for my hard drives...
I already have a USB3 hub ...

 

[Chz]

For an off the shelf solution I'm a fan of qnap. I have a 4 Bay from them I'm very happy with. If you want something a bit more DIY there are loads of enclosures for RPi or similar. But also look out for HP proliant microservers they sell some very nice 4 bay +1 severs in a small form factor

If you don't want to roll your own, Synology and Qnap are the gold standard. They're not that cheap, but much more flexible than a Buffalo or similar.

Reminds me that I was going to set up a linux VM on mine to provide some services internally.

 

[xenon]

I'm after an empty box at the moment.
I have 3 2TB drives, plus my old 500 GB

NAS are better with NAS optimised drives. WD Red or whatever they're called now as example. They are designed to be always on, less prone to vibration, though not necesarily the fastest access times. I use those in mine. I second Synnology if you want an easy solution. The J models are the cheapest. Though been a while since I looked.

They support various flavours of RAIDD. or you could by an external RAID enclosure and save a little bit of money by foresaking the server funtionality if you just need to access from your laptop. Or do that mount it on a Raspberry Pi running Samba or something like NextCloud.

 

[UnderOpenSky]

Turn the old PC into a NAS?

Use the money saved to buy a better PC/bigger hard drives.

 

[xenon]

In my workshop I use a Pi with Open Media Vault and a 3D printed a case with two 3.5" drive bays. I've got two 4TB drives attached by a powered USB hub. The whole thing probably cost less than 300 AUD.

In the house I've got a QNAP TS-462 with 4 x 2TB which does exactly the same thing and costs 4 times more.

In my experience with this nerdy shit, you either pay with time or money or, occasionally, both.

It's also kinda nice to just have the 1 plug for the whole thing. This is way overkill for OP's use case but personally I'm using an HP Microserver with Esxi and a couple of VMs one of which is doing the samba thing. I don't need no webgui to access my stuff though.

 

[gentlegreen]

Turn the old PC into a NAS?

Use the money saved to buy a better PC/bigger hard drives.

My mobo is 11 years old and had a wobbly yesterday !
It also consumes enough power that I count it as almost half my heating
I may feel differently if I end up with excess solar electricity ...

 

[gentlegreen]

NAS are better with NAS optimised drives. WD Red or whatever they're called now as example. They are designed to be always on, less prone to vibration, though not necessarily the fastest access times.

I'm definitely not fussed about access times.
My current big drives are WD green ...

I will revisit this when I finally manage to escape this place and set myself up in a new home - hopefully within 2 years or I'll go nuts.

 

[Chz]

My mobo is 11 years old and had a wobbly yesterday !
It also consumes enough power that I count it as almost half my heating
I may feel differently if I end up with excess solar electricity ...

That is the plus to the standalone NAS boxes. Not only are they dead simple to manage, they draw about 15W and are quiet.

 

[newme]

That is the plus to the standalone NAS boxes. Not only are they dead simple to manage, they draw about 15W and are quiet.

rasp pi and on a few externals are barely any different. Idk the numbers but for the price difference it has to take a while for it to be cost effective.

 

[Chz]

rasp pi and on a few externals are barely any different. Idk the numbers but for the price difference it has to take a while for it to be cost effective.

It's fine for a mirror, but a 4 disk raid5 will swamp the poor thing. It doesn't have the usb bandwidth. TBF, I only use a 2 disk mirror and it would be fine for that but we can't pretend the performance is competitive on a larger array.

 

[newme]

It's fine for a mirror, but a 4 disk raid5 will swamp the poor thing. It doesn't have the usb bandwidth. TBF, I only use a 2 disk mirror and it would be fine for that but we can't pretend the performance is competitive on a larger array.

Oh yeh but a main drive and a mirror seems far more than enough for a home user. Most of the storage is long term, read only or both. 4+ years later both drives are working fine and so is the pi. It just works, fine. Cost to replace both drives and keep those as a third backup would be less than a proper system over this time. Usually a home setup does not require a real server, is it better, sure of course. Is it multiple times more expensive, yes.

 

[UnderOpenSky]

Seeing as I read everywhere that RAID isn't a backup, I'm not sure what the point of mirrored drives is for home use. I mean how important is uptime for my Plex server?

 

[Chz]

Seeing as I read everywhere that RAID isn't a backup, I'm not sure what the point of mirrored drives is for home use. I mean how important is uptime for my Plex server?

It's because recovering backups is a massive pain, whereas just plugging in a new disk to replace the failed one and letting it go at it is simplicity itself.