Ask HN: What type of personal NAS would you recommend? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What type of personal NAS would you recommend?

98 pointsPseudomanifold111 comments

It's 2021 and I am still using my home-built NAS (FreeNAS!), but I am increasingly interested in reducing energy consumption and maintenance time (mostly to improve compatibility with the family life, which leaves me less time to tinker with hardware).

So I humbly ask the hivemind:

- what are good solutions for storing personal backup on-site (other than a bunch of external hard drives)?

- What are some caveats that I should avoid?

- Can I trust the 'standard' companies (Synology, QNAP, Seagate, ...) to keep my data sufficiently safe?

Strong opinions, war stories, and all other suggestions are highly welcome!

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This advice makes me extremely unpopular in NAS forums, but I strongly recommend you never use any other RAID option than RAID-1. When a disk goes bad, you have a single mirror disk that you can directly and immediately connect to your computer and recover from. With any of the NAS proprietary RAIDs, or something like RAID-5, you'll need to somehow hook up 3 or 5 disks to your computer to have any chance of a recovery.

The NAS gurus always say "RAID is not a backup", and it is true you should have additional backups. But no backup solution is perfect, none get updated every day, especially if you plan on keeping the backup off-site. For most users, the NAS is the backup. All I'm saying is that when a disk fails on your NAS, you'll be in panic mode and will want the easiest, most direct path to data recovery, and there is no RAID option in this scenario preferable than RAID-1.

Seems like very reasonable advice to me.

For most people I agree with that. Heck, that's basically what I'm doing with my vdevs, since they're all mirrors.

But I think there's a semi-common exception: people who are using ZFS where they are maxing out the drives their enclosure can hold (or have a plan for that expansion). In that case, sure, fine, use raidz1 or raidz2 (with a hot or cold spare), because the rebuild commands are the same.

With RAID-5 your system still functions when a drive breaks. With RAID-6, two drives can fail without causing problems.

RAID-1 always survives a single drive failure too, and it can also survive 2 (or more) disks failing, if they aren't two mirrors of each other (not that I would wait to allow that to happen). But what about when the NAS itself fails (and they almost all do, just read the forums)?

This is why I've always used either Linux RAID or ZFS.

If the RAID is in software I can slap those disks into anything (like my desktop) and keep going.

If the RAID is NAS specific or on hardware, well, now you need something specific.

Of course you should have backups too, but why add something that will make your life more complicated in an already stressful time?

Synology at least just uses mdadm and lvm under the hood, so any Linux box can read its volumes.

How about Synology SHR? Do you need DSM to rebuild?

What SHR does is take the smallest disk size and create partitions of that size across all disks and raid them together, then take the second smallest disk size and create partitions across all disks with at least that much space and raid them together, then finds the third smallest, etc. [0]

It's all still just lvm partitions and mdadm.

> Do you DSM to rebuild?

Depends what you mean. If a disk fails, I hot-swap a replacement in and press the volume rebuild button in the GUI.

[0] https://kb.synology.com/en-my/DSM/tutorial/What_is_Synology_...

Ah, I see you've updated the question:

> Do you need DSM to rebuild?

I don't think so. I've never had to do it without DSM, but since it is just mdadm and lvm you should be able to connect all the remaining disks to and Linux box and run the appropriate mdadm commands to fix the array.

Ok, thanks!

Yes, I already figured out based on your previous response (and modified the question for others).

But will the array survive a rebuild? The calculators I've used gave me significant probability of uncorrectable read errors during this process. It only got worse as capacity increased.

RAID-1, RAID-10, RAID-5, RAID-6, etc. none offer protection against an accidental `rm -rf`.

With that in mind, the NAS is not the backup. Once a file is deleted, it's gone.

With regard to recovering from a RAID-5 dual disk failure, typically a USB 2x sata toaster is enough to connect the failed disk and the replacement disk to a system that can run a ddrescue to clone the failed disk. Often times disks that are ejected from a RAID array still have enough life left to copy data off very slowly (over several tries/passes)

For backup, a simple solution is connecting very large external USB3 disk(s) and running daily rsync hardlink backups. There are several scripts to do this, and it's quite low effort to maintain after its set up.

Yep, exactly, all the home users know what a sata toaster is and a ddrescue and a rsync hardlink script. No problem!

That's why I would always recommend a Synology (or similar) NAS to non tech nerds (or tech nerds who want something that just works without putting effort into it), because backups are easily managed to various storage destinations and work reliable

> With that in mind, the NAS is not the backup. Once a file is deleted, it's gone.

Snapshots can be used to catch that failure mode, so I don't think this is universally true. Whether there actually are NASes that would have snapshottable file systems out of the box... Is there?

There is!

https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

Synology supports snapshots if you choose to use BTRFS, but it also lets you enable recycle bins so you can recover things you deleted.

Note that not all the Synology products support BTRFS....

Right, but the recycle bin is universal, just to clarify.

Mirroring is a good recommendation for simplicity, but you're half touching upon two different aspects.

1. Think about the contents of your bare disks, in terms of what is required to read them. Lots of RAID-1 will stick headers at the start of the disk (including Linux software raid by default, iirc). Using ZFS mirroring will necessitate the use of ZFS to read it, and so on. I prefer using only Free software raid for this reason, while opting to make myself reliant on Linux/ZFS.

2. Mirroring is much simpler for the sake of rebuilds/performance, and if you're looking for a simple hassle-free setup that's the way to go. I've got a 4+3 raidz3 for my main array, not even for capacity's sake but rather for redundancy's sake (it was going to be a 3+3 until I realized how ZFS deals out chunks). But I realize that's going to be a hassle if I do start getting correlated disk failures (I've also got true backups).

> you'll need to somehow hook up 3 or 5 disks to your computer to have any chance of a recovery

If you are using only 2 disks, the only reasonable options are 0 or 1. So, you are saying that 0 is too unreliable, what I think nobody will disagree.

But when you have enough disks, RAID 6 is a no-brainier.

> All I'm saying is that when a disk fails on your NAS, you'll be in panic mode …

I have 3 + 2 disks Truenas setup, so when a disk fails, i’m still another failure away from single copy of data state. No panic, just relaxed shopping for replacement drive.

I think the authors point was that if the NAS itself fails, with RAID1 you can hook a drive up to a computer and get the data. RAID5 hardware RAID will generally require the same controller for recovery, making the operation more difficult.

ZFS or MDADM don’t have the same limitation, but there are other caveats there.

What I use on my NAS is 2 data disks that are backed up to on-demand mounted disk which keeps versioned backups of changed files. For my use case this gives me a copy of each file that I care about and in case of malware encryption, corruption or deletion of the file, I have old version available. This will not protect from a fire, theft or from loss of anything that was modified since the last backup but I feel this works well for all the scenarios I care about. Irreplaceable photos can always be uploaded to Google or similar for additional layer of security.

I backup to raid 1 and use raid 6 for performance.

I highly recommend Synology. QNAP and FreeNAS seem really great in a lot of ways, but Synology is the solution for people who want something solid that takes up as little of their time as possible. Avoid Drobo and Seagate.

I would make your first / boot drive a SSD, and put WD Reds in the rest, 2 drive redundancy if you want to be super safe.

In addition, I recommend using the built-in cloud backup software to backup high-value data to Blackblaze B2.

Happy to answer any other questions.

i'd say wd red pluses, not just wd reds.

Seagate Ironwolf is cmr on the lower end line making it cheaper than the analogous WD Red Plus line. Given the price and that Seagate hasn’t recently fucked consumers I would recommend those drives instead.

I've got one of each (wd red/ironwolf) in my Nas at the moment both still going strong 4 years later.

If it's 4 years old, that WD Red is from before WD pulled the SMR shenanigans.

The TLDR is they switched the WD Red drives from CMR to SMR technology without announcing it or noting it on drive specifications, and then when they got caught they announced the WD Red Plus line which became their cheapest CMR drives with NAS -focused firmware.

So before this, WD Red was just fine, but for new purchases, we have to specify WD Red Plus, not just WD Red.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/311182-red-alert-wd-su...

That's good to know, I've still got 2 spare bays to fill!

Yeah, anything non-SMR and with RAID-focused firmware should be fine. For WD specifically that means Red Plus not Red, because Red has SMR. Seagate Ironwolves should be just fine, but I haven't bought any since the WD version was cheaper at the time I was purchasing.

Another good option according to published Backblaze data[0] is HGST.

[0] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

Not a fan of the WD reds, they have 10x the error rate (according to their spec) of the normal enterprise drives. I believe they takes it from one bit error per 120TB read to one bit error per 12TB. Not something I want to worry about during a RAID rebuild.

I recently was comparing. Both QNAP and Synology have demo web UIs to try. That was enough for me to stop considering QNAP. It was almost like a joke of the worst most annoying UX possible with all kinds of alerts popping up and everything inconsistent and terrible.

What makes you recommend WD Red?

Given the history of the WD Red series they should be avoided by anyone who cares about data integrity in a NAS.

After the SMR scandal, WD did a rebrand and now any drive with any form of promise for NAS use are called WD Red Plus.

I'd go with Toshiba or Seagate Ironwolf.

Honestly, exhaustion makes me recommend them. I am exhausted trying to find the best drives. They are hard to find, constantly discontinued, or internals replaced without notification. WD Reds are freely available and cheap. I just switched from single to double redundancy to account for trusting them less.

Thanks, that's helpful! What would you recommend for actually running the backup? Can I mount a Synology NAS over SSH or something? I'd ideally just run my normal backup scripts without thinking too deeply about the end point.

SSH, NFS, SMB, rsync, pretty much anything. It also has built in applications to backup to another synology or S3/glacier.

I 2nd the Synology recommendation.

A solid product with zero regrets (thus far).

Avoid plain WD Reds (SMR), for storage use only WD Red Plus (CMR) or WD Red Pro (CMR).

Others have already sung the praises of Synology boxes, so I won't repeat (and do a worse job of it) what has already been said. But I will say this, the DS410 in the garage is still plugging away after all these years. How many years? The last two digits of Synology model numbers represent the year they were made. Eleven years of hourly Mac backups, document and picture storage, and I paid the eye-watering sum for the camera storage license, so cameras are hitting disks all day, too. Without looking, there are four of what I believe to be WD Greens, and I've had just the one die. Still have a backup in the closet that I've never used. (Granted, drive longevity probably has little to do with the NAS brand.)

Yeah, it's slow, long in the tooth, and maybe I should replace it this year. But I'll replace it with another Synology.

I have a very similar story with a Netgear ReadyNAS nv+ that has been running for about 10 years. I put 4x 2TB disks into it on RAID 5, and have a spare sitting in a box in case I get a failure. Daily offsite backup. Not a single issue over the years. I have ssh, and it's just Debian under the hood, so I've added a bunch of extra stuff to it.

I have no idea what I'd use nowadays. As someone pointed out, if the box itself dies, I'm screwed. I think it uses mdadm under the hood, but that's a guess. Maybe I'd just buy a mini ITX barebones that holds 4 drives, boot off a usb stick that runs FreeNAS and configure the disks in a simple 2x2 mirror.

I used to have a QNAP NAS and it was really underwhelming.

Upgraded it to a Synology 918+ and haven't regretted it even once. Added an SSD for read caching, upgraded memory to 12GB a year ago. The SSD cache has a hit rate of 88%, reducing the need to hit the spinning drives as often.

The Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR) was one of the main reasons I got a Synology NAS, I started with a random assortment of drives of different sizes and it just made a volume with those. Every time I run out of space, I upgrade the smallest one and tell the NAS to expand the volume. It just works.

Running a dozen or so Docker containers on it + native Plex package. It can even transcode video with hardware.

The only way I can realistically upgrade from that setup is to build an actual PC with Unraid or something similar and that'll be a noisy power hog unless I spend mucho $$ on it.

It would help a lot to reduce the scope by knowing some requirements you may have in terms of storage size/number of disks/specs/performance/features/integrations/etc.

Without knowing anything else, for a small and power-efficient setup I can recommend the Odroid HC4 with Armbian (manually upgraded to Bullseye; Bullseye builds are currently broken but building Buster and then upgrading works fine) and a ZFS mirror of whatever SATA drives you choose. I use one as a backup sink.

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/

As for drives, I've been committing myself for Toshiba recently. They have a good reputation for reliability/durability and reasonable cost-performance.

If you're going for SSDs, that market segment is in a bit of constant flux.

For something beefier and way more extendable I've been writing about my experiences with ASROCK RACK's X570 boards here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28302303

Though, from what I understand you may get lower idle power consumption from the right Intel CPU/chipset combo than AMD Ryzens as of now. This is just something I gathered from others' remarks and not something I researched or benchmarked properly myself so take that with a grain of salt.

I never used a prebuilt QNAP/Synology but I'm curious what it is that takes time for you these days that you hope to cut down on? A DIY can be pretty much as fire-and-forget once you have it set up and on the flip side you still have plenty of room for tinkering with containers and whatnot on Synology et al... Like, is there ongoing maintenance you have to do on your FreeNAS box just to keep things in place or is it more a personal tendency to keep changing things that makes it never ending?

Thanks, that's really helpful! I have relatively mild specs in mind---was thinking of probably having 2 x 1 TB RAID 1 or something.

The main reservation I had for going DIY is that there's a lot of initial building involved (getting hardware that works well together etc.) whereas Synology et al. is more like 'plug and play.' However, I revised that opinion whilst reading that thread, primarily because I learned about NUCs and other such alternatives. I know myself very well, though, and I know that if there's a fully-fledged OS, I am bound to change stuff, try out new things, etc., when in reality all I should be doing is making backups :D

I've built my home NAS years ago using a Ultron RPS19-G3380 case and a Atom D410 mainboard, system is embedded XigmaNAS (formerly NAS4Free), and I wouldn't change it for any ready made solutions. It boots from a USB key direclty inserted on the mainboard and works flawlessly since day one. Max uptime is over 2 years, and I had to turn it off for scheduled maintenance. Other than disk and system upgrades, it doesn't need much attention from the user; mine is on a 2.5 meters high shelf and had to move it down once in years to upgrade to XigmaNAS and bigger disks. Admittedly I didn't test it for power consumption which I believe would be slightly worse than most similarly specced ARM boards, but sadly ARM support is still a work in progress so I have to stick to x86.

> What are some caveats that I should avoid?

Be very careful about SATA connectors: they're among the worst piece of junk ever designed and have an extremely low guaranteed life (literally dozens of operations, not thousands), therefore, don't think of drive bays and especially desktop "toasters" as something in which drives can be inserted and pulled every day; that would be a solution for defective contacts and data loss. Been there, done that. Twice.

> Can I trust the 'standard' companies (Synology, QNAP, Seagate, ...) to keep my data sufficiently safe?

I guess so, although sometimes there are stories about newly discovered vulnerabilities. It's also possible malicious hackers would rather direct their attack on well known products than home built systems, but that doesn't mean nobody is attempting to target our NASes. I don't have any experience with those brands, however.

As for the rest, I was also following the Helios64 project which seemed really intriguing, albeit it meant moving from *BSD to Linux (actually I am a Linux user, although I like more BSD solutions for NAS servers and firewalling). Unfortunately the project died. It's FOSS, though, hardware and software so hopefully someone will take over development and production. https://kobol.io/

What are you currently spending so much maintenance time on? My experience with Debian+ZFS is that once you spend some time setting it up, it just works. I would think FreeNAS would be similar, assuming you pick a straightforward setup. If you want to downsize, look into 2 or 3 disk mirror setups and low power motherboards.

As for trust, you can trust anybody for anything. Should you is a different question. I rest easy knowing there will never be an article about a product I critically rely on deciding to sell me out. And needing to navigate least-worst commercial options seems like a much larger maintenance burden.

As always with tech its : Speed. Quality. Price. Pick Two.

You have carefully omitted your budget. Your budget will likely ultimately determine your options.

Otherwise I'll tell you to get a 10Gb switch and build a five node CEPH cluster. :-)

> build a five node CEPH cluster. :-)

OP was looking to spend less time, not more :P

Price is really not a problem. I have learned the hard way that cheap stuff breaks often :)

After many years thinking about it and procrastinating, I finally built a Ceph cluster with 4x Raspberry Pis (8GB RAM, 4 or 5 TB external portable drive for each Pi).

The setup per node is super simple, Ubuntu 20.04, install Docker, and then one command to add the new node to the cluster, and one more command to add a disk.

(Ceph version 16 switched to cephadm for deploying and managing a cluster and it's a lot easier now than with previous versions.)

With just 4 nodes I'm already saturating a 1Gb connection on my client (Ryzen desktop).

Perhaps the most surprising thing for me was how stable and forgiving a native CephFS client is on my Linux laptop. After waking up from sleep, it takes about a second to reconnect.

This weekend I'm planning on expanding to 7 nodes. With 7 nodes total power usage should be ~31 watts (not counting network switch), which is less than my current 6 disk ZFS RAIDZ2 setup in my desktop.

I think I was in a similar situation as you - after having a kid my already dwindling time and appetite to play with backups waned even further. I ended up buying a Synology DS418j NAS a couple years ago and it's been adequate. I wouldn't quite rave about it, but I also haven't experienced anything better.

I've thrown tens of thousands of photos at it, and my only complaint there is the background processing to generate thumbnails is very slow, especially with "Live Photos" from iPhones (which are essentially photos with short videos attached). If I upload a couple thousand of those, the NAS might not finish generating the thumbnails for over day, so if you browse using the apps Synology provides for photos, you just see lots of placeholders for a while.

I did have a (SeaGate IronWolf) disk fail on me already, and the NAS did it's thing correctly - it made audible beeping alerts (which were definitely attention getting as the NAS had never played a sound prior to that). When I swapped in a new disk I was easily able to instruct the NAS to add it to the RAID array and recover, and everything was back to healthy pretty quickly.

If I were to shop for a replacement I'd be tempted to look for something with a beefier CPU as the thumbnail generation thing is occasionally annoying. But honestly the CPU is mostly idle most of the time, so if I did get a more powerful NAS the CPU would probably be idle 99.9% of the time instead of 99% of the time.

Synology seems like a good choice to me. Rarely heard a bad word about them. I consider going DIY to save a few nickels but if I had a larger NAS budget I would definitely go for Synology.

It depends on your needs, but here is my expierience. I like my data encrypted, no cloud and backed up, so my config is:

1. Intel NUC + Internal 2TB NVME SSD (24/7)

  - Encrypted with LUKS
  - All-Day-Data like personal Photos, Music, Audiobooks shared via SFTP / SMB
  - Low Power consumption + good performance

2. Dell T20 + 32GB ECC RAM with encrypted ZFS 10TB RAID 1 (wake on lan / on demand)

  - FreeNAS
  - Backup Server for NUC and all other clients
  - ZFS Snapshots for Ransomware protection

3. Alix APU 4GB with ZFS (24/7, off site at my fathers home)

  - disaster backup for my most important data
  - sync via zfs send with one specific dataset from machine 2

Its pretty low power, but also low on storage - it took a while to find out that the data for my all day use is < 2TB. This is often not enough for most people...

I can recommend to use an cheap old machine as NAS with ECC RAM (a must) and ZFS, like a

  - Dell T20
  - HP N54L 
  - HP gen8.

OS can be FreeNAS/TrueNAS, napp-it or another reliable one. I never had problems with these and once configured, there is hardly any effort to maintain them.

What I don't recommend is:

  - Raspberry PI based (not reliable, slow)
  - Custom build (expensive, much effort)

Soho NAS like Synology are ok-ish, but I don't like them - Bad things happend to me. Broken filesystems, damaged files, non-working backups, slow performance and so on. But that was a while ago, maybe now they are better :-)

Thanks, really appreciate all those details! Guess a NUC looks awesome---that plus FreeNAS with 2 drives essentially replaces my current setup but in a much nicer form.

(I share your reservations wrt. Synology; it's working for my parents so far but I like the extra degree of control)

> Soho NAS like Synology are ok-ish, but I don't like them - Bad things happend to me

There's also the issue of some of your NAS devices getting hacked. Happened to me.

I've had my Synology DS918+ for about a year, and overall I've been happy with it except for one huge mess with encrypted folders completely wrecking my Dropbox for a few weeks. Here's what happened:

I wanted to have a backup of my Dropbox on my NAS, so I used Synology's CloudSync service to back up to an encrypted folder. Unfortunately Synology's encryption actually encrypts each file individually, which Dropbox happily syncs to all of the computers that use that Dropbox, making all of those files unusable!

In the end, I had to write a script that detected which files were encrypted (files start with `__CLOUDSYNC_ENC__`), then use a WINDOWS ONLY decryption utility provided by Synology to decrypt and finally get back to a clean state. Then I wrote another script to move the decrypted files back into the proper path in Dropbox while correcting the newly decrypted files with the original metadata (creation date) from the encrypted bad files. What a pain!!

I'm still not sure of a good way to achieve my original goal of backing up Dropbox while still protecting my data with encryption. Let me know if anyone has a solution!

Couldn't you have simply restored the original files via the Dropbox web UI?

Are you using CloudSync's encryption feature? That's meant more for using Dropbox (or whatever) as the mirror and giving it encrypted files which your NAS nodes will transparently decrypt, like Synology's version of Boxcryptor.

To back up data from Dropbox, I'd create an encrypted Shared Folder on the NAS, turn off CloudSync encryption, and sync into the folder with the sync direction set to pull-only. That gives you a mirror with local file system-level encryption (using ecryptfs; buyer beware) and keeps Dropbox as your source of truth.

There may be a different way to do it with DSM 7, but I've only tried this on 6.

Running a 2-drive Synology DiskStation, because MacOS backs up literally every hour, and shingle storage on NAS drives requires data relocation after write, the NAS-type hard drives are noisy and LOUD. It will be loud as long as your Macbook or iMac is on and is used. On the contrary Windows backs up weekly so its never a noise problem when my wife with Macbook is away. This has to be hidden somewhere where it won't overheat and also will not bother you with clicking/crunching the data.

At this point i have installed it and i stopped looking around for other solutions. It works for Windows, it works for Mac, i did not try Linux, but i don't really backup my Linux data, its all in Github anyway.

Is your data safe? Definitely as safe as 2 NAS-type drives can be. Did not experience data loss, but don't trust a comment on the internet, look for some research and statistics if you can find.

I like Synology, but I'd suggest more than two drives, so that increasing the size can be done gradually rather than by replacing every drive at the same time.

When you say "loud", what kind of noise are we talking about? Is it fans, or just a loud version of the standard "disk access" sounds anyone who lived through the pre-SSD era would recognize from any hard disk?

A question that I never see anyone ask: how easy is it to expand the capacity?

RAID apparently requires drives of matching capacity. Can't create a storage pool from a heterogeneous set of drives and can't expand capacity over time by buying new drives.

Btrfs almost supports this. Their RAID5/6 parity implementation still has problems.

Synology NASs do support expanding capacity with different sized drives using what they call SHR.

https://kb.synology.com/en-my/DSM/tutorial/What_is_Synology_...

It’s just a fancy UI on top of the standard LVM tools but it does make it easier than doing it manually.

Apparently ZFS is getting zvol expansion soon as well which will work with both raidz1/raidz2.

That's extremely good news!!

I used FreeNAS for several years and it was fine. I did feel like ZFS needed to be my hobby though. (The internet may have done me a disservice there)

We bought a Synology 1813+ many years ago. I run whatever Synology’s custom RAID 6(?) solution is. We have 2 disks of redundancy, and haven’t filled all the bays. (We’re at 6/8 at 8TB total)

I’m very happy with it. We use it for local backups. I’ve swapped a few failed drives (it was easy) I run a Plex server and a photo management server on it.

I used to worry about drive portability because of the proprietary RAID. I put that aside and I’ve been happy ever since. The Portability issue hasn’t ever been a thing because I haven’t ever needed to go anywhere.

My 'storage solution' up to this point has been 'random disks in a desktop tower' and I was doing some research just this morning for upgrading to a more complete local solution.

My use-cases: primary storage device for home lab, computer/phone backup server for myself and extended family, media server, self-hosted web archive, general self-hosted services.

My preferences: I don't like the direction that Synology is trending in (i.e. the same direction as Ubiquiti) / I don't like that it's proprietary. I really like the idea of using ZFS. I don't want to spend a ton of time designing building and debugging a custom system.

That leads me to the IX Systems Mini X [0], a 5+2-bay integrated system with FreeBSD-based TrueNAS OS (successor/rename of FreeNAS). One of the X+ models comes with dual 10GbE which is pretty nice for future-proofing. So my current homelab plan is:

    Mini X+: 8 core, 64 GB, 2x10GbE - $1600
    5x 6TB WD Red Plus (in zfs-raidz1 for 24TB net capacity) - $650
    1x 480GB Kingston DC1000B M.2 PCIE-3.0 enterprise SSD
       with power loss protection (PLP) as a SLOG/write-cache - $130
    MikroTik RB5009UG+S+IN router-switch [1] with 1x10Gb SFP+, 1x2.5GbE, 7x1GbE - $185
    Encrypted backup from NAS to rsync.net using Borg [2][3], maybe raw ZFS snapshots for certain workloads (databases).

    Total: $2565
    Monthly: internet - $70 (1GB) - $100 (2GB), remote backup: $10 (initial) - $80 (half capacity)

That's my current plan anyways. Feedback welcome.

[0]: https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

[1]: https://mikrotik.com/product/rb5009ug_s_in#fndtn-gallery

[2]: https://www.borgbackup.org/

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997856

Similar, but different: I'd recommend assembling your own machine (you get to pick your own case), Supermicro A2SDI for a low power motherboard, CRS326/CRS328/CRS309/CRS317 for switches (listed in increasing number of 10GbE ports), and routing on the A2SDI or another low power amd64 board.

Storage wise I'd either shrink your requirements for simplicity (eg two 14TB spindles in a simple mirror), or go for larger capacity with larger drives. 6TB drives seem small for a new deployment. Also, I'd do more than raidz1 to prevent against cascading failures on rebuild.

I'm coming from a different place where I view vanilla Linux as a positive (hence the router), but my constraints give you a different datapoint to consider. If I could find an inexpensive quiet 10GbE switch that was OpenFlow capable to punt switching policy to my Linux router, I'd be using that instead of Mikrotik.

Maybe I'm not weighting the management complexity of running different OSes for different devices high enough.

If I upgrade to 2 Gbit internet (recently offered by Google Fiber in my area) a motherboard with only 1GbE would be annoyingly limiting (though I suppose a PCIE card could fix that). I was looking at the RB5009UG because it's relatively powerful (cpu,mem,storage) and has that 2.5GbE to cover my line upgrade, and I could pair it with a CRS305 or CRS309 if I need more 10G switching in the future. Though I admit that a clearer delineation between router and switch might be nice.

I chose 6TB because it's enough to cover my immediate use and it's the lowest $/TB right now (net 24TB is ~4x my current capacity and I've been kinda cramped). The idea is to upgrade to 14TB drives when it's full for a net 56TB. I guess the questions are: How much do I care about the upfront cost difference? ($650 vs $2000) How long before I fill up 24TB? (1/2y?) What will the price of 14TB be when I get there? (<$1300 total?) How much value am I getting from upgrading to new drives? (MTBF) How much trouble will it be to upgrade? I'm honestly not sure how to weigh these.

Is it 'get to pick your own case' or 'have to pick your own case, power supply, memory, motherboard, cooling fans, assemble wire and test it, ...', though I guess these are two sides of the same coin. I'm not afraid of assembling PCs from parts (I've used my own PCs for 10+ years), but if I'm paying a $400 premium for eliminating 20+h of the above tasks + a 1y warranty that doesn't seem like a bad deal to me. Though now that you bring it up I might downgrade to the $1200 Mini X and add a $200 SFP+ card myself.

Thanks for weighing in. :)

Weigh it however you feel is necessary. I've just grown to hate clicking around in arbitrary web UIs to input arbitrary configuration models, where the only way to make things easier the next time is to create free form notes. And then when having a problem with a device, or needed additional functionality, the only solution is to throw it out and buy a new one.

When you're doing price calculations on the drives, don't forget to take into account the cost of a drive bay, and additional electricity used. In other words, it helps to prefer larger capacity drives that are similar $/GB. I was just surprised by 6TB drives because I built my array 4 years ago out of 8TB drives and have seen that even larger drives are coming down in price. In your situation I might opt for a two 14TB drive mirror, with the idea that you could reuse those drives as part of a raidz later. Although that's easy to say for someone else's array.

And yeah, having to build the machine is a bit of work. But I find it less work to know what went into it than to having to modify it a few years down the line and discover what the builders did. In general I favor spending time up front on my own schedule, rather than having to spend it later when I just need to get something to work so I can accomplish something else.

At any rate, enjoy your new hardware and plentiful storage space!

how much time is freenas administration taking? That's what i use, and i barely need to spend time on it, so i'm not sure how much time you can save switching. If the issue is power, then you can stick with freenas as well just with a very small system. If, you just don't want freeNAS and you want something that should be more turnkey, any device with 2 drive slots and raid 1, with a plug-in or something to automatically sync to backblaze or similar will be fine.

Ideally you want to follow 3-2-1 (3 total copies, 2 local, 1 offsite) for backup, so I'd recommend the following setup:

A small FreeNAS box. Like, 3 hot data drives at most, small. If you really want to save on power and are willing to take a hit on performance, you can use something as small as a raspberry pi. (again, if you don't want freenas, then swap this for anything with 2 drives that can RAID 1 and can automatically sync with backblaze or similar).

On the local PCs pick a specific folder to back-up instead of everything, since you'll only have a small backup.

Personally, I would stay away from anything that isn't ZFS backed, but i've heard good things about synology. I wouldn't trust any solution from an HDD mfg, because i don't think their code is that good for that sort of thing (eg https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/2/22561140/wd-cloud-os-3-sec...)

Why not buy a simple Linux box with a bunch of large harddrives? Then you can install whatever you want on it, and you don't have any unwanted corporate cruftware preinstalled.

You do end up having to roll your own stuff that the vendors like Synology provide. Depending on your ISP and router, for example, a reliable way to manage it remotely isn't always easy. The Synology setup figures out how to punch holes, make reverse tunnels to a Synology owned jump box, etc, in a way that you don't have to think about...it just works. Similar for the mobile apps to sync photos, integration with various 3rd party offsite backups, etc.

All possible to roll your own, of course, but time is money.

Maintenance isn't free as it takes time to do it. Some just want a COTS solution that works.

Perhaps not an answer that fits your criteria, but I have been using FreeNAS for several years now. My configuration was simple - SMB with a few jails running Gitea and Syncthing (and other misc self-hosted things off and on). Haven't had to touch the config in years -- only tinkering was for the sake of tinkering, not maintaining. So I got started when I only wanted to tinker and experiment. Bought an old Core2Duo motherboard and put 8GB DDR2 RAM on it. 2 3TB hard drives plus an old laptop hard drive for the FreeNAS install. ZFS mirror. Few years later the motherboard stopped working (not sure the problem, all capacitors seemed fine by my multimeter). Data recovery was relatively easy. I have a SATA->USB converter meant for smaller laptop hard drives. I connected one of the desktop hard drives to it by a SATA cable with the plastic on one end cut away to expose the pins (to turn it from female to male) and fit it in the USB converter and the unmolested end to the HD. Powered the HD from my power supply with a normal SATA power cable. Hooked it up to my laptop (with ZFS on it, of course) and bam! Was able to recover files. I didn't touch the setup for a while, but finally I bought an older Supermicro motherboard for its inexpense and ECC compatibility, got 2 CPUs to place, some ECC, and connected the original hard drives to it. Nearly plug-and-play. FreeNAS was able to resume from where I left off when the previous motherboard died. Updated to latest (as it had been a couple years!) and didn't have to fiddle with the config. Maybe not power efficient like you were asking, but I'm happy with it. That's my NAS "war story" -- a mild one, anyway.

Well for a whole home I don't recommend and WD cloud products, they don't have the performance and cross-platform protocols that make sense for more than 1 computer.

I always comeback to FreeNAS, which I have had configured various ways. I recently updated all my core hardware to mac mini so it has power/sleep modes that save that energy consumption...however payback is a lot longer than a PC..

In the end it will always be a challenge of performance vs. energy consumption.

I had a terrible experience with the Western Digital products[1], and a much better one with Synology. The nice thing about going with product from a vendor, versus building your own, is that they provide a lot of niceties that aren't easy to maintain yourself. Like...

- Whatever crazy tunneling and so forth that they do so that I can access the admin interface over the internet regardless of how brain-dead my home ISP router is. Synology is very good at this.

- Mobile apps that make it fairly easy to do stuff like "sync any photos after I take them to the NAS, but only when the phone is on WiFi, and optionally delete it from the phone after the sync is confirmed.".

Also worth looking at with Synology is their support for really cheap offsite backup, like Backblaze B2. I was able to set something up to protect against say, a house fire, and be selective about what I was sending, and it's something like $1/month for that peace of mind.

[1] For example, it's fairly easy to mostly brick them and the recovery process is having to send hand-crafted/altered ICMP packets to it during boot and hope that coaxes it into a BOOTP mode. They are also quite underpowered and just go unresponsive for minutes at a time. The WD products are awful all around.

I personally use unRaid, but i also like to tinker, and very much have had to tinker with it. I would recommend it if you want power, flexiblity, etc. (i personally choose it over FreeNAS for the VM's).

My friend however wanted a no hassle solution, he brought Synology and it just works, he's never had to mess with it. To quote him: "if Apple made a NAS"

I was recently having a browse, something like the QNAP TS-473A looks good.

I run my own custom built ZFS for Linux server but the QNAP TS-473A interested me as officially supports ZFS and is practically a small Ryzen server in a cute form factor.

I use ZFS striped mirror (Raid 10). 4 drives, 2 mirrors in stripe mode. This gives a reasonable level of safety and performance.

I'm currently speccing out my NAS upgrade and plan to go with ODROID HC2 using a scale out filesystem. I plan to test both cephfs and glusterfs, although I have more experience with the latter.

This is a different NAS model, in that each hard drive has its own micro server attached. Which I like, because it means that I won't be constrained by a NAS chassis, and it mitigates a lot of single points of failure. Plus it will scale in both performance and capacity as I add drives.

The HC2 costs about 50 bucks each, so it's the cost of a drive, +$50 and some maintenance overhead to keep the small cluster running. Starting off with 2 or 4 drives it's cheaper than most comparable synology or similar traditional NAS and for my use case is far more robust and flexible.

Hey Op, Synology is great. Support is fantastic. Everything basically just works, and bc support is so good - if anything starts acting up, you can just call in and they’ll get you helped. Recco 1821+ or other unit using newer amd low energy consumption chips.

These are mine backup boxes based on FreeBSD with ZFS and rsnc(1) for the transfer layer.

For the hardware I use MiniITX motherboards with low power 6W TDP CPU.

Disks are 2.5 4TB or 5TB in mirror on not depending in the needs.

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/silent-fanless-fre...

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/silent-fanless-fre...

Regards.

I have a Synology NAS. I guess it’s fine. But the real problem is what software to backup my win10 desktop to? I tried EaseBackuo which was terribly documented and the UI made no sense (made in China I think). So I gave that up, abs bought Acronis True Image. This software looks nicer but works horribly too. It has intermittent spells of failing backups telling me only “failed to lock file”. The support team has just been giving me a run around for 2+ months. Provides no concrete details or solutions despite me sending them the 35mb log files that Acronis generates. It’s all shameful. Is there a decent software for this????

Under Windows 10 open up control panel and look for the legacy Windows 7 backup applet. It will sanpshot your machine on a regular basis to a remote SMB/SAMBA drive.

Whatever your needs, consider separating by function.

If you want something simple and standalone that just works, buy a MacMini and a DAS.

If you need a cold storage backup server that you only boot once a month, build that.

If you want something that you can assign to a Windows domain and scale, maybe some Intel NUCs would work.

A netbooted, POE-enabled Raspberry Pi 4 or two can do quite a lot, depending on your needs.

I've use several proprietary consumer NAS products over the years, and mostly I've found they make great gifts to friends after a year or two.

I have a Readynas (now owned by netgear) 'prosumer'-ish nas. 6 bays desktop form factor. It's great, i replaced an older readynas (pre-netgear) which i got about ~10 years out of. It's actually functional except for the power supply. I couldn't find a replacement fast enough for my needs so I upgraded, bodged a normal pc power supply to do a data transfer. It was so old I couldn't just put the old drives in the new chasis and preserve the data.

What if you don't want to hack/tinker and want a Drobo-level solution that isn't Drobo? (My Drobo is very old and I don't want to upgrade to a new Drobo.)

Synology offers the same feature set as Drobo. It actually ended up being what I went with. They offer lots of different sized devices.

We bought our second Synology NAS three years ago, an Intel four bay with SSD caching. It's fantastic. Some of Synology's ancilliary software is buggy or has missing features, but as a backup intermediary (it backs up our backups to cloud storage) and file server it's been flawless. Also the apps available for multiple platforms make integration with phones and tablets easy as well as latop and desktop.

I had a ReadyNAS NV2+ which I recently switched off of onto TrueNAS hardware Mini XL+.

That keeps the fussing with the hardware and installation issues down to an acceptable level but means that in a panic I can slam the drives onto commodity hardware and recover the data and its not locked into a proprietary format. The cost is a bit, but i figure it'll get amortized over another 10+ years.

There's 101 interesting solutions out there, but for me, Unraid looks like a really appealing community and offers the ability to tinker more than others.

If you want more of a "set it and forget it" simple approach, the big players you listed (Synology and others) can work amazingly well.

I use QNAP with 2 HDD's. One for media (it has HDMI, so it is great for Kodi) and second for backup of my main HDD from PC. I don't trust RAID, so I use SW solution for regular backup (Bvckup 2 - it has nice UI btw).

Today I would probably buy NAS with 4 slots to run Nextcloud.

I made HRCloud2 [1] a couple years ago. I intend to give it some love once I'm done with some other projects.

[1] https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2

Whatever you choose, buy two if your data is real important or replicate to the cloud.

I use Synology with one box having 4 disks in RAID5 and the second having one large disk with the most important data replicated over.

Build a cheap PC with linux, you can do everything a Nas does and much, much more. Way more powerful and you can upgrade to dozens of hard drives. That's what I did some months ago.

I am quite happy with my Synology DS920+. I mostly use it for backup and hosting Docker containers. I was surprised by how much software is produced by Synology itself and either comes included with the machine or is available as a package - LDAP, WebDAV, SQL, Plex, replication/cloning/backups, and a host of other services.

One thing that surprised me was RAID - I am not very experienced with home servers and such and was really disheartened by how much of my disk got eaten up by RAID. I was using the Synology Hybrid RAID which I think is similar to RAID 5.

TL;DR Synology is pricey but full featured and very pleasant, understand your RAID configuration before you purchase disks.

EDIT: Another thing I will say is that docker compose is not supported IIUC, so just watch out for that if your configuration depends on that (like mine initially did).

I became very unhappy with Synology when I discovered that boot loading was signed, and I couldn't just put Debian on this box that was running a hugely overweight customised Ubuntu with background services that were difficult or impossible to switch off.

The NAS is an underpowered DS216 (two 5.25" drives mirrored, 800MHz ARM, 256MB RAM) that I'd bought new, foolishly assuming the official OS would work just fine on it. More fool me, eh?

I still have the device - but I am never buying another, and I actively disrecommend Synology going forward.

My next NAS box will probably be an old Microserver running FreeNAS or some reasonable OS. The Synology's predecessor was a tiny Linux box that I had to install my desired services on by hand, so I know it's feasible.

I also have a Synology and it kind of blows me away how much stuff is just... available. And whatever isn't available you can install via Docker pretty easily.

One thing to watch out for is upgradability. My system has 4 GB of RAM, which is Not A Lot. There's an easily-accessible SODIMM slot that I can throw an 8 GB stick into, and an almost-completely-inaccessible SODIMM slot with the original 4 GB. If you're going to have slow disks you'll need lots of disk cache, and maxing out mine is looking to be a full afternoon project and not a quick in-and-out.

> I am not very experienced with home servers and such and was really disheartened by how much of my disk got eaten up by RAID. I was using the Synology Hybrid RAID which I think is similar to RAID 5.

SHR1/2 is basically RAID 5/6 but with a mechanism for handling disks that have different sizes. Basically it breaks the disks up into partitions such that any "extra" space on other disks becomes part of another array which is only redundant within the disks that have that space.

Anyways, SHR1 is 1 disk redundancy so you should see (disk_count * space_per_disk) - space_per_disk for an array where all the disks are the same size. SHR2 has 2 disk redundancy and I'm sure you can figure out the math for that. Are you not seeing the expected amount?

For the record, I like synology. They keep updating old hardware for an incredibly long time. My parents have my old DS212j (release 11/2011) and it can run the latest DSM 6.

I've been happy with my Synology DS218+ as well. I use it to host some Docker containers for home automation and some other things, both with and without Docker compose (need to use the CLI to get compose working).

The one thing that burned me recently is DSM version 7 removed support for any USB device that's not a mass storage device. This effectively kills a lot of what I love about the Synology. Next time I'll probably roll my own.

I have so many systems lying around, that I just loaded up a Linux server and installed SSHFS. Excellent for media storage and development.

If you just want a reasonably small (1-4tb) volume with redundancy and don't care too much about performance, you could buy 2x raspberry pi 4 and those cheap enclosures that provides space for a hard disk (usb 3.0). One is the primary, the other is the backup. Schedule an rsync from the primary. This would be cheap and simple. It also lets you undo an accidental "rm -f" before the next scheduled rsync.

Do you need a NAS. If power consumption is the issue why not put more drives in your daily driver?

zfs and rsync on FreeBSD

I have an HP Microserver N54L and it's been incredible. I use XigmaNAS (similar to FreeNAS) and it's been rock solid for many years.

Microserver is the way to go. Same price as dedicated NAS with much more power.

The new model is also half the size, still with 4 full size drives.

I have the G8. It's awesome indeed. Acts as a backup server for various devices (mac & windows), DLNA server, file sharing, etc.

Additionally, I have a DLink DNS-320 NAS, which is pretty old but does the job.

Thanks, that sounds awesome---I was not even aware of this type of hardware. Definitely going to consider one of these (or a NUC).

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