Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the message of this article. I've played with half a dozen types of home NAS / RAID / storage solutions over the decades.

The best way I can describe it is:

There are people who just want to use a car to get from A to B; there are those who enjoy the act of driving, maybe take it to the track on a lapping day; and there are those who enjoy having a shell of a car in the garage and working on it. There's of course a definite overlap and Venn diagram :-).

My approach / suggestion - Understand what type are you in relation to any given technology vs what is the author's perspective.

I will never resent the time (oh God so much time!) I've spent in the past mucking with homelabs and storage systems. Good memories and tons of learning! today I have family and kids and just need my storage to work. I'm in a different Venn circle than the author - sure I have knowledge and experience and could conceivably save a few bucks (eh not as given as articles make it seem;), as long as I value my time appropriately low and don't mind the necessary upkeep and potential scheduled and unscheduled "maintenance windows" to my non-techie users.

But I must admit I'm in the turn-key solution phase of my life and have cheerfully enjoyed a big-name NAS over last 5 years or so :).

The trick with old computers harnessed as NAS is the often increased space, power, and setup/patching/maintenance work requirements, compared to hopefully some learning experience and a sense of control.

> But I must admit I'm in the turn-key solution phase of my life and have cheerfully enjoyed a big-name NAS over last 5 years or so :).

You know, I thought I was too, so I threw in the towel and migrated one my NAS to TrueNAS, since it's supposed to be one of those "turn-key solutions that doesn't require maintenance", and everything got slower, harder to maintain and even managed to somehow screw up one of my old disks when I added it to my pool.

The next step after that was to migrate to NixOS and bit the bullet to ensure the stuff actually works. I'd love to just give someone money and not having to care, but it seems the motto of "If you want something done correctly, you have to do it yourself" lives deep in me, and I just cannot stomach loosing the data on my NAS, so it ends up really hard to trust any of those paid-for solutions when they're so crap.

Are people doing more than serving SMB shares with their NAS’s? I feel like I’m missing out on something.

I'm hosting a couple of apps in Docker on mine. (Pihole, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, and Bitwarden.)

Depending on how you build it, you could run homeassistant next to your smb, which lends itself to all sorts of add-ons such as calibre-web for displaying eBooks and synchronizing progress.

Of course, gitea and surroundings, or similar ci/cd can be a fun thing to dabble with if you aren't totally over that from work.

Another fun idea is to run the rapidly developing immich as a photo storage solution. But in general, the best inspiration is the awesome-selfhosted list.

People want all kinds of things besides literal SMB shares:

- Other network protocols (NFS, ftp, sftp, S3)

- Apps that need bulk storage (e.g., Plex, Immich)

- Syncthing node

- SSH support (for some backup tools, for rsync, etc)

- You're already running a tiny Linux box in your home, so maybe also Pihole / VPN server / host your blog?

You've got compute attached to storage, and people find lots of ways to use that. Synology even has an app store.

I personally don't get what they are serving with a home NAS? Movies/Music/Family Photos is all I can think of, personally...and those don't seem that compelling to me compared to cloud.

Also ebooks and software installers, but those and movies/music are my main categories.

Cloud costs would be... exorbitant. 19 TB and I'm nowhere near done ripping my movies. Dropbox would be $96/month, Backblaze $114/month, and OneDrive won't let me buy that much capacity.

And you can buy those disks for… $300 or $400 apiece, I guess? A onetime purchase.

Any substantial movie/series collection can be more over a TB and thus not cost efficient to host in the cloud.

I've been running a server with multiple TB of storage for many years and have been using an old PC in a full tower case for the purpose. I keep thinking about replacing the hardware, but it just never seems worth the money spent although it'd reduce the power usage.

I have it sharing data mainly via SSHFS and NFS (a bit of SMB for the wife's windows laptop and phone). I run NextCloud and a few *arr services (for downloading Linux ISOs) in docker.

(Currently 45TB in use on my system)

Edit: as no-one is asking, I base my system on mergerfs which was inspired by this excellent site: https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/mergerfs/

> and those don't seem that compelling to me compared to cloud

I tend to be cloud-antagonistic bc I value control more than ease.

Some of that is practical due to living on the Gulf coast where local infra can disappear for a week+ at a time.

Past that, I find that cloud environments have earned some mistrust because internal integrity is at risk from external pressures (shareholders, governments, other bad actors). Safeguarding from that means local storage.

To be fair to my perspective, much of my day job is restoring functionality, lost due to the endless stream of anti-user decisions by corps (and sometimes govs).

I host mine locally to backup the cloud or in case Google just screws my account one day.

Another use case is hobby photography. Video storage (e.x. drone footage), or keeping a big pile of RAW photos. The cloud stuff becomes impractical quickly.

Running a home server seems relatively popular for all kinds of things. Search term "homelab" brings up a culture of people who seem largely IT-adjacent, prefer retired DC equipment, experiment with network configurations as a means of professional development and insist on running everything in VMs. Search term "self-hosted", on the other hand, seems to skew towards an enterprise of saturating a Raspberry Pi's CPU with half-hearted and unmaintained Python clones of popular SaaS products. In my experience — with both hardware and software vendoring — there is a bounty of reasonable options somewhere in between the two.

I run NFS and Postgres to enable multiple-machine video editing.

I'm running Truenas Scale on my old i7 3770 with 16GB DDR3.

Obviously got a bunch of datasets just for storage, one for time machine backups over the network and then dedicated ones for apps.

I'm using for almost all my self hosted apps.

Home Assistant, Plex, Calibre, Immich, Paperless NGX, Code Server, Pi-Hole, Syncthing and a few others.

I've got Tailscale on it and I'm using a convenience package called caddy-reverse-proxy-cloudflare to make my apps available on subdomains of my personal domain (which is on CloudFlare ) by just adding labels to the docker containers.

And since I'm putting the Tailscale address as the DNS entry on CloudFlare, they can only be accessed by my devices when they're connected to Tailscale.

I think at this point what's amazing is the ease with which I can deploy new apps if I need something or want to try something.

I can have Claude whip up a docker compose and deploy it with Dockge.

I just retired my 3770 server last month, it was a good system

I still have one powering a firewall. The only pressure to replace it is power consumption.

Unfortunate that hacker news doesn't have reply notifications but I'm curious what you did when retiring it.

Just recycle the parts? Was it your main and only server?

I have that server running Truenas, I have another PC I had built for friends and family for Plex only, and I have a third one running an ethereum validator which is the most powerful but only does that.

It's not stuff that would sell for any price i'd care to get and just throwing it away / recyling it feels bad since it still works.

Not much more, but the extra bits probably differ for different people.

My (Synology) NAS also serves as a Time Machine backup and hosts an LDAP backend for my.

How does that work for you? Last I tried, any interruption during a remote Time Machine backup corrupted the entire encrypted archive, losing all backup history.

It's a secondary backup method for my household but seems to have been chugging along for years without issues for me.

I use mine for a ton:

- Home Assistant

- GitHub backups

- Self-hosting personal projects

- File sync

- golink service

- freshrss RSS reader

- Media server

- Alternative frontends for reddit/youtube

- GitHub Actions runners

- Coder instance

- Game servers (Minecraft, Factorio)

Admittedly, this is more of a project for fun than for the end result. You could achieve all of the above by paying for services or doing something else.

https://github.com/shepherdjerred/homelab/tree/main/src/cdk8...

There's a range. A lot of people treat their NAS as their home server - torrents, downloads, media server, even containers and everything that goes with it.

I played with it as well - it's fun and rewarding and potentially optimized, but also... Can be a lot of work and hassle.

For myself when I say turn key solution, I should specify that I'm also doing more of a "right specific device for specific purpose ", so my NAS is now a storage device and nothing else.

I wouldn't call TrueNAS, or anything where you're installing an OS on custom hardware, "turn-key". That's saved for the Synologys and UGREENs and Ubiquitis of the world.

You can purchase TrueNAS hardware + Software pre-configured. It is not clear what the individual you were responding to was doing, but I have personally experienced many off the shelf, supposedly ready to go IT solutions that require as much tweaking and admin time as a custom solution. But different folks have different skill sets, too.

The problem with Synology type NAS is that they still treat you like a product. If you go this way, you have to accept the limitations. Or you have to do everything yourself.

It's curious that you would choose NixOS for a system that "just works". As much as I like the core ideas of Nix(OS)—reproducibility, declarative configuration, snapshots and atomic upgrades/rollbacks—, having used it for a few years on several machines, I've found it to be opposite of that. It often requires manual intervention before an upgrade, since packages are frequently renamed and API changes are common. The Nix store caches a lot of data, which is good, but it also requires frequent garbage collection to recover space. The errors when something goes wrong are cryptic, and troubleshooting is an exercise in frustration. The documentation is some variation of confusing, sparse, outdated, or nonexistent. I'm sure that to a Nix veteran these might not be issues, but even after a few years of usage, I find it as hostile and impractical to use as on the first day. Using it for a server would be unthinkable for me.

For my personal NAS machine, I've used a Debian server with SnapRAID and mergerfs for nearly a decade now, using a combination of old and new HDDs. Debian is rock-solid, and I've gone through a couple of major version upgrades without issues. This setup is flexible, robust, easy/cheap to expand, and requires practically zero maintenance. I could automate the SnapRAID sync and "scrub", but I like doing it manually. Best of all, it's conceptually and technically simple to understand, and doesn't rely on black magic at the filesystem level. All my drives are encrypted with LUKS and use standard ext4. SnapRAID is great, since if one data drive fails, I don't lose access to the entire array. I've yet to experience a drive failure, though, so I haven't actually tested that in practice.

So I would recommend this approach if you want something simple, mostly maintenance-free, while remaining fully in control.

You only really ned to deal with breaking api bianually though. I have really have had use of being able to quickly recover once my bootdisc fails and isntantly being able to have the same machine upp and running again.

I appreciate your perspective and effort, as I said, I was there too :-). Nothing you mention would be considered "turn key" by anybody other than very specific subset of Hacker News audience, and may inadvertently prove my point :-).

Another way to put it - My home lab has production and non-production environments.

Non-production is my kubernetes cluster running all the various websites, AI workflows, and other cool tools i love playing with.

Production is everything in between my wife typing in google.com and google; or between my kids and their favorite shows on Jellyfin.

You can guess which one has the managed solutions, and which one has my admittedly-reliable-but-still-requires-technical-expertise-to-fix-when-down unmanaged solutions.

> My approach / suggestion - Understand what type are you in relation to any given technology vs what is the author's perspective.

Similarly what I was once told when looking at private planes was "What's your mission?" and they've stuck with me ever since, even if I'm never gonna buy a plane.

One person's mission might be backing up their family photos while someone else's mission is a full *arr stack.

I personally think big-box computer retailers that build custom turn-key computers (e.g. Microcenter) should get into the NAS game by partnering with unraid and Fractal. It's as turnkey as any commercial NAS I've ever used but comes with way more flexibility and future proofing and the ability for users to get hyper technical if they want and tweak everything in the system.

It's wild how much more cost effective this would be than pretty much any commercial NAS offering. It's ridiculous when you consider total system lifecycle cost (with how easy it is to upgrade unraid storage pools).

Looking right now and my local Microcenter builds essentially three things: desktop PCs, some kind of "studio" PC, and "Racing Simulators". Turnkey NASs would move a lot of inventory I'd wager.

I think the Terramaster NASes are about as close to this as you can get, they even have an internal USB header that seems purpose-added for the Unraid boot disk.

That said, I prefer straight Debain to Unraid. I feel Unraid saves you a weekend on the command line setting it up the first time (nothing wrong with that!), but after playing with the trial I just went back to Debian, I didn't feel like there was $250 of value there for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Almost everything on my server is in Linuxserver.io Docker containers anyways, and I greatly prefer just writing a Docker Compose file over clicking through a ton of GUI drop downs. Once you're playing with anything beyond SMB shares, you're likely either technically savvy or blindly following a guide anyways, so running commands through ssh is actually easier to follow along with a guide than clicking in a UI, since you can just copy and paste. YMMV.

You have good points!

For me, eliminating the few hours dealing with some stupid config option I messed up is easily worth $250, which unraid basically makes go away. But yeah, most of the things the system does are really just some basic linux distro with various bits installed.

The terramaster NAS's are surprisingly reasonable for pre-built NASs. And I think they'd be fine if you want an <4 bay NAS solution.

There's a few tiers I think of home NAS users:

0 - add an external hard drive to my base machine, maybe share it (or the content) to other users on the network

1 - put the drive on the network, there's a bunch of OEM "drive on your network" options there

2 - the 3-5 bay home NAS user. Used to be a medium user, but now can easily hit ~100TB.

3 - the greater than 6 bay home NAS user.

At some point, I moved from #2 to #3 and decided that I had enough spare drives lying around that it was worth it to invest in a big case and centralize everything in one box. It's around this time that I think the cost efficiency of the NAS hardware really left me behind.

A 6-bay terramaster is around $500 and provides an N95 and 8GB of memory. So basically in rPi5 territory.

A 12-bay terramaster is like $1800 is with an i7-1255U and 16GB of memory.

I built a 16+ bay unraid system this year for around $1500 that included an i9-12900k and 128GB of memory + an unraid lifetime license. I know I'm a #3 NAS user, but the different in price is a bit, for less capable equipment.

You could build the same system, and save about $400 if you put it together and just put some linux distro on it.

I guess that point I was making originally still stands, I think these retailers could build really nice NAS options on a big price undercut. At volume I bet they could negotiate moving unraid licenses for much cheaper as an OEM option.

Note: Yes! I acknowledge none of these choices really include the actual drives, any of these options might allow for a gradual in-fill and replacement of drives over time.

Good points as well :)

I think there is a slight modification to this, at least for me, there are things tech related for me I want turnkey - I've used MacOS for years because I want a unix system with a decent GUI that I don't have to manage (the fact that the machines work well is a nice addon). I've got a synology, it works.

I don't have unlimited bandwidth or time and want to continue the tinkering phase on things that interest me rather than the tools that enable such.

I'm an not the relentless explorer and experimenter that you're sort of patronizing with this comment. I'm somebody who knows that you can put together a NAS with an old desktop somebody will give you for free, slap Debian Stable on it, RAID5 (4 or fewer) or RAID6 (5 or a few more) a bunch of drives together, and throw a samba share on the network in less than a day (minus drive clearing time for encryption.)

It is not some sort of learning and growing experience. The entirety of the maintenance on the first one I put together somewhere between 10-15 years ago is to apt-get update and dist-upgrade on it periodically, upgrade the OS to the latest stable whenever I get around to it, and when I log in and get a message that a disk is failing or failed, shut it down until I can buy a replacement. This happens once every 4 or 5 years.

The trick with big-name NAS is that they go out of business, change their terms, or install spyware on your computer and you end up involved in tons of drama over your own data. This guide is even a bit overblown. Just use MDADM.* It will always be there, it will always work, you can switch OSes or move the drives to another system and the new one will instantly understand your drives - they really become independent of the computer altogether. When it comes to encryption, all of the above goes for LUKS through cryptsetup. The box is really just a dumb box that serves shares, it's the drives that are smart.

I guess MDADM is a (short) learning experience, but it's not one that expires. LUKS through cryptsetup is also very little to learn (remember to write zeros to the drive after encrypting it), but it's something that turnkey solutions are likely to ignore, screw up, or lock you into something proprietary through. Instead of getting a big SSD for a boot drive, just use one of those tiny PCIe cards, as small and cheap as you can get it. If it dies, just buy another one, slap it in, install Debian, and you'll be running again in an hour.

With all this I'm not talking about a "homelab" or any sort of social club, just a computer that serves storage. The choice isn't between making it into a lifestyle/personality or subscribing to the managed experience. Somehow people always seem to make it into that.

tl;dr: use any old desktop, just use Debian Stable, MDADM, and cryptsetup. Put the OS on a 64G PCIe or even a thumb drive (whatever you have laying around.)

* Please don't use ZFS, you don't need it and you don't understand it (if you do, ignore me), if somebody tells you your NAS needs 64G of RAM they are insane. All it's going to do is turn you into somebody who says that putting together a NAS is too hard and too expensive.

Md is great, but does not detect bit rot.

Consider mergerfs + snapraid.

Id also argue if you can setup md you can probably figure out how to setup zfs. It looks scary on the RAM, because it uses “idle” ram, but it will immediately release it when any other app needs it. People use ZFS on raspberry Pi’s all the time without problems.

Thank you for responding.

* my original post was in no way intended to be patronizing - it was merely to point out that before investing effort, it pays to understand one's goals and priorities :-). Some activities have rabbit holes, which are fun, but only if you're into that sort of thing.

* now though, I will indulge in pointing out my absolute favourite hacker news type of post : "how dare you insinuate this is tricky or difficult or time consuming for anybody - you merely [series of acronyms and technologies and activities nobody in my family could do after a month's study, while hand waving over risks and issues and costs]" 0:-)

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