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Comment by zeafoamrun | Hacker News Reader

I built my own NAS, just Ubuntu+ZFS using an old PC I had and it works great. Don't know why people are so crazy about buying prebuilt NASes.

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Why wouldn't they be? No fiddling, super compact form factor, (usually) far superior energy efficiency, maybe phone apps, did I mention no fiddling?

Also, the form factor!

But form factor and energy efficiency may be helped by some of the changes that producers are doing.

Why complain about those, then?

Diy is still possible. Looks like nas is becoming more specialized.

I suspect the energy efficiency correlates with how old it is -- modern silicon in laptops is amazing. I doubt a new PC would take up 45W like this i7 7700k-powered one I've had for years.

No fiddling is definitely not a primary point. If one has both valuable or large amounts of data fiddling is inevitable. Nothing I have seen in retail markets is at a level of chromecast or phone setup or TV setup.

And often not only the price is high but poor reliability.

It is amazing that no one spoke about security in any of the child comments of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131785

Of course no fiddling is a primary point. That’s probably _the main point_. Sure you need _some_ configuration/setup, but it’s in a completely different ballpark to a custom built solution.

which brand? Anytime you have data locally it is lot of work. There is a reason people go to Google drive or even proton drive etc for that reason. If you can do that initial setup then DIY is not worse. Yes, all these plug-n-play give a false sense of security. One of the RAID drives is failing - no one knows.

Your definition of fiddling is maybe wrong. Not everyone is Linus S or Jeff geerling to look for that exact DDR stick etc. Get a resonable laptop or mini PC with 2 x drives. Done. Even windows drive share.

Why are you comparing a laptop to a NAS?

storage of data long-term of course to many segments of a market needs to be seamless and safe feeling, comforting even. To slap a brand on the side of a NAS that is complex and causes grandma to lose the entire family photo history that you scanned for a few summers after your uncle did research for decades - well, that's not great for repeat sales, right?

Believe me, you don't want a NAS at a chromecast level. Chromecasts are designed to be user friendly and hide a lot of settings. That wouldn't be a problem if the things worked at least. I can't even count how many times I've had to reset a chromecast because something broke and wasn't fixable.

A casual user would never buy a NAS at all, since most prefer the ease of something like iCloud or Google. If you buy a NAS you often have a specific reason to (too much data, needing to be able to reach a speed to work off of it, security...) and then the fiddeling becomes an advantage I feel. Yes it's a bit more effort, but you can get something that actually does what you want to instead of what the manufacturer thinks that you want it to do.

This "no fiddling" could be the single entire counterpoint to the article and hacker culture in general. All the problems stem from "consumer wants no fiddling".

I think it's a little more nuanced. Most people cannot fiddle (with PCs). They would have to learn to, first. Does this mean they deserve to have shit shoved down their throats? No. However, they are very vulnerable, and companies want to capitalize on this fact.

Hackers (whatever kind) are just one portion of the total populace. Others deserve genuinely good products, too. And maybe sometimes even a hacker wants to take a break. ;-)

> Most people cannot fiddle (with PCs). They would have to learn to, first. Does this mean they deserve to have shit shoved down their throats?

I can fiddle perfectly well. I do it all day at work, with workstations, servers and HPC. I can already scratch that itch with much nicer than I will be ever able to buy myself. But I am not spending 1 hour more than I need to for my NAS at home, life is too short and I also like to have other hobbies. To the point that yes, I do spend a bit more for convenience and niceness.

> And maybe sometimes even a hacker wants to take a break. ;-)

Exactly.

I setup one on an old pc 4 years ago freebsd zfs, literally an hour of maintenance over the course of 4 years now with ai anyone can do it.

Yeah the compact form factor and energy efficiency were the strongest point for me.

For me, "fiddling" is now the job of Claude Code. Nobody who can manage to install Claude needs to be intimidated by anything else in Linux.

Its the maintenance and details that kill your NAS.

You will probably rely on it for 10 years at least, so building your NAS means committing to maintaining it in the long term, you have to be sure this is something you will uphold.

Also while setting up your NAS initially is definitely doable, there are a trillion little things to get right and make sure won't bite you later on (scrubble, etc).

All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.

As some kind of cosmic karma for making my smug comment, one of my metadata mirror vdevs died this morning while my wife was doing a big transfer.

> All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.

A NAS is not a backup? It's hot storage.

I have a NAS but I backup my photos on AWS in S3 Deep Glacier. It costs me less than $1 a month for 500GB of pictures. That's a backup.

If it is secondary place to store and has some archiving/delete protection it is a backup.

If it is only place you store your data sure, you need another option to backup the NAS itself

But are these off-the-shelf solutions actually supported for ten years? And since they're usually bought for "easy remote connectivity" and whatnot, that's rather important. Bonus points for updates typically being installed automatically, so people won't even think to check whether it's still updated or not.

I have a NAS made from a 15-year-old computer, with standard parts. It can saturate a gigabit link over WireGuard, so it's good enough for my needs. I installed the latest Linux kernel on it the other day. And it doesn't have random unknown stuff calling home. Since it runs ZFS and scrubs regularly, I'm quite confident the data on it is still in good shape.

Almost all off-the-shelf consumer grade NAS appliances are running unmaintainable OS yocto builds already 2 years out of support, and a list of CVE under active exploitation.

The only really functional OSS NAS exception for small offices is the CephFS builds from https://www.45drives.com , and that is because of included support services. =3

I ran a Synology DS418play for 8-9 years. It got OS and security updates throughout that time. I recently replaced it with a TrueNAS setup because I needed a dramatic capacity increase, but otherwise it would still be supported.

Most have developed abstractions to reduce platform and service specific dependency:

https://github.com/rclone/rclone

From a maintenance perspective, one must not assume a NAS is a backup, but rather a high-bandwidth local/VPN file share.

* maids unplug equipment to vacuum offices (yes, this does really happen.)

* drives fail eventually, bit-rot is a thing, and filesystems evolve over time

* hardware specific features will always become a problem eventually. No one will check a degraded RAID/ZFS setup without service telemetry.

Practical options:

* sshfs + JBOD mount is fine for most home win11/bsd/linux/macOS/iOS/android users, as simple things have less failure modes and less time-cost to repair.

* fault tolerant systems like CephFS are usually too complex for home users. However, https://www.45drives.com offers a support option for small offices.

* ZFS has a lot of tradeoffs, and most people don't use the better key features (auto-snap-shotting and docker/VM deduplication.) In some cases even F2FS will also work fine, and probably last a bit longer with consumer flash drives.

* I agree the IT support issue with distros like TrueNAS or openmediavault becomes a popularity contest over what features are supported long-term.

It is often better to use a generic OpenBSD or Debian OS installation, and run the rclone network share abstractions on PC/Mac clients. Android and iPhone both have sftp clients for auto media backups over router VPN as well..

Lightning always wins every argument, an offsite VPN to remote file-backup is usually wise. =3

That means the one you buy probably also doesn't get those things right.

For me, it was laziness. While I have the skills to built one from parts, I just wanted a big drive in an aesthetically pleasing box. I didn't want a project. I wanted something small and somewhat rugged. So I got a synology 5-bay almost seven years ago and have never looked back. It lives beside my UPS and wifi router in a small tower, all objects I expect to "just work" for months on end without any attention.

My AI rig ... that is a project. (After a kernel update, one of my GPUs has disappeared. Fixing that will be a project for my next day off.) I don't want my NAS to ever become a weekend project.

Hot-swappable, lockable drive bays with individual LED indicators. Needing more SATA ports than PCs typically come with. Features like auto-shutdown on USP failure that work out of the box. NICs with more than 1 Gbps. Lower power usage.

Maybe power efficiency?

And simplicity. And cost vs suitability for purpose. And form factor. And vendor support for the unit.

Jank ass recycled pcs and expensive, overbuilt diy rigs simply don’t even belong in the same conversation.

i did that, and really wish i bought something , mostly because i have like 4 hhds just lying in the bottom of the case

My old case was a big workstation one with 10 drive bays already. Definitely preferable to having them loose

I bought a plastic tower for disks which let's me have 10 disks with some space between them. I then bought some Artic fans and attached them with tape to the 'tower'. Then I used a 11 years old optiplex 990 as Debian zfs connected to 8 of the disks, and I have 2 spares which I'll be able to use when the others die.

Performance is great. I could do it because I was given those disks for free, with plenty of ours on each of them.

Several hardware generations back, my old 4x160GB raid5 had two drives on the bottom of the case, held on by screws going through holes I drilled in the outer wall of the case.

These days I managed to snag a deal on a Supermicro 846. I'm still settling into it, the main thing that concerns me is being able to suck enough air through the drive bays without making a lot of noise. My previous incarnation used some iStar toolless drive bays. I've learned to appreciate hot-swap bays, mainly for only having to do the cabling once.

Situation on market is very simple to explain: People spending months in 8-5 jobs to save money to buy HW don't bother to spend few minutes to make research on what they're buying.

I have Ugreen DXP4800 plus NAS with 10-core i5-1235u and 32GB RAM, 10GBit LAN for price of what people pay for Synology with 4-core low power Ryzen 1500 and 8GB RAM and 2,5GBit LAN.

And if I wanted to save money, I would buy some older workstation for pennies with hell lot of GB ECC's, lots of caddy's add extenion cards for NVMe.

I do the same with Debian. An old 3079 nvidia card for the server, docker for most service, and the onboard amd onboard discrete gpu passed through to a blueiris vm. Power is a bit higher but I’m fine with the flexibility and lack of vendor lock in and upgrade paths. If it dies any zfs machine could mount those drives.

>using an old PC I had and it works great. Don't know why people are so crazy about buying prebuilt NASes.

The problem is the "old pc" is typically a desktop-class cpu which is very power hungry. (~100 watts). And to make things worse, the older cpu has slower performance that doesn't justify the extra watts it consumes.

For 17+ years, I used a 2008 era Intel DX58SO motherboard + Core i7 920 in a full size Silverstone tower case as my NAS. It originally started with 1.5 TB drives and I just kept upgrading the drives all the way up to 16 TB. It worked ok and was reliable so I was never interested in turnkey NAS appliance like Synology, etc. I also wanted to install my own os, plus recycle/reuse/repurpose philosophy, and not be shackled by a proprietary NAS ... yada yada yada. The big problem with re-using my old PC is that at idle, it consumed 125 watts.

Electricity isn't 11 cents per kWh like it was 17 years ago. It's now 21c/kWh -- and will keep going up because of AI, oil prices, etc.

Last month, I did a lot of research to reduce the power usage and ended up buying a UGREEN DXP4800 Pro NAS appliance. UGREEN lets you install your own os and it uses a laptop-class cpu (much better performance specs than Synology) which is much more power efficient. At idle, it consumes just 25 watts. Also, the Intel i3-1315U in the UGREEN has a Geekbench score of 2124 which beats the i7 920 of 450. So 4x the performance while using 1/5th the power usage!

I briefly considered "upgrading" my DX58SO/i7-920 to another old pc (2014 era) X99/i7-5820K. That's slightly more power efficient of ~80 watts idle. However, running ffmpeg to convert videos makes it jump to ~180w! The UGREEN can do the same ffmpeg conversion with better performance and yet it only increases to ~45 watts.

Another unexpected bonus of lower power usage is that my server room temperature is noticeably less warm, and the lower power UGREEN gets 3x the runtime on the APC battery backup when there's a power outage. The UGREEN did cost $700 but the savings on the electricity bill will recover that in about 4 years.

I also like the UGREEN toolless hard drive sleds. The old Silverstone tower hd sleds required screws. I also like the smaller footprint. The NAS appliance was a total quality-of-life improvement.

The only thing I "lost" from the old tower setup was the CD/DVD drive bay. But I don't rip discs anymore so I that doesn't matter. If I really really wanted to, I can hook up a DVD drive to the UGREEN via a SATA-to-USB adapter but I hope to never buy physical media again so I don't expect that will happen.

There's an allure to re-using a "free" old PC as a NAS and there's also the pride of a DIY storage solution. However, that mindset also makes one overlook the negatives of that setup. Sometimes, "free" items actually cost more money.

I got a UGREEN DXP6800 about two weeks ago on which I installed FreeBSD, and was just noticing today how slow the USB is when I saw this article mentioning a possible explanation (like ten times slower than when I plug the same external SSD into another machine). Have you noticed USB bandwidth issues in your setup or is it likely just some misconfiguration on my part?

I believe that the target market for this equipment is small / medium size enterprises that need a solution for local storage of whatever information they process in their day-to-day operations. So, they won't have a system administrator on staff. They would rather try to assemble their computer system themselves or pay someone once to put things together. In this context, having a pre-built component that one can plug into the larger system is what customers would be looking for.

It's similar to the days when buying a PC would involve either finding a friend who could read the specs from the computer shop, make a list and assemble the PC once all the components are bought, or you'd buy a build from the shop (with some extra markup for the service). And today most PC users have moved on to laptops if not just even phones.

Most people will use what's commercially available. Today, most NAS users won't have an old PC case with HDD mounts laying around. They will have to buy something, and that something will likely be a pre-built NAS, the kind this article is written about. And similar to how laptops are a form of enshitification of desktops, these NAS boxes are too. Removing modularity drives the price down, but also doesn't allow the users the ability to repair and to study the product they own.

People aren't "crazy" about buying pre-built NAS boxes. It's what there is, they buy what's available.

Power consumption?

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