What's a good solution for a small NAS?
I'm looking to offload all my media from my main PC and make it accessible to other devices in my house. It's likely to only be a few TB, probably 2 drives at most.
I've been trying to find a low-power solution since it will be running all the time. I do have a PoE switch, so it would be a bonus if it can run off PoE but not a requirement. I've been checking out a lot of the SBC's that have become popular over the past couple years, but even the budget ones have gotten pretty expensive.
What are some good options?
Currently running as my backup NAS is the ODROID-HC4. It’s running Open Media Vault on Armbian. https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/
That looks pretty decent. I don't like the toaster form factor, but I'm sure I can just use SATA extensions and 3d print a good case for it.
OMV can run NFS, right?
Yup. Including smb and ftp
I'm also watching this as I'm in the same boat. I can't help I'm afraid but I imagine people might ask if you want to ever transcode to the other devices.
I probably won't need to transcode anything, I just want it to serve files as they are.
You know that NAS can go in sleep mode, right? And wake up only when you try to activate them.
But what is the use-case? Only make your holiday films available to a media center? Or do you plan to also use it as a storage for other devices?
In the first case a sbc can do the trick (however can struggle if you share 4k). But I would definitely look into "real" NAS (Synology, qnas, etc.) before using a sbc.
It's just for using as shared storage between several devices. Just receive files from whichever device I'm using, and serve them later to another device. Basically to replace having to use an external drive and swapping it between devices.
Any modern SBC is better than that crap.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 20 acronyms.
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PoE = Power Over Ethernet
How much do you want to spend?
If you go for a Raspberry Pi have a look at Terrapi cases as well the obvious Argon ones.
Another option would be a Zimbaboard. It is more expensive but it has dual SATA connector (you need to buy a Y cable with the Zimbaboard) and there are 3D print designs to create a single unit, e.g. https://www.printables.com/model/224057-zimaboard-dual-hdd-stand.
I'm not sure about PoE and a NAS. Will a PoE HAT or similar provide enough power for the board and the drives?
I use a NanoPi M4 V2, which has a SATA hat accessory. It will support 4 HDDs and even power them if they are all 2.5" drives, or you can do what I did and use 4x 3.5" drives in a simple cheap cage and a separate 12V 8A power supply on the side to power the lot. No problems streaming 4K x265 content using Plex (with a compatible Plex Media Client)