Recommend me a decent but cheap NAS

jherazob@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 4 points –

Ideally one that can use more than one disk so that i can expand it later when i can. Have some minimal experience with Synology since there's one at work and i have interacted with it a couple times and like the interface, but am not married to any brand as long as it works.

Located in EU if it makes any difference.

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I ended up going with a smaller Synology as it was actually replacing a RaspberryPi + External drive setup that was failing.

At the end of the day, the Synology was much more expensive, but for me it was worth the trade-off to have a mostly plug and play setup. I can easily move files around in a GUI. I can setup torrents, even configure it to use a VPN and it all takes minutes instead of researching configurations and managing daemons and processes like I had to do previously.

Edit: Also, don't forget to take into account power consumption when reviewing options. There can be a big difference between running an old desktop 24/7 as a NAS versus a Raspberry Pi.

Buy the cheapest old computer on your equivalent of Craigslist and install TrueNAS. If you want to use a lot of drives, make sure there are enough SATA connenctions on the motherboard.

You can also put an LSI SAS raid controller card flashed into IT into a PCI slot and use SAS to SATA cables. Can easily find them used on ebay for reasonable prices. And if you really grow your server, you can transition those SAS ports to point to a JBOD array with SAS ports, although that takes you from "cheap" to "cheap when compared to buying new."

I'm also a fan of Unraid since it makes expanding the array much easier, but you have to pay for it, and it's designed with the assumption that the only thing you're doing on the bare metal is storage, and everything else is either containerized or in a VM.

Unless you have some really high throughput needs, or are putting it in a real weak computer, I recommend software raid like zfs. No need for a real raid controller unless you just need additional sata ports. Heck, even synologys prefer software RAID these days and they have atom or arm processors.

I use a Raspberry Pi 4B with a USB 3 JBOD 4-bay disk enclosure, with the disks in a ZFS pool, and it has been working great for my needs.

Synology are very good and have good dedicated models for home usage. Way better than old PC. There are YouTube channels about nases, they compare different brands and models - check them.

"Cheap" is a relative term.

the old PC thing is a clear first choice. Also a WD NAS, preloaded with Hard drives have a very good prince point if you also need the HDDs e.g. The WD My Cloud EX2 with 2x6TB HD is currently 422€ (amazon spain) and each individual 6TB WD red is 200€. (leaving the NAS at 20€). If you get the 24TB version is even cheaper than the two HD combined.

I would hesitate with WD. I’ve always been a fan of their drives but their software straight up wiped people’s backup disks a few years ago, iirc. That would give me pause before ever using their software again.

I agree with the hesitancy on WD. They're also starting to automatically flag NAS drives older than 3 years with a warning flag. Plus when they shipped out SMR drives as Red drives a few years back... https://youtu.be/cLGi8sPLkLY

Really any PC could be made into a NAS. If you have any old PC laying around you can install Linux to it, and then set up disk shares. I'm assuming you mean an appliance like NAS and honestly the only one I know of, but never used, is Synology.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre computers are great for this. I got one off eBay for $30 (just make sure it comes with their proprietary AC adapter).

I'm also in the market for this.

I'm considering setting up a raspberry pi4 nas, and would love to hear pros and cons from people with experience on the matter.

I assume there are faster solutions, but I think it should meet my needs well

I made one with an R-pi and hard drive with Open Media Vault. It was pretty easy to set up, and I haven't had any trouble with it. Only one disk so far, since I don't have that much stuff.

The main issue is if you try to attach multiple portable drives. My Pi 3B+ could only really power a single HDD, but I wanted to attach multiple. The only solution there was a powered USB hub. I eventually got an old Lenovo mini PC and used that.

Yeah, I'm just split between that or an odroid hc4. I wouldn't even need to buy a case for it.

I wouldn't recommend a Pi 4 even if you can get one at the listed price. It is fast enough but it lacks the interface and connectivity for a decent NAS.

My setup is a raspberry pi with a large external hard drive running smbd, and it works fine.

What model pi? How responsive do you find it?

Don't know about that guy but I use a RasPi 4 with a four bay laptop drive toaster. Four terabyte drives and it works great for streaming to multiple devices.

I think it's a base model 3, no gobs of memory. I don't use it for anything especially taxing, just file storage and occasionally streaming music or low-resolution video. The bottleneck is the slow WD Archive hard drive.

I've been running a QNAP TS-435UeX and it checks all the boxes coming in with a mountain of hardware and capability for cheap. Dual 10 GB SFP+ ports, dual SSD slots for raided read write acceleration, user upgradeable memory. It does a lot of stuff and it's an appliance so all the building out and troubleshooting crap is done for you, you just do what you want to do and be productive. The onboard encryption engine can fill the bandwidth of those SFP+ ports even if they're bonded. 4 drive bays, but you can also add another 12 via a couple of different sized expansion boxes.

It's a 1U so the fans are kinda small, therefore it's a bit noisy. The desktop version should be alright though.

I've been running a Buffalo 220, 2 bay drive for over 6 years now. I use it to host my Plex media non-stop for that time. Only issues are sometimes when there is a power loss, it gets unmounted or gets reassigned a new IP from the router, but thats mostly me not assigning a static private IP. I believe the one I have only allows for max 8TB but I think it can go up to 16TB. Do not know what the prices are in EU but it similar or slightly cheaper than Synology in price. https://www.buffalo-technology.com/productpage/linkstation-ls220d/

A year ago I bought an Adjustor AS3304t to replace my xpenology frankenas. I have been pretty happy with it as a NAS, but it is not as good as a Synology. Still out was pretty inexpensive and work well for is primary purpose.

I recommend building your own. Just get something that can hold a lot of disks, and then put in however many you need for your data and redundancy. I like XigmaNas for the software because RAIDz. / zfs.

I've spent entirely too long in the last week or so researching this. You either go cheap but DIY, or expensive but prebuilt. That's not to say that a DIY is always cheaper than a prebuilt, you can go absolutely nuts if you want, but the performance and spec will always be better for the money going DIY. Hot swap drawers are over-rated as you'll maybe use them once a year if that. I can't recommend any specific prebuilt because I haven't used any and am waiting for parts for my DIY build.