Can I build a NAS out of a desktop? [Request]

comfydecal@infosec.pub to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 52 points –

n00b question, sorry. If I had a desktop that could hold 4 HD and 2 SSD, could I turn it into a NAS? Could someone point me in the right direction if this makes sense?

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Yep. Just install Linux, plug it into your router, set a static ip, and install the nas software ya want.

There are plenty of approaches. ChatGPT is great at debugging issues and helping ya through the setup. I did this with a raspberry pi and external usb drive the other week.

Nice, didn't realize a NAS could be on smaller hardware. Thanks for the info!

Some people even use Raspberry Pis as their NAS. I use an old MacBook (5th gen i5) as a home server with 2 external hard drives as a NAS, which also runs a few docker containers like Jellyfin. Before that, I was using an old PC with 1st gen i3 for all these things.

yes, try freenas/truenas

You totally can, but since it will be on all day with 4 hdd look into wattages you want to live with. There are some small NUCs or Pi based NAS with low wattages. There is OpenMediaVault, FreeNAS/TrueNAS software to install

Hey sorry, thinking on this more, could I just turn on the NAS when desired? What is the benefit of running it constantly?

Yep, look into Wake On LAN if you just want to power the NAS on remotely.

My NAS also powers on at certaIn times of day and off again after a while - IF - no-one's connected / no network traffic / etc.

I do NOT need my NAS on at 3am...

Edit : forgot to say, check out OpenMediaVault

Note that there is some reliability drawback of spinning hard disks on and off repeatedly. maybe unintuitively HDDs that spin constantly can live much longer than those that spend 90% of their time spun down.

This might not be relevant if you use only SSDs, and might never affect you, but it should be mentioned.

Stellar! Thanks for the info!

You can also configure the HDDs to power down when they're not in use. HDDs are the biggest power consumer anyway.

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You could totally turn on as needed, WakeOnLan is good for that. But typically when people run a NAS it is for streaming audio, video, file sync and backups and maybe docker running other services so the NAS is typically on 24/7 so it is available on demand. But it doean't have to be 100% uptime if you don't want it to be. For example I have two OpenMediaVaults one on a pi and one an old IomegaNAS. The pi is on always with an attached drive, and serves Samba Shares and DLNA/DAAP shares. Has docker running syncthing, CUPS print server, Trillium Notes, and homeassistant; so makes sense for it to be on all day, especially because my wife's system backsup to it daily automatically. The converted Iomega NAS is mainly a backup machine sInce it is old and not as performant (only has 100 network speed. So that gets turned on to do a bulk backup and not much else.

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No reason why not. May be a little power-hungry depending on the spec but if you already have it go for it. FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) is the usually suggested OS to run: https://www.truenas.com/freenas/

Since you have 4 HDD slots probably run 4 disks in a RAID 5 so think of how much space you need. RAID 5 is n-1 so if you have 4x 10TB drives you will be left with 30TB of space before formatting. You can calculate here: https://www.raid-calculator.com/

Then either mirror the SSDs for OS and caching or just use one. Depends on your budget really.

Maybe I'm dumb but looking at wikipedia I'm a bit confused. Seems like you can do this on almost any linux distro. What is the reason behind setting up a dedicated OS, cost of operation, stability, performance?

kinda the same reason people suggest something like linux mint over slackware, gentoo, arch, etc… mint is easy to install and is preconfigured to be an easy to use user desktop environment. you can configure any other option to be have like that, but they tend to be a bit more “DIY”, which is great if you know what you’re doing!

dedicated NAS OSes will have good software out of the box that make it easy to configure and manage various common disk-related configurations (RAID, SMB, NFS, etc). you can certainly do all this yourself, but it might not have a pretty, unified user interface, or you might have to deal with software that isn’t compatible with some version of a library that’s in your distro of choice… all resolvable things, but they take time to solve: anywhere from installing a package manually to applying a kernel patch and recompiling the kernel to get something to work

Power consumption is the main issue. If it's an old, power hungry desktop and you live somewhere with expensive electricity, it can be quite costly to run. If you have an energy efficient desktop or have cheap power then it will be fine. Just make sure it has a good quality power supply if it's going to run 24/7.

Absolutely anything can be turned into a NAS, as long as you're aware of your own needs and the hardware's capabilities. A NAS is just a computer with some specific requirements.

When I first built my NAS, it only used parts that I got for free. A cheap micro ATX board with only two RAM slots, an i3-4160 CPU, 2x2G RAM, a worn-out SSD, and a 1T HDD. It couldn't run something like TrueNAS, but it was enough for Proxmox and some Alpine containers running services like Samba, Transmission, Wireguard, and a small Debian VM for me to fuck around with. The single storage disk means there is no redundancy, so I only store replaceable data on it, like TV shows and installers.

There are many hardware-focused channels on video platforms that offer guides for budget home servers. Wolfgang's Channel is good, and Hardware Haven and Raid Owl just finished a competition of building a sub-$200 home lab.

It'll work fine. A NAS is just a PC. Try Unraid if you want a user friendly UI. It costs money but it's only a one off payment for a lifetime license, and they have a free trial.

Anything that can can provide storage attached to the network is a potential NAS. It doesn't take a lot of power to just offer and store files. If you start getting into stuff like live transcoding or heavy encrypt/decrypt that's a bit different matter.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
LXC Linux Containers
NAS Network-Attached Storage
NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
Plex Brand of media server package
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

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Of course. Just put disks in and set up whatever remote filesystem and it's a NAS.

Another option is to use openmediavault.

I haven't looked at truenas.

TrueNAS is very good at being a NAS. I used it for some time but eventually moved to CasaOS because it's better at being a home server.

I hadn't heard of CasaOS before; looks very cool. I am currently on TrueNAS and it's been fine, but I had been running it in a VM because it wasn't a good fit for running other things along side it. This seems like an interesting solution, thanks!

My first NAS was an old desktop that I got for $300 running an FX-6300 and a GTX 550, I slapped a couple hard drives in there, installed Ubuntu, and made an SMB share.

I'd recommend installing TrueNAS Scale on a system rather than doing what I did in part due to it being so much better than what I was doing, but you could run it on a potato if you wanted.

Hell my latest NAS upgrade is going from a PowerEdge T610 (tower server from like 2010ish) running TrueNAS Scale to a normal desktop (from 2017) running TrueNAS Scale

If anything using normal desktop hardware makes servicing it easier than using old server hardware

Unraid is a great option for anyone, but beginners in particular. It does, however, cost money and isn't open source.

Thanks for the resource, might be good to at least research. Thanks!

My NAS is an mATX mobo with an i5, 64G RAM, 8 disk drives, 3 nvme drives, and an ARC GPU for video transcoding.

Disk drives are all mirrored. One nvme runs NixOS which is easy enough to redeploy if the drive dies. One nvme is cache on top of the disk drives. Last nvme I use for temp fast storage like Jellyfin transcoding.

Its more of a combo NAS/server as I run most self hosted apps on it (tor node, monero node, jellyfin, *arr stack, etc).

I just got an arc for jellyfin transcoding. Could you tell me more about your setup for that?