Asking as I’ve got a lot of spare components lying around that I’m planning on turning into a NAS. If it doesn’t work out I’ll buy a pre-built enclosure and reuse the drives.
Got a Xeon E5-2690v2 with TrueNAS Scale and a Synology DS418. Having used both pretty heavily over the years I can safely say I'm indifferent. The Synology is efficient; the TrueNAS Scale box performs really well with the added bonus of being able to run Kubernetes and Docker workloads. They're both sitting in their respective corners, doing their respective things, with minimal intervention.
I bought a used Datto NAS and put xpenology on it. Without drives, $300 got me 4 bays, 1 internal 2.5", dual 10gb nics, and 32gb of ecc ddr4. If you're ok using the hacked bootloader for synology's os, it's hard to beat.
That's functionally it. Instead of quick connect I just run Tailscale/OpenVPN if I need to access it away from home. You also can't get easy SSL Certs in the gui, but it you can get them yourself and upload them if needed. If you DIY, your CPU also won't show up correctly in the GUI, but works just fine. Otherwise, I don't notice anything missing.
There's a few different loader options since DSM 7.x, but I've been using "TinyCore RedPill Loader Build Support Tool ( M-Shell )" with zero issues throughout multiple updates. They've even semi-recently gotten it working to support auto updates with no manual builder reloading. Much lessy finicky that the DSM 5/6 days.
So yeah, it's grey area bootloader... but I've been using it daily since 2016 with no real issues.
I picked up an old Dell Optiplex tower and slapped 4 cheap 4 TB drives in it. Setup as RAID 5 I got 12 TB of "redundant" storage for cheap! Perfect spot to keep all the p0rn torrents.
But I used OpenMediaVault for that deployment. It's been OK.... but I kinda feel that I am missing out on some of the more active developments of other distributions.
Despite that, I would absolutely suggest grabbing an old office computer and throwing some drives into it for a home NAS.
It’s the power usage and physical space that puts me off those kind of solutions. Of course, that varies a lot based on your living circumstances (location, whether you own a house, etc).
Understand that this is a rabbit hole where you’ll hear a million opinions. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend keeping it simple. It’s been a while since I looked at what’s new, but I’d look at truenas scale or unraid first.
I personally use truenas core (based on freebsd) but truenas scale (based on debian) opens up more options like docker that might be useful in the future.
I recommend sticking to hardware you already own until you run into something that you can’t do. Then you’ll have a better idea of what to look for and how everything works.
Thanks, the flexibility and closed source (I assume) of turn key solutions puts me off them. I’ve already got a raspberry pi running a few containers and I work with docker and Linux in my day job so I know a decent amount. The form factor of the turnkey solutions is the big draw for me at the moment to them as I’ve just got a spare ATX mid size tower handy. Would ideally replace with smaller case but then I’d need a smaller motherboard and that’s just raising costs for starting out. Potential upgrade path anyway.
I have a node 304 case with an itx board and I wish I’d have gone with something bigger with more expansion slots. Some sata ports died on me so I installed an hba card to give me more. That means I can’t add a 10g nic or a video card for hardware acceleration or…you get the idea. Ideally spend less money now and experiment, then in the future you’ll hopefully learn what suits your needs.
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