Is buying a NAS worth it or am I better of building my own version with a raspberry pi or a small PC?

>building my own version with a raspberry pi or a small PC

this I believe more flexibility. most raid/nas enclosures are shit. I plan on getting a server board to play around with

>Is buying a NAS worth it
It saves some time BUT you can easily assemble a faster Linux NAS or one with more drive capability cheaper or far cheaper on your own.

At 2 drives or below, Odroid or Rock64Pro or some such have you covered better than RPi, they are better passively cooled and got no bottlenecks on the networking.

At 4-8 drives it usually is not a bad idea to just grab an onboard Asrock and build a cube case with that. On the lower end of that count you can still easily use a Chinese PicoPSU clone or an original, above that you just use normal PSU.

At 6+ drives it's also OPTIONALLY worth considering a Ryzen 2200/2400g or i3 or some such. That shit then scales to like 16-20 drives with decent enough speed, but... yea, not going to detail the variants on that.

As for software - Linux with mdadm or snapraid+mergerfs are rather obivous, Optionally LUKS encrypt all drives with a key file on your OS drive just so you can toss the drives you RMA/replace safely.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3200G
Case: Fractal Design Node 304 Mini-ITX
Whatever m-ITX motherboard, RAM, storage and PSU you want to spend money on.
Software: FreeNAS

>most raid/nas enclosures are shit
That is no longer entirely true - thanks to a lot of entities asking for docker they added many more powerful machines.

But they DO cost too damn much vs self-assembled Linux box.

On the RPi4? Uh, I think Ethernet performance was fine now, WLAN very uninspiring.

But this maymay now almost absolutely certainly needs to be actively cooled (even the last one was bad, this one is worse):
jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-needs-fan-heres-why-and-how-you-can-add-one

IMO really, really just avoid meme pi. Get an Odroid, Rock64Pro - some such. Or with more drives an Asrock/Gigabyte onboard Intel, and with even more drives some Ryzen or such. Shit will work okay that way.

>no ecc memory

It's a measure against some very low probability issue with almost certainly not terribly high impact when it even happens.

There are maybe data sets and machines that make this protection worthwhile, but you don't really automatically need ECC.

AMD Ryzen 3 3200G supports ecc.

Depends. If you know anything about *nix, build your own (way more flexibility, and lower cost). A raspberry pi could also work depending on the usage (simple file server for one person is ok, but don't run any heavy workloads like video encoding or VM storage of it).

Unironucally this can be done with Windows Media Player

Could be done, but arguably Jellyfin or Kodi are kinda nicer.

The earlier is also just fine in a container, so you could grab the docker-compose example and deploy it in a minute or two.

Also is for you.

BTW since this very often comes up: Avoid realtime transcoding if at all possible. It's not all that nice anyhow.

Fix playback devices. If your TV has a trash OS or trash WLAN, get a $20-100 Chinese Windows/Android HTPC or something. Don't get a $700 two 4k stream transcoding machine that burns $100 or 200Eur of power every year when running 24/7.

Qnap is definitely great but it's expensive. Also arm built Qnaps are not that fast.

debian buster has guaranteed software updates until 2024, unlike that proprietary chink box

Watch your power consumption. I tend to like a Pi for its low power over a repurposed desktop.

Yeah, mine's not an ARM chip.

>FreeNAS
Nice, non-expandable, overkill meme

i used to stream my media over emby to my smart tv but it had trouble with lager files (pause/resuming took ages, forward and rewind crashed the whole movie) - 20gb+

everything is connected with ethernet. no wlan streaming

with usb 3.0 everything is fine but its annoying plugging it to my pc/tv when i get new media

sorry my english is trash

Depending on your needs or how many spare parts you have at home.

Also for the love of God almighty don't use a fucking raspi for a NAS. It's literally not fit for that purpose.

What about the R4 with gigabit port?

Recently built my own using a Ryzen APU, 16 gigs of RAM, and 4 of those refurb Hitachi 4TB hard drives that are everywhere dirt cheap right now. The all in one solutions were very tempting but in the end I didn't want to be locked into their software. FreeNAS was a compromise, but I knew that when I installed it.
If a NAS box existed that was a simple ARM SBC with 4 HDD bays and a microSD card slot to fit the OS I would have bought one in a heartbeat.

What if I have 3 drives? Do I just neck myself?

Everyone here is wrong if they say to build your own one. Its too much hassle, too complex to setup all just for your own personal use. Just get the syntology NAS they're the best.

Unless you know Linux commands and stuff don't build your own, you will regret it, espeically if you try and go with freeNAS garbage.

You buy a 4th drive. I guess 3 drives could do a raid 5 but it just seems stupid.

check out ODROID-HC1: Home Cloud One
for octa-core NAS better than raspberry pi

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Nah. you're just sitting in between the choice of attaching one USB drive externally to a Rock64[Pro] or Odroid something, or starting to build an onboard x86 with some asrock/gigabyte board.

The latter may be wise since if you're actually need 3 drives, you might expand to 4 drives.

>$59 for an external hard drive bay with ethernet port
>but no usb 3
>"It's a fucking octocore!"
>with only 2 gigs of ddr3
>power supply sold separately
>doesn't even run 12 volts to properly power a 3.5" hdd while using off the shelf PSUs like the Nvidia Tegra
>RAID array? Just buy another one and JBOD that shit.
This is why I hate Odroid. They have the potential to make good shit but they jew hard and/or drop the ball every time.

i bet the fan is loud as fuck
also, no ntfs support

what's best for running four 10 tb drives in raid 6?

Fan is inaudible except when it starts up.
Why would you need or want NTFS on a NAS?

Does a dozen seeders count as off site backup?

I built my own. The advantage of making your own, is that you can also use it as an entertainment machine for your TV. Mine is overclocked from 1.5GHz to 2GHz also.

I am in the middle of making a NAS as we speak.

My Decade old i7 920 x58 died the other week after a serving proud.

Incredibly i managed to score this junked core 2 duo 4gb ram with the same case FOR FREE. Gonna install Debian Buster and run whole hodgepod of drives over the years and will be Mirroring 8tb

I had a whole bunch of seagate 2tb drives fall over and almost fuck me... i really need to buy some new 8tb but have been too poor.

Anyways can any rec some good cheap PCI Sata cards ?? dont need any special raid just more ports.

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Linux mdadm.

I would say worth it. By the time you add all the parts, the pre built NAS is the better option.

forgot pic

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Uh... what? There aren't even that many parts involved.

It is if you don't want ghetto shit like this or using old towers.

Odroid/Rock64 + case + microSD

or

PSU & case, mainboard with onboard CPU, RAM

And then the external cables and the HDD that you also put on/in a typical NAS box. Maybe I forgot something?

>ghetto shit like this
elaborate

ECC memory is only worth it in a production environment or you intend on using NAS 24/7. If you are just using it for bulk data storage and doesn't need 24/7 access. You really don't need ECC memory especially if you relax timings and intentionally underclock the memory by a small margin.

This, Syntology or QNAP or refurb'd HP shit.

Just buy an external USB drive?

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Look to Ebay for used servers. Bag an HP N40L/Gen 10 model for cheap. These come with EEC ram. Load it with drives. Install Freenas.

Create datasets, Copy over your data. Setup e-mail alerts/disk scrubs/smart tests.

Last - Enjoy life and not having to worry about "bitrot" or "drive failure" Use the server as it was meant for - just works. If something happens you'll get an e-mail from the server.

Build it right and your server will run for years without any problems and your data will remain intact with zero degradation/errors. Half ass it and watch as your data just shits on you.

Do you want to re-rip/re download your media collection if you get hit by bitrot/errors/failure? Fuck no. You want to do it once and then just enjoy it for years till your dead. I've got 4TB of just media (that's small). Do you think I wanna redo it all? Hell no. My porn stash is 5TB (small), I don't wanna redo it either.

ZFS/REFS + backup/ups is your only hope.

>slower ram won't bit flip
Source: right out of my ass

nases regularly fuck you on warranties and use proprietary parts that make fixing them a no go unless you are comfortable with dealing with hacked together psus.

you are better off building your own nas out of old server parts, if a pi will get you by or not is really a matter of what you are looking to do.

>offsite backup
>ecc memory
>brand new ryzen builds
>for watching movies

Agree with all this up until the file system, at which point I would suggest ZFS.

Damn right. My QNAP from 8 years ago still gets software and firmware updates.

Done this

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>QNAP
>great
What the fuck are you guys smoking? The software is the absolute worst I've ever seen. Several years after the release of the hardware the initial setup still has fatal bugs (dialog for downloading a desktop environment fails with "no internet connection" error message despite you seeing the current external ip in the bottom right corner), the virtual switch software is still fucked up and randomly breaks down even further thanks to half-assed firmware updates.

A lot of the dialogs and UI forms haven't been tested at all. Many of them act like a bullet hell game: you have to memorize the exact orders in which to fill in the forms and which dialog options to click when the nonsensical error messages appear. The only shit tier software problem I HAVEN'T seen with QNAP is the one where deleting [insert form] entries you've made disappear from the UI but are still stored, giving you the error message "duplicate entry" when you try to readd the entry you've deleted.

The connectivity features are awesome in general too. You have a DNS feature, but you can't use just any IPs from the virtual machines or virtual switches, only the ONE GATEWAY WAN is hardcoded, despite there being TWO WAN connectors in the device.

Not to mention you get to enjoy completely random data loss with QTS's Download Station that has the freshest Torrent client ever: it's based on libtorrent from 2014! Of course you can't update it.
>download 500GB torrent
>torrent client freezes to "Moving" after finishing
>reboot the app
>the data is gone now

You'd be better off building your NAS on a Macbook pro and you'd still get better bang for your buck.

Fuck QNAP.

>*DDNS feature

I made an xpenlolgy nas of an N54L. works well.

Get one of those old HP Microservers. They were made up to Ivy Bridge, IIRC.

friend got a synology recently
fucking expensive for what is essentially a netbook in a case with a bunch of hdd slots
got me to set it up, put two ssds in it for cache, they show up under /dev and i can read/write to them from the shell, but the systems' webui doesn't display them, so i can't use them, synology's support doesn't have an idea either

Unfortunately, unlike every other Ryzen, Ryzen APUs do not support ECC. The memory works, but there's no parity.

I've heard speculation that this is because the GPU's memory interface doesn't support ECC, and that limitation is somehow shared with the CPU.

I learned this the hard way, because I built a Ryzen APU NAS with ECC RAM, and it's not operating in ECC mode. Now I want to upgrade it with a 3600 and a low-end discrete GPU, so my ECC will work, but I can't afford it right now.

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I don't know what you need exactly but I have a router with a usb 3 external hard drive attached to it. It works just fine and it's cheap too.

Cool. What level RAID are you running on that?

>that cute little fan grill on a fan so small you probably couldn't get your finger in there anyway

just buy an stx board a pentium and some hdds should be the same price and not be a gimped arm machine on proprietary locked down fw

>freenas
Why fucking bother?
Literally just set up NFS shares on ANY os. Windows has winnfsd and its perfect.

>its too much hassle to type in a folder location and hit "share"
You people are retards.

>NFS is the only reason to use FreeNAS
Jow Forums in 2019

>an OS that is designed solely at hosting network attached storage is worth using over literally any OS that is designed as general purpose, and can also host network file shares
Give me one good fucking reason to use freeNAS over even SMB/samba

i hope this is bait

How the fuck is a qnap box shit? Software is good hardware is cheap. The drives are the most expensive part. I'm guessing you've never even used them

Its not. Using a dedicated NAS OS, proprietary or otherwise, is bonafide retarded.

It's really hard to put together a build that is comparable to premade and for price, and power consumption these days.

It protects you against memory controller and motherboard tracings shenanigans which are much more likely to be the source of "silent data corruption" then backroom cosmic radiation (unless you live in a high elevation). Ironically, ECC is mainly designed to protect data against that. The whole protection against background radiation is just an added bonus.

>using a dedicated NAS OS, proprietary or otherwise, is bonafide retarded
Do you know what attack surface means? Running Windows, of all operating systems you could choose as a "NAS OS" is five million times more retarded.

Not really true any old i3 and a Mobo with enough sata ports is plenty. Second hand market is full of them. How many hard drives are needed exactly? My NAS has been scaled down to just a 2TB SSD hanging off the usb3 port on my router. Extremely low power consumption , extremely high speed and I can access it from anywhere because my router is also a VPN server. Also a single Samsung Evo SSD is a hell of a lot more reliable than spinning disks in raid

It's not. Most are basically exactly like some J5005 build (which you can buy onboard of an Asrock and I think also Gigabyte and other boards).

Some other devices are like an i3 build which you can optionally substitute with a Ryzen or such.

Strictly consider whether your old i3 is power efficient though. Not all are. Usually just get a new one that is power efficient for the drive count and performance required.

> My NAS has been scaled down to just a 2TB SSD hanging off the usb3 port on my router.
Also not the worst option depending on the router and firmware.

> Also a single Samsung Evo SSD is a hell of a lot more reliable than spinning disks in raid
No chance, sorry. A RAID6 array is most definitely more reliable by far.

What's a good external enclosure that:
* Uses an SFF-8088 SAS connector
* Is tray-less
* Is powered by external 12V DC
?

Haha. Ah bud. Raid 6 with spinning disks is incredibly slow, it will have a raid controller as a point of failure or a software raid OS which is another more complicated point of failure. The disks themselves are stupidly unreliable. Raid check summing and re building take forever and the whole thing will be gimped by either the processor or 1gb Ethernet connection unless you stump up a lot more cash.

I'm a sys admin and I can tell you that 8tb disks fail a lot but every single Samsung Evo I've bought for my company (laptops mostly) have never failed all of them at 95% health after 2 years usage. Every single raid array I've dealt with using enterprise SAS disk drives is more unrelaible than a single Samsung sata SSD with the exception of ultra cheap DRAM less ones which I didn't buy but have seen fail out in the wild.

So my home NAS is now just a router with wifi6 and plugged into a UPS. No down time, no moving parts, low power bill yet extremely high performace

GNUBee
Seems like a side project by a zipper head who works in a factory and isn't raid5/6 performant but for a typical raid10 that I run it's brilliant.

>Old i3
Not power efficient enough.
>J5005
Not ecc compatible.
If that's what you want in a nas then I guess to each their own.

The ecc meme on NAS died out when the cost of an rsync didn't lock the system. ecc in general is a bit of a meme unless you are running medical software and risk factor pays into insurance.

>ecc is a bit of a meme
Just leave.

ecc is a meme freindo
no one I know uses it unless they have to due to insurance reasons - definition of a meme

You're the meme who just spouts memes.

>am I better of building my own
build your own
for the price of one of those NAS devices, you can buy a brand new Dell PowerEdge T30.
Run FreeNAS or unraid, or just regular linux.
NAS devices are just crap that the manufacturer has a vested interest in not supporting long term so they can get you to buy a new one.

Why would I pay on average double for error correction on a single subsystem of a single service in my company instead of just getting better practices at reacting to corrupt or missing data, like proper backups and using rsync to transfer sensitive data. ecc is a meme to make money from shills, only buy it if you need to use cyber insurance.