Maybe not the newest idea, but it would really be neat if Linus made a "build your own NAS video"

[wisex]

I've watched Linus' videos for a long time, and every time he makes a server related video I go down a rabbit hole trying to see how it is that I can build myself my own NAS. I personally do contract video production work for local businesses, and frankly I shoot A LOT of video. Thing is that I want to be able to build a separate NAS (because frankly it is miles cheaper than any pre-built you could buy) to be able to store all of my commercial video and photography work, because I KNOW that having my project videos archived on individual external hard drives is not only expensive, but not as safe and redundant as on a server. So if Linus could make a video that we could all go to, to learn how to build our own NAS that would honestly be amazing. (plus for the more hardcore gamers out there, you can store your steam library on it!) 

[Spotty]

Take old PC (preferably one with gigabit LAN and as many SATA ports as possible, but either can be added to with PCIe add in cards)

Fill it with HDDs

Install NAS orientated OS on it.

[TheBean]

2 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Take old PC (preferably one with gigabit LAN and as many SATA ports as possible, but either can be added to with PCIe add in cards)

Fill it with HDDs

Install NAS orientated OS on it.

or use an old laptop to save space, reduce noise, sometimes cheaper

[harryk]

Pretty sure LTT has multiple videos on NAS stuff, particularly with Unraid, but I think there's a video on FreeNAS as well.

[wisex]

24 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Take old PC (preferably one with gigabit LAN and as many SATA ports as possible, but either can be added to with PCIe add in cards)

Fill it with HDDs

Install NAS orientated OS on it.

Is it really this easy?... theres no way?..

[wisex]

4 minutes ago, harryk said:

Pretty sure LTT has multiple videos on NAS stuff, particularly with Unraid, but I think there's a video on FreeNAS as well.

He does have a few videos about unraide, but I wasn't aware that he made a FreeNAS video? I'll definitely see what I can find on his channel, but thank you for the response!

[harryk]

7 minutes ago, wisex said:

Is it really this easy?... theres no way?..

Actually yes. I built an Unraid server last year, if all you want is NAS functionality then I'd argue its easier than installing Windows. 

https://lime-technology.com/getting-started/

 

[Spotty]

4 minutes ago, wisex said:

Is it really this easy?... theres no way?..

It's pretty much what I did with my old system (i7 860, 8GB RAM). Installed FreeNAS on it and put in whatever spare HDDs I had lying around and installed FreeNAS to a 16GB USB flash drive.

[Don Vielenio]

6 hours ago, wisex said:

Is it really this easy?... theres no way?..

Yes it is, I've build one based on an old Dell Optiplex, stuffed as many HDDs as I had in there, set up a linux with software RAID5 so one of the old drives could fail and it's working.

What would be more interesting is building an own SAN.

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

too late people already did that with $35 raspberry pi

[UrbanFreestyle]

27 minutes ago, dgsddfgdfhgs said:

too late people already did that with $35 raspberry pi

yeah i was running a pi with hdd attached for several years. Worked fine. it suffered speed wise as shares the ethernet and USB but i was doing very few transfers and was mainly using it as ocasional backup / media host for streaming movies to my TV and works fine for that. I was running omv on it.

[Don Vielenio]

 

41 minutes ago, dgsddfgdfhgs said:

too late people already did that with $35 raspberry pi

I had with a pi, but the performance was unexceptable.
A raspberry Pi does not have gigabit ethernet and only USB 2.0, if you have a Pi 3, use WIFI, cause WIFI is in opposite to the wired interface not using USB to communicate with CPU, so you get slightly higher speed. But advanced stuff as RAID, do not do with a raspi, you'll regret it!

[UrbanFreestyle]

1 minute ago, Don Vielenio said:

 

I had with a pi, but the performance was unexceptable.
A raspberry Pi does not have gigabit ethernet and only USB 2.0, if you have a Pi 3, use WIFI, cause WIFI is in opposite to the wired interface not using USB to communicate with CPU, so you get slightly higher speed. But advanced stuff as RAID, do not do with a raspi, you'll regret it!

agreed, it's ok to use as a central store for media but anything more you can get better. I think if you already have a Pi and USB drive it's fun to do but if you are starting from scratch there are better options.

[Don Vielenio]

1 minute ago, UrbanFreestyle said:

agreed, it's ok to use as a central store for media but anything more you can get better. I think if you already have a Pi and USB drive it's fun to do but if you are starting from scratch there are better options.

A Banana Pi fore example would be better, with gigabit ethernet and a SATA port, I'm using it as a mirror for Ubuntu repository, taking it in the morning to work, attaching it to network, starting mirroring and in the evening i can do much faster updates at home.
I'd really wished they'd given the raspi in version 3 atleast gigabit ethernet and USB 3 Gen1

[skunkmunkey]

I just run a Win 10 machine as my main NAS/media server, has an old Raptor as the OS drive and a 10TB RAID5 array, nothing complicated and works fine and is user friendly as it's the same OS as my other machines

[wisex]

16 minutes ago, skunkmunkey said:

I just run a Win 10 machine as my main NAS/media server, has an old Raptor as the OS drive and a 10TB RAID5 array, nothing complicated and works fine and is user friendly as it's the same OS as my other machines

I was under the impression that you have to use an OS like FreeNAS? do you know of any online tutorial videos for how to set something like that up with Windows 10? 

[skunkmunkey]

of course you don't, as long as you've got Win 10 Pro so it allows file sharing etc then you're good to go. Setup the machine, share the drive and map it on any other computers you want to access it from.

 

FreeNAS etc use far less system resources etc and will run on a potato but if the computer is capable of running Win 10 as normal then it's fine as a NAS

[NineEyeRon]

The hardest bit of any NAS is finding somewhere to put it that has:

 

a) power

b) fast enough connection

c) no or little noise impact.

 

I have my single bay NAS in my living room, you can’t hear it during the day but at night or anytime you want it quiet it’s annoyingly loud!

 

If I could move it elsewhere and still get gigabit connection I would.

 

At the moment the bottleneck is the fact it’s a Seagate Persoal Cloud and it’s not the fastest.

[benny_r_t_2]

On the subject of LTT perhaps making a "Build your own NAS tutorial", I think it would be cool if they did a live stream with screen capture so the viewer can see exactly what is going on.  I like the idea of a live stream because there can't be cutaway edits when unexpected things happen.  Seeing how someone confronts the little roadblocks in realtime would be very interesting.  But because there are so many variations of what people call "NAS" it is probably easier to just search youtube to find a tutorial tailored for what you wanted to do. 

 

For example,  you could setup a "NAS" just by using a regular desktop PC or laptop or old headless server that no one wanted anymore, install any linux distro on it, then install various tools for the job:  SAMBA, FTP, openssl, HTTPD or whatever.  Configure the NFS and setup same workgroup on the clients that will access the NAS, etc.  This would be a more DIY compared to buying a Synology box that is already basically preconfigured and plug n play and probably self explanatory.

 

I have enjoyed seeing the live streams each week lately and setting up unraid or a DIY NAS (not synology out of box setup) sounds like a good idea.  And by setup I mean starting with the hardware already built and ready, just installing a linux distro and configuring it from there.  These livestreams remind me of the old'n days back when it was just Linus and that mystery camera person with a shoe on his head, entirely unscripted.

[Don Vielenio]

2 minutes ago, benny_r_t_2 said:

For example,  you could setup a "NAS" just by using a regular desktop PC or laptop or old headless server that no one wanted anymore, install any linux distro on it, then install various tools for the job:  SAMBA, FTP, openssl, HTTPD or whatever. 

I'd also suggest NFS and openssh, ssh for remote administration of the NAS and for SFTP