Building a NAS for my parents.

[adm0n]

I'm planning to gift my parents a barebone nas for Christams and I'm wondering if this would be a good build for the price:

 

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	Intel Core i3-9100F 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor	€88.89 @ Alternate
Motherboard	ASRock H370M-ITX/ac Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard	€112.14 @ Mindfactory
Memory	Corsair Vengeance LPX 8 GB (1 x 8 GB) DDR4-2400 Memory	€28.99 @ Amazon Deutschland
Case	Fractal Design Node 304 Mini ITX Tower Case	€86.89 @ Alternate
Power Supply	BitFenix Formula Gold 450 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply	€69.67 @ Amazon Deutschland
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	€386.58
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-12-15 13:17 CET+0100

 

I'm getting all the parts locally, so I'd pay around 370€

 

My father hobby is photography, so he would back up his pictures to the system and my mother would probably only ever back up her computer on it. I'm thinking of maybe setting it up, so that my father could edit his images right on the nas.

I intend to run either unraid or freeNAS on it. I read, that a raid(5) would be better for stability and zfs would be better for perfomance, is this right? I also want the whole system to be as power efficent as possible, so the low powered i3 is actually perfect for that. But if there is a better option, please tell me

 

I will also require them to buy the harddrives for themselves.

[FloRolf]

honestly from someone who struggles with FreeNAS himself, i'd recommend a Synology box for your parents. it's just waaay simpler, uses less power, is smaller, costs less and is easy to set up. Just get one pre-filled with like 2x 4TB drives and another external drive to make regular backups to and you're set.

[Geoff35674567]

20 minutes ago, adm0n said:

I will also require them to buy the harddrives for themselves.

 

21 minutes ago, adm0n said:

My father hobby is photography, so he would back up his pictures to the system and my mother would probably only ever back up her computer on it. I'm thinking of maybe setting it up, so that my father could edit his images right on the nas.

Wouldn't buying them a usb drive for christmas fit this purpose?

[adm0n]

13 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

honestly from someone who struggles with FreeNAS himself, i'd recommend a Synology box for your parents. it's just waaay simpler, uses less power, is smaller, costs less and is easy to set up. Just get one pre-filled with like 2x 4TB drives and another external drive to make regular backups to and you're set.

I'd set it up for them. But a good synology 4x box would cost already more than what I put together ... And this is already going to be a present for multiple years..
But thank you for your input. I considered them as well. I just don't think 2 bays will suffice. If you safe your pictures in raw and as jpgs, you are down 50mb per picture at least. With how many pictures he already has, and redundancy, as well with a backup of their pcs, It would already be kinda a strech, if they don't go for the expensive 10TB HDDs.

 

Quote

Wouldn't buying them a usb drive for christmas fit this purpose?

My mother simply won't make a backup. She already has an usb drive for that, even though it is a mac and all she has to do is plug the USB drive in ... so the only thing I could do there, would be automating it...

And my father already has a bunch of full USB harddrives.