NAS Recommendation

OhioYJ · May 25, 2021

Yes another one... I've been searching through the threads, and tried to compile my thoughts to common questions that seem to get asked of people. I'm guessing the easiest solution here is just to buy a pre-built NAS? However having spare hardware laying around makes me reconsider that thought.

- Needs to work with Linux, as most of my PCs are Linux. Have one Windows only, and two that are dual boot for gaming.
- Don't necessarily care about RAID, as this data is backed up across multiple machines, drives, including off-site backups.
- Don't need access to the data online (outside the local network), in fact I don't want this data accessible online (to me or anyone else).
- This data doesn't need encryption, sensitive data won't be stored there.
- I do have enough spare parts to build a fairly decent PC that could be a NAS (TrueNas?). The only down side is my spare MB is a ATX, so it would be large. (I think it would be decent enough for a NAS, I3 4370, 16 GB RAM, so dated, but decent)
- The simplicity and size of a pre-built NAS is somewhat appealing. If I buy one, I want a quality one (Snyology?).
- I wired the house with Cat6 cable, but all my switches are only Gigabit. I've actually only got one PC right now with more than Gigabit networking capability anyways.
- My main "gaming" machine has 32 TB of WD Gold drives in it now. It would be ideal to have the NAS to be roughly sized 10 TB at the moment with some room to expand. I have a spare Gold or HGST drive I can use for this purpose now.
- All I really want is to be able to reach out to a folder on the network and run a robocopy or rsync command to make files on other PCs match (media won't be run from it).
- This would only be accessed by one machine at a time, and the theory being only changed files are being copied 99% of the time. So it's not going to be stressed.

Pixel5 · May 25, 2021

well since you got the hardware already id just give truenas a try, personally i like using unraid but it costs some money so it would increase your build cost slightly.

OhioYJ · May 26, 2021

8 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

well since you got the hardware already id just give truenas a try, personally i like using unraid but it costs some money so it would increase your build cost slightly.

That's sort of what I was thinking. If I stay that route I'll eventually have to swap cases as my spare case is a HTPC case that only has room for one 3.5" HD. It would let me test the waters though. I'll look into Unraid.