nas Building my Nas

[Lllr]

I am starting planinng to build a real Nas to replace a fatigued raspbi 4 with an external 8tb WD disk, a 2tb time capsule (becoming more and more unreliable) and another 2tb wd Nas.

I need something which could archive documents and media. Because a lot of these data are important to me I was thinking of at least a 4bay, raid 5 solution.

I was thinking to begin with 6/8tb per disk.

 

Nice to have is a media server feature (I've been using emby happily so far).

 

Do you have any suggestion for any particular brand and model?

Also, is there any suggestion of disks? Thanks a lot in advance!

[Needfuldoer]

What’s your budget, before drives? 

 

Synology is the gold standard of prebuilt NAS appliances. They’re feature-packed and easy to administrate, but expensive. 
 

Software solutions like TrueNAS and Unraid will run on just about any desktop or server. Power consumption, noise, and performance will vary wildly. 
 

For drives, you have a few options:

 

- Used enterprise drives are cheap for their capacity, but usually not very power efficient. If you get SAS drives, you’ll need a SAS controller. If you go this route, buy at least a couple extra drives to keep as cold spares. I’d even run an 8-drive RAID6 or RAIDz2 so you can lose two drives before the data on the array is in jeopardy. 
 

- Dedicated NAS drives like the Seagate IronWolf Pro and WD Red Plus are purpose-built for small drive arrays, but they can be expensive to buy new. 
 

- Shucking drives out of external enclosures usually gets you a NAS drive for a cheap price, but you usually get a shorter warranty. They’re also like Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know exactly what you’re going to get. 
 

Whichever path you take, you want to avoid SMR drives. 

[voyager_]

There are many solutions from pre-built NAS solutions to going the custom route. I went with unraid because of how simple expansion is and data recovery is a little more straight forward since the data is not stripped across disks. It will all really come down to budget and what sort of performance you are looking to get out of it. 

 

Synology is really popular but can get expensive fast when you start looking at higher end models. Lots of good information here.

On 3/2/2022 at 4:03 AM, Needfuldoer said:

What’s your budget, before drives? 

 

Synology is the gold standard of prebuilt NAS appliances. They’re feature-packed and easy to administrate, but expensive. 
 

Software solutions like TrueNAS and Unraid will run on just about any desktop or server. Power consumption, noise, and performance will vary wildly. 
 

For drives, you have a few options:

 

- Used enterprise drives are cheap for their capacity, but usually not very power efficient. If you get SAS drives, you’ll need a SAS controller. If you go this route, buy at least a couple extra drives to keep as cold spares. I’d even run an 8-drive RAID6 or RAIDz2 so you can lose two drives before the data on the array is in jeopardy. 
 

- Dedicated NAS drives like the Seagate IronWolf Pro and WD Red Plus are purpose-built for small drive arrays, but they can be expensive to buy new. 
 

- Shucking drives out of external enclosures usually gets you a NAS drive for a cheap price, but you usually get a shorter warranty. They’re also like Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know exactly what you’re going to get. 
 

Whichever path you take, you want to avoid SMR drives. 

 

[Lllr]

On 3/2/2022 at 9:03 AM, Needfuldoer said:

What’s your budget, before drives? 

 

Synology is the gold standard of prebuilt NAS appliances. They’re feature-packed and easy to administrate, but expensive. 
 

Software solutions like TrueNAS and Unraid will run on just about any desktop or server. Power consumption, noise, and performance will vary wildly. 
 

For drives, you have a few options:

 

- Used enterprise drives are cheap for their capacity, but usually not very power efficient. If you get SAS drives, you’ll need a SAS controller. If you go this route, buy at least a couple extra drives to keep as cold spares. I’d even run an 8-drive RAID6 or RAIDz2 so you can lose two drives before the data on the array is in jeopardy. 
 

- Dedicated NAS drives like the Seagate IronWolf Pro and WD Red Plus are purpose-built for small drive arrays, but they can be expensive to buy new. 
 

- Shucking drives out of external enclosures usually gets you a NAS drive for a cheap price, but you usually get a shorter warranty. They’re also like Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know exactly what you’re going to get. 
 

Whichever path you take, you want to avoid SMR drives. 

 

On 3/3/2022 at 2:41 PM, voyager_ said:

There are many solutions from pre-built NAS solutions to going the custom route. I went with unraid because of how simple expansion is and data recovery is a little more straight forward since the data is not stripped across disks. It will all really come down to budget and what sort of performance you are looking to get out of it. 

 

Synology is really popular but can get expensive fast when you start looking at higher end models. Lots of good information here.

 

Hi @Needfuldoer @voyager_, thanks for your reply, in the past days I was looking around and I found the terramaster F5-221 which cost ~400€ and looks a fair price to me (is it enough for what I want?). It looks kind of the north star I want to follow but also I might have been tricked by marketing.

 

I would go for a prebuilt for simplicity and hoping that will better manage energy consumption.

please let me know what you think!