Cheap Single Disk Nas Suggestions.

[SukaroBlue]

I’ve found my self in need of cheap single bay NAS that doesn’t come with a disk already. It needs to be small because it has to go in my living room where the router is and I don’t think my roommates would appreciate an ugly desktop computer in the living room. The only thing that seems to fit my requirements is a synology that goes for a little over $100. I’m trying to see if there are other options hopefully under $100.

[da na]

There are Raspberry Pi cases with NVME or SATA adapters built in you could get. That might be the best option for you

[cstrachn]

You could do what i did. I had a ton of extra drives and an old PC. I just built that into a NAS box. Used XPEnology, a synology clone of types. There are many ways you could go about getting nas software on the pc, this was just what i used.

 

Raspberry pi is a cheap way as well, not as fast as an old pc

 

Benefit of using old pc is you can spend all your money on a larger hard drive

[SukaroBlue]

9 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

There are Raspberry Pi cases with NVME or SATA adapters built in you could get. That might be the best option for you

I already have a Pi 4 as well so I think that would probably work well. I’d just need to find a case that doesn’t look terrible and I would be golden.

[SukaroBlue]

8 minutes ago, cstrachn said:

You could do what i did. I had a ton of extra drives and an old PC. I just built that into a NAS box. Used XPEnology, a synology clone of types. There are many ways you could go about getting nas software on the pc, this was just what i used.

 

Raspberry pi is a cheap way as well, not as fast as an old pc

 

Benefit of using old pc is you can spend all your money on a larger hard drive

As I said in the post I can’t use an old PC because it has to go to my living room and my roommates would be upset if I put an old pc in my living room. If I had an Ethernet run to my room that’s probably what I’d do I even have a few computers that would work well for this but I don’t so RIP. You and another user suggested using a raspberry Pi and considering I have a pi already I’m probably going to go that route.

[cstrachn]

Yah sounds good. i have my NAS in the computer room mounted on a shelf out of the way. But yah in living room it would look ugly.

 

You're going to need a simple usb to sata or a pi hat to connect a drive to the raspberypi. so like $20-$30 for that, a drive if you have one already. and then the case. possibly a larger power supply to run both. good HDD pulls like 10W, ssd maybe 7-8W. So plan acordingly.

 

Or another fun option. find a broken dvd player, VHS player? and rip it apart and  shove a pc in that or the pi. make it look like it belongs in the living room  I actually tried this once. Ended up with a mini pc for living room tv. Got lucky and picked up a Dell Optiplex 7040 Micro PC for $25!