NAS Build Questions

[EastCoastSunrise]

Hello!

 

Currently I have a Buffalo 4TB NAS (2 TB Useable because of RAID), currently it is full of mostly pictures my family takes lots of high res raw files. So storage can fill up pretty fast, therefore I am looking to upgrade it. We don't really use plex or anything similar, however this could change. While I dont know of any solution in particular I would love to self host a photo sharing site for the family photos that isnt google drive or similar. Because I am a cheapskate I am thinking of buying an old used dell optiplex or similar and taking the hardware out of the case and putting it in some other case. Which leads me to my first question, what are some good options for cases here? I dont care if they are rack mount or not. In total I would like about 10TB with one drive for parody, with some room to expand it down the road when the need arises. Second question is, if I keep the optiplex in its case are there any diskshelfs, JBOD type encloseures, etc that will suit my needs or does it not make sense to go this route. Thanks for the help in advance.

[tkitch]

I built a nas this fall with:

Used ITX Mobo & CPU
Jonsbo N1 case

it holds 5 drives, and works great.  

[Takumidesh]

8 minutes ago, EastCoastSunrise said:

parody

parity*

 

2x 10TB drives, and any computer will work.

 

though parity isn't a backup, it helps for downtime, but hopefully you don't have a drive fail while rebuilding the array.

 

as far as software I have been using photoprism and I like it a lot, has a lot of features similar to google photos, though I use it as a single user, so I don't know how well it will work for multiple people.

 

You can also setup a nextcloud instance

 

[Gokul_P]

12 minutes ago, EastCoastSunrise said:

Hello!

 

Currently I have a Buffalo 4TB NAS (2 TB Useable because of RAID), currently it is full of mostly pictures my family takes lots of high res raw files. So storage can fill up pretty fast, therefore I am looking to upgrade it. We don't really use plex or anything similar, however this could change. While I dont know of any solution in particular I would love to self host a photo sharing site for the family photos that isnt google drive or similar. Because I am a cheapskate I am thinking of buying an old used dell optiplex or similar and taking the hardware out of the case and putting it in some other case. Which leads me to my first question, what are some good options for cases here? I dont care if they are rack mount or not. In total I would like about 10TB with one drive for parody, with some room to expand it down the road when the need arises. Second question is, if I keep the optiplex in its case are there any diskshelfs, JBOD type encloseures, etc that will suit my needs or does it not make sense to go this route. Thanks for the help in advance.

if you are going old optiplex mother board route make sure that thing uses a standers screaw layout. Dell is the one that uses every thing on their system proprietary.  Iam using a ExtremeMachines NAS HDD Storage Server Case (its an chinese oem case with brand name slapped on the perticular one that i got have no markings about the company) with a  mini itx board and 4 2 tb harddrives totalling 4tb usable storage after raid. Case is very cheaply build but it does the job for me. 

[Jarsky]

Have you checked with Buffalo or documentation if you can just replace the drives in your RAID?

Most NAS devices and Array softwares you can just replace the drives one at a time (waiting for the new drive to rebuild before replacing the next) with larger drives, to expand the storage capacity.