Advice on either buying a NAS or making on myself. Inexperienced tech person here

[Lord_Fudge]

Hi,

 

So I recently watched a Linus video of them building a NAS. I had no idea what a NAS was before this and I've discovered it's something i very much need and I cant believe I've never heard of it before. I have a multitude of cables and external HDD's all named something different for different things. Backups of old laptops, old phone photos and media, old university work, new university work, new photography work, and even my hobby of astronomical photography stuff! All of this is not-so-neatly contained on around 4 seperate hard drives/ssd's/SD cards. It's always been a pain and causes me a headache when i have to find an old file or something thats important like government documents.

Anyways, I was looking up reviews of NAS's and googling about them and in conculsion: i'm lost and confused. I managed to build my own PC last year and I can make some .cmd's for photography file transfers, but I do not know anything much about coding or software side of things. I do not like paying subscription services or having anything in any "clouds" as I dont trust them.

 

I am open to buying a "plug'n'play" NAS like synology but I'm not sure what their software stuff is like - i just want to access my files and folders when i need to and I want to be able to backup stuff I want backed up, easily.

 

I have no plans to use it as a media server or to stream anything from it or use it for games. Just basically a backup and place i can neatly sort out and store all my files and folders.

 

I am not against building my own one, however I fear i may do something wrong and/or lose my data because im not very tech literate - I can follow a youtube tutorial pretty well though.

 

I have some parts I think could be useful:

• Ryzen 3600 with its cooler
• 2070 super
• an ATX powersupply i think is like 750Watts
  
  I dont have extra memory, case or motherboard but i am happy to buy whatever. Same goes for the HDD/SSD (whatever is recommended to use)

I have also never used linux, but I hear its not too difficult to figure out.

 

In terms of what I value the most out of this would probably be the safety of the info first, then ease of use to backup stuff, then price and speed.

 

Thank you for reading all this and thank you for any advice people have that they may send my way. I get overwhelmed with this stuff fairly easily which is why im not against just buying a NAS from somewhere thats reccomended - I just thought seeing as I have an old CPU and GPU lying around I may save myself some money. Also I could use a completely offline, no subscription, software that just lets me access the files - no streaming server or gaming server stuff.

 

I love you all, you're all very helpful. Thanks.

 

Fudge

 

[Coaxialgamer]

If you aren't planning on hammering your NAS with requests all the time, that hardware frankly seems a bit overkill. I've heard of people using Raspberry Pis as NASes, and even a Celeron box should be able to do the trick. Realistically that 3600 is fine but you'd be using that 2070 super as little more than a display adapter in a dedicated NAS, so maybe get something a bit more...basic.

 

There are various NAS operating systems to choose from, such as OpenMediaVault or TrueNAS (in no way an exhaustive list). I probably wouldn't use old hard drives for this (just use two or more hard drives for redundancy and drop your existing data over) either.

[OhioYJ]

Buying a NAS is generally easier. You can slap some drives in it and be done. It will likely be more energy efficient and maybe (this depends) cheaper. However there are some downsides.

 

Building your own gives you a lot more freedom in my opinion. You won't need the GPU. The really isn't a need for a GPU in most cases, onboard graphics is plenty. I don't even have a monitor hooked up to my NAS. I chose to build my own. I looked into buying one, and then decided against it. One thing that really concerned me was Synology (the NAS brand I was looking at) kept "locking" things down, and trying to tell people what type of hardware they could use and couldn't use. This was the big thing that pushed me over to building a TrueNAS box. It also gave me more freedom to upgrade things easier, and install whatever I wanted (software or hardware).

 

I wouldn't let the Linux part worry you. There really isn't much configuration or "using" of Linux in this. You install, and then setup through a web interface.

 

As for the power consumption, I don't need my NAS very often, it's only for backup. Since I only need it sometimes once a month, I've setup it up for wake on lan, and have my back up scripts wake it when needed. There isn't any reason for it to run 24 hours a day for a month, if I'm going to use it for an hour or two. It's shut back down when I'm done with it.

 

While many NAS systems have redundancies built in, remember you should still have another plan for backing up important data. You never want to have important data just in one spot.

[Lord_Fudge]

8 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

Buying a NAS is generally easier. You can slap some drives in it and be done. It will likely be more energy efficient and maybe (this depends) cheaper. However there are some downsides.

 

Building your own gives you a lot more freedom in my opinion. You won't need the GPU. The really isn't a need for a GPU in most cases, onboard graphics is plenty. I don't even have a monitor hooked up to my NAS. I chose to build my own. I looked into buying one, and then decided against it. One thing that really concerned me was Synology (the NAS brand I was looking at) kept "locking" things down, and trying to tell people what type of hardware they could use and couldn't use. This was the big thing that pushed me over to building a TrueNAS box. It also gave me more freedom to upgrade things easier, and install whatever I wanted (software or hardware).

 

I wouldn't let the Linux part worry you. There really isn't much configuration or "using" of Linux in this. You install, and then setup through a web interface.

 

As for the power consumption, I don't need my NAS very often, it's only for backup. Since I only need it sometimes once a month, I've setup it up for wake on lan, and have my back up scripts wake it when needed. There isn't any reason for it to run 24 hours a day for a month, if I'm going to use it for an hour or two. It's shut back down when I'm done with it.

 

While many NAS systems have redundancies built in, remember you should still have another plan for backing up important data. You never want to have important data just in one spot.

I see. I was definitely leaning towards buying one from a NAS company. I am just sill concerned that the software might be annoying or not let me easily do what i need to do.

Not too concerned with power consumption.

I do know the GPU would be overkill for nas, but my thought process was to use it to initially setup my NAS because the 3600 doesnt have intergrated graphics, then once its setup and going, I can simply take it out.

[Lord_Fudge]

2 minutes ago, UndefinedException said:

The most important thing of building a NAS is the power efficiency, most of the time the NAS is going to be on idle.

 

Ryzen 3600 is okay but I would recommend to turn off a few cores and undervolt to save some power.

2070 super is only necessary if you are planning to setup a media server and requires transcoding on the fly. I would recommend only use it when you are installing the OS, after you set it up, you should just remove it, (the idle power consumption of 2070 super is not low).

Power supply is fine if it is high quality

 

If you haven't bought other stuff yet, here are a few suggestions

1. RAM, pick ECC if possible as TrueNAS uses tons of RAM as cache and you don't want corrupted data

2. MB, pick something that has 2.5G LAN / use an external LAN card

3. HDD, DON'T pick SMR hard drives

4. Cooling, remember, no water cooling
5. RAID is not a backup, if you have a 5TB RAID1 pool, you should also have another 5TB HDD/pool to backup your data

You can also check out others' builds to get yourself an idea how to get started
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI/edit#gid=0

The 2070super part was my thought too as I know the 3600 doesnt have integrated graphics.

 

I will take a look at others builds to get an idea, then I will make a decision sometime to either build my own or buy one. I am definitely leaning on just buying one but its restrictive software/paywalls that would concern me. As well as any cloud stuff or anything.

 

Not sure what SMR hard drives are, but I will lookout for that nonetheless.

 

I should learn/lookup/watch something about RAID and stuff as I do not know the difference.

 

Thank you 

[OhioYJ]

10 minutes ago, Lord_Fudge said:

Not sure what SMR hard drives are, but I will lookout for that nonetheless.

Shingled Magnetic Recording. Generally found on "cheap" drives. Ideally you want CMR (conventional magnetic recording) drives, which most (not all) NAS drives will be. In my opinion, you always want a CMR drive.

 

It seems more over whelming than it actually is. It's fairly user friendly in actuality.

 

You do need to figure out how many drives you may have though. I ended up with 8 drives, so I needed an HBA card. If you don't have that many you can plug them all directly into the motherboard. It can be done later, but something to think about.

[Gorgon]

1 hour ago, Lord_Fudge said:

Hi,

 

So I recently watched a Linus video of them building a NAS. I had no idea what a NAS was before this and I've discovered it's something i very much need and I cant believe I've never heard of it before. I have a multitude of cables and external HDD's all named something different for different things. Backups of old laptops, old phone photos and media, old university work, new university work, new photography work, and even my hobby of astronomical photography stuff! All of this is not-so-neatly contained on around 4 seperate hard drives/ssd's/SD cards. It's always been a pain and causes me a headache when i have to find an old file or something thats important like government documents.

Anyways, I was looking up reviews of NAS's and googling about them and in conculsion: i'm lost and confused. I managed to build my own PC last year and I can make some .cmd's for photography file transfers, but I do not know anything much about coding or software side of things. I do not like paying subscription services or having anything in any "clouds" as I dont trust them.

 

I am open to buying a "plug'n'play" NAS like synology but I'm not sure what their software stuff is like - i just want to access my files and folders when i need to and I want to be able to backup stuff I want backed up, easily.

 

I have no plans to use it as a media server or to stream anything from it or use it for games. Just basically a backup and place i can neatly sort out and store all my files and folders.

 

I am not against building my own one, however I fear i may do something wrong and/or lose my data because im not very tech literate - I can follow a youtube tutorial pretty well though.

 

I have some parts I think could be useful:

• Ryzen 3600 with its cooler
• 2070 super
• an ATX powersupply i think is like 750Watts
  
  I dont have extra memory, case or motherboard but i am happy to buy whatever. Same goes for the HDD/SSD (whatever is recommended to use)

I have also never used linux, but I hear its not too difficult to figure out.

 

In terms of what I value the most out of this would probably be the safety of the info first, then ease of use to backup stuff, then price and speed.

 

Thank you for reading all this and thank you for any advice people have that they may send my way. I get overwhelmed with this stuff fairly easily which is why im not against just buying a NAS from somewhere thats reccomended - I just thought seeing as I have an old CPU and GPU lying around I may save myself some money. Also I could use a completely offline, no subscription, software that just lets me access the files - no streaming server or gaming server stuff.

 

I love you all, you're all very helpful. Thanks.

 

Fudge

 

I bought a 2-bay Synology 10 years or so ago and ran out of space within a couple of years with 2 x 3T disks. I looked at a 5-bay or 8-bay solution from them but the cost was more than buying server-grade hardware and rolling my own TrueNAS Box.

 

It was a learning curve for sure even though I work in IT but it's gotten much more point-and-click these days. IX Systems will even sell you a complete system without drives.

 

Depending on how much or little effort you want to put into it in increasing levels your options are:

 

1. Buy a 4-5 Bay Synology, Qnap etc.

 

2. Get a system from IX Systems

 

3. Roll your own NAS using:

a) TrueNAS, Unraid, ProxMox ...

 

If you do want to roll your own and run any ZFS it is strongly recommended to use ECC memory which you'll have to jump through hoops to do using that 3600. Unraid would work better with that hardware but if you don't want to be tinkering with the system and just want a reliable NAS you can get up and running quickly I'd go with option 1 or 2.

 

And yes, as others have mentioned make sure you get CMR rather than SMR drives.

 

Level One Techs and Craft Computing on YouTube have some good tutorials on setting up TrueNAS.

[ToboRobot]

1 hour ago, Lord_Fudge said:

 

 

So I recently watched a Linus video of them building a NAS. I had no idea what a NAS was before this and I've discovered it's something i very much need and I cant believe I've never heard of it before.

 

 

I'd start with a commercial appliance.  You can always build or setup your DIY system later (maybe learn linux a bit before you trust all your precious data to it), but if you didn't know about it before, maybe start with the easier option and work your way up.

 

[Lord_Fudge]

1 hour ago, Gorgon said:

I bought a 2-bay Synology 10 years or so ago and ran out of space within a couple of years with 2 x 3T disks. I looked at a 5-bay or 8-bay solution from them but the cost was more than buying server-grade hardware and rolling my own TrueNAS Box.

 

It was a learning curve for sure even though I work in IT but it's gotten much more point-and-click these days. IX Systems will even sell you a complete system without drives.

 

Depending on how much or little effort you want to put into it in increasing levels your options are:

 

1. Buy a 4-5 Bay Synology, Qnap etc.

 

2. Get a system from IX Systems

 

3. Roll your own NAS using:

a) TrueNAS, Unraid, ProxMox ...

 

If you do want to roll your own and run any ZFS it is strongly recommended to use ECC memory which you'll have to jump through hoops to do using that 3600. Unraid would work better with that hardware but if you don't want to be tinkering with the system and just want a reliable NAS you can get up and running quickly I'd go with option 1 or 2.

 

And yes, as others have mentioned make sure you get CMR rather than SMR drives.

 

Level One Techs and Craft Computing on YouTube have some good tutorials on setting up TrueNAS.

Thank you! great advice. I will have a look 

[Lord_Fudge]

I think i have decided to go for the attached image below. let me know what you all think.