Family NAS Storage Help

[ethanmorrow]

So I'm a tech enthusiast trying to set up a proper storage solution for my parent's data.

Recently the hard drive on the family desktop died and I'm trying to avoid dealing with that again. 

I have enough tech experience to troubleshoot a lot of issues with smartphones/PCs, but I don't have any experience in any sort of NAS stuff.

 

I figure I would get a QNAS or Synology system with either 2 or 4 drives so that the NAS has redundancy. 

 

Below is a description of the devices and use cases. Can I get advice telling me if this is all possible or if I need to go with a different path? Also some recommendations on what NAS systems that would be suitable.

 

Devices

Desktop computer in the same room

A laptop that is often attached to a docking station at the house, but also spends a week or more at a time traveling for work

A laptop that is almost never home

 

 

Thanks for any of your advice!

[shoutingsteve]

Do you have spare hardware laying around?  Building a TruNAS box from old harware is the best solution.

 

I have mine with 6 drives in a raid 5 configuration.  It has both SMB (windows) and AFP (apple) and NFS (linux) sharing, so it will work for everything.  Plus if you have roku or firestick that you can install VLC player on, you've basically got a really great media server.

[ethanmorrow]

1 minute ago, shoutingsteve said:

Do you have spare hardware laying around?  Building a TruNAS box from old harware is the best solution.

 

I have mine with 6 drives in a raid 5 configuration.  It has both SMB (windows) and AFP (apple) and NFS (linux) sharing, so it will work for everything.  Plus if you have roku or firestick that you can install VLC player on, you've basically got a really great media server.

There is probably an older laptop lying around that I could use for it. Not sure about any drives, but those are easy to buy.

How would I go about making a TruNAS system with that?

[shoutingsteve]

I don't think you can use a laptop, mostly because of the USB nature of the hard drives.

jump on ebay and find a used tower PC that has a mobo with lots of SATA connectors.  It doesn't have to be the latest technology (mine is a Pentium G4400 from a decade ago).

Then you get enough drives to fill every SATA slot and you boot the TruNAS os of a USB thumbdrive (that you leave in the backpanel of the server).

 

Important note:  You cannot add more drives to the ZFS pool (the raid array) but you can increase the pools size by increasing the capacity of the drives.  The system will be limited by the smallest drive.  What size SATA drives do you have laying around? 

[shoutingsteve]

 

4 minutes ago, shoutingsteve said:

I don't think you can use a laptop, mostly because of the USB nature of the hard drives.

jump on ebay and find a used tower PC that has a mobo with lots of SATA connectors.  It doesn't have to be the latest technology (mine is a Pentium G4400 from a decade ago).

Then you get enough drives to fill every SATA slot and you boot the TruNAS os of a USB thumbdrive (that you leave in the backpanel of the server).

 

Important note:  You cannot add more drives to the ZFS pool (the raid array) but you can increase the pools size by increasing the capacity of the drives.  The system will be limited by the smallest drive.  What size SATA drives do you have laying around? 

Like this setup here:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/145493271145?hash=item21e0132269:g:dEgAAOSwqpBld3fs&amdata=enc%3AAQAIAAAA8HRhl3%2FiOtB1MNbZZZm0VT%2F8LAAGiBLz%2BR7liZGLCZSDmKgIP9Etj3cOfp09OnuIeGnibwyXjjJunGBnHjhBwt233lhHGp%2BCMXOxdTMd%2Bn%2FehDZdQWP2gwmGnYKhnk1SE7avE2sKHtNfmaGOgaKuvWgmlACaENeMNHkOGkvNiiXBKo2MKCZd5U3dzuC%2FbpvMFxIcV8b7qfSuPNHvQfCR0o7eFjNNxGtSg10SzOFqFZw%2BJZ2eN5Id%2B%2F0CrsEb1RbXy2owLZLRC9Jke2%2BJiGNMDHvGLczsituXYJVAevmR1OfP824mYk3xh4WxhktBjv4K%2FQ%3D%3D|tkp%3ABFBMgNzXxKBj

 

 

GA-Z87X-UD3H has 8 sata slots.  So if you had 8 2 TB drives laying around you can get 12 TB of storage (if you have 2 dsiks of parity to protect you from drive crashes).

But if even one of those drives is a 1 TB, then the entire pool will be reduced to 6 TB ( the ZFS treats every drive like it is the same size as the smallest)

[ethanmorrow]

23 minutes ago, shoutingsteve said:

 

Like this setup here:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/145493271145?hash=item21e0132269:g:dEgAAOSwqpBld3fs&amdata=enc%3AAQAIAAAA8HRhl3%2FiOtB1MNbZZZm0VT%2F8LAAGiBLz%2BR7liZGLCZSDmKgIP9Etj3cOfp09OnuIeGnibwyXjjJunGBnHjhBwt233lhHGp%2BCMXOxdTMd%2Bn%2FehDZdQWP2gwmGnYKhnk1SE7avE2sKHtNfmaGOgaKuvWgmlACaENeMNHkOGkvNiiXBKo2MKCZd5U3dzuC%2FbpvMFxIcV8b7qfSuPNHvQfCR0o7eFjNNxGtSg10SzOFqFZw%2BJZ2eN5Id%2B%2F0CrsEb1RbXy2owLZLRC9Jke2%2BJiGNMDHvGLczsituXYJVAevmR1OfP824mYk3xh4WxhktBjv4K%2FQ%3D%3D|tkp%3ABFBMgNzXxKBj

 

 

GA-Z87X-UD3H has 8 sata slots.  So if you had 8 2 TB drives laying around you can get 12 TB of storage (if you have 2 dsiks of parity to protect you from drive crashes).

But if even one of those drives is a 1 TB, then the entire pool will be reduced to 6 TB ( the ZFS treats every drive like it is the same size as the smallest)

Thanks for that information. How would I sort out the remote backup from devices that are not there.

[shoutingsteve]

I am not sure, I never open my NAS box to the internet.  My work laptop syncs as soon as I open it at home because I use a program called "Goodsync."

[ethanmorrow]

6 hours ago, shoutingsteve said:

I am not sure, I never open my NAS box to the internet.  My work laptop syncs as soon as I open it at home because I use a program called "Goodsync."

Thanks for the app reccomendation