DIY NAS using a thin desktop as a base

[Elegorn]

Hi, I've got a thin Lenovo Thinkcenter collecting dust I'd like to turn into a NAS. I've looked at a lot of DIY NAS guides and they all involve desktop cases with internal hard drives, which obviously won't work with this as the only storage options are a single internal SSD slot. Could I turn this into a NAS? I don't currently have a hard drive enclosure, what kind should I buy? I've seen warnings online against buying RAID enclosures, but I haven't fully understood why they're a bad idea.

 

I don't need anything fancy, but RAID 5 and SSD caching would be nice.

[cekcons]

As far i know they are just less reliable compared sata method with motherboard controller. If you want to store less important stuff (games , video clips , movies) you can get any raid case and call it a day. You can connect directly from usb multipe drives and put one ssd for good luck but even at usb 3.0 it will be slower so i guess ssd would be waste. Also use drive cases with external power. Usb power can be janky.

[jaslion]

You can do a usb jbod and stuff but in reality id just sell it and get a cheap slightly bigger one as the cost for adapter is gonna be WAY more than a 50$ 4th gen i5 full tower or sff unit whilst also being less reliable.

[Alex Atkin UK]

26 minutes ago, jaslion said:

You can do a usb jbod and stuff but in reality id just sell it and get a cheap slightly bigger one as the cost for adapter is gonna be WAY more than a 50$ 4th gen i5 full tower or sff unit whilst also being less reliable.

USB JBOD are quite expensive and use less common PSUs if that ever need replacing.  Although you kinda should have one anyway to backup the NAS to.

 

I see a lot of people talking about building a home NAS on the forum, nobody ever mentions how they plan to backup that NAS.

[jaslion]

2 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

USB JBOD are quite expensive and use less common PSUs if that ever need replacing.  Although you kinda should have one anyway to backup the NAS to.

 

I see a lot of people talking about building a home NAS on the forum, nobody ever mentions how they plan to backup that NAS.

If it runs on windows a cheap way is backblaze. Yes you should have 3 backups but most people dont have money for that. So backlbaze is a cheap 70$ a year way to at least have some

[Alex Atkin UK]

2 hours ago, jaslion said:

If it runs on windows a cheap way is backblaze. Yes you should have 3 backups but most people dont have money for that. So backlbaze is a cheap 70$ a year way to at least have some

Depends on the size of your NAS.  I wouldn't fancy backing up even 20TB to the cloud, it takes long enough to local storage when not using RAID.

[LIGISTX]

5 hours ago, Elegorn said:

Hi, I've got a thin Lenovo Thinkcenter collecting dust I'd like to turn into a NAS. I've looked at a lot of DIY NAS guides and they all involve desktop cases with internal hard drives, which obviously won't work with this as the only storage options are a single internal SSD slot. Could I turn this into a NAS? I don't currently have a hard drive enclosure, what kind should I buy? I've seen warnings online against buying RAID enclosures, but I haven't fully understood why they're a bad idea.

 

I don't need anything fancy, but RAID 5 and SSD caching would be nice.

If you are planning to use truenas which uses the ZFS file system, do not use a JBOD or USB, drives NEED to be connected via SATA. ZFS needs to see the drives as block devices or bad things can and likely will happen. 
 

Unraid you can probably get away with it, as you likely could with windows. Picking your OS and what you want from the NAS is key… then you can buy hardware. 
 

4 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I see a lot of people talking about building a home NAS on the forum, nobody ever mentions how they plan to backup that NAS.

Backblaze B2 has been fantastic for me. I back up the actual important stuff which is ~4.5TB. Most people probably don’t have double digit TB worth of important data…. Lots of Linux ISO’s out there taking up NAS drive space

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 hour ago, LIGISTX said:

Lots of Linux ISO’s out there taking up NAS drive space

Lots are irreplaceable due to licenses expiring and the unwillingness to support physical media.

[LIGISTX]

2 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Lots are irreplaceable due to licenses expiring and the unwillingness to support physical media.

Thankfully the internet is practically limitless at this point. If you know where to look, hard to find linux distros from times past can always be found

[jaslion]

3 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Depends on the size of your NAS.  I wouldn't fancy backing up even 20TB to the cloud, it takes long enough to local storage when not using RAID.

It is why you do make a decent folder structure and split between documents and entertainment

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 hour ago, jaslion said:

It is why you do make a decent folder structure and split between documents and entertainment

There seems to be this assumption that entertainment can always be replaced, I have plenty that cannot.

 

I still can't bring myself to trust any cloud service with my personal data either.

[Blue4130]

8 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

If you are planning to use truenas which uses the ZFS file system, do not use a JBOD or USB, drives NEED to be connected via SATA. ZFS needs to see the drives as block devices or bad things can and likely will happen.

JBOD's can be fine, but it needs to be SAS based. (I guess if you are pendantic, then this is really a disk shelf)

 

https://chrisbergeron.com/2020/03/07/diy_das_part1/

 

[Elegorn]

On 7/12/2024 at 5:14 PM, LIGISTX said:

Unraid you can probably get away with it, as you likely could with windows. Picking your OS and what you want from the NAS is key… then you can buy hardware. 

I don't really care what OS it is, as long as I can get redundancy for one disk failure.

 

Could I do SSD caching on Windows? I have a lot of mass media that rarely needs to be accessed, and maybe a terabyte that I actually use within any given month. I'd like those often used files be stored on the SSD as well as the hard drives

[LIGISTX]

4 hours ago, Elegorn said:

I don't really care what OS it is, as long as I can get redundancy for one disk failure.

 

Could I do SSD caching on Windows? I have a lot of mass media that rarely needs to be accessed, and maybe a terabyte that I actually use within any given month. I'd like those often used files be stored on the SSD as well as the hard drives

Why do you need to cache anything on an SSD, especially multimedia? 
 

If you have standard gigabit networking, unless you have a lot of people using the system at once creating lots of random read and write operations, harddrives will be fast enough to Saturdays a gigabit network. 
 

An SSD is a good boot device, and/or what you would want to run VM’s or docker containers on. But unless you have a real reason for SSD caching, you probably don’t need it. 

[Elegorn]

On 7/14/2024 at 7:26 PM, LIGISTX said:

Why do you need to cache anything on an SSD, especially multimedia? 
 

If you have standard gigabit networking, unless you have a lot of people using the system at once creating lots of random read and write operations, harddrives will be fast enough to Saturdays a gigabit network. 
 

An SSD is a good boot device, and/or what you would want to run VM’s or docker containers on. But unless you have a real reason for SSD caching, you probably don’t need it. 

 

I work a lot with large amounts of small files, and on my old cheap NAS it was atrocious. The random reads and writes were really slow as opposed to working off an SSD. Is there a solution that can make working with them tolerable using just spinning disks?

 

Videos are perfectly fine on a mechanical disk for me

[LIGISTX]

30 minutes ago, Elegorn said:

 

I work a lot with large amounts of small files, and on my old cheap NAS it was atrocious. The random reads and writes were really slow as opposed to working off an SSD. Is there a solution that can make working with them tolerable using just spinning disks?

 

Videos are perfectly fine on a mechanical disk for me

Is it not possible to keep a working set of data locally? A SSD cache would help random reads (potentially, if what you are trying to read is actually in the cache), but you still have to contend with network overhead which is a lot… things would be tremendously faster if you just had a few TB SSD locally and could store enough data on it to be what you work off of. 
 

I have ~5TB of pictures, but I have a local SSD that is 2TB and I keep the previous 1-2 years of pictures on it locally so I can edit without having to hit my NAS. I copy all my images to the NAS after import as a backup, but I try and not work off the NAS even tho I have 10 gig networking between it and my PC. 

[Elegorn]

On 7/17/2024 at 4:47 PM, LIGISTX said:

Is it not possible to keep a working set of data locally? A SSD cache would help random reads (potentially, if what you are trying to read is actually in the cache), but you still have to contend with network overhead which is a lot… things would be tremendously faster if you just had a few TB SSD locally and could store enough data on it to be what you work off of. 
 

I have ~5TB of pictures, but I have a local SSD that is 2TB and I keep the previous 1-2 years of pictures on it locally so I can edit without having to hit my NAS. I copy all my images to the NAS after import as a backup, but I try and not work off the NAS even tho I have 10 gig networking between it and my PC. 

The issue with this I fall into is my macbook's meagre (soldered on) 512GB SSD. With all the programs and their libraries I need there's maybe 100-200GB of working space left.

 

But you're probably right on the overhead. Maybe I should just consider an external SSD instead to keep the working files in.

[LIGISTX]

56 minutes ago, Elegorn said:

The issue with this I fall into is my macbook's meagre (soldered on) 512GB SSD. With all the programs and their libraries I need there's maybe 100-200GB of working space left.

 

But you're probably right on the overhead. Maybe I should just consider an external SSD instead to keep the working files in.

I would seriously consider a thunderbolt SSD to work off of locally.