Build Low Power Use NAS Or Go With Prebuilt?

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I’m looking for advice if it will be worth it in my budget to build a NAS myself, as i been looking into getting a NAS for backups.
I’ve built desktop PCs for over 14 years now but I’m totally new when it comes to NAS and servers. Currently i only do back ups of my 256 GB Boot SSD to a old 1.5 TB HDD in the same PC. I have looked at prebuilds in my budget like the QNAP TS-230 but it can only fit 2 drives and i was kind of hoping for a bit more redundancy than that if possible.

I live in Denmark and my budget is 4000 DKK (around 530 euro) total for the build and storage drives.
We gonna be 2 people max accessing it at the same time.

Hardware
Storage: I’m only gonna start out with 2x4TB drives but if possible i want to be able to expand to at least 4 for redundancy in the future.
Ram: At least 2 GB
The rest of the components i am pretty open to any suggestions.

Operating System
I looked at unRaid, FreeNAS or TrueNAS Core not really sure which to go with.

I highly appreciate any help/advice given.

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You have basically five good options:

  1. Buy a purpose built NAS, so Synology, QNAP, etc
  2. Build with unRaid
  3. Build with FreeNAS (renamed to TrueNAS core)
  4. Build with OpenMediaVault
  5. Build with a OS over CLI, so Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu accessed over SSH.

Prebuild NASes are easy, but are often expensive compared to building.

Using something like stock Debian and setting everything up over the command line is a good option if you are comfortable with it, but is probably not the best idea if you are not experienced with using the CLI.

The difference between unRAID, TrueNAS, and OpenMediaVault, at least in what matters for a NAS is primarily what they support for file systems. unRAID has its own proprietary format for disk arrays, TrueNAS uses ZFS, and OpenMediaVault has BTRFS or EXT4+MDADM, with a plugin for ZFS.

For hardware, I would suggest not getting a hardware raid controller. This is because software disk arrays are better these days than hardware raid, for almost all cases. Plug the disk directly into the motherboard, or get a disk controller that has an HBA mode to give the disks directly to the OS.

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Here’s the hardware incl. a pair of 6T drives giving you 6T (5.5T of usable storage):
https://geizhals.eu/?cat=WL-1711347

3700 DKK total … hmm maybe you could go for 8T drives instead…

Anyway, my point is you can start with OpenMediaVault and btrfs in raid1. When you run out of space and you get a 3rd drive and rebalance, and then 4th drive, and so on…
I wouldn’t recommend raid5 with 3 drives only… it’ll work, it’s just a bit meh.

Magic happens when you get to more than 4 drives, you can add an old enterprise LSI2008 based refurbished sas card and some cables for <€50 and get more ports and new drives would still fit in the case.

Also, if you want 10G or multigig networking, there’s also multiple ways you can do this in the future.

If you want lower latency, there’s options there as well, motherboard supports nvme, there’s ways of doing caching.

You could also use ZFS, but you’d be limited in how you add drives to it. (Can’t transform vdevs between raid levels - need to evacuate data, but easy to move ZIL and l2arc to nvme and get speed)

edit: sadly OpenMediaVault will have you reaching for the command line with either zfs or btrfs… and at that point you have to start to wonder what are the benefits of using it over, for example, a Debian Linux installation that you could perform onto properly partitioned and properly setup drives.

I don’t have a guide on hand on how to do this, if you (@TheLazyGrizzly) feel you’d be lost installing Linux onto a NAS following a guide and then admin-ing it later, perhaps paying for unraid and losing some flexibility but going with ZFS would be a better option for you. Unraid is very polished.

There’s also Rockstor, I’ve never tried it looking at documentation I wouldn’t recommend it.

There’s also Proxmox, but afaik it doesn’t do btrfs arrays.

There’s also FreeNAS/TrueNAS - they’re FreeBSD based, I prefer Linux kernels and systems.

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You won’t be able to build as low power as you could but a pre-built, just an FYI…many of the cheaper synology solutions are arm based and sip power. I’d totally start with one of those and move to bigger and better when you’re ready for more.

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The case looks pretty big to me not sure where i would put that, other than that with the sales tax being pretty high here (25%) the total cost for that would be 4462 DKK sadly. Going down to 2x4 TB drives instead like i talked about in OP, would get the price below 4000 DKK again. Also I’m curious what’s the reason you went Exos drives instead of NAS drives like Ironwolfs and WD Reds?

I played around with Linux before but i am not confident in my ability to admin-ing it with command lines. So i think i would go with unRaid out of thos options.

I have found today one 4 Bay NAS that’s in my budget the DS420j but would 1 GB Ram be enough for my use case? It seems pretty low to me but then again i have only ever build desktops.

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Hello fellow Dane :slight_smile:

If it’s primary for backups, then i don’t think the 1 GB ram is gonna be a problem.

But check out a review on it:

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Considering the underlying OS is a stripped down linux I dont see 1GB ram being an issue.

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Not exactly what you are looking for but …
2x Odroid HC2 + big HDD’s and OpenMediaVault. A king when it comes to “Low Power Use NAS”. :slight_smile:

H92eUDS
H92eUDS3024×4032 937 KB

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If it’s just a backup target, then a four bay unit from Synology is hard to beat. If there’s just one or two users, then you can run that on a potato, and it’ll be fine. DSM makes it pretty easy to replicate your NAS to the cloud also if that’s something you’re interested in doing as a way to satisfy the 3-2-1 rule.

If you’re ever going to run a media server from it, or do something else which may be a bit more demanding, then I’d start looking at something custom built.

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that’s with the VAT/sales tax included, … if you order form mindfactory or most german retailers, they’ll account the correct sales tax for you … it should be similar, right? (between 15 and 25% across EU)

fractal node 304 or fractal node 804 are also interesting NAS cases, … but slightly more expensive (the chieftec one comes with a power supply, and the 304 only fits mini itx)

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I wonder, I wonder…
Bzzzz

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Realizable …

I like HC2 / HC1 as a little NAS. Contrary to appearances, it has the potential for expansion in a simple method of adding just another unit.
I know that RAID and ZFS lovers will not like it, but … Nothing prevents you from storing data on one large disk and using the other unit as a 1:1 copy.
Of course, a box for 4 or more hdd and 10G is nice, but at $54 the HC2 is worth considering.
Especially that it is passive, consumes little power and easily saturates 1G. Of course, it lacks power to encode video for plex or a few vm, but it can be used for many other things without any problems. :slight_smile:

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You see, with something like BeeGFS, the speed of the individual server does not matter because they work as a “swarm”.

I am aware BeeGFS or other file systems like it make 0 sense at home. But I want to try that at some point.

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And this is the advantage of HC2 that can be gradually expanded according to the needs and possibilities of $. :slight_smile:

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