If you need a just works nas, Synology isn’t bad. It will even do well with some workloads. It sounds to me like plain old Linux would suit your needs most though.
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You may do pretty well to go to a local used computer store (if you have) or ebay and grab an old office machine that holds 1 or 2 drives for under $100. A Thinkstation P300 is a fairly ideal machine from my local stock for example. Can held 2 drives if you convert the DVD drive, a cheap SSD for OS (Linux recommended) and can just use the other drive as storage for your NAS. It offers room for expandability on ram, PCIE (10G if you ever wanted it) ect, and is very cheap to buy and low power at idle. I currently use mine as a proxmox machine, which holds my pfsense router (4 port intel nic I got for $30), and my critical backups of my NAS, along with my docker containers, some VM’s, and LXC containers. Best $150 I’ve spent on my homelab for that and the NIC.
Was thinking about that too, but power consumption remains a concern, even though it’s true that I might save enough money by buying used to power it for the next few years haha.
A Dell Optiplex small form factor with a pair of 2.5" drives in RAID would use very little power, as well as be virtually silent. The machine would run you ~$100 or less, and the drives would go for about $100/each.
I think I’ll see what the used market is like, and if I don’t find anything I’ll just stick to a separate NAS and Odroid N2. While ARM it seems to be very capable, and I find the small form-factor and low power consumption appealing.
Plus that kind of device is still useful after it’s replaced eventually down the road. Assuming I don’t go straight into a PhD program, I’ll be done with my studies soon anyways, so as soon as I start working full time I will have more options anyways.
Thanks for all your answers and insight! Particularly on the tips about the Odroid, I wasn’t aware of these and just
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Don’t underestimate the power draw of a NAS. My Thinkstation pulls ~15w from the wall at idle, which is similar to a NAS I used to own. That would cost ~$2/mo at your electricity cost, which seems pretty low even at those high electric costs.
Edit, cheaper on the power budget, but drives could be external, I also have had unedma hell Chromebox converted to Linux. I’m hesitant to recommend external driven to anyone but it’s technically cheaper on power.
Now my question is, what specific drive would the community recommend? Affordability vs. Longevity vs. Performance.
Use whatever drive you have access to, or if buying new, can afford. Backup often if you’re saving anything important on it. And remember, raid is not a backup.
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Are you planning on exposing any of the services this device to the public internet? If so, I recommend not using a SBC. Many of the SBC packages are not quick about getting security patches out to their packages because they are more conserved about stability/compatibility than security. Kernels are a big one.
If want to host something on public internet, I recommend some hardware than can host at least one full VM (not containers).
Any specific examples? SBC doesn’t have much to do here. Everything is taking place in terms of ARM architecture …
Whether SBC will be good for OP is a matter of debate. Odroid HC1 or HC2 or something stronger and more powerful, a matter of $$$.
SBC is cool but you have to be aware of its limitations. For sure x86 will be more convenient on the hardware and especially the software side.
Armbian based Debian 10 or ubuntu and 5.4.6 kernel are now available without any problem. I don’t see any delays in the versions relative to the x86, although it depends on the devs who do ARM and not the SBC itself.
What Debian has in the ARM line will be the same for almost every SBC … The easiest way is to use SBC which is supported by Armbian.
You should just build it yourself, forking the repo and adding a build YAML takes virtually zero effort. There are plenty of providers with free CI build such as GitLab and Azure DevOps.
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You need to balance. Blackblaze’s quarterly reports are a great start but most home users can tolerate much less drive failure than they can, so keep that in mind.
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I checked out their quarterly report a few months ago but I’ll look into it again. Also I’ll probably follow your suggestion about forking and building it myself. Thank you!
Yes and no. I will have remote access to it via the internet, but not publicly. I help run the infrastructure of the company I work at, and got a dedicated VPN gateway that wasn’t needed anymore because it couldn’t keep up with the load, so I’ll be using that to get remote access. Should be safe enough and the networking equipment I use is a mix of used-professional and pfsense, so I think security-wise it should be more than fine haha.
Completely agree with you on being very careful about exposing something to the wider internet.
That’s true I never considered the energy consumption of the NAS. Especially the more powerful ones like the DS918+ etc. necessarily have to draw some because they are, well, normal quad-core computers.
It’s clear that I will be paying some money for the power used, and it’s clear that it won’t be a 1 Watt idle kind of thing. What I want to avoid is to buy cheap-ish hardware, or used hardware that’s older to save a buck, and end up blowing all those savings on 2 years’ worth of electricity, because its so inefficient.
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