So, the story is that afew years back, I disconnected my WB MyBook Duo because of serious vulnerability flaws. The data was still ok. Now… my ADHD brain completely forgot about it.
So I reconnected it to the internet and whadda-ya-know a month later I can’t access it, it gives the permanent yellow LED and all signs that it’s compromised.
I consider the data as lost since I’ve not got the knowledge to get it off there safely nor the money for someone else to do that for me. So, never mind the data that’s on there, I need a new NAS. It’s just that… I know nothing about it. This is what I’m have in mind:
4bay NAS, at least 8TB total capacity. Mirrored. No SSD yet, probably Ironwolf or WD Red?
2.5Gb NIC, since I’m in the middle of a Cat6 in-wall cable upgrade. Futureproofing, I don’t think I need the speed yet. The PCs already have a 2.5Gb NIC. I use a UI Dreammachine pro SE that has a 10Gb port i’d like to reserve for the NAS, UI 2.5Gb switch coming later.
Upgradeable RAM and upgradeable expansion slot.
A CPU fast enough to transfer a full windows backup from at least 3 PCs simultaneously.
Ponderings:
I’d like a 19" rack-mounted NAS, but these seem to be quite expensive for my use case. It would make the installation a lot neater though.
I heard good stuff from QNAP, opinions?
I could build it myself with spare PC parts, but It’d be a step in the dark and perhaps not wise for something so crucial? Thoughts?
It it possible to transfer backups to SSDs in the NAS and then internally from the SSDs onto the HDDs? This way the network usage will be minimised whilst mainttaining high speeds, and at the same time use the reliability of a HDD internally. Am I stationg the obvious here? :). Is this what SSD Caching basically is?
I can imagine that spoon-feeding me this info is tiresome and annoying. I completely understand if you don’t feel like it. I just have a hard time informing myself and retaining all the info from different websites due to ADHD. Thank you for your consideration
[EDIT: Yeah, not 8GB drivespace, nor do I immediately need 8GB of RAM, right ;)? Meant to say 8TB drivespace! ]
This one seems to fit your needs and is highly rated:
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If you want to build one yourself, you basically just take a tower like one of these:
then stick whatever PC hardware you want into it and build a normal PC. You can run either a basic Windows OS and just set up drive sharing if thats what you are comfortable with, or you can install a linux distro on it like this to make it a “real” NAS:
Try and get a motherboard that has the most SATA ports built in that you can, usually that means ASRock. Or, if you get a case with more hard drive bays you can always get an HBA which gives you a bunch more hard drive ports.
You can even get an HBA with both internal and external connectors such as this one:
With that HBA that has external connections, if you need more expansion room in your NAS you can connect the HBA to an external rack or tower with a bunch more drive bays and it will look like local storage on your NAS PC:
There are two external drive connection standards, the 6gb/s “SFF-8088” and the 12gb/s “SFF-8644”. Depending on what the HBA has for its connectors and what the external tower or rack has for its inputs you would get the cable you need. You can even get an 8644 to 8088 cable to go between the two types. The expansion tower just plugs straight into your PC/NAS HBA and it looks like a locally connected drive inside the main case. In this way you can effectively add more drives “forever” as your expansion needs grow. I believe the limit is like 1024 drives per HBA, which is effectively limitless for home use. Plus you can always get a second HBA if for some reason you needed more than a few petabytes…
The Broadcom and Areca HBA’s from the 3000 series and up usually have built in Windows driver support and work mostly flawlessly. Very stable solutions for adding more hard drive ports.
You didn’t state a budget, so I’m assuming you’re not strictly on a budget but can’t afford to splash out lavishly either.
To get you up and running fairly cheaply, consider a used workstation (Intel 6600 or later) with at least 8GB RAM, preferably 16GB. Purchase a pair of 16TB drives from ebay and plonk those into said workstation. Install Proxmox on the system and you’re off. Do make sure the HDD’s are from different brands, WD, Seagate and Toshiba are good candidates. If your budget allows, consider using a 256GB SSD for Proxmox, including caching.
Indeed, I didn’t. I’d say around €1k w/o drives. I could stretch a little if needed. As an investment, see?
How that you mention it, I DO have a rather weird mis-buy laying around.
An i5 6600 non-K on a H170 ITX board. Problem;: it’s one of those freak boards with DDR3 instead of DDR4. Yet I have 2*8Gb 1833 RAM laying around… I have a few Crucial 120Gb SSD’s as well. Might go on the lookout for a Sata expansion card, since it’s a ITX limited connection board.
I’ll give it a try! If I fail, I could always go the QNAP route. Thanks!
I see they have a Rack mounted version of that and I can’t see any other differences between the two.
This might be my easy way out! Thanks!
As for the hard DIY built, all good stuff. I shall combine it with what I have laying around and see if I can complete it ( I replied to Dutch_Master’s suggestion. ). I don’t have much to loose doing so, yet much to learn ^^.
Which product are you referring to? If you meant the very last link in my post then remember that those “disk shelves” and “trayless towers” are for attaching to HBA cards and are not NAS units themselves. They are just expansion units.
I do think one thing to note is Linus and Jake the writer of the video don’t really talk about the power usage with one of the negative aspects of DIY stuff is that the power costs can be notably higher and it’s really not something relevant for them in Vancouver.
Linus did mention it recently in a video, including the notion that power is one of the few things left in Vancouver to be cheap. They also showed a graph with power costs per kWh in Europe for comparison. I’m not too sure said graph is accurate as in my country I pay quite a bit more then shown in that graph (FYI: I pay € 0,68202/kWh for electricity and € 2,71663/m3 for gas. That’s gas, not petrol )
DIY does makes sense for a certain class of products.
Biggest question here, do you need ECC memory or not? If yes, €1k is most probably not going to cut it, seing as ECC-supporting consumer motherboards come at a hefty premium. The RAM itself is only 25% more expensive but the motherboard can easily increase the costs with a few hundred dollars.
So, with that in mind, here are my two (three?) top picks. First, let’s replicate the LTT build with an Intel Core i5 12400 and 16 GB of RAM:
Only drawback to this is that this has no ECC RAM.
To deal with lack of RAM, as a second option you could swap the Mainboard+CPU+RAM combo If you want to add at least another €300 for motherboard and another €25 for RAM costs. So if this is a feature you really care about, go get it.
The third option is to go for AM4 (5600G + A520 combo) instead of the above, e.g. replace the above build to:
Isn’t something low end like a raspberry pi not capable of this kind of thing? (not actually proposing, they’re way overpriced and underpowered relatively to rk3588 or even am311d boards, or celerons/pentiums in a similar price range). Wouldn’t the throughput vary wrt. number of files being transferred and how much i/o samba ends up having to make?
What backup solution are you using?
Would you consider a 4-bay USB thunderbolt thing + something like a nuc?
Right now? None. That’s why I need it relatively fast.
Actual comment from wifey: I have too many projects and we can’t afford for me to take the time to learn and experiment. She’s right, I’m still renovating and just became a dad. I don’t have the time right now.
Off the shelf QNAP NAS it is.
Sorry for wasting all of your time
I might return to actual fine-tune the darn thing, but I’m pretty sure QNAP UI is pretty straightforwards for my needs.
Depends on your requirement for a NAS. Most folks here on L1 look for a NAS that can saturate 1G network or rather even 10G network.
RPi is severely resource constrained. Only the RPi4 platform offers remotely sufficient bandwidth.
The stock RPi could connect a bunch of HDDs via USB hub to one of the USB3 ports and serve their content over 1G network.
The power consumption in this design would be dominated by the power consumption of the HDDs+USB hub. The 6-9W of the RPi seem excessive in comparison to current desktop computers that draw less power, but offer more connectivity and performance (but are more costly to buy).
So, if you have a RPi4 lying around (not likely - otherwise a RPi is still unobtainium), this is better than nothing and cheaper than a $1000 NAS, but is compromising in basically every technical aspect.
(FYI: I pay € 0,68202/kWh for electricity and € 2,71663/m3 for gas. That’s gas, not petrol 
)
