Keep NAS or buy hard drives and turn PreBuilt into NAS?

I have a QNAP TS 230 with two 4 TB Ironwolf NAS drives but when wanting to improve the situation of external hard drives used by other members of the family I realized that 4 TB drives are much too low and it would be difficult to buy appropriate sized drives while including any form of redundancy in a 2 bay enclosure. As I am moving from a prebuilt to a custom computer I was considering trying to use the prebuilt as a NAS. However it only has room set up for 3 Hard drive bays. Is it better to move to that or perhaps wait and try and buy on sale an old computer or an already designed NAS and use that instead for a NAS.

Also, is it maybe best not to worry about trying to find a solution and just let someone who wants to have over 14 TB of external hard drives that aren’t labelled or organized store movies and family photos that way?

The QNAP prebuilts, while quite inflexible, is very good at keeping your operating power consumption low. If lower wattage device is desirable and if you have disposable money, have you considered maybe putting larger capacity drives to it?

Speaking of QNAPs, keep those things updated with the latest software. Malware operators seem to like infecting those machines because the QNAP devs infrequently does updates. If you cant seem to update them, maybe it is time to retire them altogether.

I have considered putting larger capacity drives in it I just wasn’t sure how useful that would be as it is a 2 bay NAS. For my own personal stuff I feel like the 4 TB is more then enough it’s more so if I want things to be able to have everything in the house it seems like it would need to be larger and I wasn’t sure what would be the best solution for that.

Having a NAS made from consumer parts is also nice but you wont get as low as power consumption on NAS prebuilds.

The price of NAS flexibilty isnt just money from buying new consumer grade parts you are also left to fend for yourself in a custom build. I made a new one recently and there was a gotcha that the M.2 drives in the motherboard I bought wasnt supporting SATA3 and that information wasnt available anywhere.

Ah, so for most regular joes it might best to not do a NAS from consumer parts. Where maybe I should just buy a NAS with more flexibility when one comes on sale instead if I would like low power consumption?

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You mentioned low power use, but what kind of performance are you looking for?

For example, I have a 1T SN700, an 18T WD Elements, and a 20T WD Elements, all connected over usb3 to an Odroid n2+, the whole setup uses less than 10W typically and will happily read/write large files at gigabit rates while playing a 4k movie on the TV that the Odroid is connected to.

There are some SBCs that might be more suited for NAS use, if you’re not looking for something super high performance?

Sorry, what’s a SBC?

SBC stands for single board computer, and refers to systems like the raspberry pi, or x86 systems with soldered-on CPUs and RAM.

Have you considered just buying a cheap case with a lot of drive bays on a local used site? If your prebuilt doesn’t use some weird nonstandard junk, anyway.
What prebuilt are you considering? If it as 3 5.25"(optical drive) drive bays, you can convert those to 4 or 5 3.5"(hard drive) bays.

For optimal storage efficiency in a raid setup, want a 3:4 ratio afaik. 3 drives of storage with 1 drive of parity/redundancy. If you even have 1 5.25" drive bay, you could stick a 3.5" drive adapter in it, and get your requisite 4 drives.

The prebuilt I have only has 3 3.5 bays so yeah it probably isn’t worth it to try and convert to a NAS. Given that my attempt to move to Linux hasn’t been totally smooth it might make sense to keep a Windows machine for gaming as the 8700k didn’t seem to run into issues, though if I do that I’m not sure if I should put the NVIDIA GTX 1070 back into it so it can handle gaming better. Or if there’s something else I can do with the machine. I really didn’t expect one of my main PvE hobby games to just not work at all with a VM.

I reinstalled my distro so I’m kind of distracted by that and as sales season is ending just accepting the current state for now. Maybe I didn’t give QNAP enough of a chance and I will be less annoyed if I try to properly revisit the software again.

Sorry if I’m rambly I have a few ideas that I want to do and not exactly sure how to do them or how they’d go together. One thought in the past was to have the QNAP be running home assistant instead of my Pi and my Pi 4B be used for a barcode reader to make home inventory easy but the new computer and finding out how low the power of the QNAP distracted and made me wonder if I should just switch to using the XPS 8930 as a NAS or some other thing.

Once again, very sorry that I’m rambly I’ve been up for over 16 hours.


SBC == Single Board Computer, like a raspberry pi or similar

Some of them are a bit on the expensive side these days (150$/£/€ or more), so some people go for refurbished thin clients instead e.g. Fujitsu S920 or a Dell 7040.

The Odroid N2+ that I use, ended up costing me about a 100-ish incl. case, emmc storage for os, emmc adapter so I can put stuff on emmc using a computer, and a POE power splitter. I was buying it so I could hook it up to a TV (and get HDR10+/DV from Kodi) those more powerful and somewhat larger thin client machines can’t do modern video as well - they just don’t have the modern hardware accelerators.

This particular board I’m using comes with 3x physical 3.0 ports hooked up to a single USB root hub - I have one more port free for another drive once I run out of space (probably not soon, the 20TB disk is new - maybe I should peel off the plastic).

If I wanted more disks from the start, I’d look at enclosures: Festplatten & SSDs Externe Gehäuse mit Formfaktor: 3.5", Datenträger Anzahl: 10/12/13/15/4/5/6/8, Anschluss intern: SATA 6Gb/s Preisvergleich Geizhals EU . The ~ $250 raidsonic/icy box 10Gbps one is nice.

There used to be $30-ish nanopi neo3-lts available, it’s similar to pine64 rock64, as well as several other $50-ish boards with multiple USB3.0 ports. It seems everything has gone at least 50% up in price over the last year and availability is making shipping more expensive… see above for reference to people using thin clients.

Oh the software stack I’m using is pretty insane, it’s very much the case that when the thing reboots, I need to ssh and run a shell script to mount filesystems and start containers for fileserver stuff,… CoreElec which is is the distro I’m using for Kodi video playback, isn’t built for NAS-ing - but allows for Entware and has docker.


Basically, how much space do you need? How many drives do you want? How much random read write or sequential performance do you need? What apps do you want to run on it / other than presumably maybe samba?


BTW, good price for HDD space at home, currently as of December 2022 is <$15/TB – after about 2 years of stagnation the prices of HDD space are finally falling again.

The cheapest per TB drives are generally either the biggest drive from previous or one before previous generation of HDDs (16-18T per drive) or the second biggest drive in current generation of HDDs (e.g. 20T drives).

Tere’s several websites that track pricing like geizhals.eu and diskprices.com . Right now, it’s not a good time to buy, because Thanksgiving sales and discounts just ended. camelcamelcamel can send you notifications when price of something goes down, and you can see historical pricing too - as an indication for how low can price of something go, and you can check in on prime days on Amazon and before other holidays / or back to school days and what not.

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