NAS and Server Solutions for reasonable price

Now normally I would go full DIY and have already built a system, installed FreeNAS on it, and be on my merry way but this needs to work without me around. I’m setting this up for my family and it really needs to be seamless or they will not use it. I’m at college most of the time so it needs to be easy enough that my brother who’s computer experience is limited to an iPad could use. Though at the same time it needs to have enough use that I still can have some fun. I was looking at some of the cheap Synology rack mount NAS as we do have a server rack for networking gear (just a simple gigabit home networking setup with POE for the access points) but it’s a really small Navepoint one and it doesn’t have the depth to fit anything too extravagant. Some of the more expensive Qnap and Synology systems in the $800-$1000 range looked pretty good minus Qnap’s ridiculous thought that someone’s going to use their NAS as a movie watching/karaoke device. I do like a lot of the server features of the Qnap and Synology though it is far less than a FreeNAS build. The main thing I need out of this system is the ability to perform RAID (most likely RAID 10 or something with a little higher failure tolerance) with the added ability of adding a caching drive (I bought a bunch of old SSD’s from this guy, barely used. Samsung 850 Pros and an old PCIe M.2 drive non-NVMe). I was hoping to bond 4 ports together for 4Gb/s speed to compensate multiple devices reading at the same time. The main use of this system will be a backup for basic files (family pictures, school documents), save stream records/backups of youtube clips, a small plex server (I’m open to other options as I don’t like that Plex isn’t open source), and a backup of all the files that I could probably re-download off the internet but I’d rather have them forever myself (who knows when our ISP overlords will block those sites).

Some of the recent leaks where there was a flaw found in the WD cloud drives where people were able to get at the files on them from the outside is terrifying. I would like the ability to access the files remotely (ie. at school) but I would prefer safety over convenience when it comes to this.

I know this is really convoluted but the biggest issue is just finding something that is reliable but also still fun to mess with. I love tinkering but as I’ve become more busy in life I have realized the value of having something that just works. Any way, thank you! I await your responses and suggestions.

P.S. if I could run a minecraft server on it that would be cool.

Could take a look at the HP MicroServers allthough they only have 1 Gigabit network connection.

The next best thing I could find is a Netgear ReadyNAS

Those HP servers look great minus that they are running ancient CPUs and that netgear looks really good except I was planning on installing all of my own drives. I might look into it more because that does look pretty perfect. So long as the price goes down without drives :slight_smile:

35W and DDR4 certainly isn´t the bulldozer Opteron.
https://www.amd.com/en/opteron

It performs like an i5 7267U in PassMark and gets 293 points in Cinebench R15 (according to HWBot wich is a bit faster than the i5 6200U (265 points))

As a backup for our corporate EMC SAN we use either Netgear ReadyNAS or 8 bay QNAP NAS devices so they are solid choices.

I am using a QNAP 453B for streaming MKV films direct to my TV plus You Tube other internet services. It also has a full install of Ubuntu to use as an alternative desktop on the TV and captures my CCTV setup. I can run VMs on it and it has a PCIe upgrade slot for SSD caching and 10 gbe so great for a tinkerer :slight_smile:

QNAP tend to have more hardware upgrade options compared to Synology so that’s why I went for a QNAP.

We download Ghost images a lot at work and I’ve currently got a DIY server with a Intel server board in an Antec case with 6 HDDs running MS Storage Pools with 1 HDD setup as a live spare but I’ve never had issue in 2 years running that server.

I’ve just spec’d up a replacement which will use 4 larger HDDs in a HP Gen 10 server linked to above again running MS Storage Pools and once tested I’ll deploy another 30+ similar setups across the country.

So all those options have proven to be reliable for me.

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Thank you! That was really helpful. I have noticed that the Qnap’s appear to have a lot more server functionality. I looked at some of their Thunderbolt enabled servers and they had two full M.2 slots along with the PCIe slot for expansion. I think the only thing that weirded me out about the Qnaps was some of their features that just seemed ridiculous like the audio inputs for Karaoke on some of their models.

Are you saying that it’s a new Zen based Opteron? I looked at the link and couldn’t glean much from it.

Found some info, those Embedded-SoCs seem to be based on “Merlin Falcon” wich is basically an updated Carrizo design. So it is somewhat related back to Excavator.

QNAP are a Taiwan registered company so that’s probably a regional thing similar to the the Japanese obsession with Karaoke!

Only other thing I thought of was any solution that uses a rigid backplane to connect the drives always gets my vote ReadyNAS/QNAP/GEN10.

As the only issue I had after setting up the DIY server was a slightly loose SATA cable creating spurious errors but the error correction was able to handle it in the Storage Pools until I re-seated the cable and then no more issues.

I use unRAID . It base license is $59 USD with support for up to 6 drives
It runs on most hardware, boots from a USB then runs in RAM. It has a huge amount of community maintained docker containers for things like Plex, Syncthing, minecraft server managers, home automation stuff like NodeRED as well as automatic downloaders for various things. It’s also really easy to spin up virtual machines. There’s so many things unRAID has. You can tinker with it or make it as push button as you like. It’s very friendly to amateurs.

You can have one to two disks as parity drives. For example if you have 3 x 8TB HDDs one is a parity. So if one HDD fails the parity HDD can help rebuild the dead HDD. If the parity drive dies you can use the two HDD drives to rebuild the parity drive.

This applies to up to 12 drives so that means and you only need one 8TB parity HDD to help rebuild a HDD if any of your 12 8TB HDDs fail.
Note though that if your parity HDD fails at the same time as another of your HDDs the data on that HDD will be lost unless you have a second parity drive.

I’m not sure what else I can say without rambling too much. What I will say is my unRAID server has been quite stable for the year and a half I’ve been running it and my friends has been running fine for 3+ years.

If there are any better options out there that are as easily as unRAID I’d be interested to know what they are.

Anyone feel free to correct me if I got something wrong. I am a bit of a noob