if you’re comfortable building one out I would recommend the DIY solution. There are countless vids on selection and OSs. The most highly suggested one is trunas core (freenas) or unraid (not really a nas solution imo). If youre windows centric I know that which a pro lic you can run windows storage spaces.
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The quirky option:
- Get a pair of <5W hard drives (they’re not the cheapest but there’s large options as well)
- Get a pair of Nano Pi Neo 3 … 2G ram option
- Connect them using a cheap usb3 - SATA adapter.
- Learn Linux (basically setup debian or Alpine btrfs and rclone and samba)
- Move one of the off-site, for more safety.
- Done.
Enjoy your cheap NAS.
The more capable version:
- Get a fractal node 304
- Get 6x 18T WD Gold drives , or seagate exos (start with two).
- Build an AM4 system inside based around a B550 and 5600X
- Debian + LVM per drive + luks + btrfs.
Why btrfs and not zfs?
They’re both copy on write with checksumming and built-in compression and built in raid. Btrfs will let you reconfigure drives and raid levels as you need more space even without unmounting. ZFS is more of an industry standard, but more expensive to run on the account of being harder to expand. (e.g. can’t really go from 3 drive raidz1 to 4 drive raidz1 without wiping data and starting over).
Ultimately, it all depends on $ and actual needs. But when it comes to Home NAS start small go big later imho.
Two Odroid HC2 / HC1 or one HC4 + armbian/openmediavault 
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Welcome to the forum! I personally recommend skipping commercial products. Get your hands dirty and build your own (with our help 
). Especially if you want to use the box for more than just a NAS (like running VMs on it). If you want it to be strictly a NAS box, use TrueNAS Core. If you want to run VMs on it, like a VM for a website and another VM for a database and another VM for backups, use Proxmox. Proxmox is a hypervisor that could be used strictly as a NAS (but why would you do that?) and TrueNAS Core is a NAS OS that can also be used as a hypervisor. TrueNAS Core is more similar to offerings like Synology.
For HDDs, I’d recommend Ironwolf.
If you give a budget and a target capacity, we could do a build for you and we could compare with commercial offerings from Synology.
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First of all, thanks for all the replys.
To everyone that recommented to build my own NAS: I think that building your own NAS is really cool, but my knowledge isn’t that great yet (especially linux basics lol) so rn I’m looking for a plug and play solution.
@Novasty I actually thought about buying the 420+ but ofc I saw the 920+ and that it has a better processor. Is it worth paying the bit higher price?
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IMO with what you have posted and your use-case in mind, a mid range + Synology or something around there.
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If the price difference isn’t too big, the 920+ would be far better. Also another thing to keep in mind is how Synology does their naming scheme.
DS[DriveCount][YEAR]
So a DS920+ is a 2020 NAS that can support 9 drives. 4 drives to start and an additional 5 drives with the DX517 expansion unit.
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Synology and to the hell with their small drive number nas
RAID6 is better than raid5 id opt for a 6-8 bay dont go 4 or less. Yes they are cheap and attractive but you probably want the two drive failure robustness of raid6 because what happens when a crappy SMR wd red fails?
As for drives id take the iron wolfs at this point
Toshiba also make a cheaper MG tier 2 line which is worth looking at. They make a great N300 line as well
One more thing: RAID6 is not a true back up solution
there’s also a prior comment which I like
Honestly if you do AM4 ZedFS limits your space by the amount of RAM you have so software raid I am finding is better.
(Im sort of in the boat of scoping out my NAS build too
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Want to piggyback my agreement RAID6 minimum. Synology then supports a simple external backup HDD (readable to other systems) or hyper backup.
As you grow with needs it can support storage to hypervisors, Plex, various self hosted cloud services for storage, security NVR etc.
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SHR2 If you’re using Synology’s hybrid raid, which isn’t all that horrible.
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I mentioned btrfs… since it’s more flexible on raid and therefore cheaper for home use — you start with raid 1 and 2 drives ; then rebalance into raid 10 once you 4 drives, and then into raid 6. You can do this without a nuke-n-pave or a second system / box of drives; to hold your data while you reconfigure the array.
Also, it’s lighter on the ram… just as a plain old filesystem.
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Honestly I think the OP would get a great experience out of spending a good amount of money building his own. There are people in this thread that will conflict with that and its fine. Synology is a great turnkey solution
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The difference is like 40€ soo…
I think I’ll go for the 920+
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Even thought I don’t want to build my own I’m curious.
Bc when I don’t like the Tower Designs wouldn’t I go for a rack-NAS to get smth bigger?
If you have a rack at home and noise isn’t an issue or are willing to install one, they’re great. They fit a ton of drives.
Cubic shaped cases like that node-304 will allow for larger quieter fans and a decent amount of storage.
I’m assuming based on your described use case (a bit of sql a webserver) you’d benefit from a better multipurpose system and a bit more airflow for a cpu.
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Diy works wonders, only downside is a lot of experiments till you find out what fits your needs,
If you are planning small go for freeNas or if you want future proof build go for upgradable solution with more hp, and proxmox as it enables much more kvm features with passthrough and other storage solutions.
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oookey
I changed my mind I think I’ll build my own NAS.
I talked to a friend who has a small NAS at home (an old i5 and ddr3 ram etc),
but he showed me the benefits of freenas.
not so nice:
ryzen cpus are not that available rn
idk what motherboard to get (cpu r3 3300X?)
and I don’t know any good ecc ram modules
Ok, so let me reaffirm your needs: Windows backups, storage for videos, a webserver and in the future some SQL and multimedia. Not sure what the last one implies though. For this, you can get away with very few system resources. You could start on the cheap with a junkyard build, if you manage to find an old server with ECC RAM that’s cool too. But for a new build, you could go with the same motherboard that I have on my PC and on my pfSense box, which is the ASRock J3455M and get 8 or 16gb of non-ECC DDR3 RAM (1x 8gb DIMM should suffice for starters). In a Synology DS920, you would probably get a similar CPU with non-ECC RAM as well and only 4gb of RAM.
I would do a Ryzen build for ECC support, but prices are through the roof at the moment and availability is low. After this, you need to get a few PCI-E sata expansion cards. I personally bought 2x x1_PCI-E cards that offer 2 sata ports each, because they were very cheap and I intended to keep the x4 PCI-E slot free. That would give you a total of 6 sata ports, enough for a RAID-Z1 and a boot drive. Ryan went and done some testing with TrueNAS Core and installation on USBs was very flaky and unpredictable, so a boot drive is needed (an el-cheapo 32gb ssd would do just fine).
If you really fancy more drives, you could look for those x1 PCI-E expansion cards that offer 4 sata ports (I couldn’t find any), or you could get 1x x1 PCI-E with 2 ports and 1x x4 PCI-E with 4 ports, for a total of 8 sata ports, which will give you enough to do a 6 drive RAID-Z2 (optimal, as explained here in the quote from Sarge: ZFS RAID Config for old disks ). Then you would have 1 SATA port taken by the boot drive and one free SATA port for either a caching drive after you max out the RAM, or for a hot-spare (I don’t like hot-spares).
I can see that there are newer ASRock models with a better CPU (still use Atom cores, have a newer architecture, but I don’t expect any noticeable difference) that have basically the same features that my motherboard has: ASRock J3710M and J4105M. The first also uses DDR3, the later uses DDR4 and both have a max of 16gb.
For a case, go with anything that you like, however, I would highly advise you use a case that has some form of easily removable drive cages. We had 2x Antec P150 quiet (one black, one white) used as NAS and they were absolutely bananas. Aside from the fact that you could install a Chieftec cmr3141sas or similar hot-swap drive bay, which I did on another Antec that I have an Intel Server board inside. For something that doesn’t look like a museum piece, look for an Antec 302. Antec usually has those easily removable drive cages. If you want something smaller that could fit 6 hdds and a SSD, that’s hard to find, but I guess Antec p101 silent would do.
I would estimate this build to be around $450 without HDDs.
Edit: typos and deleted a sentence that I haven’t finished (I had to rush to go out and now I finished and came back to edit this).
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Don’t stress about ECC too much - as long as your ram/case temp is near any kind of humanly endurable temp (e.g. lower than 50 C) - and you have decent non-overclocked ram, the likelyhood of getting any kind of random bit flip is very very low. (>99% chance you’d go for multiple years before flipping a single bit out of a 32GB deployment). For a small home NAS you’ll be fine.
FreeNAS (aka TrueNAS Core these days) relies on ZFS, you won’t be able to add disks one by one to your existing volumes or filesystems. This is not an issue with BTRFS or Unraid or Synology. Also, the container situation is kind of weird, since it’s not using the linux kernel natively. Also, the whole thing with installing on a flash drive, or a separate drive that is then made to not have redundancy and be a single point of failure whilst being an additional storage device makes no sense.
I’d suggest you installed Debian instead, such that it just boots from the same reliable array of drives you’d ordinarily use to store your stuff. And that you used btrfs, which allows you to change raid levels and rebalance data on drives on the fly and add more space when you need it (and not before). For example, once you fill up your e.g. 5T out of 6T total on the two mirror drives, with btrfs you can add a 12T drive, and rebalance for a total of 12T of space. As far as btrfs is concerned, you can do all this without even rebooting. Although you’ll probably want to power off the machine to add hardware (cheap “home gamer” cases and power supplies and what not). You can’t start with 2 drives in ZFS and get a bit more space by adding a third drive, but you can with btrfs (or with unraid and similar).
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Speaking of Debian and stuff, I remember people praising OpenMediaVault, which uses Debian at its core. I have never used it, but I guess it should be ok. Reading through the Wiki, it seems it has plugins for MySQL server, Nginx, Plex, Subsonic, OpenVPN and “many more.” And being Debian, it also has support for ZFS and the above mentioned BTRFS (never used it, cannot vouch for it, just like I can’t vouch for OMV). Not sure how the plugin-system functions (simple apt or docker images?), I always preferred configuring my own stuff in the back.
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