I’m going on a trip where I’ll be taking loads of photos and videos, probably 200-300GB per day for a few days. I’d like to have redundant storage to backup my files but don’t really want to buy a bunch of SD cards or standalone USB thumb drives/HDDs/SDDs. That’s what lead me to look into what it would take to put together a travel nas. I have a home nas in a rack however it’s a tad slow as it’s mainly spinning rust and rather large and power hungry. I kinda want another toy to play with in the form of an all flash nas, it’s just a little pricy.
My initial plan for the compact nas is to buy a used dell T3240 compact, toss in a couple 4tb nvme ssds and try to boot truenas core off of an a key 2230 SSD or a sata ssd. Then later on use the pcie slot to add 2 more m.2 drives to give me 8 or 12tb of redundant storage in a ~2.5L? box. It’s frustrating that it only comes with 1G lan but maybe I could get a usb 2.5/5G lan adapter to work with truenas? I haven’t looked into that one yet.
Anyway, does it make sense to buy a few 2tb thunderbolt ssds specific for the trip then have them just set in a drawer afterwards or build that compact nas and take it with me?
Am I overthinking this?
A friend has a qnap nas and doesn’t like it so that’s swayed me away from the TBS-464.
That is probably the absolutely smallest package available right now. It is not the most performant NAS, true, but it should still allow you to do what you want it to.
Another option could be to get an external HDD cabinet connected over USB 3.0 / USB C, just add drives:
Part of wanting all flash storage would be to avoid vibrations shaking the hdds, I will be in a car for over 10h one way this trip and dont want to damage anything.
I like that pi nas and didn’t know it existed. I’ll have to grab one for my parents to replace a core2duo system I set up a while back.
If vibe isn’t going to be an issue I’ll consider spinning rust, it is far cheaper per tb then flash.
I don’t really like the idea of paying that much for a rpi.
One other idea I had was to grab a M90n or M90n iot and toss in 2 nvme drives and boot from the wireless card slot or a usb drive. I saw a M90n on sale for cheaper then that pi on eBay. Though I’ve read they also overheat a bit.
If you want a solid base to build on, but that doesn’t have as much connectivity as the Dell T3240 compact, I think you should look into the Odroid H3+. Has dual 2.5Gbit NIC on board, an NVME slot, dual SATA ports, can be equipped with an eMMC module to boot Truenas for your application and costs just as much as an 8GB these days anyway.
I just came across the deskmini x300. It’s smaller then the dell in 2 dimensions and supports 2 2.5" and 2 2280 drives. Runs Ryzen 5000 and has an internal usb2 header I might be able to use for a dom. Newegg is selling it for $150 barebones on eBay. Are there any glaring flaws with that system besides the 1G lan?
From past experience with Desk Minis is the “supported memory” list is often more out-dated as they were “certified” 6-8 months before the product reached stores so you could find yourself buying RAM that won’t work even though the SKU hasn’t changed(had this issue with GSKill and Corsair memory kits). Compatibility wise stick with OEM grade Samsung or SK Hynix memory, they work across everything as PC ODMs are more specific with specs.
how is your internet connection? Leave the NAS at home and run NextCloud on it? if mobile data is a concern, you can do uploads when you are sitting in a mcdonalds or a hotel room.
Use SSD’s and remove the drives when you travel (It is tool-less drive sleds so no big deal) The reason I say to remove the drives when you travel is that I had a client that used this for a travel NAS and it was great because you can power it off of 12v DC from your car battery. But if you leave the drives in when traveling they can damage the backplane.
Do you really need the NAS to be portable? I would have just bought a SATA to USB converter for SSDs and used that. Or, I already have a NVME to USB adapter that I used to use with the Pi 4 as my main PC, until a week ago when I moved to an Odroid H3+. I got the type 2 case, which doesn’t have room for drive expansion.What I don’t like about the cases is that you need to put a fan on top of the case and have it blow air in (mine’s passive and at 14C room temp, the CPU stays at 27.8C).
If that redundancy is important to you, but you don’t care about the speed of the NAS, only the flash vibration resistance. then Odroid HC4 and RockPro64 are cheaper alternatives. The toaster format of the HC4 makes it perfect for that, although the hardware is really limited (also, software support is not really there, but it can run md-raid and btrfs). RockPro64 can run these + ZFS, but the official case is a pain to deal with, although you could have 4 SATA SSDs in there. And without the HDDs, it might be a bit easier to work in, as you gain a lot of free air.
But I can tell you, the H3+ with the type 3, 5 or 7 are probably more compact than the rockpro64 official case, only because you cannot put a PCI-E car in the former, so it saves space. Also, RockPro64 official case is the heaviest (it’s metal after all, might impede on portability), followed by the h3(+), followed by the hc4. The toaster wins on smallest size and least weight.
I am happy with my rockpro64 NAS in terms of speed, I run zfs on 2 pools, ssd and hdd pools. With a bit of creativity, you can probably get away with running 6 or 8 SSDs in the RockPro64 case though, and go for raid6 for capacity. But 8 ssds will get pricey really fast.
Yeah after some more thought I’ll probably just grab a couple mx500 4tb drives and use a SATA to USB adapter. I can reuse those drives in a nas at a later date if I get to it but that way I’m only out ~$500 instead of the over a grand for less performance and more bulk for this trip. I’ll get redundancy in the form of me copying files to both and get full sata3 speeds instead of just 1g or 2.5g speeds. I’ve been meaning to replace a couple ssds in my current nas for a while now anyway…
I’d only take SSDs so vibrations aren’t a concern. You can get 8 TB Samsung QVO SATA drives you could use externally or 8 TB Sabrent NVMe drives to install in a laptop. Dell has a model that takes 4 NVMe drives and my plan is to stuff it with NVMe if I start doing heavy video (which I haven’t).
The Odroid mentioned is a solid contender, too.