I don’t know if I can claim a spare hard drive hooked up to a Raspberry Pi as a NAS, but it’s what I have - and it works quite well for my single-user use case.

I’ve got a Synology 918+ with 16TB in raid 10.

Of the synology software, I regularly use: Photos (photo backup and organization tool), Drive (a private “cloud” sync like Dropbox), the contacts and calendar services, and surveillance station, their security camera monitor/recorder. Via Docker, I also run dokuwiki, gitea, draw.io, minio, postgres, freshrss, firefly3, calibre, and a few others. Like others, Time Machine backups of laptops and backups of non-apple hardware use a lot of the space.

I also have my older Synology 213 running still just as a place to backup important stuff from the primary.

I used a Rasberry Pi 4 to make a pi-hole ad blocker. I then learned you could just plug in a harddrive to it (USB) to make a very simple NAS. I bought an SSD to USB case/adapter, and with basic tutorials online I now have a network drive. To reiterate, I have no programming skills. Both the pi-hole and now the NAS were from copy-paste command line walkthroughs.

It’s not a fancy “NAS” as far as redundancy or backup, but now all 4 of the gaming PCs (wife and kids have their own) can connect to the same drive for sharing stuff. I also use it to manually back up all our photos/videos. I love it.

On Reddit, we had a r/selfhosted. Do we have something like that here, in the new frontier?

I’ve just been using an old laptop with jellyfin, radarr, sonarr and transmission.

I have a synology NAS, two bays with 4TB in raid.

Mostly used for Plex (Netflix alternative and for music streaming) but also find these useful:

Vaultwarden (password manager) Virtual machine (for torrenting) Sonarr (torrent indexer) Radarr (torrent indexer) Synology Photos (photo backup) Synology Drive (personal cloud storage) Joplin (notebook)

Probably some other stuff as well. I highly recommend mariushosting.com if you have or end up using a synology NAS. Amazing tutorials for just about anything.

I have an older R710 running TrueNAS right now with 1tb of (usable) flash storage and 10Gb connection the to the rest of my lab.

I have another TrueNAS instance running as a Proxmox VM with a Lenovo SA120 DAS attached to it, which has 2x 10Tb drives in mirror mode for mass storage. It’s also technically connected via 10Gb to the rest of my lab.

I have a $60 ASRock mobo + Intel Celeron quad core combo. Stuck 16gb of Ram in it and two sata controllers. I think ran was the most expensive and the computer now costs $150 without the drivers. I have x8 4TB drives and a 60GB ssd running true nas. That gives me 24TB space and two redundant drives for failure tolerance. From there I run jails (FreeBSD containers) for NextCloud, MiniDLNA, and transmission.

Desktop PC running proxmox with a bunch of VM’s. Mostly focused around hosting Plex but some other stuff as well. Below are some of my VM’s. All are running Ubuntu server btw.

• HDDs get passed into this VM which uses mergerfs to pool them all together. Then I’m running an NFS server to share the drives with the other VM’s that need access.
• Torrent client, sonarr, radarr, etc. To automatically acquire content.
• Plex VM
• Gaming servers (hosts Minecraft, valheim, etc servers)
• externally exposed nginx instance, hosts sites such as overseer.
• internally exposed nginx instance, allows for https access to all internal services (sonarr, radarr, flood, etc).

Theres plenty of replies with options of decent, current NAS setups - so I’ll reply with my 1st NAS instead…

You could start with a Pi-NAS to save a lot of $$coin$$… start with a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB; it has gigabit ethernet, so it meets that baseline… since you’ll be running over the USB-3 BUS regardless, you can get away with buying cheap USB drives; there are many brands, but Western Digitals are pretty cheap… they go up to like 40GB now a days, but 4TB drives are only $100 or so… I went with two 8TB drives. Its better, IMO, to go with the larger 3.5" versions because they come with external power supplies. I found with the smaller 2.5" drives, the Pi could only power one sucking power over USB…

I used no RAID, as you have to jump thru a few extra hoops to get RAID setup over drives on the USB-3 bus… backup was done thru my Proxmox PBS server - but we’re not here for the safe backup talk, right?

All this was running OpenMediaVault, which is a pretty decent NAS software. It has support for all the connection types you want - and believe it or not, I also ran Plex in docker and got decent results; while I wasn’t able to do any transcoding, wireless playback worked quick enough for me - and I could even watch movies remotely…

I mention this setup b/c a 16TB Pi-NAS can be had for $300, all in… you can see speeds of 100MB/s but I found 40-50MB/s was an average because of WiFi or other bottlenecks.

Its cool to have options when building a NAS; I’ve since moved my NAS to a Proxmox VM on my Dell Poweredge server, but the Pi-NAS ran without fail for four years…

• pAULIE42o
• . . . . . . . . . . .
• /s

Custom low power build:

• Case: some old 2U Supermicro case with 6 HDD bays that got thrown out at work
• Mainboard: ASRock J4105M Micro ATX
• CPU: Intel Celeron J4105
• RAM: 8 GB DDR4 (CPU doesn’t support more)
• RAID controller: LSI 9212-4i
• System SSDs: 2x 128 GB Intenso 2.5" SATA SSD (mounted into the first two bays with 3D-printed 2.5" to 3.5" adapters)
• Data HDDs: 2x Seagate Ironwolf 4TB, 2x Seagate Exos X16 14TB, combined into an 18 TB zfs pool
• PSU: PicoPSU

My main goal was to build a 4 HDD NAS that can run at very low power and without active cooling most of the time (because it sits under my desk) but can spin up fans if needed.

On the software side I run Ubuntu 22.04, docker and Jellyfin as a media server. The J4105 provides Intel Arc graphics for video encoding.

Currently running an R710 in RAID6 with 32TB usable, but between the data on plex and backups of things in the rack I’m low on space.

I’m looking at getting 8 Odroid HC4s and some referbed 20TB drives to build a Glusterfs cluster that will host all of my VM disks and backups. At least with that I’ll have 80-120TB depending on how much fault tolerance I have. Because they have two HDD slots I can double my storage when it gets low and just add more boards to expand the array when I’m tight for space again.

Computer with Ubuntu Server, with a Ryzen APU (3400g), 16GB DDR4 RAM, and 2 x 4TB WD Red CMR Drives.

Use it as a media server for Jellyfin, and also as a file server using NFS. Works super awesome and I wish I had done this sooner

I’d like to build a NAS. Does anyone have a simple guide I could follow? I do have experience building my personal computers. I could search online for a guide, but a lot of the time small communities like this will have the end-all be-all guide that isn’t well known.

I’m lucky enough to have a Kobol Helios64, but unfortunately the small company that made these shut down. It’s fine for the time being but I’m going to have to pay attention to the NAS market to be ready to replace it one day… my main goal is low power, so I’m not sure if it’s worth it to go to a more commercial option like Synology or if I should be building something.

As appliance NAS tend to be, the actual SBC in the Helios64 is pretty slow so I minimize what I run on it. It does have Plex server, but most everything else runs on another ARM machine that mounts from it by SMB.