Curious what you’ve got installed on it. What do you use a lot but took awhile to find? What do you recommend?
I just have a Synology with 4 drives. Super basic and was very easy to set up and takes up very little space in a closet. I mount it to my Ubuntu server using samba, and then any data processing that needs to be done on that data (e.g. plex, music server, etc.) is done on the server, which is much more powerful than the little Celeron CPU that the Synology has.
TrueNAS virtualized under Proxmox with HBA card passed through. I don’t run apps on my NAS, it’s just for storage.
I have an Ubuntu VM running on my Proxmox server. It just exports some folders over NFS that I mount from my laptops and PC. Then I have Nextcloud running in a separate VM so my phone can upload photos. The NC storage is all the NFS mounted folders from the NAS. Simple and works.
I run everything on a lean Ubuntu server install. My Ansible playbooks then take over and set up ZFS and docker. All of my hosted services are in docker, and their data and configs are contained, regularly snapshotted, and backed up in ZFS.
I run basically all of the Arr stack, Plex (more friendly to my less tech savvy family then my preferred solution Jellyfin), HAss, Frigate NVR, Obsidian LiveSync, a few Minecraft worlds, Docspell, Tandoor recipes, gitea, Nextcloud, FoundryVTT, an internet radio station, syncthing, Wireguard, ntfy, calibre, Wallabag, Navidrome, and a few pet projects.
I also store or backup all of the important family documents and photos, though I haven’t implemented Immich just yet, waiting for a few features and a little more development maturity.
About 30TB usable right now.
Docspell
Could you go into a bit more detail on this particular stack and how it’s useful to you?
Certainly. Mostly it started as a way to keep tax documents and receipts safe and easily findable.
It’s grown into a “huh, maybe this letter from <bank, school, insurance, charity, etc> is important, but it clutters the house less when ones and zeros”, so we scan it in.
Then when we need info, we can just search for the name of the sender, the date, account numbers, literally anything remotely legible in the document and get lightning fast results.
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
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Using an old Netgear Readynas R102 with 4.5 TB of usable storage in RAID 0.
I used to run all kinds of services on the nas itself via the ssh access, but I’ve since moved those to separate raspberry pis. The pis use the nas as a networked storage.
I run a webserver, music server, matrix server and torrent client seeding ubuntu images.
I want to make a storage cluster using Ceph in the future, but I’ve not found any suitable small computers that I could use with that.