n00b question, sorry. If I had a desktop that could hold 4 HD and 2 SSD, could I turn it into a NAS? Could someone point me in the right direction if this makes sense?
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Yep. Just install Linux, plug it into your router, set a static ip, and install the nas software ya want.
There are plenty of approaches. ChatGPT is great at debugging issues and helping ya through the setup. I did this with a raspberry pi and external usb drive the other week.
Nice, didn’t realize a NAS could be on smaller hardware. Thanks for the info!
Some people even use Raspberry Pis as their NAS. I use an old MacBook (5th gen i5) as a home server with 2 external hard drives as a NAS, which also runs a few docker containers like Jellyfin. Before that, I was using an old PC with 1st gen i3 for all these things.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.
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You totally can, but since it will be on all day with 4 hdd look into wattages you want to live with. There are some small NUCs or Pi based NAS with low wattages. There is OpenMediaVault, FreeNAS/TrueNAS software to install
Nice, good things to balance. Thanks for the info!
Hey sorry, thinking on this more, could I just turn on the NAS when desired? What is the benefit of running it constantly?
Yep, look into Wake On LAN if you just want to power the NAS on remotely.
My NAS also powers on at certaIn times of day and off again after a while - IF - no-one’s connected / no network traffic / etc.
I do NOT need my NAS on at 3am…
Edit : forgot to say, check out OpenMediaVault
Note that there is some reliability drawback of spinning hard disks on and off repeatedly. maybe unintuitively HDDs that spin constantly can live much longer than those that spend 90% of their time spun down.
This might not be relevant if you use only SSDs, and might never affect you, but it should be mentioned.
Stellar! Thanks for the info!
No reason why not. May be a little power-hungry depending on the spec but if you already have it go for it. FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) is the usually suggested OS to run: https://www.truenas.com/freenas/
Since you have 4 HDD slots probably run 4 disks in a RAID 5 so think of how much space you need. RAID 5 is n-1 so if you have 4x 10TB drives you will be left with 30TB of space before formatting. You can calculate here: https://www.raid-calculator.com/
Then either mirror the SSDs for OS and caching or just use one. Depends on your budget really.
Maybe I’m dumb but looking at wikipedia I’m a bit confused. Seems like you can do this on almost any linux distro. What is the reason behind setting up a dedicated OS, cost of operation, stability, performance?
Nice, thanks so much for the info!
Power consumption is the main issue. If it’s an old, power hungry desktop and you live somewhere with expensive electricity, it can be quite costly to run. If you have an energy efficient desktop or have cheap power then it will be fine. Just make sure it has a good quality power supply if it’s going to run 24/7.
Unraid is a great option for anyone, but beginners in particular. It does, however, cost money and isn’t open source.
Thanks for the resource, might be good to at least research. Thanks!
My first NAS was an old desktop that I got for $300 running an FX-6300 and a GTX 550, I slapped a couple hard drives in there, installed Ubuntu, and made an SMB share.
I’d recommend installing TrueNAS Scale on a system rather than doing what I did in part due to it being so much better than what I was doing, but you could run it on a potato if you wanted.
Hell my latest NAS upgrade is going from a PowerEdge T610 (tower server from like 2010ish) running TrueNAS Scale to a normal desktop (from 2017) running TrueNAS Scale
If anything using normal desktop hardware makes servicing it easier than using old server hardware
Another option is to use openmediavault.
I haven’t looked at truenas.
Yeah. That’s what I used to do when I started out.
The simplest thing to do is install Debian on the computer and create partitions. You have 4 HDDs and 2 SSDs so it’d be stupid to create 6 separate partitions for each drive.
See in the BIOS if your motherboard supports software RAID1, so you are protected against drive failure somewhat. This will allow you to get something barebones running that’ll use at least 2 drives with redundancy. I assume the mobo RAID1 is stupid and only allows for max 2 drives, so the other drives will be just laying around useless. If that’s the case, probably use the 2 SSDs first. I see other posters recommending higher orders of RAID, but I only have 2 HDDs so I never really delved into that :P Perhaps that’s sound
With a system like that you could probably set up some small NFS for sharing your files by configuring it manually from the terminal.
Note that going with raw linux is “simpler” in the sense that it’s perhaps easier to wrap your head around or tinker with, but TrueNAS or Unraid have GUIs that will allow you to create e.g. the mentioned NFS share with a few clicks, rather than having to do it from the terminal. Depends on what you’re looking for. You could move up to TrueNAS or Unraid once you’ve played with raw Linux enough for example.
Once you have that,
I only ever dealt with ZFS and TrueNAS. ZFS will allow you to create a “partition” (pool in zfs terms) from many drives at the same time, so you’d be able to use more drives than just the two from RAID1.
The drives that you have are probably shitty SMR drives whose write speed dramatically slows down once you’re writing to them for a longer time. Consider buying CMR drives in the future, or just going all-SSD if it fits your usecase. ZFS hates SMR drives.
yes, try freenas/truenas
Anything that can can provide storage attached to the network is a potential NAS. It doesn’t take a lot of power to just offer and store files. If you start getting into stuff like live transcoding or heavy encrypt/decrypt that’s a bit different matter.
It’ll work fine. A NAS is just a PC. Try Unraid if you want a user friendly UI. It costs money but it’s only a one off payment for a lifetime license, and they have a free trial.
Or truenas
Thanks!
