I can not over express how happy I am with having setup my NAS from scratch.
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That's what containers are for. Fucking up the container won't fuck up the host. That was the best decision in self hosting I've done. Even that one virtual machine feels weird and uncomfortably legacy now but it needs to interact with hardware in a certain way that just won't fully work with docker.
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That'd be great. Love to get a bigger better setup and just leave this one to run the surveillance system
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So what OS are you running on your NAS?
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Tiny/mini/micro.
You can grab a used box for under $200. Most I've picked up have been around $100-$125, then I drop in a new m.2 for the host, maybe add/change ram depending on what I got it with.
Data lives on the NAS (really multiple for me, but besides the point here), and you'll get waaaayyyyy more compute with a usff PC like that than you will with a pi or what a NAS can offer. They also run really light on power when you aren't putting the CPU to work, so budget friendly in a bunch of ways.
I've got a goal after a move my wife and I are planning to run the whole shebang on solar, with battery and a switch to utility power. I've got 10 of these little monsters now, after a recent addition, and its quite doable from my measurements of actual power usage.
Which is a really long way of saying you may want to look at some tiny/mini/micro PCs.
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You can have more than one drive on a pi, either USB, or they sell sata boards
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That's what I'm doing. Here's my setup:
- BTRFS RAID W/ snapshots - can always roll back
- OS installed on SSD - can always reinstall without messing with the RAID
- containers installed on SSD (also BTRFS W/ snapshots) and backed up to RAID; only access RAID through bind mounts (ro if possible)
It's incredibly unlikely that I'll mess anything up on the host, but I can always reinstall if needed.
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Yes, I have 2x 4TB external drives in a Snap Raid config. Works great for years.
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I've done this before. That's why I have a Proxmox cluster separate from my NAS now.
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How do you connect them? Via SATA? Do you have a drive enclosure?
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Setup: noun (set-up)
Set up: verb
You need to pick the right lane, man.
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Why's that?
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Pi-NAS = rpi4 2gb + qnap tr4 USB enclosure + open media vault
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Just USB3, external drives and my Raspi has an enclosure.
Was actually my first venture into homelabbing but it proofed pretty sufficient.
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I wouldn't mind that, but I have a bad habit of over-tinkering with the system files. Having Proxmox as a base where I can spin up VMs and containers to fuck with to my heart's content is far more ideal in my situation. Plus, my entire cluster - NAS included - pulls 100-120 watts.
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Oh I'm always doing something with it, it's basically my winter hobby haha. I'm currently building a "new" NAS out of an old HP Proliant G2 case (from like 2002) and 7th gen Intel hardware, to replace the current Mac mini/4-bay Sabrent DS-SC4B. Still gonna keep it running OMV, because it's awesome, but the USB connection between the Mac and drive station is cumbersome.
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Grammer is for english class or grammer community's. Who cares
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If your NAS has enough resources the happy(ish) medium is to use your NAS as a hypervisor. The NAS can be on the bare hardware or its own VM, and the containers can have their own VMs as needed.
Then you don't have to take down your NAS when you need to reboot your container's VMs, and you get a little extra security separation between any externally facing services and any potentially sensitive data on the NAS.
Lots of performance trade offs there, but I tend to want to keep my NAS on more stable OS versions, and then the other workloads can be more bleeding edge/experimental as needed. It is a good mix if you have the resources, and having a hypervisor to test VMs is always useful.
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Sometimes it's just easier to build it from the ground up with all the knowledge you have gathered so far.
