NAS Hardware selection
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
And a 4tb SSD is the same price as a 16tb HDD.
If that trend continues, when you get to a 100tb of SSD(s) the equivalently priced HDD(s) will have 100x the capacity.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
2TB is insanely small for a NAS. At that point, you could honestly just run a Pi 5 with M.2 HAT and a 2TB SSD for something like $200 total. Could always buy a second Pi for mirroring and even locate it in a friend or family member's house for mirroring and backup.
I use a Pi 4 with 7 TB of external SSDs just fine at home. It also hosts a pi.hole ad blocking server, my 1TBish jellyfin music streaming collection, my network share for kodi, an always-on VPN for my phone and laptops, and a few other small services. I'm sure I could upgrade for better read/write speeds. But everything is performant enough as is, and it's completely silent and fan-free in my living room by the router. Honestly for most services a Pi with a passive cooler will perform admirably.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
4x is way far compared to 100x
the only case where hdds have a 100x ratio, is where apple scams their customers offering a 256gb upgrade for $200: it means $800 per terabyte (this price was a scam even 15 years ago), and a $500 18tb HDD is 100x "apple platinum grade ssd"
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
2TB is perfectly fine for a NAS. Not everyone needs high capacity
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
Maybe you could pickup a old workstation and drop a few drives in it. It is fairly affordable and would allow you to get your feet wet. For ZFS you really want lots of ram so make sure you get enough.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
I use my old desktop. It's totally overkill, but it's also free since I was going to throw it out instead.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
Of course, nothing wrong with it. In fact it makes OP's quandary a lot easier! I'm looking into something with 20TB or so of capacity myself, and that's given me an appreciation for how much simpler it is to solve this problem at 2TB.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
I planned to use nfs, since it is one of the options of TrueNAS and it works on both windows and linux.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
I planned to use nfs, since it is one of the options of TrueNAS and it works on both windows and linux.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
Just that you don't need a beast of a machine (with it's higher cost and power consumption) to just serve files at reasonable performance. If you want to stream video, you'll need greater performance.
For example, my NAS is ten years old, runs on ARM, with maybe 2gigs of ram. It supposedly can host services and stream video. It can't. But it's power draw is about 4 watts at idle.
My newer (5 year old) small form factor desktop has a multi-core Intel cpu, true gigabit network card, a decent video card, with an idle draw of under 12 watts, and peaks at 200w when I'm converting video. It can easily stream videos.
My gaming desktop draws 200w at idle.
My SFF and gaming rig are both overkill for simple file sharing, and both cost 2x to 4x more than the NAS (bought the NAS and SFF second hand). But the NAS can't really stream video.
Power draw is a massive factor these days, as these devices run 24/7.
RPi is great for it's incredibly low power draw. The negative of RPi is you still need enclosure, and you'll have drives that draw power attached to it. In my experience once I've built a NAS, RPi doesn't draw significantly less than my SFF with the same drives installed, as it seems the drives are the greatest consumer. As I mentioned, my SFF with 1TB of storage draws 12 watts, and RPi will draw upwards of 8 watts on its own (my Pi Zero draws 2, but I'd never use it for a NAS). It's all so close that for me the downside of RPi isn't worth the difference in power.