NAS Hardware selection

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I did the opposite and used it as an excuse to upgrade my main PC, with the parts that got replaced being inherited by the new server.

Perhaps an unwise move due to it not being optimised for power savings, and looking at your particular use case it wouldn't be a smart move.

Depending in where you want to have this NAS, one of the more important factors to consider is how quiet you can make it. If you only have a few HDDs they're not too loud, but ssds are silent. It can also be worth getting some good fans and making sure you can mount them in a way that doesn't cause unnecessary vibration to have it be real quiet.

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I have a UGreen NAS (6800 Pro) and the hardware on it has been great. I added a new system drive and have been running Proxmox since day 1.

The install process would be the same, enter bios, enable boot from other drive, disable UGreen OS drive, and then reboot to install whatever OS you want.

NASCompares did a video review of the UGreen NAS with TrueNAS installed and had nothing but good things to say.

I got mine during the Kickstarter campaign, but I still think they have some good value at retail vs competitors.

I’ve owned QNAP and Synology, the one area that has been an issue has been around the CPU being the bottleneck and slowing down transfers. This was on the lower end models.

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If you want to roll your own, I've had good luck with ASRock Rack motherboards.

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It will be used just for file storage. But what exactly do you mean by "lighter hardware"? april said anything more than a raspi, so better than the quad-core Arm Cortex A76 processor @ 2.4GHz from the raspi 5? (ik that truenas is for x86 and not arm)

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I personally use a dual core pentium with 16GB of RAM. When I first installed TrueNas (FreeNas back then), I only had 8GB of RAM, but that proved to be not enough to run all the services I wanted, so I would suggest 12-16GB. Depending on the services you want to run any multi-core x86 CPU that allows 16GB of RAM to be used should be adequate. I believe TrueNas recommends ECC RAM, but I don't think using consumer grade RAM and hardware has caused me any problems. I'm also using an old SSD for the system drive, which I is recommended now (I used to use 2 mirrored USB thumb drives, buy that's not recommended anymore). Very importantly, make sure the HDD(s) you get are not shingled drives; made that mistake initially, and performance was ridiculously bad.

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I really really would love them...if only they would allow ECC RAM and more RAM in total. Then they would have built a killer device.

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If you are really sure about the disk space requirements you can easily get one of the endless mini PCs with a N100 or a small Intel on it and chuck two NVMe's in it and let these run as RAID1.

Have a decent backup plan,though.

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What decade do you live in? It's closer to 2-4x nowadays, and 2TB is nothing

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I really like my Synology NAS, but if I had to do it again, I would roll my own with one of the Mini-PC's from Amazon. They're essentially just as expensive as the Synology hardware and you can make due by installing Rockstor or something similar. You won't get the same experience as the Synology setup, but IMO it's not really worth the underpowered hardware. I would much rather have something significantly more powerful like the Mini-PC to be able to run containers on without having to worry about system resources.

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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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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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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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2TB is perfectly fine for a NAS. Not everyone needs high capacity

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NAS Hardware selection