The Cheapest NAS

My secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of businesses use them and upgrade on a regular schedule.

If you care about power consumption like I do, you can Google "$model energy consumption white paper" which contains very accurate data about idle usage, for example https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy...

In one case I had a nuc where on Linux after enabling power saving features for the sata controller, idle usage even fell to 5W when the pdf claimed 9.

Having an actual pc instead of a random sbc ensures best connectivity, expandability, and software support forever. With almost all sbcs you're stuck with a random-ass kernel from when the damn thing was released, and you basically have to frankenstein together your own up-to-date distro with the old kernel because the vendor certainly doesn't care about updating the random armbian fork they created for that thing.

I would question all these Raspberry PI-ish NAS attempts, especially when it includes some power adapters and milling out cases. It all feels so fiddly and sluggish while still being "not that cheap". Storing my important personal data on an USB-drive somewhat feels risky. It probably wouldn't burn a house down, but still...

The real benefit is the small form factor and the "low" power consumption. Paying 43 bucks for the whole thing - now asking myself if it is worth saving a few bucks and living with 100Mbit network speed, instead of spending 150 bucks and having 2.5Gig.

There are so many (also "used") alternatives out there:

- Fujitsu Futro S920 (used < 75, ~10W)

- FriendlyElec NanoPI R6C (< 150, ~2W, https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...)

- FriendlyElec Nas Kit (< 150, ~5W, https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...)

- Dell T20 / T30 (used < 100, ~25W)

- Fujitsu Celsius W570 (used < 100, ~15W)

My personal NAS / Homeserver:

  Fujitsu D3417-B
  Intel Xeon 1225v5
  64GB ECC RAM
  WD SN850x 2TB NVMe
  Pico PSU 120
  

More expensive, but reliable, powerful and drawing <10W Idle.

Everyone is an expert at storage as long as everything is working great. It's when stuff fails that you feel like an idiot and wished you had one extra hdd in your RAID array or a secondary NAS you were backing up to or one extra site you offloaded your data to.

I don't do cheap any more. But I can see the appeal.

When people set up these NAS's, how are they accessing the files? NFS? SFTP?

And how are you accessing it when away from home? A VPN that you're permanently connected to? Is there a good way to do NAT hole-punching?

Syncthing kind of does what I want, in that it lets all my computers sync the same files no matter what network they're on, but it insists on always copying all the files ("syncing") whereas I just want them stored on the NAS but accessible everywhere.

Nextcloud kind of does what I want but when I tried it before it struck me as flaky and unreliable, and seemed to do a load of stuff I don't want or need.

> The remedy is to turn UAS off via adding usb-storage.quirks=152d:0578:u to the kernel cmdline.

This is the point where I'd have thrown it in the trash and given up. I simply don't know how people have the patience to debug past stuff like this: I get that the point of the project is to be cheap and simple, but this is expensive in time and decidedly not simple.

The image builder for this board looks dodgy af:

"The distribution builder is a proprietary commercial offering as it involves a lot of customer IP and integrations so it cannot be public."

Seems like a supply side injector to me!

Ignorant person question here: “why they make NAS servers without ECC memory?”

That's pretty cool. Fits their use case for sure. I would probably opt to spend a little more for a gigabit port. From what I've seen watching Jeff Geerling, you can setup a pretty reasonable performing NAS on something on these small SBCs.

As other comments in this thread, I want to echo the value for money that is to be had in refurbished SFF office PCs that come available on the second-hand market.

I picked up an HP ultradesk something or other for dirt cheap a while back. When I got it it turned out to be surplus stock, so not even second hand - was brand new, for maybe 20% the retail price. Dead quiet, and super power efficient. It's not the most powerful CPU, but it's 10th or 11th generation which is perfect for hardware encoding for my media server use case.

It does not have all the hardware for RAID and multiple hard drives and all that, but one NVME boot disk, and one 16TB spinning rust disk is more than enough for my needs. It's media, so I'm not worried about losing any of it.

These boxes are cheap enough that you can get multiple ones responsible for multiple different things in a single "deployment". At one point I had a box for NAS, a box for media server, a box for my CCTV IP cameras and a box running homeassistant. All humming along nicely. Thankfully I was never masochistic enough to try some kubernetes thing orchestrating all the machines together.

This is all obviously for the homelab/personal use case. Would not recommend this for anything more serious. But these machines just work, and they are bog standard X86 PCs, which removes a lot of the hardware config and incompatibility bullshit associated with more niche platforms.

It’s ironic they call themselves Libre Computer, but don’t release the tools to allow users to create their own images

Its very hard to beat Dell Wyse 3030 LT with USB attached disks.

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/silent-fanless-del...

I use that and the costs are about $20-25 for a used Dell Wyse 3030 and $60 for used 5TB 2.5 HDD from Seagate in USB 3.0 case.

Then the power bills will also be tiny as it draw about 3.8W when idle and 10.3 W with CPU and disks stressed to maximum.

The only limitation is 'only' 2GB RAM - but with ZFS ARC set to 32MB minimum and 64MB maximum RAM is not an issue.

    % grep arc /etc/sysctl.conf 
      vfs.zfs.arc.min=33554432
      vfs.zfs.arc.max=67108864

Regards.

Personally I like the Dell/HP/Lenovo Micro PCs. For ~200€ you can get one with an i5-10500T, 16GB DDR4, and 256GB NVMe SSD and it can be upgraded to 64GB RAM with lot of storage (1x NVMe + 1x 2,5")

>total 43

So the price of used Sandy Bridge or newer laptop (optionally cracked screen) with 1Gbit ethernet, USB3, couple SATA, couple PCIE lanes (ExpressCard and mpcie slots) and build-in UPS.

> up-to-date Debian

OP has a perverse sense of humor :)

----

But, not to waste space on this mindless joke, here's my (or, more precisely, my wife's) success story.

So, I've had it with a laptop and built myself a PC. Money wasn't really a problem, I just wanted to make sure I will have enough of everything, and spares, if necessary. So, I've got a be quiet case with eight caddies and a place for a SATA SSD. It's expensive... but it doubles as my main workstation, so I don't have any regrets about spending more on it! It has a ton of room for installing fans. It has like ten of them at this point, plus liquid cooling. The wifi modem that was built into the mobo that I bought doesn't have a good Linux driver... but the case has a ton of space, and so I could stick an external PCIe wifi modem. And I still have plenty of room left.

Anyways. My wife was given some space for her research in the institute she works for. And they get this space through some unknown company with vanishing IT support, where, in the end, all the company does is putting a fancy HTML front-end on Azure cloud services, sometimes mismanaging the underlying infrastructure. While the usage was uncomfortable but palatable, she continued using it. Then the bill came, and oh dear! And then she needed to use a piece of software that really, absolutely, unquestionably needs to be able to create symlinks. And the unknown company with vanishing IT has put together their research environment in such a way that NAS is connected via SMB, and... no symlinks.

So... I bought a bunch of 4T hard-drives, and now she has all the space she needs for her research. She doesn't even pay for electricity :(

Performancewise this looks similar to https://gist.github.com/SvenKortekaas/60387b0428b1592e5c9ec0... , where the aluminum-case and baseboard were available for about 11USD for a time. (ex. shipping, OFC)

The fitting SBC was about the same price, the most expensive part was the high-efficiencý (GAN) wall-wart, and 2.5" Disk.

I know this, because I ordered this eons ago :-)

Still running somewhere, that thing. 24/7 since then, with some reboots, because updates...

Runs Armbian, if you like to, or anything else if you are willing to mess more.

Seems to be still on sale, according to https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...

Cheap, but not necessarily good, expandable, or resilient.

Although, I can tell you what not to do: a 45 drive SAS/2 or /3 4U JBOD case takes way too much power to use all the time and uses screaming 1U fans and PSUs by default.

I do have 45 drives in various XFS on md raid10 arrays. Don't even mention ZoL ZFS because that was a fucking disaster of undocumented, under-tested, and SoL "support" for something that should only be used on a proper Sun box like a Thumper. XFS and md are fairly bulletproof.

Perhaps one can Ceph their way into significant storage with a crap ton of tiny DIY boxes, but it's going to be a pain to deploy and manage, take lots of space, and probably damn expensive to physically install, network, and provide UPS for.

The cheapest NAS is usually just taking some old desktop PC and repurposing it headless. :-)

Odroid HC-4 is only $73... and lightyears ahead https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/

> 100Mb may seem like a joke nowadays, but the main purpose of such a toy NAS for me is to keep a copy of a directory with ~200K small files. Having 1Gb would only marginally improve the syncing speed even if the SBC supported USB 3.0.

He's wrong here. The most important thing with small files is latency, and a 1000M network will have significantly less latency than a 100M network.

Anyone running TimeMachine over network knows what I mean - local attached storage is blazing fast (particularly SSDs), wired network storage is noticeably worse performing, and wifi is dog f...ing slow.

What convenient solutions exist for graceful shutdown of a NAS, without data loss or other drama, in case of power outage? It seems a more pressing concern than flipped bits or network failures.

My NAS is just my old gaming PC - I swapped out the GPU with a more basic one, and I add another hard drive or two every time storage gets low. It works great and costs me very little in both money and time.

I'm currently at 46TB or storage, and I recently threw in a 2.5Gbps NIC when I upgraded the rest of my home network.

(Mine certainly uses more electricity than the one in the article, but I pay $0.07/kwh, and run a few docker images that take advantage of the added performance, so I'm happy with it.)

I'm happy with XigmaNAS (BSD) on a used mini-pc and a multiple USB3.1 HDD enclosure. Speed is excellent as is stability. Having some memory and CPU cycles to spare, I also am playing with Home Assistant Supervised run as a Virtualbox VM inside of it.

Regarding that LaFrite board, I mailed a while ago LoverPi, which appears to be the only one selling it, to ask them if they accept PayPal, but got no reply. Does anyone know of a distributor in the EU or a different worldwide seller?

Personally I don't want to put too much stuff on my router/firewall. The reason I run OpenBSD on it is because I want it to be as secure as possible, it has the final word in my network and it's the outer most device of my network.

For storage I've been using Synology for a long time, first ds411+slim and now a ds620slim. I love the slim form factor, only 2.5" drives. It just works™

You can find ex-corporate dell optiplexes or hp prodesks for like $40 for i5-7/8xxx on eBay in the US. They're fantastic.

The entire concept of network attached storage is kind of cargo-cult in the vast majority of personal use cases. Just put the drives in your computer. Fewer abstraction layers, fewer problems, cheaper, faster, less fragile, easier to debug and fix if problems do happen. It's just not as hip or cool sounding as "NAS".

Is there any NAS software that just lets you add disks whenever you want, while using them for redundancy if they aren't full? I wish something was as easy as adding another disk and having the redundancy go up, then removing a disk and having the redundancy go down.

Interesting cheap low power system. My brain connects "NAS" with "Data I value" and there isn't anything in the author's system that is focused on enhancing the data integrity. Not saying that is bad, just saying it's the thing that often makes commercial NAS system both more expensive and more power consumptive. I've got an 8 drive RAID-6 setup as a ZFS pool[1]. More power, last I checked about 50W when idle, close to 150W when "working", but I think at this point I've had failures in nearly every piece that ended up replacing something but never lost any data, never corrupted any files. Replaced the power supply, the mother board, and two drives. I haven't had to replace any memory but I do have an extra stick "spare" because that is the kind of thing that ages out and is hard to replace (it's DDR3 memory but I've had systems with DDR2 so really hard to get DIMMS for).

That said, I do see a lot of value in low power systems like that of the author and run a couple. The way I do the energy calculation though is that I boot them off internal storage (MMC/SD) and then mount a root filesystem from the NAS. That way they don't have any storage power cost directly, they are easy to replace, and the power consumed by my NAS is amortized over a number of systems. giving it some less obvious economics.

[1] It is an iXSystems FreeNAS based system.

I had an old RaspberryPi model 2 around, installed OpenMediavault, a couple of USB HDs and off I went [1]. Amazing what you can do with old hardware!

[1] https://bochovj.wordpress.com/

I found an ex-office HP computer with and i5-4670 on the side of the road and have been thinking about setting it up as a home server. Does anyone have a recommendation for how to set it up as a NAS, VPN, Home Assistant and Plex server?

If you need to add storage to just one computer (at a time), consider just getting a hard drive enclosure. It's much simpler, cheaper, more secure, and faster than a NAS.

You can turn it into a NAS at any time by adding a mini pc or similar.

My "NAS" and homeserver is an old Lenovo ThinkCentre mini PC with a large SSD inside. My "RAID" is an rclone cloud backup. Might be a bit scuffed but it works really well, at least for me.

I'd say the cheapest NAS would be an external HDD plugged in your WiFi router - most of them have at least one USB port nowadays, with some offering advanced features like photo gallery etc.

Although not quite as cheap, I bought a mini pc (Intel N-95, 8GB, 256GB) for not a whole lot more. It has room for a 4TB SSD in a built-in enclosure, which I mirror to an external 4TB HDD nightly. Important stuff is cloud-synced and manually backed up monthly to a external HDD that lives at work. It also runs Jellyfin, minimserver, syncthing etc.

One of the nice things is that it has a full sync of my cloud storage, so I don't have think about backing up individual devices much any more: I create a file on my laptop, it syncs to cloud storage, then to the minipc. From that point on it's part of the regular nightly/monthly backup routine.

If I hit the 4TB limit it might be a pain, as I'm not sure it'll support an 8TB SSD.

Note that it doesn't look like it has ECC, so make sure to have backups. Fancy file systems like ZFS don't remove the need for ECC.

Same reason I'm not buying another raspberry pi, I'd rather have solar panels and an old reliable pc running somewhere

cost and power are legitimate motives. I'd probably have started with a rpi-02 though: storage and ethernet over USB is not going to win any races, though it'll compete with what he ended up with...

Jeez just buy a real computer. Optiplexes are dirt cheap

Old PC or terramaster enclosure from aliexpress

I mean wtf wouldn't you just buy a G1 Elite Slice, or any of the various NUC's you can buy for 50$ and get you a full Intel computer with a 6700 or 8700 cpu 4-8gb of ram and a full drive slot, and normally extra space for a m2 and a gbit nic lol

100MB LAN port is unqualified for a NAS…