Perfect NAS Solution

Where I live (250 apartment complex in Sweden) people throw old computers in the electronics trash room, I scavenge the room every day multiple times when I take my dog out for a walk like some character out of Mad Max.

I mix and match components from various computers and drop debian on them then run docker containers for various purposes. I've given my parents, cousins and friends Frankenstein servers like this.

You'd be amazed at what people throw away, not uncommon to find working laptops with no passwords that log straight into Windows filled with all kinds of family photos.

Sometimes unlocked iPhones from 5 years ago. It's a sick world we live in.

We deserve everything thats coming for us.

Perfect NAS involves drives in ZFS mirror and ECC memory.

It is very cool that nvme drives are now cheap. It looks like pricing is linear up to 4TB now. That probably means the time for 10gb copper at home is finally here. (edit 10gb RJ45 switches also appear to be sufficiently available now)

It seems that almost every DIY-NAS article these days is an excercise on minimizing power consumption. People seem to forget the purpose of the NAS: storage and (secondarily) expandability.

SSDs are getting cheaper, but their capacity is still lagging. E.g. a 4TB Samsung NVMe drive is >2.5 times more expensive than a same capacity NAS-grade HDD, and ~4.5 times more expensive per GB than a NAS-grade 18TB HDD at the same price.

What is the point of bean-counting on KWhs if the $ you pay for storage will either burn a hole in your pocket, or leave you with a NAS that will be full in a year and virtually no expandability options?

Die you consider Fujitsu Celsius Workstations (e.g. Celsius W570 / W580)?

These machines are pretty big, but cheap and i managed to get a

  Fujitsu D3417-A board
  Bojiadafast Adapter 24-16pin aliex.
  160W streacom nano
  Xeon 1225v5 
  64GB ECC RAM
  WD SN850x 2tb nvme

To draw less than

  7 Watts

I'll never use a NAS without ECC RAM for anything else than disposable content (i.e. downloaded stuff).

It will take 100 hours to consume 1 KWh at 10 W. So at, say, 10 cents per KWh, this amounts to like ten dollars per year of 24/365 operation or to $800 for a full human life.

This is something that needs to be taken into account if one is planning to buy a new machine to reduce power draw by like 5W.

This is not taking into account the footprint of producing that extra machine earlier than it would need to be produced.

Here in EU SSD prices are much higher now but anyway for me the point is not much going "mini" but being accessible and upgradable, in a home setup I do not care much "the NAS" but the homeserver: I do not have a datacenter-as-a-computer where some machines host a gazillion of nvme serving them via nvme or iscsi and so on to some blades allowing easier physical storage administration and greater flexibility, I typically have some desktops used as desktops, a homeserver or two (the second as a spare), so the main point is having a machine to do anything not just backup. A classic desktop rackmounted in a 4-5U, a switch, a patch panel, a UPS, a "router" it's the machine room. Having many small boxes is not much comfy to manage in case of hw issues, having a rack, well accessible, with any component easy to replace is valuable to me.

Since the home already consume much more than few W for ventilation and so on the consumption of a modern PC does not change much, it's not an old multi-opteron server.

I've written up my experience (going into the 10th year now!) with a DIY home NAS [1],[2]. I recommend a dual setup:

- a software RAID 1 for important data (eg. contracts, receipts, emails, family pictures) paired with par2archive to counter bit rot - a JBOD with snapraid for large media collections

The posts go into details, eg. properly configuring ext4.

[1] https://blog.georgovassilis.com/2020/04/01/building-the-perf...

[2] https://blog.georgovassilis.com/2022/10/28/my-home-nas-setup...

OS for home NAS I highly recommend Unraid. I have enough trouble at work dealing with OS upgrades, commands, configurations, etc. I am happy that Unraid just works and is worth every penny, huge community of plugins, etc.