Let's Talk Network Attached Storage For Home Office

I work from home and I'm a digital packrat. I make good use of DropBox and Google Drive, but I also like having my own server here at the house. I've got an ancient second gen HP Media Vault MV5150 that has served me for almost eight years, but it maxes out at 2TB total addressable space (only 1TB if I want to run in RAID 1 mode). That's not enough. It is also running on borrowed time, as it has been going 24/7 since I bought it.

So now I'm looking for a new Ethernet connected NAS that will serve me for a few years, but not require me to sell off a project car. Hopefully I can still write off the expense on my taxes.

I'm thinking of a similar solution to what I have now. Just a small box housing two 4TB drives. If I had the time I'd throw something together with FreeNAS, but with three kids and my own business, I just need something I can plug in (I know, not very GrassrootsComputersports).

Anyone have recommendations? So far the QNAP TS-231P looks pretty slick: https://www.amazon.com/TS-231P-US-Personal-mobile-Airplay-support/dp/B01N78FRVZ

Not sure about hard discs yet, so there's still that to research. I made a mistake with my last NAS in buying a slower hard drive expansion than I realized and it hurt overall file transfer speed. Not doing that again.

Are you really so short on time that you can't throw something together with FreeNAS? Maybe buy/specify a cheap prebuilt computer from a local computer store to save most of the time involved? It's not only the cheapest but also the best solution (as often happens in computing).

Also make sure you're running RAID1 for high availability and not any kind of attempt at a substitute for backups.

Here's the cheapest commercially-supported FreeNAS box. It starts at $1k, which is a lot for home computer equipment, but by business standards, is about as much as smelling something from Oracle:

https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/

GameboyRMH said:

Are you really so short on time that you can't throw something together with FreeNAS? Maybe buy/specify a cheap prebuilt computer from a local computer store to save most of the time involved? It's not only the cheapest but also the best solution (as often happens in computing).

Also make sure you're running RAID1 for high availability and not any kind of attempt at a substitute for backups.

My brother-in-law just asked me the same question about building my own, so I guess I'll spend some time on MicroCenter's website piecing together a box to see how it shakes out.

Using RAID1 is more for redundancy in case of a drive failure, I'll still pull backups to an external drive. Those little portable hard drives are stupid cheap now.

Does your router include/support USB ports?  Or is it something you need to replace anyway?

if you don’t want to roll your own NAS unit, there are USB RAID units you can just attached to the router that let you avoid the cost of the Network part of the NAS.

It’s something that’s been working out for me lately. 

In reply to slefain :

If you're considering building your own, look at the HP Microserver gen8 or gen10. gen10 is supposedly a little more noisy and a little more powerful, plus cheaper compared to the prices I'm seeing for gen8s.

My homebuilt NAS/Server is pretty much ready for a hardware refresh and I'm seriously considering the Microserver instead of building another one myself.

I know you said you didn't want to roll your own, but OwnCloud is pretty snazzy.

Alright I did some research, I do not have time to roll my own right now. I have a "to do" list a mile long and right now my time is worth more than the money it will cost to buy a boxed NAS solution.

The Asustor AS3102T looks pretty slick, sitting at about $225 right now: https://www.asustor.com/en/product/AS3102T?p_id=44

Probably spend another $200 on discs. Considering I spent $289 on the old HP Media Center (500 gig drive) eight years ago, I'm okay with spending a little more on this one.

I wouldn't roll my own NAS unless I had some really special reason as to why I might do so OR I thought my time was free PLUS I had most or all of the components already lying around gathering dust.  I had great luck with a Synology 2-drive NAS doing drive mirroring in hardware.  That said, there seems to be a hardware fault with a disk controller, and I am looking to replace it with something similar.  But really, all I had to do was drop in the drives, plug it into my network, and turn it on.  Easy, web based interface to deal with, and it didn't require a lot of thought or knowledge.  

Something else; power savings.  I would rather have a box set up with power savings in mind like that Synology box that I had instead of a PC running some *nix that maybe isn't so great about power consumption.  For drives, I bought some Western Digital drives that were meant for video surveillance purposes, that were good about long life but gave up some speed to hotter drives.  I could write at 50 megabytes/sec reliably to the thing which was fine with me.

That Asus box looks nice.  I didn't read in-depth; can you set it up so that the box is reachable from remote locations?  Meaning, you can get to your data outside of the house, like for me when I want to show off digital photography that I've got saved to the thing.  There was an Asus box in that price range that did but I haven't looked into this stuff for about a year now.  

I have a QNAP TS-220, ie. their basic 2-bay storage device with a pair of WD red 2TB disks. I run it mirrored (RAID 1) for a little redundancy. And I periodically make a total backup copy onto a separate HD that I keep at work just in case the house burns down.

Despite all it's capabilities, I've mostly only used mine like an external hard drive, except that I do use their Android app to browse music and random files, photos, etc when I'm at home. I have not exposed mine to the internet for remote file access.

It's been rock solid. Somehow, it even survived a ten foot drop to the concrete floor (I keep it on a shelf in my basement, out of the way up between first level floor joists). Only broke the fan.

My vote is QNAP, or Synology.

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I've had FreeNAS for 6+ years now, started out as an extra back-up for SWMBO's dissertation when I found out the only two copies were on her laptop and a portable (mechanical) hard drive she kept in the same laptop bag.

My first iteration was on a surplus, Supermicro, single 775 socket, quad core Xeon, 1U server chassis I got from Geeks.com, back when they were still cool, and still handled tons of surplus hardware for super cheap.  I stuck 4, 1TB WD RE3 HDs in it, and all was good.   The thing sounded like a jet engine, even with the fans turned down as low as BIOS would allow, but it was fine in the basement.

SWMBO graduated, we moved back home, and the server was moth balled for a few years.

Fast forward to last Summer, our digital media collection is clogging up my laptop, and the 2 TB WD MyBook, so I decided to revisit the FreeNAS server.  I wanted to upgrade to something more efficient and MUCH quieter.  I had previously built a HTPC with a passively cooled, embedded quad core, J1900, motherboard, and really liked its performance to power consumption ratio, so I decided to use something similar to replace the loud, power hungry Supermicro.

My replacement, upgrade, hardware included a passively cooled, embedded, quad core, J3455 motherboard, 8 Gb of Corsair DDR3, also added a Marvell PCIe 1x SATA controller to make up for the lack of ports on the motherboard, a way overkill refurbished 80+ Gold modular Corsair 750W PSU, reused the same 4 WD RE3 HDs from the original build, and stuck it all in a used Fractal Designs R4 case to help mitigate the noise of the enterprise hard drives, and have plenty of room for growth.  I more-or-less stole that case from someone on eBay, couldn't believe no one else bid on it, really, I gave $45 to get that giant thing to my door.

The great thing about FreeNAS, even with all that new hardware, and a fresh image of the newest version of the OS on a different USB drive, it recognized the ZFS file structure on those hard drives I reused from the original version, and no data was lost.

I guess it's not as quick as just plugging something in and turning it on, but it's not like it's all that time consuming to throw some hardware together, assuming you've built a PC or two before, even if you haven't it's not that hard, or time consuming, watch a youtube video.

I'm very pleased with my FreeNAS experience, plus the Plex Server add-on is freaking sweet!

Edit, here's a pic of the newest guts back when I was rebuilding it.

My problem is I can't spend a dime without researching it to the Nth degree. By the time I research all the components to fit my needs at the best price, I'll be hours into just that part. Then I'd need to put it all together and configure it. I just don't have the time. Three small kids, homeschooling family, remodeling the house, running my own business, maintaining a rental property, and a fleet of neglected cars makes for limited time to sleep, much less build my own NAS that may or may not work. Back when I was single I'd have been all over a FreeNAS build, but now I'd rather pay money and just have it work.

QNAP has my attention as well, I'll add it to the list.