I've been building and running various home servers for years. Currently I have a n eBay special FreeBSD quad xeon (based on the desktop socket) with 64GB ECC and a cheap SAS/SATA card running two ZFS arrays.
On a side note: I hate web GUI's. I used to think they were the best thing since sliced bread but the constant churn combined with endless menus and config options with zero hints or direct help links led me to hate them. The best part is the documentation is always a version or two behind and doesn't match the latest and greatest furniture arrangement. Maybe that has improved but I'd rather understand the tools themselves.
I've self-hosted web apps (typically IIS and SQL Server) for over 20 years.
While using desktops for this has sometimes been nice, the big things I want out of a server are
- low power usage when running 24/7
- reliable operation
- quiet operation
- performance but they don't need much
So I've had dual Xeon servers and 8-core Ryzen servers but my favorites are a miniForums with a mobile Ryzen quad core, and my UGREEN NAS. They check all the boxes for server / NAS. Plus both were under $300 before upgrades / storage drives.
Often my previous gaming desktop sells for a lot more than that ... I just sold my 4 year old video card for $220. Not sure what the rest of the machine will be used for, but it's not a good server because the 12-core CPU simply isn't power efficient enough.
As a DXP2800 owner with TrueNAS: TrueNAS is so nice on the 2800 for my needs.
It's even relatively straightforward: start it up with a keyboard and video attached, enter the BIOS, and turn off the watchdog settings. I'd also recommend turning off the onboard eMMC altogether for the following FYI.
Just FYI: If you blow away the UGREEN OS off the eMMC, restoring it requires opening a support ticket with them, and it's some weird dance to restore it because apparently they've locked down their 'custom' Debian just enough for 'their' hardware.
As per someone on a Facebook group, "you CANNOT share the file as their system logs once you restore your device and flags it as used. It will fail the hardware test if the firmware has been installed again".
Thanks, I've been tempted, but wasnt sure if they work 'local only' and without app, and this sounds like it dials home? Anyway seems like a long wait list for suitable HDD will save my money for now. Plus I was a little more tempted by their Arm offering.
Ah, no -- the "watchdog" here is basically a system hardware watchdog. The OS 'feeds' the watchdog in the BIOS every X amount of time, if the dog isn't 'fed' in Y time, the computer will fully reboot itself (assuming it crashed).
Because I've installed something that can't feed the watchdog, I just turn the watchdog off.
Their OS install crap, I assume they're just trying to make sure that you can't try to put it on your own hardware (sort of like how people pirate Synology DiskStation).
It is water-cooled and whisper quiet aside from the GPU fans. So yes there are options.. but right now selling the RAM alone might pay for a whole mini-server. I'm going to try to sell it locally to a PC gamer though, get some proper use out of it!
I appreciate the message of this article. I've played with half a dozen types of home NAS / RAID / storage solutions over the decades.
The best way I can describe it is:
There are people who just want to use a car to get from A to B; there are those who enjoy the act of driving, maybe take it to the track on a lapping day; and there are those who enjoy having a shell of a car in the garage and working on it. There's of course a definite overlap and Venn diagram :-).
My approach / suggestion - Understand what type are you in relation to any given technology vs what is the author's perspective.
I will never resent the time (oh God so much time!) I've spent in the past mucking with homelabs and storage systems. Good memories and tons of learning! today I have family and kids and just need my storage to work. I'm in a different Venn circle than the author - sure I have knowledge and experience and could conceivably save a few bucks (eh not as given as articles make it seem;), as long as I value my time appropriately low and don't mind the necessary upkeep and potential scheduled and unscheduled "maintenance windows" to my non-techie users.
But I must admit I'm in the turn-key solution phase of my life and have cheerfully enjoyed a big-name NAS over last 5 years or so :).
The trick with old computers harnessed as NAS is the often increased space, power, and setup/patching/maintenance work requirements, compared to hopefully some learning experience and a sense of control.
> But I must admit I'm in the turn-key solution phase of my life and have cheerfully enjoyed a big-name NAS over last 5 years or so :).
You know, I thought I was too, so I threw in the towel and migrated one my NAS to TrueNAS, since it's supposed to be one of those "turn-key solutions that doesn't require maintenance", and everything got slower, harder to maintain and even managed to somehow screw up one of my old disks when I added it to my pool.
The next step after that was to migrate to NixOS and bit the bullet to ensure the stuff actually works. I'd love to just give someone money and not having to care, but it seems the motto of "If you want something done correctly, you have to do it yourself" lives deep in me, and I just cannot stomach loosing the data on my NAS, so it ends up really hard to trust any of those paid-for solutions when they're so crap.
> My approach / suggestion - Understand what type are you in relation to any given technology vs what is the author's perspective.
Similarly what I was once told when looking at private planes was "What's your mission?" and they've stuck with me ever since, even if I'm never gonna buy a plane.
One person's mission might be backing up their family photos while someone else's mission is a full *arr stack.
Reusing existing hardware is a great gameplan. Really happy with my build and glad I didn't go for out of the box.
>In general, you want to get the fastest boot drive you can.
Pretty much all NAS like operation systems run in memory, so in general you're better off running the OS from some shitty 128gb sata ssd and using the nvme for data/cache/similar where it actually matters. Some OS are even happy to use a usb stick but that only works for OS designed to accommodate this (unraid I think does). Something like proxmox would destroy the stick.
Also, on HDDs - worth reading up on SMR drives before buying. And these days considering an all flash build if you don't have TBs of content
Never used proxmox myself, but is that the common issue of "logs written to flash consuming writes"? Or something else? The former is probably just changing a line in the config to fix, if it's just that.
> And these days considering an all flash build if you don't have TBs of content
Maybe we're thinking in different scales, but doesn't almost all NAS' have more than 1TB of content? My own personal NAS currently has 16TB in total, I don't want to even imagine what the cost of that would be if I went with SSDs instead of HDDs. I still have SSD for caching, but main data store in a NAS should most likely be HDDs unless you have so much money you just have to spend it.
“I repurposed an old gaming PC with a Ryzen 1600x, 24GB of RAM, and an old GTX 1060 for my NAS since I had most of the parts already.”
Wouldn’t running something like this 24/7 cause a substantial energy consumption? Costs of electricity being one thing, carbon footprint an another. Do we really want such a setup running in each household in addition to X other devices?
> Wouldn’t running something like this 24/7 cause a substantial energy consumption?
Obviously depends on the actual usage, and parent's specific setup, lots of motherboards/CPUs/GPUs/RAM allow you to tune the frequencies and allows you to downclock almost anything. Finally, we have no idea about the energy source in this case, could be they live in a country with lots of wind and solar power, if we're being charitable.
> could be they live in a country with lots of wind and solar power, if we're being charitable.
Because solar wind and hydro have no impact on the environment at all. Or nuclear.
I wish people would understand that waste is waste. Even less waste is still waste.
(I don't argue for fossil fuels here, mind you.)
Plus, the countries have shared grids. Any kWh you use can't be used by someone else, so may come from coal when they do, for all you know. It's a false rationalization.
> Because solar wind and hydro have no impact on the environment at all. Or nuclear.
> I wish people would understand that waste is waste. Even less waste is still waste.
So if I have 10 mining rigs connected to the state power grid, what the source of that energy has matters nothing for the environment? If I use a contract that 100% guarantees it comes from solar, it has the same environmental impact as if I use a cheaper contract that guarantees 100% coal power?
I'm not sure if I misunderstand what you're saying, or you're misunderstanding what I said before, but something along the lines got lost in transmission I think.
? It’s not like the machine would be custom built for him.
Are you saying it’s fine to drive a huge truck if you’re single and just need to get around the block to buy a pack of eggs, just because the emissions are nothing compared to those required for making that smaller, more efficient car that you could buy instead?
no, they're saying the emissions needed to create that smaller, more efficient car may vastly exceed their car's emissions during its entire lifetime under their use. so it may be a net loss.
Better? No absolutely not. Capable? Without a doubt. I have a multi bay nas and it's like 1/6the the size of my pc case. My nas also makes removing and replacing drives trivial. There's a million guides online for my particular nas already and software written with it in mind. It also draws a lot less power than my gaming pc and has a lot quieter operation.
It's difficult for me to accept it's better given all the above.
The first thing you should consider doing with you old device is selling or giving them away. This helps lowering the need for manufacturing more hardware, it prevents the hardware becoming e-waste in a drawer, and it put pressure on the market to lower it's prices.
Sure, you can reuse as a NAS, but someone probably needs it more.
The electronics went so cheap recently, so selling it to strangers is rarely worth the effort. Then there's a question, what OS are you going to put on an old PC. And then even if they are, say, only using browser, and would be okay with linux, modern browsers need 8GB of memory at least.
After I had a reckoning with bitrot, would muchly recommend to use something with ECC memory for NAS. And a checksumming filesystem with periodic scrubing that won't get corrupt on you silently.
Unfortunately PCs have mechanical devices that give out after a few years. I am referring of course to fans. I use a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu and Samba as my NAS. It is cheap and reliable.
I do too, but I’m looking to get proper solution soon. A Pi is a pretty lousy NAS. It can’t even power two drives so you can’t have redundancy unless you get a powered USB hub. And even then, I used one of those for a while and the drive connected to it prematurely failed. I think maybe because the power supply wasn’t stable.
I have a Pi4 running Raid 1 NAS with two SSD drives, and an externally powered USB hub. Unfortunately, it crashes every 6 months or so and needs a power cycle. Haven't been able to track down why, but I also suspect a power supply issue.
Initially I naively tried to run the two drives right off the USB3 ports in the Pi, and that basically crashed within a day - but that is of course because I was exceeding the power draw. An external hub and supply helped, but didn't fully fix the issue.
Is there a particular brand you buy? Mine always fail after about 5 years… and I try a new brand each time. Not cheap fans, either; usually $15-20 per 120mm unit.
Noctua, but $20 might not be enough for the cheapest one depending where you live.
I’m not buying anything else and I’m also swapping out any non-noctua fan in my parts when possible (e.g. bought a scythe cooler due to ‘interesting’ dimensional constraints and swapped its fan with a noctua one.)
I tried using different sd cards with RPi but kept having issues with broken filesystem few months after, it was probably caused by bad power supply and electric surges.
You don't HAVE to boot RPi4+ from an SD card. RPi4 and RPi5 can boot from an external SSD just fine. I don't recall the last time I used an SD card in an RPi but it must have been years.
I didn't want to leave the convenience of home NAS products and suffered through them for a decade. TrueNAS turned out to be just as low maintenance after the one time cost of assembly and reading up on ZFS.
It depends on your use case. I still think I overreacted to the death of my old NAS but after I found that storage I had mentally written of as "archive" had great performance I was using it all the time and upgraded my home office switch to 10G.
While there are use cases for NAS, generally, if you have a desktop PC it's far better to put the hard drives in it rather than setting up a second computer you have to turn on and run too. Putting the storage in the computer where you'll use it means it'll be much faster, much cheaper, incomparably more reliable, with a more natural UI, and it'll use less eletricity than having to run 2 computers.
Now if your NAS use case is streaming media files to multiple devices (TV set top boxes, etc), sure, NAS makes sense if the NAS you build is very low idle power. But if you just need the storage for actual computing it is a waste of time and money.
I've been building and running various home servers for years. Currently I have a n eBay special FreeBSD quad xeon (based on the desktop socket) with 64GB ECC and a cheap SAS/SATA card running two ZFS arrays.
On a side note: I hate web GUI's. I used to think they were the best thing since sliced bread but the constant churn combined with endless menus and config options with zero hints or direct help links led me to hate them. The best part is the documentation is always a version or two behind and doesn't match the latest and greatest furniture arrangement. Maybe that has improved but I'd rather understand the tools themselves.
I've self-hosted web apps (typically IIS and SQL Server) for over 20 years.
While using desktops for this has sometimes been nice, the big things I want out of a server are
- low power usage when running 24/7
- reliable operation
- quiet operation
- performance but they don't need much
So I've had dual Xeon servers and 8-core Ryzen servers but my favorites are a miniForums with a mobile Ryzen quad core, and my UGREEN NAS. They check all the boxes for server / NAS. Plus both were under $300 before upgrades / storage drives.
Often my previous gaming desktop sells for a lot more than that ... I just sold my 4 year old video card for $220. Not sure what the rest of the machine will be used for, but it's not a good server because the 12-core CPU simply isn't power efficient enough.
The UGREEN NAS OS doesn't do encryption right?
Well that isn't on my checklist!
https://www.reddit.com/r/UgreenNASync/comments/1nr2j39/encry...
It's possible because you can install a different OS, TrueNAS, etc. but it's not something I personally worry about.
As a DXP2800 owner with TrueNAS: TrueNAS is so nice on the 2800 for my needs.
It's even relatively straightforward: start it up with a keyboard and video attached, enter the BIOS, and turn off the watchdog settings. I'd also recommend turning off the onboard eMMC altogether for the following FYI.
Just FYI: If you blow away the UGREEN OS off the eMMC, restoring it requires opening a support ticket with them, and it's some weird dance to restore it because apparently they've locked down their 'custom' Debian just enough for 'their' hardware.
As per someone on a Facebook group, "you CANNOT share the file as their system logs once you restore your device and flags it as used. It will fail the hardware test if the firmware has been installed again".
Thanks, I've been tempted, but wasnt sure if they work 'local only' and without app, and this sounds like it dials home? Anyway seems like a long wait list for suitable HDD will save my money for now. Plus I was a little more tempted by their Arm offering.
Ah, no -- the "watchdog" here is basically a system hardware watchdog. The OS 'feeds' the watchdog in the BIOS every X amount of time, if the dog isn't 'fed' in Y time, the computer will fully reboot itself (assuming it crashed).
Because I've installed something that can't feed the watchdog, I just turn the watchdog off.
Their OS install crap, I assume they're just trying to make sure that you can't try to put it on your own hardware (sort of like how people pirate Synology DiskStation).
Find a cheap low power CPU to swap in. Or tune it in BIOS to use less power (some CPUs have an eco mode that make this easy).
Sell the gaming GPU and put in something that does video out, or use a CPU with an iGPU.
Big gaming cases with quiet fans are quiet.
Selling the GPU and tuning or swapping the CPU can put money in your pocket to pay for storage.
It is water-cooled and whisper quiet aside from the GPU fans. So yes there are options.. but right now selling the RAM alone might pay for a whole mini-server. I'm going to try to sell it locally to a PC gamer though, get some proper use out of it!
This is literally impossible with most server grade stuff. It’ll never be as efficient as the low power modern stuff.
I appreciate the message of this article. I've played with half a dozen types of home NAS / RAID / storage solutions over the decades.
The best way I can describe it is:
There are people who just want to use a car to get from A to B; there are those who enjoy the act of driving, maybe take it to the track on a lapping day; and there are those who enjoy having a shell of a car in the garage and working on it. There's of course a definite overlap and Venn diagram :-).
My approach / suggestion - Understand what type are you in relation to any given technology vs what is the author's perspective.
I will never resent the time (oh God so much time!) I've spent in the past mucking with homelabs and storage systems. Good memories and tons of learning! today I have family and kids and just need my storage to work. I'm in a different Venn circle than the author - sure I have knowledge and experience and could conceivably save a few bucks (eh not as given as articles make it seem;), as long as I value my time appropriately low and don't mind the necessary upkeep and potential scheduled and unscheduled "maintenance windows" to my non-techie users.
But I must admit I'm in the turn-key solution phase of my life and have cheerfully enjoyed a big-name NAS over last 5 years or so :).
The trick with old computers harnessed as NAS is the often increased space, power, and setup/patching/maintenance work requirements, compared to hopefully some learning experience and a sense of control.
> But I must admit I'm in the turn-key solution phase of my life and have cheerfully enjoyed a big-name NAS over last 5 years or so :).
You know, I thought I was too, so I threw in the towel and migrated one my NAS to TrueNAS, since it's supposed to be one of those "turn-key solutions that doesn't require maintenance", and everything got slower, harder to maintain and even managed to somehow screw up one of my old disks when I added it to my pool.
The next step after that was to migrate to NixOS and bit the bullet to ensure the stuff actually works. I'd love to just give someone money and not having to care, but it seems the motto of "If you want something done correctly, you have to do it yourself" lives deep in me, and I just cannot stomach loosing the data on my NAS, so it ends up really hard to trust any of those paid-for solutions when they're so crap.
> My approach / suggestion - Understand what type are you in relation to any given technology vs what is the author's perspective.
Similarly what I was once told when looking at private planes was "What's your mission?" and they've stuck with me ever since, even if I'm never gonna buy a plane.
One person's mission might be backing up their family photos while someone else's mission is a full *arr stack.
Reusing existing hardware is a great gameplan. Really happy with my build and glad I didn't go for out of the box.
>In general, you want to get the fastest boot drive you can.
Pretty much all NAS like operation systems run in memory, so in general you're better off running the OS from some shitty 128gb sata ssd and using the nvme for data/cache/similar where it actually matters. Some OS are even happy to use a usb stick but that only works for OS designed to accommodate this (unraid I think does). Something like proxmox would destroy the stick.
Also, on HDDs - worth reading up on SMR drives before buying. And these days considering an all flash build if you don't have TBs of content
> Something like proxmox would destroy the stick.
Never used proxmox myself, but is that the common issue of "logs written to flash consuming writes"? Or something else? The former is probably just changing a line in the config to fix, if it's just that.
> And these days considering an all flash build if you don't have TBs of content
Maybe we're thinking in different scales, but doesn't almost all NAS' have more than 1TB of content? My own personal NAS currently has 16TB in total, I don't want to even imagine what the cost of that would be if I went with SSDs instead of HDDs. I still have SSD for caching, but main data store in a NAS should most likely be HDDs unless you have so much money you just have to spend it.
Yes it is a NAS and it is cheap and convenient to repurpose hardware.
But for anything where your data is important isn't ECC memory still critical for a NAS in this day and age?
“I repurposed an old gaming PC with a Ryzen 1600x, 24GB of RAM, and an old GTX 1060 for my NAS since I had most of the parts already.”
Wouldn’t running something like this 24/7 cause a substantial energy consumption? Costs of electricity being one thing, carbon footprint an another. Do we really want such a setup running in each household in addition to X other devices?
> Wouldn’t running something like this 24/7 cause a substantial energy consumption?
Obviously depends on the actual usage, and parent's specific setup, lots of motherboards/CPUs/GPUs/RAM allow you to tune the frequencies and allows you to downclock almost anything. Finally, we have no idea about the energy source in this case, could be they live in a country with lots of wind and solar power, if we're being charitable.
> could be they live in a country with lots of wind and solar power, if we're being charitable.
Because solar wind and hydro have no impact on the environment at all. Or nuclear.
I wish people would understand that waste is waste. Even less waste is still waste.
(I don't argue for fossil fuels here, mind you.)
Plus, the countries have shared grids. Any kWh you use can't be used by someone else, so may come from coal when they do, for all you know. It's a false rationalization.
> Because solar wind and hydro have no impact on the environment at all. Or nuclear.
> I wish people would understand that waste is waste. Even less waste is still waste.
So if I have 10 mining rigs connected to the state power grid, what the source of that energy has matters nothing for the environment? If I use a contract that 100% guarantees it comes from solar, it has the same environmental impact as if I use a cheaper contract that guarantees 100% coal power?
I'm not sure if I misunderstand what you're saying, or you're misunderstanding what I said before, but something along the lines got lost in transmission I think.
sure, but the co2 emissions from a new machine would take about 10 years to offset, by which time this thinking has made you replace it.. twice.
? It’s not like the machine would be custom built for him.
Are you saying it’s fine to drive a huge truck if you’re single and just need to get around the block to buy a pack of eggs, just because the emissions are nothing compared to those required for making that smaller, more efficient car that you could buy instead?
no, they're saying the emissions needed to create that smaller, more efficient car may vastly exceed their car's emissions during its entire lifetime under their use. so it may be a net loss.
Better? No absolutely not. Capable? Without a doubt. I have a multi bay nas and it's like 1/6the the size of my pc case. My nas also makes removing and replacing drives trivial. There's a million guides online for my particular nas already and software written with it in mind. It also draws a lot less power than my gaming pc and has a lot quieter operation.
It's difficult for me to accept it's better given all the above.
The first thing you should consider doing with you old device is selling or giving them away. This helps lowering the need for manufacturing more hardware, it prevents the hardware becoming e-waste in a drawer, and it put pressure on the market to lower it's prices. Sure, you can reuse as a NAS, but someone probably needs it more.
The electronics went so cheap recently, so selling it to strangers is rarely worth the effort. Then there's a question, what OS are you going to put on an old PC. And then even if they are, say, only using browser, and would be okay with linux, modern browsers need 8GB of memory at least.
After I had a reckoning with bitrot, would muchly recommend to use something with ECC memory for NAS. And a checksumming filesystem with periodic scrubing that won't get corrupt on you silently.
> checksumming filesystem with periodic scrubing
Do you know a system that does this? Looking for this too
btrfs and zfs
> old gaming PC with a Ryzen 1600x, 24GB of RAM
"Old", right. That old PC I'm about to throw away has 2 GB of RAM.
Unfortunately PCs have mechanical devices that give out after a few years. I am referring of course to fans. I use a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu and Samba as my NAS. It is cheap and reliable.
I have fans for the early 00s.
Also a fan is like $10?
Things which are more vital than that are the disks, power supply, rams.
I do too, but I’m looking to get proper solution soon. A Pi is a pretty lousy NAS. It can’t even power two drives so you can’t have redundancy unless you get a powered USB hub. And even then, I used one of those for a while and the drive connected to it prematurely failed. I think maybe because the power supply wasn’t stable.
I have a Pi4 running Raid 1 NAS with two SSD drives, and an externally powered USB hub. Unfortunately, it crashes every 6 months or so and needs a power cycle. Haven't been able to track down why, but I also suspect a power supply issue.
Initially I naively tried to run the two drives right off the USB3 ports in the Pi, and that basically crashed within a day - but that is of course because I was exceeding the power draw. An external hub and supply helped, but didn't fully fix the issue.
I've had more SD cards die on me than fans. I don't think any have died in the past five years, even.
Is there a particular brand you buy? Mine always fail after about 5 years… and I try a new brand each time. Not cheap fans, either; usually $15-20 per 120mm unit.
Noctua, but $20 might not be enough for the cheapest one depending where you live.
I’m not buying anything else and I’m also swapping out any non-noctua fan in my parts when possible (e.g. bought a scythe cooler due to ‘interesting’ dimensional constraints and swapped its fan with a noctua one.)
I tried using different sd cards with RPi but kept having issues with broken filesystem few months after, it was probably caused by bad power supply and electric surges.
You don't HAVE to boot RPi4+ from an SD card. RPi4 and RPi5 can boot from an external SSD just fine. I don't recall the last time I used an SD card in an RPi but it must have been years.
I can’t remember replacing fans because they stopped spinning but I have EOLed them because the bearings went bad and they started to screech.
Don't use an SD card, then. It's that simple.
I didn't want to leave the convenience of home NAS products and suffered through them for a decade. TrueNAS turned out to be just as low maintenance after the one time cost of assembly and reading up on ZFS.
It depends on your use case. I still think I overreacted to the death of my old NAS but after I found that storage I had mentally written of as "archive" had great performance I was using it all the time and upgraded my home office switch to 10G.
While there are use cases for NAS, generally, if you have a desktop PC it's far better to put the hard drives in it rather than setting up a second computer you have to turn on and run too. Putting the storage in the computer where you'll use it means it'll be much faster, much cheaper, incomparably more reliable, with a more natural UI, and it'll use less eletricity than having to run 2 computers.
Now if your NAS use case is streaming media files to multiple devices (TV set top boxes, etc), sure, NAS makes sense if the NAS you build is very low idle power. But if you just need the storage for actual computing it is a waste of time and money.
Why do you think it'd be more reliable? That's one of the main advantages of a NAS