Curious what you’ve got installed on it. What do you use a lot but took awhile to find? What do you recommend?
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I don’t know if I can claim a spare hard drive hooked up to a Raspberry Pi as a NAS, but it’s what I have - and it works quite well for my single-user use case.
Sounds like a NAS to me!
On Reddit, we had a r/selfhosted. Do we have something like that here, in the new frontier?
There’s !selfhost@lemmy.ml (and apparently also !selfhosted@lemmy.ml and !selfhosting@slrpnk.net which popped up in the autocompleter).
Thank you! When I tried looking for them last night, I couldn’t find anything, so this is very much appreciated!
I’ve got a Synology 918+ with 16TB in raid 10.
Of the synology software, I regularly use: Photos (photo backup and organization tool), Drive (a private “cloud” sync like Dropbox), the contacts and calendar services, and surveillance station, their security camera monitor/recorder. Via Docker, I also run dokuwiki, gitea, draw.io, minio, postgres, freshrss, firefly3, calibre, and a few others. Like others, Time Machine backups of laptops and backups of non-apple hardware use a lot of the space.
I also have my older Synology 213 running still just as a place to backup important stuff from the primary.
I’d like to build a NAS. Does anyone have a simple guide I could follow? I do have experience building my personal computers. I could search online for a guide, but a lot of the time small communities like this will have the end-all be-all guide that isn’t well known.
I don’t have one off hand but a NAS at homelab level is not that different from a server.
I have had success with getting a second hand server with a moderately powerful processor (old i5 maybe?), a good 1/10Gb network card (which can be set up with bonding if you have multiple ports), and lots of SATA ports or a raid card (need PCI slots for the cards as well).
I would go with even a lower power processor for power savings if that’s a thing. ECC ram would be great, especially for ZFS/btrfs/xfs.
I’ve got a ‘NAS’ setup on my desktop computer/server. I use it for almost everything. It runs VMs and games and self-hosted servers, etc, etc. It is Arch Linux but does it all. Plex/Sonarr/Radarr/QBittorrent.
24 TB of HDD in raid 10.
I haven’t found a good reason to keep a separate computer/server. It pretty much just always complicates the setup. If I need more separation, a VM is usually a better answer in most cases as far as I can see.
I’ve got a HP DL360 g9 running Ubuntu server lts and ZFS on Linux with 8× 1.2tb 10k disks, and an external enclosure (connected by external SAS) with 8× 2tb (3.5" sata) disks. The 1.2tb disks are in a ZFS raid10 array which has all our personal and shared documents, photos, etc The 2tb disks are in a raidz6 and stores larger files.
It uses a stupid amount of power though (mainly the 10k disks) so it’s going to be replaced this year with something newer, not sure what that will look like yet.
I used a Rasberry Pi 4 to make a pi-hole ad blocker. I then learned you could just plug in a harddrive to it (USB) to make a very simple NAS. I bought an SSD to USB case/adapter, and with basic tutorials online I now have a network drive. To reiterate, I have no programming skills. Both the pi-hole and now the NAS were from copy-paste command line walkthroughs.
It’s not a fancy “NAS” as far as redundancy or backup, but now all 4 of the gaming PCs (wife and kids have their own) can connect to the same drive for sharing stuff. I also use it to manually back up all our photos/videos. I love it.
I don’t have a NAS yet, but I’ve been interested in one as well as PiHole for a bit. I have 2 Raspberry Pi 3b+ currently and have muddled my way through setting up Octopi for a 3D printer on one and setting up ADSB plane tracking on the other. Mostly copy-paste commands as you did on both of them using PuTTY. If I ever get a Pi 4, I’d be interested in doing what you did with yours. Any resource suggestions?
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-nas-for-whole-home-file-sharing
That’s literally the bookmark I still have from 3 years ago - and it looks like they kept it updated! Enjoy!
You’re amazing! Thank you! Now to find a Pi 4 that’s actually in stock. Any recommendations on RAM version?
I doubt it’s very intensive if you’re only doing a single drive NAS - but I did get the Pi4 with 4 GB. It’s been running the pi-hole and network drive nonstop for 2 years, no issues. and of course - enjoy!
Excellent. It’s been a minute, probably 3 years since I bought a Pi, time to get searching. Thanks again and have a great day.
I’ve just been using an old laptop with jellyfin, radarr, sonarr and transmission.
Custom low power build:
- Case: some old 2U Supermicro case with 6 HDD bays that got thrown out at work
- Mainboard: ASRock J4105M Micro ATX
- CPU: Intel Celeron J4105
- RAM: 8 GB DDR4 (CPU doesn’t support more)
- RAID controller: LSI 9212-4i
- System SSDs: 2x 128 GB Intenso 2.5" SATA SSD (mounted into the first two bays with 3D-printed 2.5" to 3.5" adapters)
- Data HDDs: 2x Seagate Ironwolf 4TB, 2x Seagate Exos X16 14TB, combined into an 18 TB zfs pool
- PSU: PicoPSU
My main goal was to build a 4 HDD NAS that can run at very low power and without active cooling most of the time (because it sits under my desk) but can spin up fans if needed.
On the software side I run Ubuntu 22.04, docker and Jellyfin as a media server. The J4105 provides Intel Arc graphics for video encoding.
Currently running an R710 in RAID6 with 32TB usable, but between the data on plex and backups of things in the rack I’m low on space.
I’m looking at getting 8 Odroid HC4s and some referbed 20TB drives to build a Glusterfs cluster that will host all of my VM disks and backups. At least with that I’ll have 80-120TB depending on how much fault tolerance I have. Because they have two HDD slots I can double my storage when it gets low and just add more boards to expand the array when I’m tight for space again.
I don’t have any experience with the Odroid HC4, but I used to have an N2 and while I am sympathetic towards Odroid I can’t help but feel their software/firmware support is lacking. I always had issues with the GPU driver and there was either a hardware or firmware fault with the USB controller which lead to random access errors.
Oh I’m not going to use the trash OS Odroid supplies. I’m going to use Armbian which is much more stable and has better support for the tooling I want to use
Thank you for saying that, I’ve been struggling with my HC4 using the Odroid supplied OS for a while and need to start fresh. Definitely going down this path thus time. Cheers!
Computer with Ubuntu Server, with a Ryzen APU (3400g), 16GB DDR4 RAM, and 2 x 4TB WD Red CMR Drives.
Use it as a media server for Jellyfin, and also as a file server using NFS. Works super awesome and I wish I had done this sooner
It’s something I always wanted to setup for my personal files, docs, media etc. but get dissuaded once I see synology costs, hard drive requirements, RAID setup options and just generally power draw / heat&noise generation. Looking forward to answers here, I’d be very happy to get off cloud storage but not if it’s a second job maintaining and setting it up
I’m using a Synology setup. I thought I’d grab an off the self option as I have a habit of going down rabbit holes with DIY projects. It’s working well, doing a one-way mirror off my local storage with nightly backups from the NAS to a cloud server.
I use synology. I’ve done freenas, openfiler, even just straight zfs/Linux/smb/iscsi on Ubuntu and others. Synology works well and is quite easy to setup. I let the nas do file storage. And tie other computers to it (namely sff dell machines) to do the other stuff, like Pi-hole or plex. Storage is shared from the nas via cifs/smb or iscsi.
Synology also has one of the best backups for home use imho with Active Backup for Business. It can do vmware, windows, max, Linux etc. I actually have an older second nas for that alone. But you can do it all in one easily.
I use mine for file storage, Pi-Hole, and Jellyfin mostly.
I built a massive overkill NAS with the intention of turning it into a full blown home server. That fizzled out after a while (partially because the setup I went with didn’t have GPU power options on the server PSUs, and fenangling an ATX PSU in there was too sketchy for me), so now it’s a power hog that just holds files. I just turn it on to use the files, then flip it back off to save on its ridiculous idle power costs.
In hindsight I’d have gone with a lighter motherboard/CPU combo and kept the server grade stuff for a separate unit. The NAS doesn’t need more than a beefy NIC and a SAS drive controller, and those are only x8 PCIE slots at most.
Also I use TrueNAS scale, more work to set up than UNRAID but the ZFS architecture seemed too good to ignore.
A GPU isn’t really necessary for home server unless you want to do lots of client side transcoding. I have a powerhungry server that runs a VM offering samba and nfs shares as well as a bunch of other vms, lxc containers and docker containers, with a full *arr stack, Plex, jellyfin, a jupyterlab instance, pihole and a bunch of other stuff.
I was trying to do some fancy stuff like GPU passthrough to make the ultimate all in one unit that I could have 2 or 3 GPUS in and have several VMs running games independently, or at least the option to spin it up for a friend if they came over. I’m probably not quite sophisticated enough to pull that off anyways, and the use case was too uncommon to bother with after unga bungaing a power distribution board after a hard day of work.
Ah now I get it. You’ll probably need an expensive PSU to make that work. I’m sure there would be some option though in the server segment for people building GPU clusters.
Yeah, I was trying to go all the way when I should have compartmentalized it a bit and just had two computers instead of one superbeast. The server PSUs aren’t super expensive relatively speaking, 1U hotswap 1200W PSUs with 94% efficiency are like $100. Problem was that the power distribution board I had didn’t have GPU power connectors, only CPU power connectors, and tired me wasn’t going to accept no for an answer and thus let out the magic smoke in it. I got lucky and the distribution board seems to be the intended failure point in these things, so the expensive motherboard and components got by unscathed (I think, I never used the GPU, and it was just some cheap Ebay thing). Still a fairly costly mistake that I should have avoided, but I was tired that night and wanted something to just work out.
That’s quite interesting. I would have thought that they were more expensive than that. I’ve been there too. You’re doing a bunch of stuff, tired and just want it to somehow work. What have you been doing with the build after that, if you don’t mind me asking?
Was going to make it a sort of central computer that could centralize all the computing for several members of the family. Was hoping to get a basic laptop that could hook into the unit and play games/program on a virtual machine with graphics far above what the laptop could have handled, plus the aforementioned spin up of more machines for friends. Craft Computing had a lot of fun computing setups I wanted to learn and emulate. I would have also had the standard suite of video services and general tomfoolery. Maybe dip into crypto mining with idle time later on. Lots of ideas that somewhat fizzled out.
That sounds really interesting. I have some VMs set up in a similar way for family memeber though they’re very low power. They’re mostly used to ease the transition from windows to Linux. I hope you get to do it again sometime :)
