NAS, Raspberry or Synology.

[luiHS]

Is there any advantage in building a NAS with a Raspberry instead of buying a commercial NAS?

I am going to use it to share movies between a PC and a mobile phone.

As a commercial NAS I have seen a single bay Synology. I don't like RAID systems, I find them unreliable, from experience I prefer to make differential backups on another disk.

If I used a Raspberry, I had thought about using a Raspberry 4 that I have or buying the new Raspberry 5. And the question I have is whether to buy an adapter board to be able to connect SATA hard drives or connect the hard drive with a SATA to USB adapter. I will also need a box to place both the raspberry and the hard drive.

[Nominal Animal]

You do know there are well-supported Linux SBCs for exactly this purpose available already?

As an example, I have an Odroid-HC1 (old, current is Odroid HC4 with two vertical SATA bays).

For a backup or media storage type NAS, I would consider Odroid M1 with at least OS on the PCIe M.2 SSD (PCIe 3.0, 2 lanes).  It has one SATA connector, but you can use USB3-to-SATA for additional ones.  It also consumes only about 1.3 watts when idle.  Putting the OS on the PCIe means that you can use huge spinny SATA drives for backups, automatically spun down until actually accessed (although I'd also run smartd on them, scanning them periodically about once a month, to detect data and disk deterioration hopefully in time).
Of course, if you use a large PCIe SSD for the OS, you'll have ample room for storing often-accessed data as a separate NAS volume.

Standard JMicron JMS578 etc. USB 3 to SATA bridges (that cost < USD $10) work quite well in Linux, so you can use basically any Linux SBC with gigabit ethernet or better, and one or more USB 3 host ports, to build your NAS.  (For example, look at Odroid C4 or Odroid N2+.  N2+ in particular has about twice the CPU power a Raspberry Pi 4 has, in case you need that.  For a NAS, you do not.  Note their low idle power consumption, on the order of two to three watts.  Standby is typically less than one watt, and on a NAS, you can safely use the powersave governor.)

For a NAS box that is in heavy use, I'd consider an Intel/AMD -based box with support for three or more PCIe SSDs, and only use SATA for spinny-disk-type long-term backup storage (with the same smartd config as for a Linux SBC NAS).  However, the power consumption tends to grow by an order of magnitude.

As I build my own solutions, I am not up to date on specialized NAS distributions and such.  I also do not use RPis myself, for various technical (problematic USB hardware) and nontechnical (foundation) reasons.

[DiTBho]

Is there any advantage in building a NAS with a Raspberry instead of buying a commercial NAS?

Short answer: no, Synology has support, and a team working on it.
RPI and customs solutions need *YOU* to fix and develop stuff.

[DiTBho]

Intel/AMD

I say this with regret, because I personally HATE Intel as a company and x86 as an architecture, however I have to say that Zimaboards are not bad.

At least they have a lot of support, including propietary stuff that only works on x86.

[DiTBho]

Another very important aspect that is never considered: the case, the sleds (this for HDDs), the airflow, the power supply part, the heat shield, all things that with an RPI are your responsibility (and are often underestimated), whereas with products like Synology they have been well designed and tested.

It may seem like a contract that suggests using a Synology when I designed my own multi node NAS with GNU/Linux PowerPC-40x modules, but I must say that I got into troubles precisely because of the aspects I mentioned, in particular the power unit occasionally caused glitches which I perceived as software bugs while they were problems with the power section.

[aeberbach]

I don't think the commercial NAS boxes give you much but an ugly menu system and molded plastic. They're probably the same code under the hood as your homebrew solution. Some say "well designed" but are they better than any other thing in the market made for supplying power and housing drives?

[DiTBho]

are they better than any other thing in the market made for supplying power and housing drives?

I won't say anything about the various other solutions because I've never tried them myself, but Synology? I will tell you *Yes, definitively than botched home made solutions*, and I say it after trying them and installing them for my bos, friends and customers.

Of course it's my opinion, but I think that from the hardware to the software everything has been intelligently thought out.

[Postal2]

I don't know what is on the market now, I recommend to use solution "out-of-box".

[luiHS]

Thank you all for the answers, I think I will try both options, I will buy a Synology, it only costs 114 Euros in total, and since I already have a Rasbperry 4 and a 1TB SSD, I will buy a SATA to USB cable which are very cheap and I will try it with the Raspberry.

[Veteran68]

I ran custom-built Linux-based NASes for many years. My last used 16 drives in external eSATA enclosures (x4 and x8). At first it was a fun project, I learned a lot about managing storage arrays and saved money in the process. But after awhile I tired of the fairly constant administration and upkeep required, and once I lost an entire RAID array due to my own stupid error during maintenance. So years ago I decided to buy a QNAP appliance, and am currently on my second model. I love them! I considered Synology but was convinced to go with QNAP instead and am very happy with them. DIY is cool when you're starting out, looking for an interesting project, and trying to save money. Once your time becomes more important and you just want things to work, buying a commercial NAS will be a wise investment.

[SiliconWizard]

How much space did you need for justifying 16 drives? (I mean, as you're talking about a "fun project", I'm assuming this was a personal NAS and not something for a business?) Just curious.

[Veteran68]

How much space did you need for justifying 16 drives? (I mean, as you're talking about a "fun project", I'm assuming this was a personal NAS and not something for a business?) Just curious.

Yes it was my personal NAS. Initially it was populated with 500GB drives in a RAID 6 array, so 7TB (unformatted) total with the 2 parity drives. Which is nothing in terms of today's storage levels. I started out with 1 4-bay enclosure, and buying 1 or 2 drives at a time. Eventually added a second 4-bay, and then an 8-bay as I bought more and more drives. Eventually I upgraded them all to 1TB drives, doubling my capacity, before retiring it after buying my first 8-bay QNAP appliance with 3TB drives.

Among other things like backups of multiple systems and network file shares, many years ago I started ripping all my music, home videos, and DVDs/BRs to my media server. I have somewhere between 20-30TB of media on my current 6-bay QNAP NAS, which contains 6x14TB drives in RAID 5.

[ejeffrey]

Is there any advantage in building a NAS with a Raspberry instead of buying a commercial NAS?

I'm not a big fan of the raspberry pi for a NAS.  It's a bit underpowered, but mostly it's really limited on storage IO.  For a simple NAS, the SD card is OK for an OS drive, but your storage drives are pretty much limited to USB.  I'd much rather something that had NVMe and/or SATA, even for a single drive system.

I find them unreliable, from experience I prefer to make differential backups on another disk.

Of course you are supposed to have backups either way.  The main purpose of RAID is to reduce downtime from failed hard drives.  And it's true, that while you add redundancy, you also add more things that can go wrong, both in terms of more hardware that can fail and more options to mess up the configuration (including things like swapping the wrong drive after a failure!).  That said, the commercial raid offerings generally handle the configuration side pretty well, and most people seem to have only good things to say about Synology in particular.

[SiliconWizard]

How much space did you need for justifying 16 drives? (I mean, as you're talking about a "fun project", I'm assuming this was a personal NAS and not something for a business?) Just curious.

Yes it was my personal NAS. Initially it was populated with 500GB drives in a RAID 6 array, so 7TB (unformatted) total with the 2 parity drives.

Oh ok, makes sense. I built mine in around 2009 (or 2010, not sure exactly) and used 2TB HDDs (which is 4 times what you had used), so yes - that would amount to about the same. 2TB HDDs were already quite affordable back then as I remember.

I have upgraded the HDDs once in the meantime (just once) and otherwise my NAS is still running fine, yes it's at least 13 yo now and has been running almost 24/7. So is it possible to do this with a homebuilt NAS and quality, but just consumer HDDs (not enterprise-class or anything like that), without having to constantly maintain it, absolutely. (Apart from this HDD upgrade, I have just updated the OS - CentOS - on a regular basis until it went out of support, I haven't bothered to update to a more recent version of CentOS and things are plenty fine this way with now zero maintenance.)

[Berni]

I am running Unraid on a 6th gen i5 as my NAS for a number of years now.

The advantage of doing this is having a more flexible and customizable solution. Not only is it a NAS but it can also run VMs and docker containers (letting you run various services like Plex video streaming, PiHole, personal 'dropbox', personal VPN, torrent, media ingest station, security camera recorder, home automation, periodic backups etc...). So when you want to run something 24/7 in the background you just start up an instance on there and it runs, rather than scrounging around for a machine to run it on.

You also get more hardware flexibility. You can stick in a 10Gbit network card, you can stick in a SAS HBA (letting you connect multiple 12 bay arrays of drives for example), you can use a SSD as a cache, you can talk to a UPS for safe shutdown, etc... None of this applies for little Linux SBCs like a Pi tho, they are under powered.

RAID does not have to be so risky either. If you don't need the extra performance, then you can use the Unraid way of having a separate filesystem on each drive and then extra parity drives on top as safety. This way data is NOT striped across all drives. If something really bad happens and the RAID array collapses, then you can still just pull drives out and plug them into any Linux machine and see the files on it. You only loose data on the drives that actually died, not the whole array. You can also add more drives to the array any time (but does require parity to be recalculated) and they can all be different sizes. I would not recommend using hardware RAID controllers.

But if you really plan to use it as a NAS to make your files magically appear on the network then yes a Synology box is the way to go. You plug it in and it just works.

But using these premade NAS operating systems like Unraid, FreeNAS, TrueNAS...etc it makes it pretty easy too, you just install it and then manage over a WebUI. Once set up they don't need to be touched in years (apart from perhaps software updates every few years for security reasons)

[DiTBho]

QNAP
[..]
Synology

Synology vs QNAP: { pros, cons } ?

[DiTBho]

16 drives in external eSATA enclosures (x4 and x8)

{ HDD, eSATA enclosure }: which brand and model?

[DiTBho]

I am of the opinion that a "personal home" NAS should never be turned on 24 hours a day, it simply doesn't make sense.

I personally developed a solution to keep it "personal home" profiled and "off" as much as possible and "on" only when needed.

A "personal home NAS" does not have the profile of a "corporate NAS" that must guarantee data always available with minimum downtime, and for this very reason different backup and RAID policies make sense!

For a home NAS I don't think anyone cares if from the time you need the data, maybe outside your home, via the internet, it takes you half a minute longer because the NAS has to bootstrap, and serve the request!

I don't think you need to access the data that often, otherwise there's no point in having a NAS, and you'll have to carry an SSD (or in my case an i-Rev) with you.

-

I recommend becoming familiar with your NAS before entrusting it with really important data, for at least a period of 4 months.

[Berni]

It is easier to run a NAS 24/7.

Even with the recent hikes in electricity prices it currently costs about 1$ to consume 1W for 1 year. You can get a x86 PC to consume less than 20W idle fairly easily, so that would be 20 bucks per year to run. Not worth investing a lot of my time into saving that much money.

With some careful component selection and spinning down of drives you can get the average consumption a fair bit lower than that even.

[DiTBho]

RAID does not have to be so risky either. If you don't need the extra performance, then you can use the Unraid way of having a separate filesystem on each drive and then extra parity drives on top as safety. This way data is NOT striped across all drives. If something really bad happens and the RAID array collapses, then you can still just pull drives out and plug them into any Linux machine and see the files on it. You only loose data on the drives that actually died, not the whole array. You can also add more drives to the array any time (but does require parity to be recalculated) and they can all be different sizes. I would not recommend using hardware RAID controllers.

UnRaid is a great solution, in my opinion!
It's similar to the solution I developed myself for my multi node NAS.

I also prefer softRAID, all managed by the kernel as this way you don't get hurt with your own hands.

[DiTBho]

It is easier to run a NAS 24/7.

Even with the recent hikes in electricity prices it currently costs about 1$ to consume 1W for 1 year. You can get a x86 PC to consume less than 20W idle fairly easily, so that would be 20 bucks per year to run. Not worth investing a lot of my time into saving that much money.

With some careful component selection and spinning down of drives you can get the average consumption a fair bit lower than that even.

but what's the point of leaving a NAS exposed to the network, therefore exposed to a lot of attacks just because you're lazy?

And, in addition to this, my NAS's nodes consume ~nothing(1) when turned off.


(1) nothing = only the ctrl board is always online, basically it's a small router

[Berni]

The point is that id spend too much time setting this sort of stuff up than what saving the 20$ of electricity is worth. This is the main reason why i bought a Unraid license. I could make a free linux distro do everything that Unraid can do, but it would cost me too much time to do it, it was easier to just pay Unraid for a thing that works out of the box.

Also no it is not all exposed the internet directly. The only thing exposed is a single UDP port that listens for a VPN connection, the way this VPN protocol works means there is no response until it gets the secret key. So the port will not show up on any scans.

[bitwelder]

On the 'Buy or DIY' choice, I'd say that if you think you'd be happy with a NAS that does exacly what shown in the brochure, i.e. mainly a shared storage, the 'Buy' solution is OK (and specifically with Syology you should get a good system). The NAS management experience is also quite easy.
If instead you think you might use your NAS also for other purposes, as running some custom tasks and scripts, and you are not afraid to configure and manage manually (and likely also via command line), then I'd suggest to take the DIY route.

Regarding what to use to build a NAS, you may start with a Raspi 4 if you have it but if you need to buy the controller instead of getting the new Raspi 5 I'd rather choose some other brand like Odroid, which seem better suited for NAS purposes (some models are available also with a simple case that holds the board and a disk). Reason is that at least up to Raspi 4 the performance of the USB controller isn't that great.

[SiliconWizard]

Regarding leaving the NAS on 24/7, what I've done is enable wake-on-lan and I put the NAS in standby when I'm not going to use it for a certain amount of time (although I haven't put it in standby for quite a while now, so it's only occasional).
But this approach makes it draw insignificant power while in standby (it's already not hungry when active, less than 30W), while waking it up, ready to serve files, only takes a couple seconds.

[Nominal Animal]

Please note that I've only listed Odroids as an example, and not by any means the best or only possible suggestion.  I like them, and HardKernel shows their power and benchmarks on the product page, and even responds to questions on their forum.  I also like several other Linux SBCs, but have only used Odroid HC1 for a NAS-like purposes myself.

I am of the opinion that a "personal home" NAS should never be turned on 24 hours a day, it simply doesn't make sense.

Full shutdown and startup thermal cycling is a bit hard on devices.  I recommend *against* powering them off for the night only.  Off for the weekend is on the borderline for me.  If I go away for more than a couple of days and do not enable external access, then turning them off makes sense.

With spinny disks, the difference is even greater, as it is the spin-up that causes the most wear (aside from emergency head parking, which may or may not cause wear, depending on both the manufacturer and model), and also consumes a lot of current too, comparatively speaking.
I've always used SMART on my spinny drives (and prefer to use smartd to read the disk contents at least once per month, hopefully to catch any data degradation early).  I've found that while there is no reliable early failure indicator, raw reallocated sector count incrementing tends to be sufficient –– for myself –– to replace the drive.  It does not necessarily indicate the drive is going to fail, but it usually does occur before the drive fails; my strategy is to replace the drives before they fail.  I do not have enough experience on SSDs (enough units in long-term use) to have an opinion on those.

I personally developed a solution to keep it "personal home" profiled and "off" as much as possible and "on" only when needed.

Me too, as I use switchable sockets for all my electronics, and turn them off when I'm away for longer than a day or weekend, and do not need external access back home.  I do not currently use a NAS box, as my main workhorse is a laptop: I simply use external drives of various sorts for backups.

That said, with e.g. Odroid HC4, you can suspend the system (systemctl suspend, with LAN wakeup if you use the enable_wol=1 kernel boot option; see HardKernel kernel config and patches for details), in which state the power consumption is only about a quarter watt.  I'm not sure if auto-suspend is enabled by default, but it shouldn't be too hard to set up.