How does one get a NAS without spending an arm and leg these days? I started pirating because I was broke, I don’t have triple digits to spend on hardware.
How does one get a NAS without spending an arm and leg these days? I started pirating because I was broke, I don’t have triple digits to spend on hardware.
An old PC with a bunch of hard drives (they shouldn’t be NAS drives necessarily) + TrueNas. The main cost will be the hard drives which is about 20$/TB
$20/TB is a bad deal.
You can get WD Red Pro’s on sale twice a year for $16/TB.
Further you can order unused data center and enterprise drives for anything from $11-$16/TB and those things are built to take way more use and abuse than home users can throw at them.
I would not pay above $17/TB for traditional magnetic spinning disk storage.
That’s like incredibly less than what I have been able to find. Where exactly would they be on sale for that cheap?
Don’t want to buy used since you never know when they will go south on you
You can even start with an old laptop and external drives. Plenty of people shuck them anyway, so you’re not exactly overpaying. They’ll just be a bit slow. But if you’re mostly planning on streaming video that doesn’t matter too much.
If you do have a little to spend, you can do a ‘naskiller’ build. Just search for it and pick one. Basically some people put together lists of cheap, reliable used hardware you can get to build a pretty great nas, with different flavors. ‘Quiet’ ‘fast’ ‘compact’. I built one and went all out. I think it was about 600 bucks without the drives. Build up from there.
I use a mini-PC and as many of these drive stations as needed: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WR9N3KW I started with HDD’s but SSD’s work much better with those stations. Bonus: Those guys can clone drives without a computer or anything.
