What do you have, what do you recommend, and why?
Asking as I’ve got a lot of spare components lying around that I’m planning on turning into a NAS. If it doesn’t work out I’ll buy a pre-built enclosure and reuse the drives.
I think as a turn-key solution, the prebuilt enclosures are fine. I have a two-bay Synology that works well. If you’ve already got components though, DIY is probably going to give you a lot more granular control. I’m planning on building out a home server rack including a TrueNAS VM or something similar.
Syno 920+ for me
Same. Having all their custom software available and just one click away is amazing, and with Docker you can install everything else just like a regular server. It’s the best of both worlds imo.
Adding my 2c - I think it depends on if you want something that just works out of the box, or if you want to tinker and play with a DIY solution. I have a Synology DS220+ that just works, is easy to manage, has loads of apps etc. I also have a Raspberry Pi with Openmediavault installed and 3 SSDs attached which required a bit of setup, is more complex to get things working, also has apps (plugins) but is more of a project.
I replaced an old prebuilt Windows Home Server with a custom built server running unraid about…7 years ago. unraid has been rock solid for me. Great product. Very scalable for the home user.
Highly recommend unraid and it’s well worth the one time license fee.
Understand that this is a rabbit hole where you’ll hear a million opinions. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend keeping it simple. It’s been a while since I looked at what’s new, but I’d look at truenas scale or unraid first.
I personally use truenas core (based on freebsd) but truenas scale (based on debian) opens up more options like docker that might be useful in the future.
I recommend sticking to hardware you already own until you run into something that you can’t do. Then you’ll have a better idea of what to look for and how everything works.
Thanks, the flexibility and closed source (I assume) of turn key solutions puts me off them. I’ve already got a raspberry pi running a few containers and I work with docker and Linux in my day job so I know a decent amount. The form factor of the turnkey solutions is the big draw for me at the moment to them as I’ve just got a spare ATX mid size tower handy. Would ideally replace with smaller case but then I’d need a smaller motherboard and that’s just raising costs for starting out. Potential upgrade path anyway.
I have a node 304 case with an itx board and I wish I’d have gone with something bigger with more expansion slots. Some sata ports died on me so I installed an hba card to give me more. That means I can’t add a 10g nic or a video card for hardware acceleration or…you get the idea. Ideally spend less money now and experiment, then in the future you’ll hopefully learn what suits your needs.
