this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
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81
NAS decision paralysis (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 2 days ago by yyprum@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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So far I have been looking at things from the sidelines, trying to learn about self hosting by osmosis just by being part of the community and reading what people are doing. Most of the time though posts are too far for my knowledge or needs and the rest of times they are too simple a solution or directed at people just starting. I guess I'm in a middle uncomfortable ground :)

Pair that with ADHD and the huge amount of options available and I have ended up with a decision paralysis that I'm just trying to finally shake off.

So with that introduction out of the way, I'll start laying down the details of what I'm looking for, what I have so far and what I wish to get from this post. Hopefully I can make it short enough without lacking in information.

WHAT I HAVE SO FAR

I have a couple of old laptops I've been using to play around with self hosting. One is running Endeavour OS (arch based) and I have put a few *arrs there, not even docker based. Also Jellyfin, Calibre, ... It was literally the first thing I set up and of course now I'd do things differently but I'll slowly change that with time.

I got my hands on a second laptop and decided to try some different approach and some new things. Threw some stable Debian at it and installed casaOS. Started installing a few services there, wireguard to try and provide secure remote access to myself (and hoping to get some future access alternative to some others without it, but let's not get distracted by a different topic), tried putting calibre-web to give myself access to calibre on the other machine (and so far failed at it but barely tried anything to get it to work), some other *arrs are also in casaos, and all the other services in the other laptop are configured in casaOS to provide one access point to all. I have in my mind to set up also immich and some file syncing/editor and self hosted note application. But haven't done that because I lack a trust worthy storage set up.

Aside of that I got from home assistant one of their green devices to support it and that one is entirely dedicated to home assistant.

Well, hopefully that gives a bit of background on what I have so far and how I am just messing with things and trying different services for better or worse 🙃

WHAT I AM LACKING

Obviously, by the post title and what I have said so far, I'm looking to improve the storage system I have, which is... A simple and starting to be oldish external hard drive with 8TB size. I'm kinda scared of it breaking... Even thinking of going to get a second ext drive to create a copy for now. But well, that's my fault and my problem. I have been postponing getting a NAS because the options are just so wildly open. I don't want anything super complex, but I don't want to end up using some synology and depend on their software or whatever. I want to get some hardware I'm the owner of and set it up with some open source solution. But there are so many options! Plus setting a whole NAS from scratch seems to be quite expensive and about to get more expensive with the storage market situation.

WHAT I HOPE TO GET IN THIS POST

I don't expect anyone to tell me what to do or what is the perfect solution, but I hope I can get some feedback, some help on choosing what could be a good path to start, and solve my decision paralysis so I can give the first steps which will likely tie me up to what I get first for the foreseeable future.

What I think I need is a 4 bay (at least) device where I can install some trueNAS or alternative that is simpler hopefully, something that is not too expensive. I'm willing to compromise on hard drive speed and format to get a better price. Of course I'd rather get M.2 SSD drives if someone has a cheap alternative :D

I've been looking at the different RAID levels to understand which I would need (WIP) but basically I'd hope to have some back up system and more space than now with the option to expand in the future. I have no experience administering such system but I don't have an issue with learning it on the spot when I need to up the sizes etc. For context, my 8 TB are nearly full (at 7 used), it has taken a looooong time for it to be full, but the size requirements would only increase with immich and files and notes for the whole family. Maybe I would want to have different hard drives for personal data and media storage... Eggs in baskets and so on.

Well, thank you all for coming to my ted talk, I hope I have set up enough of the details that might help you help me help myself without boring you to death or making you give up on reading this :)

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[–] RunjamboJenkin@infosec.pub 1 points 1 hour ago

I was in a similar situation to yourself a while ago. There are so many options, I couldn’t decide which route to take, and I kept breathing life into my underpowered NUC server + external HDD for longer than I should have.

I’m not going to offer any hardware/software advice as there’s plenty of great suggestions in the thread already.

What I will say is… whatever you go for will be better than choosing nothing, and remaining on your existing setup. I can tell you’ve already put so much thought into it, that whatever you choose will not be a disappointment.

For me this ended up being a UGREEN DXP4800 Plus with Unraid.
Off the shelf hardware gave me much less to think about, and a great form factor. And Unraid gives me the freedom/flexibility I need as an enthusiast, whilst keeping things super convenient and maintainable.

6 months down the line I’m super happy with it. It’s surpassed my old NUC setup immensely. I would have been just as happy sourcing all the parts and making a custom build with TrueNas. But the many variables overwhelmed me to the point where I never made any tangible progress.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago

Get a old desktop and put a few drives in it. Then install Proxmox and go to town.

Remember the best practice is to spend less. Don't blow though your budget making silly mistakes

[–] agile_squirrel@lemmy.ml 18 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

To add to your decision paralysis, a USB 6 bay DAS is cheap and power efficient solution.

https://blog.patshead.com/2025/06/is-a-4-bay-usb-sata-disk-enclosure-a-good-option-for-your-nas-storage.html

Personally, I have a SSD with a 4-3-1 backup for important files and a 16 TB hdd with a 2-2-0 backup for unimportant files.

Regardless of what you go with, I'd recommend buying less quantity of higher capacity drives (14+ TB) instead of more smaller capacity drives. I'd also make sure you have a backup strategy in place first, and then worry about RAID.

[–] killabeezio@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

This is really interesting. I currently have a z800 running as a backup for my nas, but it's overkill and uses a lot of power. I also had to do some weird stuff to get set up properly. This setup might actually work for me. I have a bunch of mini pcs I could probably use. I just need to be able to add a 10gbe nic and I'll be good to go.

[–] Ugurcan@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

As a NAS owner of 5 years now, I’d definitely go with a DAS + a MiniPC, preferably with UnRaid on it.

And when buying high capacity HDDs check video reviews for their loudnesses. Some aren’t quite fit for Living Room usage as they often ROAR AND TREMBLE.

[–] yyprum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

Thanks for the note about noise, it is hard to remember that at times. In a way I would consider SSD drives only just for that reason, but have to check if all prices are prohibitively expensive.

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[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I've been going through a similar journey, and I'll tell you want I did:

I ended up just getting a low-end 2 bay Synology NAS, because it is cheap, and easy to set up shares and backups, and 12tb mirrored is all I needed. I was too intimidated by the prospect of configuring trueNAS correctly, and Synology walked back their requirement of using their own branded drives.

If you want open source NAS software, then TrueNAS and OpenMediaVault are the main options. Truenas has the better pedigree afaict, but it has pretty significant requirements that mean you'll need expensive hardware. In the end, I decided it was way more than what I needed, I wanted my NAS to be purely a NAS, and I'd do my server/cluster on different hardware.
I almost got a HexOS NAS (fork of trueNAS SCALE with a front-end written by a bunch of ex-unraid folks to be much easier to configure and admin), but it's still beta and I didn't wanna wait a few months for GA, and also it has the same requirements as trueNAS, so it'd be expensive and you also have to pay for a license.

If you go with a traditional OTS NAS, then you probably want raid 1 for a 2 bay or raid 5 if you have 4+ bays.
If you get something like truenas that uses ZFS then you want raidz1 (which is like raid5 with one parity disk). Current there are limitations with raiz if you wanna expand it later, but HexOS folks are sponsoring a ZFS feature called Any RAID, to make expanding raidz more flexible, which will presumably make it's way to all ZFS NASes when it is finished.

I'm pretty early in my self-hosting journey, but so far I have a 2 bay Synology with cloud backup and a couple of shared volumes, a rasppi 5 running home assistant, a beelink ser5 running Ubuntu server for portainer, and a cheap VPS for pangolin.

[–] Bronzie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 hours ago

I also have a Synology NAS and second this.

Yes, it's super cool to selfhost a NAS yourself, but I really just want my storage to work and not need to be tinkered with at all. I'd be mauled by the missus if something was to happen to my AIO-server/NAS, so I'd rather split them.

Let a professional company deal with keeping your storage online at all times, and have fun with the "not so important" things like docker containers on your own server.
It costs a bit more, but it gives me peace of mind.

[–] TedZanzibar@feddit.uk 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Synology walked back their requirement of using their own branded drives.

First I've heard of this but you're right.

It's really interesting how far I had to scroll down the search results to find it, as the top page or so of hits are from April when they added the restriction in the first place.

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 5 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

They walked it back for now. It's gonna come back. They've already shown they were willing to cross the line, and they will do it again.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 11 hours ago

Fwiw I suspect they won't go back. The reason they rolled it back is supposedly because they saw real drops in sales. Now they know this is a decision that will actually reduce their bottom line, they won't be so quick to try it again.

But even if they do, you'll be fine. Might be worth avoiding some of their proprietary packages if those packages lock you in (e.g., don't use Synology Photos, use Immich or something else, even if you install it and/or store your actual photo files on your Synology) to make it so that if they do do something like this, you are easily able to switch to a different NAS next time you buy one. But you'll be fine for your device. Even last time they tried this, it only applied to newer models, not to people who had already bought a Synology.

[–] talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

A NAS is any computer with space/connectors for drives and an ethernet port... it doesn't need to be powerful or state-of-the-art, and there's really no reason it should be expensive (besides the drives).

Of course companies will be more than happy to sell you an outdated J4125-based computer with 4 disk bays for over 500EUR, but that doesn't mean you have to bite.

As for RAID, if you want to use it, just setup mirrored drives (ZFS, BTRFS or even LVM) and be done with it: you'll need backups anyway so don't overthink it. Unless you want to avoid downtime (which isn't probably a big issue for most of your data?), you can do without RAID and just restore from backup if a drive happens to break.

If you don't want to build your own PC, I've heard good things about these: https://aoostar.com/collections/nas-series (beware: I didn't try any of them - my N3150-based NAS is not old enough to need replacement yet)

[–] trilobite@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

I second drive mirroring with ZFS. Truenas Scale has been a quantum leap for me. I have two very old Dell T110 with 32GB ram each. One, the main one, has 4x 4GB Western Digital Gold drives, which cost me a fortune at the time. I think they are in raid5 but cant remember. The other t110 has cheaper WD reds. I turn on the slave machine on saturdays to complete replication tasks. I dont have a robust backup model yet besides replicating to an external HD on a 3rd machine but will need to work on that.

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[–] SpikesOtherDog@ani.social 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Look, if you were looking to have more options handed to you, you are in the right place!

TrueNAS is a great diy option. I have it running on an old box of mine. The one real caveat is that you will need enough hard drive slots (don't just hang them unless you go full SSD), 4+ SATA ports or add in a SAS card, enough PSU to handle all your drives, and enough memory.

I am running one SAS card and 16 GB of DDR 3. Since the attached image I have taken pics of the serial numbers and labeled the drives.

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[–] sic_semper_tyrannis@lemmy.today 6 points 2 days ago

I've been in a similar situation looking for a NAS setup that would work for me, and with my current limited knowledge. I settled on the HomePiNAS. It's a custom PCB they make that mounts a CM5, up to 6 drives, 2.5G NIC, and x2 m.2 slots all in a 3D printable case they can ship for you too. Put on Open Media Vault or whatever else you want and it's good to go. I was interested because it's not a complicated setup, allows for AI chips to be added or whatever else you want to use, has a 2.5G nic, and is low power.

[–] sakphul@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 2 days ago (16 children)

To be honest, even if you say you want to have your own Hardware: I think you would be better of with an off-the-shelf solution from QNAP, Synology or Asustor. They are easy to use and hard to break if you only need them for basic things like file sharing. And it does not look like you require it to do more. Because all your services are already running on a different system/Hardware.

A 4 Bay solution might be overkill for you if currently an 8TB drive looks like enough storage (otherwise you would have already replaced it if you where soon running out of space). So a "cheap" 2-Bay (with 2x12TB drives in RAID1) based solution would be a good starting point to break procrastination. Imho it is always cheaper to go with larger but lesser drives. AS long as you do not plan to use secondhand drives (large drives are hard to get in the secondhand market).

Maybe Asustor is an Option. Their Software is imho good enough for basic file sharing. And with the possibility to run TrueNAS on them you have an "update" Option for the future.

[–] thirdBreakfast@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm a +1 on this. A secondhand Synology set up with some RAID will delay this decision for a few years and give you time to build your expertise on the other aspects without worrying much about data security. It's a pity that you're nearly at the limit of 8TB - otherwise I would have suggested a two bay NAS with 2x8TB, but if you're going to use second hand drives (I do because I'm confident of my backup systems) maybe 4x6TB is better. Bigger drives are harder to come by 2nd hand - and plenty of people will not be comfortable with secondhand spinning rust anyway - if that's you, then a 2 bay with 2x12TB might be a good choice.

The main downside (according to me) of a Synology is no ZFS, but that didn't bother me until I was two years in and the owner of three of them.

[–] yyprum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I am going to check what I can get in the second hand market, I wouldn't mind that. And compare like, say, 4x 6TB drives in RAID 10 (or 01 whatever makes more sense) against 2x 12 or 14 TB with raid 1.

I would just rather avoid synology, I mostly want something where I have software that doesn't own me and I own it instead.

[–] thirdBreakfast@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Yep - I feel that, especially after the branded hard disk carry on last year.

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[–] owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago

I picked up an odroid HC4 a while ago, and it's been great. Only has two slots, though. I have it set up to do periodic backups to a cloud storage service, so I feel pretty good about it overall.

[–] wltr@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Not much from me, but it wasn’t clear to me whether you were successful with WireGuard. I’m not, till today! So I can’t recommend Tailscale more! Others recommend things like Headscale, or others, I plan to migrate to them one day. But so far, Tailscale was really good for me.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Tqilscale makes it easy, but Tailscale moved their servers from Canada to the USA a long while ago, and so with the USA being what it is right now I removed tailscale and configured wireguard. Hardest part of wireguard was just setting up firewall rules to masquerate and port forward, the rest was pretty easy, just time consuming

[–] wltr@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I do agree with you, entirely. My point is, it was the easiest option. I guess self-hosting Headscale should eliminate that, if there’s nothing suspicious with the clients.

Also, I tried Netbird, and it was good, but a bit more complicated. I didn’t like it UX wise, but that could be me not having enough time to explore. I have it installed with my mum’s PC at her home. My infrastructure uses Tailscale now.

Also, there are other alternatives. I haven’t tried them yet. All I wanted to say, there are compromises everywhere, and dealing with the US is the compromise for now.

I’m located in Ukraine, so personally, I wish them what they want to push on me — this administration wants me and my family to die for the orange monkey to steal some more money for himself, betraying his own country; I guess that’s obvious for all of us.

But I just think for me personally that’s rather a vector of my movement rather than changing things momentarily. So, to me, Tailscale was a god send. As I struggled to get through this. Now I understand it a bit better. I’d love to setup WireGuard myself, I just lack some knowledge, and also time plus energy. I hope I’d do that this year. We’ll see. Thanks for enhancing my point, and happy new year.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 16 hours ago

Happy New Year, and good luck on both fronts. (The USA collusions with Russia, and the Linuxy stuff)

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Ok, so I'm going to weigh in here because I have first-hand experience, but keep in mind I am a relative novice at self hosting.

I've been using a machine that has evolved over the years from primary gaming PC, to backup server, to Bitcoin rig, to Plex server, etc. Well I finally got tired of complex raid backup solutions and bought a 4 drive Synology nas. I figured I might as well just go with the name brand because I'd probably pay a bit more, but everything would work right away.

Everything did not work right away.

I fought so hard to get incremental backup working... So hard. But it just refuses to copy some files. It actually struggles with filenames! It can't handle names that have too many characters or use certain characters. (Filenames that Windows and the MacOS have no problem with). So if I want that backup to work, it appears I have to rename hundreds of files on that PC and hope nothing breaks... While their hardware seems fine, I am thoroughly unimpressed with Synology's software.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Huh... I thought Synology had a cap of 143 characters. Are you writing a book? LOL

So if I want that backup to work, it appears I have to rename hundreds of files on that PC

You could zip or tar the offending files. Inconvenient but would work. You could use VeraCrypt or Cryptomator containers which would give you 255 character cap. Using a VeraCrypt or Cryptomator container will let you store files with longer names inside the encrypted volume, but it won’t change the 143‑character limit for the container filename itself on the Synology NAS.

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Alright thanks, those are some good suggestions. And don't get me wrong, the nas does technically work, I can do whole drive images, just not the differential file-level backups. What I really wanted was to be able to restore a single file quickly and easily. That was the dream 🙄

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[–] Cyber@feddit.uk 6 points 2 days ago (10 children)

First up... backups...

You've got all your data on a single 8TB external drive?

If you get lots of hardware, or stay the same, you'll still ~~want~~ need to get your data off that system and preferably out of the house for the 3 F's: fire / flood / feft (😉)

At this point it might just be simpler to get online storage and upload it all... or a 2nd drive and just clone it.

Now, you can breath as you change your system and oops, accidentally wipe the wrong drive... it's all offline elsewhere

Next up, to help with decision paralisis; the software and hardware you choose are going to be related... TrueNAS is going to want a new mobo with loads of RAM for the ZFS on the drives... OpenMediaVault will work on small hardware (as well as bigger too...), so decide with your wallet on hardware first.

Everything (worth considering) supports RAID - you'll want RAID1 if you only have 2 drives, RAID5 or 6 for many drives. If you use ZFS they modify the naming convention, but learn standard terminology first.

I've tried it all, over the years, so expect to try something for a while, then ditch it for something else - another reason to have your data offline somewhere.

I came back to a simple Arch linux box with 4 drives running btrfs 🙂

[–] MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

First up… backups…

You’ve got all your data on a single 8TB external drive?

This. RAID IS NOT A BACKUP !!! Sorry for shouting, but it's that important. It's a main storage tolerant of disk failure, you still need backups or you're one bad 'rm -rf' away from losing data.

First get that second 8Tb, or better yet a 16+Tb (see serverpartdeals.com or your local equivalent for good prices on manufacturer recertified drives) so you have room to grow. Now copy that 8Tb onto it and disconnect it from your computer. Congratulations, you have a cold backup and are pretty well protected from data loss, much better than a RAID.

You can now think about a NAS with confidence, but preferably before that get another drive copy your data again and take it to a friend / relative / safety deposit box (even bury it in the back yard in something waterproof). Now you have a 3-2-1 backup strategy and you're pretty damn well insulated against data loss.

TLDR: Backup first, NAS later.

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I disagree with cold backup drives.

In my experience, cold drives fail more often than warm drives. This is why all my data replication is always warm.

All backup solutions should be regulator tested, otherwise you don't know if you have a backup.

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[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Others have mentioned backup, I'm going to reiterate that.

Backup, backup, backup.

I have an (old) NAS that frankly I don't trust to not die. Then again, anything can die, so it's just one component of my data duplication.

I also have my server which is authoritative for all data, which is then duplicated (on schedules) to the NAS and 2 external drives, so I have 4 local copies.

All mobile devices sync important data to my server.

Power

My NAS idles about 15w. It's 5 drives, so honestly that's quite low and tells us it spins down drives.

My server idles at 20w, using NVME as the boot drive, a large data drive, and an SSD for virtual machines. It's power supply maxes at 80w (which it approaches when I'm converting videos with handbrake).

Before this my server was an old gaming desktop that idled around 100w.

So my server today is a 5 year old Small-Form-Factor Desktop that I picked up for $50. I paid more for the RAM I added. It has enough room internally for one 3.5" drive and the 2.5" SSD..

It's also quiet - the CPU and power supply fans double as case fans.

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