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 :)
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.
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.
I’m new to NAS hardware and how it works.
If I buy a NAS, say from Synology, would I be able to just chuck my existing EXT4 HDDs full of data in there and it’ll work? Maybe even one or two with different file systems? I’m not too worried about backups or RAID yet.
What are the limitations of dedicated NAS hardware? Can I also… “store” stuff on there? Like, say, have a “schmorrent” 🏴☠️ client save “data” directly to the drives from another computer on the network? Or do all services interacting with the data storage need to run on the NAS hardware?
You cannot use drives that already have data on them in a Synology. They will be “Wiped” during the installation/initialization process. If you can save the data somewhere else you can put it back on the NAS after Installation. I don’t know if this is also the case for QNAP or Asustor.
you can definetly store data, from a Service running on a different machine, to the NAS. This is the whole point of having a NAS. Limitation is network latency and bandwith. But this is no problem for the typical home user use case. If you habe a special use case you propably already know what you need and how to do it.
A big point of a NAS in my mind is to run some sort of redundancy, which means you will want to setup a RAID on the drives in the NAS, and that in turn means that my recommendation wouldn’t be to chuck existing drives into the NAS solution but to setup the NAS drives and then copy your data to it.
Dedicated NAS hardware storage is usually accessed over SMB, NFS or SFTP and most software has support for one of those protocols.
Some services can have hiccups when running against networked storage, f.e. Jellyfin might lose library metadata if the Jellyfin service’s library scan is started and the networked storage is unavailable.
Thanks for the notes on network storage access protocols!
Cool, thank you for that as well, and I was aware of that so I thought I would mention that in my previous comment. But I was specifically wondering if I could in fact just chuck them in as-is and it would be able to access the drives? Because like, they’re separate drives, right? How would that work in a non-RAID setup when accessing from another computer? Would they show up as separate drives? Is it at all possible?
I have a shelf of NetGear ReadyNas-4 bay enclosures. They are old as the hills ReadyNas 214 with OS 6.10.3. The first 2 of them are set up as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives) 8 bays x 10 tb drives . They have no RAID setups on them. They all show up as separate drives. Now, you may need to set up permissions to access the drives, but they all act independently of each other. However, in that setup, if a drive fails, well you’re SOL. Some caveats would be that the drives to be inserted into the JBOD NAS setup need to be formatted in a compatible file system such as EXT4 or NTFS
The other 2 ReadyNas-4 bay enclosures are set up as RAID 5. So using RAID 5, you have ~30 tb usable space and 1 10tb drive for redundancy per each ReadyNas unit.
Depends on the operating system of the NAS, but generally the NAS will want to format the drive. Even if you can somehow get it running without a disk format you’re generally in an unsupported configuration.
Yeesh, okay, I see.
Then maybe some kind of compact drive bay would suit my needs better for now, that I would just connect to a mini PC of some sort.
Thanks for all the info!
I agree.
Separate NAS/storage from server for some redundancy, and flexibility. SMB or NFS for access to files.
It’s also nice paying a premium but letting someone else be responsible for keeping it running.
If you have a distaste for Synology after their recent antics, then go with someone else.
I’d say go with a 4-bay and put two disks in, then you have loads of room to expand in the future. This is mainly because of Jellyfin and how these libraries have a tendency to grow a lot with time.