I know this topic has been done ad nauseam but I’m stuck in a decision loop that looks something like this…
“…OK screw it, I’m going to stop talking about it just get a [non-enterprise/non-rack] Synology/QNAP NAS. I rent an apartment and they have a much smaller footprint and low power draw out of the box. Damn, it really costs that much for 4 bays with entry level hardware? NIC and RAM upgrade costs how much??? What if Synology abandons that model? Where’s the fun in this solution anyway…”
“…OK I’m going to look at going DIY instead. It’s more interesting, more customisable, virtually unlimited support, can be cheaper. Man that case is big and ugly… hey that ITX case looks alright. Wow consumer ITX boards are expensive, rather limited, and look like they will suck power too. Woah OK enterprise ITX mainboards are not in my budget. Hmm that aliexpress NAS board looks alright, but could be a dice roll. Do I really have time for this anyway? OK screw it I’m getting a Synology…”
And so on… I get all the pro’s and con’s of each, and that’s part of the issue!
Ultimately homelabbing is a hobby, and if I wasn’t such a nerd I would have bought a turnkey solution already or just paid Big Tech for the solutions I require.
On the other hand, the storage is a critical part of the infrastructure and could suck the fun out of the hobby. Maybe it’s best to pay for a solution created by people smarter than me (and paid for their time), so I can spend time on fun things that aren’t mission critical.
So I want to hear from fellow nerds, which path did you chose and do you regret it?
I voted Turnkey - No regrets.
Although I have some gripes like sometimes permissions are a bit of an arse and new user setup is a pain but other than that I’m actually quite happy with it, I only dedicate some of my 4TB to the LXC and when I need to expand I can just click a button and type some numbers and just like that I have more storage.
Sometimes it’s a financial decision, so I could regret it all I want but I’d still choose the same diy route 😉
I bought a QNAP device a decade ago. Today, it is about 3% full. Turns out I didn’t need any NAS at all…
i went diy NAS, no regrets, then went with a qnap nas to save on the power bill, also no regrets - the only thing i used either of them for is a network fileshare, though, so there’s that
I spend a lot of time myself going through this same thing. Was looking at QNAP and Synology and then potentially a DIY using Jonosbo case.
In the end I ended up going with the DIY solution, but using an old computer (i7 4790k with 32GB ram). The case has enough room for 8 hard drives. Currently only have 2 1TB hard drives running in zfs mirror. Going to be adding 3 8TB HDD in a mirror in the next few days.
I have been running Truenas Scale, and I don’t regret it. So far it has been doing exactly what I need. I run about 10 VM’s off my desktop/workstation. All storage for them is on the NAS which is handed off to it via NFS. And then some SMB shares for myself and the family.
I have been running Truenas for about a month now and don’t have any regrets. I use it purely as a NAS. No VM’s are hosted on it.
I’ve built multiple DIY NASes both virtual and physical. No regrets.
I have some COTS NASes too, they do their job well. I only use them as a NAS - as in just storage. All of my COTS NASes are all secondhand, some of them are over 10 years old, still works ok, a bit slow for bit transfers but for $100 AUD for a 4 bay with 1T drives included or one of them, I’m not complaining lol
I voted DIY - No regrets. Myself (and a lot of others here) run used/surplus enterprise hardware that’s cheap/free. You’re kind of missing an option for that.
My primary NAS is a PowerEdge T620 with 13x 8TB HDDs (8 in the built in drive cages, 5 more in a caddy that fits in the 3x 5.25" bays). The server and the drives were free/surplus, but I bought an upgraded pair of CPUs (E5-2695 v2’s) , 128GB of RAM, and the drive caddy, for probably $200 total. It’s getting a little long in the tooth and I’ll be keeping my eye out for something newer (and less power hungry) during the next round of decommissioning.
This scratches my ‘play with enterprise hardware’ itch and is easier on the wallet upfront, but the power cost is probably more in the long run.
Also, you’ll likely get very different answers in the polls here vs in r/synology or similar. You’re asking homelabbers here, so you’re going to get homelab answers. But that’s okay, because it sounds like you fit in just fine here!
After a couple of years of DIY nas I got a Synology because I had kids and the risk of being the cause of data loss became unacceptable. So now I DIY compute (VMs, k8s) instead 😜
No regrets though, I learnt a bunch along the way and stopped before I lost anything irreplaceable (mostly)
A NAS is *way* too easy for even a novice to build to justify buying it as an appliance. Set up a software RAID and filesystem with LVM+XFS or ZFS or bcacheFS. Install the NFS server userspace utilities. Use the in-kernel NFS server. Add a line or two of configuration to /etc/exports.
Done. That’s what, fifteen minutes of work tops?
Synology DS1821+. I had a go at making a hyperconverged setup with an HPE DL380p G8, loud and power hungry. Also HPE are dicks with their hardware, can’t boot off the array when in passthrough mode.
Got a SuperMicro machine to try the same thing, again, loud and hungry.
The Synology is quiet and sips power. While it has no hope in hell of doing ZFS and the interface is proprietary as hell, SHR2 and BTRFS just works for me. I have a large network accessible space for “linux isos” and iSCSI for Proxmox.
I need to get rid of those 2 servers…
DIY all the way. I am currently running openmediavault 6 on an old G5930 CPU in a Coolermaster CM690 case with 5 x 6TB drives. It’s been rock solid for a few years now. This is for storage only. I have a separate DL380 G7 currently running my self hosted stuff. Most of the storage is used for media with my critical files being backed up on 2 remote locations as well.
I picked DIY with regrets but it does not tell the full story, I guess I now need convenience for my own productivity. For me the cons outweigh the pro’s of a diy system now I have spare money to invest in my lab. When I was broke it was great!
The con’s are scraping a system together and spending precious hours over multiple days configuring it and then maintaining old kit, I am not a storage guy. Every configuration took a lot of time to research and then failures and restarting from scratch and then poor performance that needed investigating.
When I bought a Qnap solution, I was up and running in less than hour including adding the discs.
Over the last couple of years I’ve gone from a HP Microserver to a DIY Frankenbox in a Fractal Define to a Supermicro CSE-846. No regrets at all. I can now fit all the disks I could possibly want.
Well my day job is managing Linux systems so it was no brainer, I run other workload on the NAS too, not just file shares, and doing that on off the shelf NAS would just be a PITA.
Wow consumer ITX boards are expensive, rather limited, and look like they will suck power too.
The what now?
I went Turnkey(ish) - No regrets.
Aquired a used WD MyCloud EX4100 with no drives for relatively cheap. Slapped 4 x 4TB drives in it and haven’t looked back since.
I have root ssh access to it so I can tinker a bit like installing zerotier to have access to my files wherever I am.
Having a specialized appliance for file storage is really nice and keeps things simple. I’ve built many storage servers over the years, and it was…refreshing to let someone else do the work for once.
