What type of personal NAS would you recommend?

This advice makes me extremely unpopular in NAS forums, but I strongly recommend you never use any other RAID option than RAID-1. When a disk goes bad, you have a single mirror disk that you can directly and immediately connect to your computer and recover from. With any of the NAS proprietary RAIDs, or something like RAID-5, you'll need to somehow hook up 3 or 5 disks to your computer to have any chance of a recovery.

The NAS gurus always say "RAID is not a backup", and it is true you should have additional backups. But no backup solution is perfect, none get updated every day, especially if you plan on keeping the backup off-site. For most users, the NAS is the backup. All I'm saying is that when a disk fails on your NAS, you'll be in panic mode and will want the easiest, most direct path to data recovery, and there is no RAID option in this scenario preferable than RAID-1.

I highly recommend Synology. QNAP and FreeNAS seem really great in a lot of ways, but Synology is the solution for people who want something solid that takes up as little of their time as possible. Avoid Drobo and Seagate.

I would make your first / boot drive a SSD, and put WD Reds in the rest, 2 drive redundancy if you want to be super safe.

In addition, I recommend using the built-in cloud backup software to backup high-value data to Blackblaze B2.

Happy to answer any other questions.

Others have already sung the praises of Synology boxes, so I won't repeat (and do a worse job of it) what has already been said. But I will say this, the DS410 in the garage is still plugging away after all these years. How many years? The last two digits of Synology model numbers represent the year they were made. Eleven years of hourly Mac backups, document and picture storage, and I paid the eye-watering sum for the camera storage license, so cameras are hitting disks all day, too. Without looking, there are four of what I believe to be WD Greens, and I've had just the one die. Still have a backup in the closet that I've never used. (Granted, drive longevity probably has little to do with the NAS brand.)

Yeah, it's slow, long in the tooth, and maybe I should replace it this year. But I'll replace it with another Synology.

I used to have a QNAP NAS and it was really underwhelming.

Upgraded it to a Synology 918+ and haven't regretted it even once. Added an SSD for read caching, upgraded memory to 12GB a year ago. The SSD cache has a hit rate of 88%, reducing the need to hit the spinning drives as often.

The Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR) was one of the main reasons I got a Synology NAS, I started with a random assortment of drives of different sizes and it just made a volume with those. Every time I run out of space, I upgrade the smallest one and tell the NAS to expand the volume. It just works.

Running a dozen or so Docker containers on it + native Plex package. It can even transcode video with hardware.

The only way I can realistically upgrade from that setup is to build an actual PC with Unraid or something similar and that'll be a noisy power hog unless I spend mucho $$ on it.

It would help a lot to reduce the scope by knowing some requirements you may have in terms of storage size/number of disks/specs/performance/features/integrations/etc.

Without knowing anything else, for a small and power-efficient setup I can recommend the Odroid HC4 with Armbian (manually upgraded to Bullseye; Bullseye builds are currently broken but building Buster and then upgrading works fine) and a ZFS mirror of whatever SATA drives you choose. I use one as a backup sink.

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/

As for drives, I've been committing myself for Toshiba recently. They have a good reputation for reliability/durability and reasonable cost-performance.

If you're going for SSDs, that market segment is in a bit of constant flux.

For something beefier and way more extendable I've been writing about my experiences with ASROCK RACK's X570 boards here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28302303

Though, from what I understand you may get lower idle power consumption from the right Intel CPU/chipset combo than AMD Ryzens as of now. This is just something I gathered from others' remarks and not something I researched or benchmarked properly myself so take that with a grain of salt.

I never used a prebuilt QNAP/Synology but I'm curious what it is that takes time for you these days that you hope to cut down on? A DIY can be pretty much as fire-and-forget once you have it set up and on the flip side you still have plenty of room for tinkering with containers and whatnot on Synology et al... Like, is there ongoing maintenance you have to do on your FreeNAS box just to keep things in place or is it more a personal tendency to keep changing things that makes it never ending?

I've built my home NAS years ago using a Ultron RPS19-G3380 case and a Atom D410 mainboard, system is embedded XigmaNAS (formerly NAS4Free), and I wouldn't change it for any ready made solutions. It boots from a USB key direclty inserted on the mainboard and works flawlessly since day one. Max uptime is over 2 years, and I had to turn it off for scheduled maintenance. Other than disk and system upgrades, it doesn't need much attention from the user; mine is on a 2.5 meters high shelf and had to move it down once in years to upgrade to XigmaNAS and bigger disks. Admittedly I didn't test it for power consumption which I believe would be slightly worse than most similarly specced ARM boards, but sadly ARM support is still a work in progress so I have to stick to x86.

> What are some caveats that I should avoid?

Be very careful about SATA connectors: they're among the worst piece of junk ever designed and have an extremely low guaranteed life (literally dozens of operations, not thousands), therefore, don't think of drive bays and especially desktop "toasters" as something in which drives can be inserted and pulled every day; that would be a solution for defective contacts and data loss. Been there, done that. Twice.

> Can I trust the 'standard' companies (Synology, QNAP, Seagate, ...) to keep my data sufficiently safe?

I guess so, although sometimes there are stories about newly discovered vulnerabilities. It's also possible malicious hackers would rather direct their attack on well known products than home built systems, but that doesn't mean nobody is attempting to target our NASes. I don't have any experience with those brands, however.

As for the rest, I was also following the Helios64 project which seemed really intriguing, albeit it meant moving from *BSD to Linux (actually I am a Linux user, although I like more BSD solutions for NAS servers and firewalling). Unfortunately the project died. It's FOSS, though, hardware and software so hopefully someone will take over development and production. https://kobol.io/

What are you currently spending so much maintenance time on? My experience with Debian+ZFS is that once you spend some time setting it up, it just works. I would think FreeNAS would be similar, assuming you pick a straightforward setup. If you want to downsize, look into 2 or 3 disk mirror setups and low power motherboards.

As for trust, you can trust anybody for anything. Should you is a different question. I rest easy knowing there will never be an article about a product I critically rely on deciding to sell me out. And needing to navigate least-worst commercial options seems like a much larger maintenance burden.

As always with tech its : Speed. Quality. Price. Pick Two.

You have carefully omitted your budget. Your budget will likely ultimately determine your options.

Otherwise I'll tell you to get a 10Gb switch and build a five node CEPH cluster. :-)

I think I was in a similar situation as you - after having a kid my already dwindling time and appetite to play with backups waned even further. I ended up buying a Synology DS418j NAS a couple years ago and it's been adequate. I wouldn't quite rave about it, but I also haven't experienced anything better.

I've thrown tens of thousands of photos at it, and my only complaint there is the background processing to generate thumbnails is very slow, especially with "Live Photos" from iPhones (which are essentially photos with short videos attached). If I upload a couple thousand of those, the NAS might not finish generating the thumbnails for over day, so if you browse using the apps Synology provides for photos, you just see lots of placeholders for a while.

I did have a (SeaGate IronWolf) disk fail on me already, and the NAS did it's thing correctly - it made audible beeping alerts (which were definitely attention getting as the NAS had never played a sound prior to that). When I swapped in a new disk I was easily able to instruct the NAS to add it to the RAID array and recover, and everything was back to healthy pretty quickly.

If I were to shop for a replacement I'd be tempted to look for something with a beefier CPU as the thumbnail generation thing is occasionally annoying. But honestly the CPU is mostly idle most of the time, so if I did get a more powerful NAS the CPU would probably be idle 99.9% of the time instead of 99% of the time.

Synology seems like a good choice to me. Rarely heard a bad word about them. I consider going DIY to save a few nickels but if I had a larger NAS budget I would definitely go for Synology.

It depends on your needs, but here is my expierience. I like my data encrypted, no cloud and backed up, so my config is:

1. Intel NUC + Internal 2TB NVME SSD (24/7)

  - Encrypted with LUKS
  - All-Day-Data like personal Photos, Music, Audiobooks shared via SFTP / SMB
  - Low Power consumption + good performance

2. Dell T20 + 32GB ECC RAM with encrypted ZFS 10TB RAID 1 (wake on lan / on demand)

  - FreeNAS
  - Backup Server for NUC and all other clients
  - ZFS Snapshots for Ransomware protection

3. Alix APU 4GB with ZFS (24/7, off site at my fathers home)

  - disaster backup for my most important data
  - sync via zfs send with one specific dataset from machine 2

Its pretty low power, but also low on storage - it took a while to find out that the data for my all day use is < 2TB. This is often not enough for most people...

I can recommend to use an cheap old machine as NAS with ECC RAM (a must) and ZFS, like a

  - Dell T20
  - HP N54L 
  - HP gen8. 

OS can be FreeNAS/TrueNAS, napp-it or another reliable one. I never had problems with these and once configured, there is hardly any effort to maintain them.

What I don't recommend is:

  - Raspberry PI based (not reliable, slow)
  - Custom build (expensive, much effort)

Soho NAS like Synology are ok-ish, but I don't like them - Bad things happend to me. Broken filesystems, damaged files, non-working backups, slow performance and so on. But that was a while ago, maybe now they are better :-)

I've had my Synology DS918+ for about a year, and overall I've been happy with it except for one huge mess with encrypted folders completely wrecking my Dropbox for a few weeks. Here's what happened:

I wanted to have a backup of my Dropbox on my NAS, so I used Synology's CloudSync service to back up to an encrypted folder. Unfortunately Synology's encryption actually encrypts each file individually, which Dropbox happily syncs to all of the computers that use that Dropbox, making all of those files unusable!

In the end, I had to write a script that detected which files were encrypted (files start with `__CLOUDSYNC_ENC__`), then use a WINDOWS ONLY decryption utility provided by Synology to decrypt and finally get back to a clean state. Then I wrote another script to move the decrypted files back into the proper path in Dropbox while correcting the newly decrypted files with the original metadata (creation date) from the encrypted bad files. What a pain!!

I'm still not sure of a good way to achieve my original goal of backing up Dropbox while still protecting my data with encryption. Let me know if anyone has a solution!

Running a 2-drive Synology DiskStation, because MacOS backs up literally every hour, and shingle storage on NAS drives requires data relocation after write, the NAS-type hard drives are noisy and LOUD. It will be loud as long as your Macbook or iMac is on and is used. On the contrary Windows backs up weekly so its never a noise problem when my wife with Macbook is away. This has to be hidden somewhere where it won't overheat and also will not bother you with clicking/crunching the data.

At this point i have installed it and i stopped looking around for other solutions. It works for Windows, it works for Mac, i did not try Linux, but i don't really backup my Linux data, its all in Github anyway.

Is your data safe? Definitely as safe as 2 NAS-type drives can be. Did not experience data loss, but don't trust a comment on the internet, look for some research and statistics if you can find.

A question that I never see anyone ask: how easy is it to expand the capacity?

RAID apparently requires drives of matching capacity. Can't create a storage pool from a heterogeneous set of drives and can't expand capacity over time by buying new drives.

Btrfs almost supports this. Their RAID5/6 parity implementation still has problems.

I used FreeNAS for several years and it was fine. I did feel like ZFS needed to be my hobby though. (The internet may have done me a disservice there)

We bought a Synology 1813+ many years ago. I run whatever Synology’s custom RAID 6(?) solution is. We have 2 disks of redundancy, and haven’t filled all the bays. (We’re at 6/8 at 8TB total)

I’m very happy with it. We use it for local backups. I’ve swapped a few failed drives (it was easy) I run a Plex server and a photo management server on it.

I used to worry about drive portability because of the proprietary RAID. I put that aside and I’ve been happy ever since. The Portability issue hasn’t ever been a thing because I haven’t ever needed to go anywhere.

My 'storage solution' up to this point has been 'random disks in a desktop tower' and I was doing some research just this morning for upgrading to a more complete local solution.

My use-cases: primary storage device for home lab, computer/phone backup server for myself and extended family, media server, self-hosted web archive, general self-hosted services.

My preferences: I don't like the direction that Synology is trending in (i.e. the same direction as Ubiquiti) / I don't like that it's proprietary. I really like the idea of using ZFS. I don't want to spend a ton of time designing building and debugging a custom system.

That leads me to the IX Systems Mini X [0], a 5+2-bay integrated system with FreeBSD-based TrueNAS OS (successor/rename of FreeNAS). One of the X+ models comes with dual 10GbE which is pretty nice for future-proofing. So my current homelab plan is:

    Mini X+: 8 core, 64 GB, 2x10GbE - $1600
    5x 6TB WD Red Plus (in zfs-raidz1 for 24TB net capacity) - $650
    1x 480GB Kingston DC1000B M.2 PCIE-3.0 enterprise SSD
       with power loss protection (PLP) as a SLOG/write-cache - $130
    MikroTik RB5009UG+S+IN router-switch [1] with 1x10Gb SFP+, 1x2.5GbE, 7x1GbE - $185
    Encrypted backup from NAS to rsync.net using Borg [2][3], maybe raw ZFS snapshots for certain workloads (databases).

    Total: $2565
    Monthly: internet - $70 (1GB) - $100 (2GB), remote backup: $10 (initial) - $80 (half capacity)

That's my current plan anyways. Feedback welcome.

[0]: https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

[1]: https://mikrotik.com/product/rb5009ug_s_in#fndtn-gallery

[2]: https://www.borgbackup.org/

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997856

how much time is freenas administration taking? That's what i use, and i barely need to spend time on it, so i'm not sure how much time you can save switching. If the issue is power, then you can stick with freenas as well just with a very small system. If, you just don't want freeNAS and you want something that should be more turnkey, any device with 2 drive slots and raid 1, with a plug-in or something to automatically sync to backblaze or similar will be fine.

Ideally you want to follow 3-2-1 (3 total copies, 2 local, 1 offsite) for backup, so I'd recommend the following setup:

A small FreeNAS box. Like, 3 hot data drives at most, small. If you really want to save on power and are willing to take a hit on performance, you can use something as small as a raspberry pi. (again, if you don't want freenas, then swap this for anything with 2 drives that can RAID 1 and can automatically sync with backblaze or similar).

On the local PCs pick a specific folder to back-up instead of everything, since you'll only have a small backup.

Personally, I would stay away from anything that isn't ZFS backed, but i've heard good things about synology. I wouldn't trust any solution from an HDD mfg, because i don't think their code is that good for that sort of thing (eg https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/2/22561140/wd-cloud-os-3-sec...)

Why not buy a simple Linux box with a bunch of large harddrives? Then you can install whatever you want on it, and you don't have any unwanted corporate cruftware preinstalled.

Perhaps not an answer that fits your criteria, but I have been using FreeNAS for several years now. My configuration was simple - SMB with a few jails running Gitea and Syncthing (and other misc self-hosted things off and on). Haven't had to touch the config in years -- only tinkering was for the sake of tinkering, not maintaining. So I got started when I only wanted to tinker and experiment. Bought an old Core2Duo motherboard and put 8GB DDR2 RAM on it. 2 3TB hard drives plus an old laptop hard drive for the FreeNAS install. ZFS mirror. Few years later the motherboard stopped working (not sure the problem, all capacitors seemed fine by my multimeter). Data recovery was relatively easy. I have a SATA->USB converter meant for smaller laptop hard drives. I connected one of the desktop hard drives to it by a SATA cable with the plastic on one end cut away to expose the pins (to turn it from female to male) and fit it in the USB converter and the unmolested end to the HD. Powered the HD from my power supply with a normal SATA power cable. Hooked it up to my laptop (with ZFS on it, of course) and bam! Was able to recover files. I didn't touch the setup for a while, but finally I bought an older Supermicro motherboard for its inexpense and ECC compatibility, got 2 CPUs to place, some ECC, and connected the original hard drives to it. Nearly plug-and-play. FreeNAS was able to resume from where I left off when the previous motherboard died. Updated to latest (as it had been a couple years!) and didn't have to fiddle with the config. Maybe not power efficient like you were asking, but I'm happy with it. That's my NAS "war story" -- a mild one, anyway.

Well for a whole home I don't recommend and WD cloud products, they don't have the performance and cross-platform protocols that make sense for more than 1 computer.

I always comeback to FreeNAS, which I have had configured various ways. I recently updated all my core hardware to mac mini so it has power/sleep modes that save that energy consumption...however payback is a lot longer than a PC..

In the end it will always be a challenge of performance vs. energy consumption.

I had a terrible experience with the Western Digital products[1], and a much better one with Synology. The nice thing about going with product from a vendor, versus building your own, is that they provide a lot of niceties that aren't easy to maintain yourself. Like...

- Whatever crazy tunneling and so forth that they do so that I can access the admin interface over the internet regardless of how brain-dead my home ISP router is. Synology is very good at this.

- Mobile apps that make it fairly easy to do stuff like "sync any photos after I take them to the NAS, but only when the phone is on WiFi, and optionally delete it from the phone after the sync is confirmed.".

Also worth looking at with Synology is their support for really cheap offsite backup, like Backblaze B2. I was able to set something up to protect against say, a house fire, and be selective about what I was sending, and it's something like $1/month for that peace of mind.

[1] For example, it's fairly easy to mostly brick them and the recovery process is having to send hand-crafted/altered ICMP packets to it during boot and hope that coaxes it into a BOOTP mode. They are also quite underpowered and just go unresponsive for minutes at a time. The WD products are awful all around.

I personally use unRaid, but i also like to tinker, and very much have had to tinker with it. I would recommend it if you want power, flexiblity, etc. (i personally choose it over FreeNAS for the VM's).

My friend however wanted a no hassle solution, he brought Synology and it just works, he's never had to mess with it. To quote him: "if Apple made a NAS"

I was recently having a browse, something like the QNAP TS-473A looks good.

I run my own custom built ZFS for Linux server but the QNAP TS-473A interested me as officially supports ZFS and is practically a small Ryzen server in a cute form factor.

I use ZFS striped mirror (Raid 10). 4 drives, 2 mirrors in stripe mode. This gives a reasonable level of safety and performance.

I'm currently speccing out my NAS upgrade and plan to go with ODROID HC2 using a scale out filesystem. I plan to test both cephfs and glusterfs, although I have more experience with the latter.

This is a different NAS model, in that each hard drive has its own micro server attached. Which I like, because it means that I won't be constrained by a NAS chassis, and it mitigates a lot of single points of failure. Plus it will scale in both performance and capacity as I add drives.

The HC2 costs about 50 bucks each, so it's the cost of a drive, +$50 and some maintenance overhead to keep the small cluster running. Starting off with 2 or 4 drives it's cheaper than most comparable synology or similar traditional NAS and for my use case is far more robust and flexible.

Hey Op, Synology is great. Support is fantastic. Everything basically just works, and bc support is so good - if anything starts acting up, you can just call in and they’ll get you helped. Recco 1821+ or other unit using newer amd low energy consumption chips.

These are mine backup boxes based on FreeBSD with ZFS and rsnc(1) for the transfer layer.

For the hardware I use MiniITX motherboards with low power 6W TDP CPU.

Disks are 2.5 4TB or 5TB in mirror on not depending in the needs.

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/silent-fanless-fre...

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/silent-fanless-fre...

Regards.

I have a Synology NAS. I guess it’s fine. But the real problem is what software to backup my win10 desktop to? I tried EaseBackuo which was terribly documented and the UI made no sense (made in China I think). So I gave that up, abs bought Acronis True Image. This software looks nicer but works horribly too. It has intermittent spells of failing backups telling me only “failed to lock file”. The support team has just been giving me a run around for 2+ months. Provides no concrete details or solutions despite me sending them the 35mb log files that Acronis generates. It’s all shameful. Is there a decent software for this????

Whatever your needs, consider separating by function.

If you want something simple and standalone that just works, buy a MacMini and a DAS.

If you need a cold storage backup server that you only boot once a month, build that.

If you want something that you can assign to a Windows domain and scale, maybe some Intel NUCs would work.

A netbooted, POE-enabled Raspberry Pi 4 or two can do quite a lot, depending on your needs.

I've use several proprietary consumer NAS products over the years, and mostly I've found they make great gifts to friends after a year or two.

I have a Readynas (now owned by netgear) 'prosumer'-ish nas. 6 bays desktop form factor. It's great, i replaced an older readynas (pre-netgear) which i got about ~10 years out of. It's actually functional except for the power supply. I couldn't find a replacement fast enough for my needs so I upgraded, bodged a normal pc power supply to do a data transfer. It was so old I couldn't just put the old drives in the new chasis and preserve the data.

What if you don't want to hack/tinker and want a Drobo-level solution that isn't Drobo? (My Drobo is very old and I don't want to upgrade to a new Drobo.)

We bought our second Synology NAS three years ago, an Intel four bay with SSD caching. It's fantastic. Some of Synology's ancilliary software is buggy or has missing features, but as a backup intermediary (it backs up our backups to cloud storage) and file server it's been flawless. Also the apps available for multiple platforms make integration with phones and tablets easy as well as latop and desktop.

I had a ReadyNAS NV2+ which I recently switched off of onto TrueNAS hardware Mini XL+.

That keeps the fussing with the hardware and installation issues down to an acceptable level but means that in a panic I can slam the drives onto commodity hardware and recover the data and its not locked into a proprietary format. The cost is a bit, but i figure it'll get amortized over another 10+ years.

There's 101 interesting solutions out there, but for me, Unraid looks like a really appealing community and offers the ability to tinker more than others.

If you want more of a "set it and forget it" simple approach, the big players you listed (Synology and others) can work amazingly well.

I use QNAP with 2 HDD's. One for media (it has HDMI, so it is great for Kodi) and second for backup of my main HDD from PC. I don't trust RAID, so I use SW solution for regular backup (Bvckup 2 - it has nice UI btw).

Today I would probably buy NAS with 4 slots to run Nextcloud.

I made HRCloud2 [1] a couple years ago. I intend to give it some love once I'm done with some other projects.

[1] https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2

Whatever you choose, buy two if your data is real important or replicate to the cloud.

I use Synology with one box having 4 disks in RAID5 and the second having one large disk with the most important data replicated over.

Build a cheap PC with linux, you can do everything a Nas does and much, much more. Way more powerful and you can upgrade to dozens of hard drives. That's what I did some months ago.

I am quite happy with my Synology DS920+. I mostly use it for backup and hosting Docker containers. I was surprised by how much software is produced by Synology itself and either comes included with the machine or is available as a package - LDAP, WebDAV, SQL, Plex, replication/cloning/backups, and a host of other services.

One thing that surprised me was RAID - I am not very experienced with home servers and such and was really disheartened by how much of my disk got eaten up by RAID. I was using the Synology Hybrid RAID which I think is similar to RAID 5.

TL;DR Synology is pricey but full featured and very pleasant, understand your RAID configuration before you purchase disks.

EDIT: Another thing I will say is that docker compose is not supported IIUC, so just watch out for that if your configuration depends on that (like mine initially did).

I have so many systems lying around, that I just loaded up a Linux server and installed SSHFS. Excellent for media storage and development.

If you just want a reasonably small (1-4tb) volume with redundancy and don't care too much about performance, you could buy 2x raspberry pi 4 and those cheap enclosures that provides space for a hard disk (usb 3.0). One is the primary, the other is the backup. Schedule an rsync from the primary. This would be cheap and simple. It also lets you undo an accidental "rm -f" before the next scheduled rsync.

Do you need a NAS. If power consumption is the issue why not put more drives in your daily driver?

zfs and rsync on FreeBSD

I have an HP Microserver N54L and it's been incredible. I use XigmaNAS (similar to FreeNAS) and it's been rock solid for many years.