First NAS Questions. Need Your Tips!

GLO on 04/11/2021 - 11:25

Hey Brains Trust!

I havent played with a NAS before but I am looking for a solution and recommendations for things i may have missed.

Things i'm thinking of using this for are:

  1. automatic back up photos/videos from ~10 phones/tablets, with great search functionality
  2. MacBook back ups.
  3. Windows 10 local back up of contacts (from 0365 etc) I know the cloud does this too.
  4. possibly using this as a media file share, PLEX maybe?
  5. host a home website
    .

Will be thinking about SSD for initial speed of back up then transfer to traditional NAS drives at specific times of the day.

That's a starting point at the moment.

Computing NAS

Comments

  • apple2016 on 04/11/2021 - 11:59

    NAS is essentially a piece of hardware. how you want to configure it or install software for your use is up to you.

  • roonie on 04/11/2021 - 12:12

    I wouldn’t have thought an ssd would be worthwhile. Especially for backups

    • Trance N Dance on 04/11/2021 - 13:12
      +1

      Considering I'm hovering around the 60MB/s mark because of full older drives in my NAS, if I chucked an SSD cache in I should be able to max out my gigabit connection and get 120-125MB/s.

      (When writing to my newer empty drives I can hit 110-115MB/s, so improvements can be marginal to really good)

      • roonie on 04/11/2021 - 13:35

        I love SSDs but do you really care if your background (incremental) backups are up to 50,% faster?

        • GLO on 05/11/2021 - 18:28

          I dont know if this is actually possible, but the SSD would act as the intermediate landing place for all phone backups, before being automatically moved to the 3.5" server drive.

          • Trance N Dance on 06/11/2021 - 01:07

            @GLO: Yes that's how most people set up their SSD caches in a NAS.

          • Revrnd on 08/11/2021 - 07:14

            @GLO: Newer NAS will most likely max out your gigabit connection well before your HDDs become the bottleneck.

  • Chandler on 04/11/2021 - 13:40
    • Automatic back up photos/videos from ~10 phones/tablets, with great search functionality
    • MacBook back ups.
    • Windows 10 local back up of contacts (from 0365 etc) I know the cloud does this too.
    • possibly using this as a media file share, PLEX maybe?
    • host a home website

    Quite a variance here.

    For the first three, assuming iPhones, I'd get a Time Machine. Periodically export your Contacts and put them on your Mac for Time Machine to backup for you.

    Media sharing you should be able to do via iTunes on your Mac, or get a Mac Mini to run as a server?

    Website you could potentially do off the Mac Mini???

    (I'm not in the Apple ecosystem, so the above is laced with assumptions)

    • smashman42 on 04/11/2021 - 19:10
      +1

      Pretty much every NAS company supports Time Machine, so you can do the same as all the Apple options you listed but with a single NAS for like 1/3rd the price

  • knobbs on 04/11/2021 - 19:15

    Anyone have recommendations on a OS? I have fumbled around with FreeNas (now TrueNas), but all the share drives and permissions just seem overly complicated for me to setup. Permissions I spent hours on and never got it right in the end and just opened everything. I watched hours on hours of "Techno Dad Life" trying to get docker and all kinds of PLEX, torrents and other things to run but I literally need a type this, click this kind of thing to install them, they seem to need to many config options that I have no idea of. Likely all due to a lack of linux knowledge. I think I need a dumb dumb, close to windows OS.

    Running a HP MicroGen8, have had on/off issues with the unit detecting a bootable drive but that is another thing. Seems to be a common problem

    • gruffogre on 05/11/2021 - 15:13
      +1

      You either want to roll your own, or you dont. Checkout Xpenology while you decide…

      https://xpenology.com/forum/forum/83-faq-start-here/

      Good Luck…

      • knobbs on 05/11/2021 - 15:26

        Sorry I don't understand, 'roll my own'?

        • smashman42 on 05/11/2021 - 16:48

          I assume from context "roll your own" = "make your own NAS OS" - usually I've seen it used more broadly as just making your own NAS itself, whether you used a prebuilt NAS distro or manually configured OS

          Often the NAS distros don't quite fit your use case perfectly where this one is missing this feature and that one is missing this other feature, so you either pick the closest and make it work, or just pick their usual regular Linux distro and make it into a NAS manually

          eg: I used Ubuntu 20.04LTS cause at the time closest NAS distro in theory for my use case, with not wanting ZFS but BTRFS + MDADM, was Open Media Vault. However it ended up having issues with virtualisation in the then current version and versions going forward, as the new built in VM solution didn't support real IP full NIC pass-through to the VM which I needed with taking one of my old bare metal servers and running it virtual. And all the other hacky mods I'd added to OMV to make it work how I wanted it to, even before I sorted out the virtualisation, kinda broke it where I needed to manage the thing via SSH or VNC anyway, making that nice simple web interface NAS distros come with for management redundant. So manual I went and I haven't looked back.

  • Revrnd on 06/11/2021 - 00:15

    Been running a Synology DS1019+ myself and it's a great little machine.

    5x 8TB WD Red Pro and 16GB RAM and it's working great as a file server, Plex machine and I'm hoping to tap into much of the same as you've stated in your OP.

    Synology have a great range of apps and well worth a look for the + series of servers.

    Can run Docker containers too if you want to virtualise anything.

  • council on 08/11/2021 - 08:20

    Following this thread.

    Also looking for a NAS.

    I've had my Ironwolf Pro 16TB HDD and Ironwolf 110 SSD 480GB for a year now and since I haven't had the chance (or money) to buy a NAS and another large drive, I've placed them in my desktop PC for now.

    Looking to use the NAS for video storage and to connect my other seagate external drives.

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