[eBay Plus] QNAP TS-433-4G 4 Bay Diskless NAS ARM 4 Core 4GB RAM, $481.50 Delivered @ Harris Technology eBay

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cohiba on 29/12/2022 - 08:42 ebay.com.au (349 clicks)
Last edited 29/12/2022 - 08:51 by 1 other user

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I'm not an expert but this seems like a great price for 4 bay NAS with 4gig of RAM. I think CPU is a little slow, but fine for most purposes, with lower power consumption.

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• 

  MasterScythe on 29/12/2022 - 09:10

  +1

  Very easy to beat (excluding size) with a DIY, but for a prebuild toaster NAS its a great price.

  • 

    Averell on 29/12/2022 - 09:41

    +1

    Does bigger size comes with higher power consumption?

    • 

      nish101 on 29/12/2022 - 09:54

      +2

      This uses an ARM CPU, so power consumption will be low… Around 25W. You're not going to beat that with any diy solution. With a diy though, you could get an Intel CPU with capability to transcode videos for plex at around the 60-100w range

    • 

      Nom on 29/12/2022 - 10:34

      +1

      Yeah as above, the extra power consumption isn't worth worrying about - a few tens of Watts at most.

    • 

      MasterScythe on 29/12/2022 - 11:25

      +1

      Someone negged me saying this is a good price, but didn't neg the deal? lol. People are strange.

      And slightly, yes, but modern intel systems can get as low as 10W idle, even my AM4 server only uses 40W idle.
      This QNAP uses 8.45W idle.

      So, the short answer is 'yes'.
      The long answer, is that the extra power use is extremely small and affordable if you have a need for a bigger, more powerful device.

• 

  bfimmortal on 29/12/2022 - 15:25

  Any guide/advice/suggestion please on a DIY NAS similar to that price range (around $500 excluding hard drives)? What operating system does it use?

  Plan to build one but a bit of unsure where to start the research.

  • 

    MasterScythe on 29/12/2022 - 16:58

    There's a few things you'll hear;
    First, avoid UnRaid, it looks easy, but it doesn't protect your data at a block level, so any ease of use in setup is negated by having to checksum your own data.
    If your data is replaceable (like media, and downloads), then it's still worth considering because it is designed to be 'plug and play'; but not if your data is important.

    If you're not able to setup your own linux install, then most people use TrueNAS, or in my opinion I recommend XigmaNAS.
    Both started as 'FreeNas' but one got pretty, and one stayed slim. Both use ZFS, which is the only filesystem you really should be considering.

    First port of call is usually an Ex-Gov store near you.
    See if they have any actual 'workstation' PC's, that is, Xeon based desktops with ECC ram. Basically a mini server, without the loud fans, and redundant PSU's.

    If thats not the case, you can still make an ECC enabled server for cheap, using a B450 or B550 Asrock board, a non-APU ryzen processor, and uDIMM ECC Ram.
    Parts are plentiful on the 2nd hand market nowadays for AM4; boards and Zen1/2 cpu's can be found easily for $50-100 a pop.

    But if ECC isn't important to you, Intel will use less power, and you can approach that any way you wish.
    Anything 6th gen and above typically start to get very efficient.

    I'd advise a pair of large HDD's in a ZFS-Mirror (Similar to Raid1), rather than trying to stripe across 3 or more disks.
    Not only does it use less power (both from the CPU, and one less physical drive) but once you factor in the 3rd drives price, 2X12TB start to get within spitting distance of 3x6TB; not quite as good, but the ease of use and added 1:1 redundancy pay that off in my mind.

    • 

      bfimmortal on 29/12/2022 - 17:39

      Thank you for the detailed guide MasterScythe, that makes my head a bit sour :-)

      Might take a little while to absorb. Thanks again mate.

  • 

    Nom on 30/12/2022 - 09:30

    Here's my much shorter guide.

    Buy one of the used Dells that regularly crop up on OzBargain for $200 or so.

    Buy a USB 4/5/8 bay drive-enclosure to go with it.
    (you can even skip this part, and just use your USB hard drives directly without shucking - you'll need a decent USB hub, and it's a cabling octopus)

    Install UnRaid/FreeNas/TrueNas or any of the home NAS systems.

    The end 👍

    • 

      bfimmortal on 01/01/2023 - 11:25

      Thanks Nom, great advice.

      Are there any decent used Dells (or others) that come with at least two 3.5 hard drive bays so you can avoid using an external USB 4/5/8 bay enclosure?

      If not, are there any decent external USB 4/5/8 bay enclosures that you can recommend?

      Thanks.

      • 

        Nom on 01/01/2023 - 15:50

        If you really want to put the drives inside the case then look for one of the mini tower DELLs - they're much less common though, most of the used machines are Small Form Factor or Micro Form Factor (2 or 1 or 0 hard drive capacity, depending on the model).

        USB enclosures, they're all much the same, just read the Amazon and NewEgg and AliExpress reviews to check there are no major cooling problems.

        Don't over think it - basically the point of my post is that almost anything works just fine as a NAS - you can eliminate size and cabling with some options, but if you shove it in your garage or somewhere then who cares what it looks like 🤷🏼‍♂️ A friend of mine has his setup on a cement sheet under his floor, just inside the access hatch. No sound 👌

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  Alit on 30/12/2022 - 15:17

  I'm in the same process to decide what to do: going for synology, etc or build my own.
  Have an old system and using that as a test box; tried Unraid and all was good but virtualization was awful and badly inefficient where I had a good cpu giving like 8 cores to vm. Other than that, Nextcloud was not that fast that I was hoping, so didn't impress me.
  It brought me across FreeNas, actually TrueNas Scale, which is Debian based and similar containerisation to Unraid. Much better efficiency in case of Nextcloud and virtualization; I am more happy with TrueNas Scale than Unraid but still having some difficulties to deploy some apps like vaultwarden, jellyfin, netapp, grafana that deployment goes forever making me worried if this won't make headache time to time if went with. Other than that, I think TrueNas is quite capable and I love having cutting edge techs available like object storage that I use as long-term archive of important docs hosted on cloud. One thing about TrueNas that really bother me is why it uses gpu, meaning it strongly warning me when offloading the gpu to passthrough the vm which means literally I need 2 x GPU if I want to assign one to windows vm.

  • 

    Nom on 30/12/2022 - 19:58

    Unless you're running a micro-form-factor machine that only has a single PCIe slot, 2 x GPUs is totally workable. Just slap in your second one and you're good to go, you'll usually need to activate VT-d in the BIOS too.