Question Can't decide between NAS and DAS

[tablespoon]

Hi, I cannot decide between the two. Mainly for home use myself. No plan to grant access to outside use. Also no plan to RAID as it is not 100% fail-proof. In this case, is there any good reason to pay more to get a NAS?

 

[igor_kavinski]

Hi, I cannot decide between the two. Mainly for home use myself. No plan to grant access to outside use. Also no plan to RAID as it is not 100% fail-proof. In this case, is there any good reason to pay more to get a NAS?

NAS makes sense if you want any device connected to your home/office network to be able to access the files, even when your main PC is asleep or off.

With DAS, you would have to turn on the PC with the connected DAS and then share its folder over the network.

We use a QNAP NAS at our office. Seems pretty decent.

 

[In2Photos]

Any chance you have an old PC laying around? Use that for the NAS and there is no cost outside of the drives you need for storage. I've been using UnRAID for at least a decade now. The only cost was the license and the drives themselves, but there are other Free options as well.

 

[Tech Junky]

With DAS, you would have to turn on the PC with the connected DAS and then share its folder over the network.

Or on consumer routers just plug it into the router with the USB port.


Like @In2Photos using a PC as a NAS offers more options and expandability as your needs change. You could even get a low power PC and connect a DAS to that.

NAS costs more for the CPU RAM and nic. On my setup I'm just using Ubuntu instead of a special os that's tuned for NAS use only. Just add mdadm and samba to use raid and network sharing. I setup raid 10 for speed and redundancy and yield over 400MB/s out of it. Decent drives these days though hit 200-250MB/s per drive.

If you're trying to be cheap though just get an enclosure and drive to sue locally.

 

[tablespoon]

I don't remember well but many many ago, I somehow was able to connect a Mac to a PC and shared files. What could that be?
So, I could connect an external drive to a computer and then use the same or similar method to connect other computers/devices to simulate NAS. Anything bad about this approach?
I mainly need to share files between main PC, iPhone and iPad as well as backing up those devices.

Besides my main work PC, I only have an Intel NUC with i3-7100U Dual-Core. Is this sufficient? It is not used now but I may need it for another project later.

I waited for Synology to release new NAS this year but the new ones use AMD CPU. Also SSD storage is limited. I don't use PLEX but not sure about the future.

 

[Tech Junky]

@tablespoon

All you need is a "PC" to connect the drive to and then share it.

I would take the NUC and put Linux on it for the "NAS" portion w/ Samba to share the drive. From there any device on the network will be able to pass data to the drive.

CPU really only matters when it comes to things like transcoding video from one format to another. The basics of file sharing don't really do much to the CPU unless there's a ton of users doing it at the same time. If you have tons of users though you're going to do something different on the storage side since you'll need faster disks / controllers to get decent speeds from them.

Intel NUC, Linux, Pi-Hole, and NAS – Part 1: The Hardware and Xubuntu 19.10

📅 November 2, 2019 Have you heard of an Intel NUC? A NUC (Next Unit of Computing) is a full-fledged computer system packed in a small — SMALL! — compact case that utilizes minimal power…

delightlylinux.wordpress.com

Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server (2022 Edition)

How I chose parts, built, and configured my first custom home storage server.

mtlynch.io

The basics are the same. Pick an OS you're comfortable with using. Add drives / NIC and configure sharing.

Static IP would be advisable since DNS isn't always the best internally for finding the share.

 

[In2Photos]

I don't remember well but many many ago, I somehow was able to connect a Mac to a PC and shared files. What could that be?
So, I could connect an external drive to a computer and then use the same or similar method to connect other computers/devices to simulate NAS. Anything bad about this approach?
I mainly need to share files between main PC, iPhone and iPad as well as backing up those devices.

Besides my main work PC, I only have an Intel NUC with i3-7100U Dual-Core. Is this sufficient? It is not used now but I may need it for another project later.

I waited for Synology to release new NAS this year but the new ones use AMD CPU. Also SSD storage is limited. I don't use PLEX but not sure about the future.

While this doesn't provide you with a ton of storage capability due to its small size the hardware is fine. Up until about 6 months ago I was running my UnRAID server on an Athlon 64 3000 1.8GHz Socket 939 with 2GB of RAM. Now its running on an Intel i5-2300 pulled from a Dell XPS system. You don't need much for just a file server.

 

[tablespoon]

@tablespoon

All you need is a "PC" to connect the drive to and then share it.

I would take the NUC and put Linux on it for the "NAS" portion w/ Samba to share the drive. From there any device on the network will be able to pass data to the drive.

CPU really only matters when it comes to things like transcoding video from one format to another. The basics of file sharing don't really do much to the CPU unless there's a ton of users doing it at the same time. If you have tons of users though you're going to do something different on the storage side since you'll need faster disks / controllers to get decent speeds from them.

Intel NUC, Linux, Pi-Hole, and NAS – Part 1: The Hardware and Xubuntu 19.10

📅 November 2, 2019 Have you heard of an Intel NUC? A NUC (Next Unit of Computing) is a full-fledged computer system packed in a small — SMALL! — compact case that utilizes minimal power…

delightlylinux.wordpress.com

Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server (2022 Edition)

How I chose parts, built, and configured my first custom home storage server.

mtlynch.io

The basics are the same. Pick an OS you're comfortable with using. Add drives / NIC and configure sharing.

Static IP would be advisable since DNS isn't always the best internally for finding the share.

What are the cons compared with buying a Synology NAS?

My NUC already has Linux on it but I may need it when I resume another project few months later. If building, shall I go for Intel or AMD?
Do I need a better CPU and GPU if I want face recognition feature like Synology Photos?

I am very sensitive to noise. I am thinking perhaps put 1 or 2 NVMe SSD in it for speed and complete quietness. Occasionally, I may want to connect to a hard drive to it for less expensive, high capacity backup.

 

[Tech Junky]

@tablespoon

Any NAS you buy off the shelf is limited to what's inside the enclosure. You can't swap anything except the RAM in them. You're stuck with whatever software they use. The NIC is limited to whatever is installed unless you pay for a higher end NAS with the option to swap parts out.

Noise is something you can deal with on a DIY setup fairly easily compared to the NAS enclosures where you might be able to get inside and pop the fan out and put something else in. The compact nature of NAS enclosures though usually limits you to louder fan options vs a PC case.

If you use the NUC it's fan less on the computing side. You can do a straight up enclosure or DAS connected to the USB port. You can use whatever OS you want and just share the drives over the network.

If you want to do NVME or SATA M2 drives for silence that's fine but, an NVME would be a waste as the bottleneck would be the USB port 5-10gbps only yields up to 1000MB/s and most NVME drives hit 3500MB/s+. Using a couple of SATA M2's though hits just over at maybe 1100MB/s.

If you went with dual M2's you could probably get 4TB's of space for ~$450 at current prices and 18TB of spinner capacity for $300 for your bulk storage / backups.

Now, if you're in it for the long haul this is the time to decide on how you want to do it so you don't have to rebuild things as time passes to expand. Since you already have the NUC that's a big chunk of the budget already in place. Adding drives though is where things add up and you have this on either DIY or NAS / DAS so, it's just something to deal with. The benefit of DIY though is you can take the guts from one case and put them into another to expand how many drove bays you want to expand to. NAS you end up buying another one for $200+ depending on how many bays you need for new drives.

When you decide you need more space or start getting into serious data capacities planning helps. It doesn't need to be high power but, somewhat recent keeps the costs down if you're using new parts since current things like RAM are cheaper than trying to source some DDR3 sticks for a NAS.

Another pro is you can use the DIY for more than just data hoarding if you choose to put more $ into it. One use for mine is OTA/Plex DVR and having a higher end CPU/RAM makes quick work of converting files from TS to MP4 / stripping commercials out. The benefit here is both time and $$ because the less time spent with the CPU pegged means less W's used in the time converting the files.

 

[tablespoon]

Thank you.

For the cost of the latest 923+ and 1522+, it may be better to build my own. Security and reliability-wise, are these off-the-shelf NAS and DIY NAS the same if I don't allow outside access to the NAS?

I checked my Intel NUC. Specs is as following:

Intel NUC Kit NUC7i3BNK Product Specifications

Is it relatively good? One problem I can see is it does not have thunderbolt 3/4 port and the ethernet port is only 1GbE.

In the past when people were choosing between Synology and QNAP, some suggested the former as it supports Btrfs. Between Btrfs and ZFS, which is better?

As for the OS, is it better to use OpenMediaVault or TrueNAS?

 

[igor_kavinski]

In the past when people were choosing between Synology and QNAP, some suggested the former as it supports Btrfs. Between Btrfs and ZFS, which is better?

BTRFS is still being improved. It's not as stable and mature as ZFS.

 

[Shmee]

I have the feeling that off the shelf NAS systems often would be less secure than a well maintained DIY system, due to sometimes having backdoors and firmware flaws that don't get patched.

One thing to keep in mind, is ZFS likes to have a fair amount of RAM. For TrueNAS, 16GB or more is recommended, though recommendation depends on your useage and amount of storage space available.

I myself would avoid using a NUC, as there just isn't a good way to connect many drives to it. You should probably build a desktop tower style computer, and pick a case where you can add hot swap bays, depending on what drives you want to use. Keep in mind, you will usually have an SSD for the OS, and then at least one volume for data. The OS drive doesn't have to be anything special, it just runs the OS for the system. Would still recommend an SSD for it though.

The data volume(s) would typically be something like 2+ drives, could be NAS/enterprise quality HDDs, or it could be SATA SSDs. Typical setups for a volume would be 2 drives in a mirror, 4 drives of 2 in a mirror for 2 mirrors, or 3+ drives for RAIDZ1, etc.

My advice would be, choose an OS you like, and then build a tower with expand-ability in mind. When choosing internal components, such as motherboard, or any NIC or HBA cards, check on the site or forums for that OS that there won't be issues with your particular hardware. For example, certain Realtek network controllers have issues with FreeNAS in the past.

 

[Tech Junky]

As @Shmee pointed out there's a lot of benefits to rolling your own setup.

In addition to storage I use my setup as my router. Security is easier to manage on it than relying on some company to keep things up to date and patched. I usually check for a new kernel weekly but, you can setup Cron jobs to automate things. Because I'm using my box for more than storage I just put Ubuntu on it and secure it with IPtables for the firewall aspect and it's maybe 15 lines. For the FS I just used ext4 on the drives.

Zfs imo is still the new kid on the block and for ram use it will just keep using more if it's available but doesn't need a huge amount to run fine. with my setup it only uses 4gb most of the time and has 16gb installed.

For me simple and stable works best.

 

[tablespoon]

Is building a DIY NAS the same as building a PC which I have done before?

Between 16GB and 32GB, is 32GB a bit overkilled?

Is it better to use ECC RAM?

About getting a case with many bays... Some mentioned that RAID is not a good way to prevent data lost, backup to another storage is. Is this true?

 

[Shmee]

Is building a DIY NAS the same as building a PC which I have done before?

Between 16GB and 32GB, is 32GB a bit overkilled?

Is it better to use ECC RAM?

About getting a case with many bays... Some mentioned that RAID is not a good way to prevent data lost, backup to another storage is. Is this true?

It is the same principle as building a PC. Just with emphasis on storage and RAM over CPU and GPU, and the OS is typically NAS focused.

ECC RAM is better if possible, but not necessary IMO, though keep in mind it will require a pricey CPU and motherboard to support it. If you decide to build out of typical desktop parts, I would go with a midrange recent DDR4 motherboard, and probably 32GB of DDR4, which shouldn't be very much. It doesn't need to be real fancy high end stuff, just a decent set of DDR4.

As for RAID and redundancy, in a sense yes this is true, but oversimplified. I would always recommend multiple backups of really important stuff. The key is redundancy. With mirrored disks, or a volume of drives in RAID5 or RAIDZ1 or whatever, you are protected if one drive fails, as long as the other(s) are ok. You can lose up to one drive with these, and then can rebuild the volume with a replacement. Of course, if the volume is wiped, or if someone steals the NAS, or a fire burns everything in the building, the redundancy in the NAS doesn't help. For this you want important stuff backed up in other locations, such as in cloud storage, an offline backup on a separate HDD, preferably offsite in storage, maybe one in a safety deposit box. This will help mitigate disasters.

Of course, with redundancy in your volumes, you will also likely be warned even before a drive dies, you can check the SMART reporting. In general, the main point of RAID etc is to reduce downtime, ususally applying to enterprise or small office/business.

 

[Tech Junky]

Good points.

I went R10 for speed and mirroring. I would be disappointed if I lost data but it wouldn't be a huge issue. I keep the must have stuff in the cloud and most of my data is just due to hoarding media. Having ample space just let's you be lazy about purging older stuff.

Take an inventory of what must be safe and get an idea of what needs to be backed up.

 

[Tech Junky]

Here's a good starting point for cases.

I used a Node 804 which has 8 bays for 3.5" drives and is a cube that holds an mATX board. I ran a 870K CPU with air cooling just fine since there's space for 8 fans inside and the storage is segregated from the rest of the parts to keep the airflow isolated and cool.

Currently I'm using a Meshify 2 case and that's due to the ADL boards at the time not offering a mATX option and even now those options are limited and not all that spectacular in specs. The M2 holds up to 13 drives in storage mode. Plenty of airflow with 7-8 fans being able to be placed inside.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/compare/yTdqqs,6KWBD3/

When doing the M2 one of my focus points was adding a USBC to the front / top for easy access to sync drives or boot from USB when needed. Using the header on the MOBO works just fine but, if you want to boost the speeds you can get a card for a slot and bump it up. If syncing things with an external drive for a backup you could add a TB4 card to the mix for 40gbps which would make backups faster if using an NVME but, for a spinner they usually top out at 200-250MB/s anyway which isn't even close to needing TB. The one perk of TB though is you can get the system to boot windows from an external drive. Then again I also have a SanDisk Pro that can do the same since it shows up as an SSD to the OS and hits ~300MB/s.

It all depends on how you'll use it and leaving yourself with options for the future. If I needed to I could use the system as a normal PC option in the event of my laptop failing for some reason. While it doesn't have a GPU inside the case the system would suffice for finding a replacement laptop or just add a GPU for some higher end needs besides browsing.

@tablespoon
As to the NUC... I started my adventures with one when trying to come up with something better than the 2-bay NAS I had been using. My motivation was to get something that could handle the media files quicker than the POS NAS CPU that took forever or bouncing files between devices to get the converted / stripped of commercials. Attaching storage to a NUC would work just fine though. It's a place to start w/o investing too much money up front while you figure out your needs.

 

[tablespoon]

It is the same principle as building a PC. Just with emphasis on storage and RAM over CPU and GPU, and the OS is typically NAS focused.

ECC RAM is better if possible, but not necessary IMO, though keep in mind it will require a pricey CPU and motherboard to support it. If you decide to build out of typical desktop parts, I would go with a midrange recent DDR4 motherboard, and probably 32GB of DDR4, which shouldn't be very much. It doesn't need to be real fancy high end stuff, just a decent set of DDR4.

As for RAID and redundancy, in a sense yes this is true, but oversimplified. I would always recommend multiple backups of really important stuff. The key is redundancy. With mirrored disks, or a volume of drives in RAID5 or RAIDZ1 or whatever, you are protected if one drive fails, as long as the other(s) are ok. You can lose up to one drive with these, and then can rebuild the volume with a replacement. Of course, if the volume is wiped, or if someone steals the NAS, or a fire burns everything in the building, the redundancy in the NAS doesn't help. For this you want important stuff backed up in other locations, such as in cloud storage, an offline backup on a separate HDD, preferably offsite in storage, maybe one in a safety deposit box. This will help mitigate disasters.

Of course, with redundancy in your volumes, you will also likely be warned even before a drive dies, you can check the SMART reporting. In general, the main point of RAID etc is to reduce downtime, ususally applying to enterprise or small office/business.

Thank you. Let's see how much more a ECC system would cost. Which CPU and motherboard would be recommended in each case? I want thunderbolt 4 support. If I use thunderbolt 4, do I still need 10GbE ethernet?

 

[tablespoon]

Zfs imo is still the new kid on the block

Does that mean it is not as mature (stable and reliable) as BTRFS?

 

[Tech Junky]

I want thunderbolt 4 support. If I use thunderbolt 4, do I still need 10GbE ethernet?

TB4 is local only and 10ge is for other PCs to be able to connect to it.

Does that mean it is not as mature (stable and reliable) as BTRFS?

Each option has it's own perks and drawbacks. Dig into them and see what bets suites yuur needs.

 

[tablespoon]

@tablespoon

I would take the NUC and put Linux on it for the "NAS" portion w/ Samba to share the drive. From there any device on the network will be able to pass data to the drive.

Why putting Linux in the NUC is better than putting TrueNAS or Windows 10?

 

[Tech Junky]

Why putting Linux in the NUC is better than putting TrueNAS or Windows 10?

Windows sucks for this kind of use with the constant updates and reboots. Not to mention using NTFS causes issues.

TrueNAS is a Linux based option. This will let you use something other than NTFS.

 

[igor_kavinski]

How to Create and Use the Storage Spaces Feature on Windows 11

A detailed guide on how to protect the data on your PC from drive failures using the Storage Spaces feature on Windows 11.

www.guidingtech.com

Step by step guide on using Storage Spaces, especially with ReFS if you care about data integrity.

This may not be very fast (storage spaces has an overhead from what I've heard about it) but at least, you can avoid getting confused by Linux if getting familiar with an unknown OS is not something you wanna do. Yank the ethernet cable or disconnect the wireless to avoid unnecessary reboots.

 

[Tech Junky]

Yank the ethernet cable or disconnect the wireless to avoid unnecessary reboots.

Defeats the purpose of file sharing.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Defeats the purpose of file sharing.

Oh yeah, then maybe a private VLAN.