Ideally one that can use more than one disk so that i can expand it later when i can. Have some minimal experience with Synology since there’s one at work and i have interacted with it a couple times and like the interface, but am not married to any brand as long as it works.
Located in EU if it makes any difference.
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Buy the cheapest old computer on your equivalent of Craigslist and install TrueNAS. If you want to use a lot of drives, make sure there are enough SATA connenctions on the motherboard.
You can also put an LSI SAS raid controller card flashed into IT into a PCI slot and use SAS to SATA cables. Can easily find them used on ebay for reasonable prices. And if you really grow your server, you can transition those SAS ports to point to a JBOD array with SAS ports, although that takes you from “cheap” to “cheap when compared to buying new.”
I’m also a fan of Unraid since it makes expanding the array much easier, but you have to pay for it, and it’s designed with the assumption that the only thing you’re doing on the bare metal is storage, and everything else is either containerized or in a VM.
Edit to add: As mentioned in the comments below (thanks u/GreyBeard@lemmy.one) it’s usually preferable to use software RAID, not hardware RAID, unless you know for sure you need that kind of performance, and if you’re asking about a cheap NAS you don’t. Flashing LSI raid controllers over to IT mode makes them pass through any attached discs, so it’s an easy way to add SATA ports when you’re running out of them on the mainboard.
Dig out an old computer and stuff it with a SSD and a handful of HDDs. And you have a decent start.
the old PC thing is a clear first choice. Also a WD NAS, preloaded with Hard drives have a very good prince point if you also need the HDDs e.g. The WD My Cloud EX2 with 2x6TB HD is currently 422€ (amazon spain) and each individual 6TB WD red is 200€. (leaving the NAS at 20€). If you get the 24TB version is even cheaper than the two HD combined.
I would hesitate with WD. I’ve always been a fan of their drives but their software straight up wiped people’s backup disks a few years ago, iirc. That would give me pause before ever using their software again.
Synology are very good and have good dedicated models for home usage. Way better than old PC. There are YouTube channels about nases, they compare different brands and models - check them.
“Cheap” is a relative term.
I ended up going with a smaller Synology as it was actually replacing a RaspberryPi + External drive setup that was failing.
At the end of the day, the Synology was much more expensive, but for me it was worth the trade-off to have a mostly plug and play setup. I can easily move files around in a GUI. I can setup torrents, even configure it to use a VPN and it all takes minutes instead of researching configurations and managing daemons and processes like I had to do previously.
Edit: Also, don’t forget to take into account power consumption when reviewing options. There can be a big difference between running an old desktop 24/7 as a NAS versus a Raspberry Pi.
Really any PC could be made into a NAS. If you have any old PC laying around you can install Linux to it, and then set up disk shares. I’m assuming you mean an appliance like NAS and honestly the only one I know of, but never used, is Synology.
Dig out an old computer and staff it with a SSD and a handful of HDDs.
I’ve spent entirely too long in the last week or so researching this. You either go cheap but DIY, or expensive but prebuilt. That’s not to say that a DIY is always cheaper than a prebuilt, you can go absolutely nuts if you want, but the performance and spec will always be better for the money going DIY. Hot swap drawers are over-rated as you’ll maybe use them once a year if that. I can’t recommend any specific prebuilt because I haven’t used any and am waiting for parts for my DIY build.
I’m also in the market for this.
I’m considering setting up a raspberry pi4 nas, and would love to hear pros and cons from people with experience on the matter.
I assume there are faster solutions, but I think it should meet my needs well
I recommend building your own. Just get something that can hold a lot of disks, and then put in however many you need for your data and redundancy. I like XigmaNas for the software because RAIDz. / zfs.
My setup is a raspberry pi with a large external hard drive running smbd, and it works fine.
What model pi? How responsive do you find it?
Don’t know about that guy but I use a RasPi 4 with a four bay laptop drive toaster. Four terabyte drives and it works great for streaming to multiple devices.
I think it’s a base model 3, no gobs of memory. I don’t use it for anything especially taxing, just file storage and occasionally streaming music or low-resolution video. The bottleneck is the slow WD Archive hard drive.
I use a Raspberry Pi 4B with a USB 3 JBOD 4-bay disk enclosure, with the disks in a ZFS pool, and it has been working great for my needs.
