n00b question, sorry. If I had a desktop that could hold 4 HD and 2 SSD, could I turn it into a NAS? Could someone point me in the right direction if this makes sense?
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A NAS is basically some software running on a computer, so you can use a desktop as that computer, ideally with a light operating system (for example, Linux in text only mode).
HOWEVER: desktops are designed for far higher computational loads than needed by a NAS, plus things like graphical user interfaces and direct connection of user peripherals such as mice, so even when idle they consume a lot more power than the kind of hardware used in a typical NAS.
Also the hardware in a good NAS will have things like extra higher speed connectors for HDDs/SDDs (such as SATA) rather than you having to use slower stuff like USB.
So keep in mind that a desktop as NAS will consume significantly more power than a dedicated NAS (as the latter will probably be running on something like an ARM and have a power source dimensioned for a couple of HDDs, not to run a dedicate graphics card like a desktop has) and probably won’t fit as many disks.
If you’re ok with having most disks be accessed a bit slower and USB3 work for you (and, for example, if your NAS is on 100 Mbit Ethernet, it’s the network that’s the slowest thing, not USB3) then it’s usually better to use an old notebook rather than desktop because notebooks were designed for running of batteries hence consume significantly less power.
Frankly I would advise against using an old desktop as NAS mainly because in a year or two of continued use you’ll have paid enough in extra electricity costs vs using a NAS to pay for a simple but decent dedicated NAS.
If they were to run some applications on the side it would validate the power usage. Like if it also was a Plex server it could be more reasonable to use more power.
Could also really hinge on the electricity cost for their region. At 10 cents a kwh and a delta of 100 watts we’d be talking 87 dollars a year assuming it’s always running at a delta of 100 watts.
I doubt there will be a 100 watt delta especially newer architectures that idle really well.
Whilst a 100W delta seems unlikelly, a 50W delta seems realistic as the kind of stuff you have in a NAS will use maybe 5W (about the same as a Raspberry PI, possibly less) whilst the typical desktop PC uses significantly more even outside graphics mode (part of the reason to use Linux in text mode only is exactly to try and save power there). It mainly depends on what the desktop was used for before: a “gaming PC” with a dedicated graphics card from an old enough generation (i.e. with HW from back before the manufactures of GPUs started competing on power usage) will use signiificantly more power than integrated graphics even in idle mode.
That said, making it a “home server” as you suggest makes a lot of sense - if that thing is an “All In One” server (media server, NAS, print server, torrent download server and so on) loaded with software of your choice (and hence stuff that respects your privacy and doesn’t shove Ads in your face) it’s probably a superior solution to getting those things as separate standalone devices, especially in the current era of enshittification.
No reason why not. May be a little power-hungry depending on the spec but if you already have it go for it. FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) is the usually suggested OS to run: https://www.truenas.com/freenas/
Since you have 4 HDD slots probably run 4 disks in a RAID 5 so think of how much space you need. RAID 5 is n-1 so if you have 4x 10TB drives you will be left with 30TB of space before formatting. You can calculate here: https://www.raid-calculator.com/
Then either mirror the SSDs for OS and caching or just use one. Depends on your budget really.
Nice, thanks so much for the info!
Maybe I’m dumb but looking at wikipedia I’m a bit confused. Seems like you can do this on almost any linux distro. What is the reason behind setting up a dedicated OS, cost of operation, stability, performance?
kinda the same reason people suggest something like linux mint over slackware, gentoo, arch, etc… mint is easy to install and is preconfigured to be an easy to use user desktop environment. you can configure any other option to be have like that, but they tend to be a bit more “DIY”, which is great if you know what you’re doing!
dedicated NAS OSes will have good software out of the box that make it easy to configure and manage various common disk-related configurations (RAID, SMB, NFS, etc). you can certainly do all this yourself, but it might not have a pretty, unified user interface, or you might have to deal with software that isn’t compatible with some version of a library that’s in your distro of choice… all resolvable things, but they take time to solve: anywhere from installing a package manually to applying a kernel patch and recompiling the kernel to get something to work
I see, thanks for the info!
Not everybody has the knowledge to deal with Linux. A product line TrueNAS or Unraid has a friendly GUI that can be used by a non-technical user.
Power consumption is the main issue. If it’s an old, power hungry desktop and you live somewhere with expensive electricity, it can be quite costly to run. If you have an energy efficient desktop or have cheap power then it will be fine. Just make sure it has a good quality power supply if it’s going to run 24/7.
It’ll work fine. A NAS is just a PC. Try Unraid if you want a user friendly UI. It costs money but it’s only a one off payment for a lifetime license, and they have a free trial.
Or truenas
+1 for unRAID. I did the same when I got tired of Netflix increasing prices while dropping content. Also got annoyed with my cable because it’s expensive and good content is rare.
Bought a 12th gen i5 desktop on sale and 4 x 10Tb drives and installed unRAID on a USB key.
Easiest thing I’ve done in years and it’s 100x better than Netflix and 1000x better than cable.
As others have said, you certainly can.
If your current system is a Windows PC then a super easy way to go about it is to purchase a product called Stablebit DrivePool which will allow you to combine multiple hard disks into one drive, and then do duplication of data you find important. Share that virtual drive as a Share that your other systems can see. DriePool is a super reliable product. Only downside other than the one time cost is that its redundancy is based on file duplication, which has the benefit that you can pull your drives out and use them elsewhere as any one file is always contained on a single drive, but unlike parity based solutions it’s super space inefficient to retain duplicate copies. It’s a tradeoff between simplicity and time to recover in a failure versus maximising disk use and reducing costs. Depending what your NAS is for, maybe you don’t need that redundancy but. You can also team it up with another product called SnapRaid (which is free) which can make your redundancy parity based.
I ran DrivePool for years on Windows and it’s a great product. Windows itself isn’t overly optimised for this use case, but as a predominately Mac household having access to Windows on a headless system was handy if I had to run the odd Windows only apps, so using Windows had its perks.
While Windows and a PC will cost more to operate, you’ll potentially be out well ahead if you don’t have to buy additional hardware. It’s likely worth running what you have into the ground rather than buying new hardware. There’s guides on some things you can do to optimise Windows too.
I’ve since moved to using UnRaid which is a paid product (one time purchase) designed specifically for NAS on your own PC. Great solution but I’d say that the barrier of entry is much higher than a Windows box. Still very versatile product. Moved to that as over time I’ve used a bit more Linux in my life, and I also had reduced need for Windows as the NAS OS.
Haven’t tried TrueNas but that’d be an alternative to UnRaid.
I would strongly discourage using hardware raid. Hardware raid abstracts away some of the complexity at the cost of flexibility and potentially reliability. I have yet to come across hardware raid that does proper error checking for example.
Agreed. The products I have used above, DrivePool, SnapRaid and UnRaid are all software solutions. This was important to me because I was reusing hardware and had a real eclectic mix of drives from 14TB NAS drives to 256GB laptop drives that I wanted to get more life out of.
The only hardware limitation is the parity based apps SnapRaid and UnRaid need your largest drive to be the parity one. Makes sense but in a situation like mine where I had a 14TB drive and the next closes was 8TB, that parity drive wasn’t well utilised. Not a big issue but.
yes, try freenas/truenas
Yes most hardware can be a server, but i recommend hdds thats made for nases!
Yep. Just install Linux, plug it into your router, set a static ip, and install the nas software ya want.
There are plenty of approaches. ChatGPT is great at debugging issues and helping ya through the setup. I did this with a raspberry pi and external usb drive the other week.
Nice, didn’t realize a NAS could be on smaller hardware. Thanks for the info!
Some people even use Raspberry Pis as their NAS. I use an old MacBook (5th gen i5) as a home server with 2 external hard drives as a NAS, which also runs a few docker containers like Jellyfin. Before that, I was using an old PC with 1st gen i3 for all these things.
You totally can, but since it will be on all day with 4 hdd look into wattages you want to live with. There are some small NUCs or Pi based NAS with low wattages. There is OpenMediaVault, FreeNAS/TrueNAS software to install
Hey sorry, thinking on this more, could I just turn on the NAS when desired? What is the benefit of running it constantly?
You could totally turn on as needed, WakeOnLan is good for that. But typically when people run a NAS it is for streaming audio, video, file sync and backups and maybe docker running other services so the NAS is typically on 24/7 so it is available on demand. But it doean’t have to be 100% uptime if you don’t want it to be. For example I have two OpenMediaVaults one on a pi and one an old IomegaNAS. The pi is on always with an attached drive, and serves Samba Shares and DLNA/DAAP shares. Has docker running syncthing, CUPS print server, Trillium Notes, and homeassistant; so makes sense for it to be on all day, especially because my wife’s system backsup to it daily automatically. The converted Iomega NAS is mainly a backup machine sInce it is old and not as performant (only has 100 network speed. So that gets turned on to do a bulk backup and not much else.
Yep, look into Wake On LAN if you just want to power the NAS on remotely.
My NAS also powers on at certaIn times of day and off again after a while - IF - no-one’s connected / no network traffic / etc.
I do NOT need my NAS on at 3am…
Edit : forgot to say, check out OpenMediaVault
Note that there is some reliability drawback of spinning hard disks on and off repeatedly. maybe unintuitively HDDs that spin constantly can live much longer than those that spend 90% of their time spun down.
This might not be relevant if you use only SSDs, and might never affect you, but it should be mentioned.
Stellar! Thanks for the info!
You can also configure the HDDs to power down when they’re not in use. HDDs are the biggest power consumer anyway.
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Nice, good things to balance. Thanks for the info!
Yes. Go look at TrueNAS Scale
Of course. Just put disks in and set up whatever remote filesystem and it’s a NAS.
Just google perfect media server
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
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Unraid is a great option for anyone, but beginners in particular. It does, however, cost money and isn’t open source.
Thanks for the resource, might be good to at least research. Thanks!
Saving for later
Absolutely anything can be turned into a NAS, as long as you’re aware of your own needs and the hardware’s capabilities. A NAS is just a computer with some specific requirements.
When I first built my NAS, it only used parts that I got for free. A cheap micro ATX board with only two RAM slots, an i3-4160 CPU, 2x2G RAM, a worn-out SSD, and a 1T HDD. It couldn’t run something like TrueNAS, but it was enough for Proxmox and some Alpine containers running services like Samba, Transmission, Wireguard, and a small Debian VM for me to fuck around with. The single storage disk means there is no redundancy, so I only store replaceable data on it, like TV shows and installers.
There are many hardware-focused channels on video platforms that offer guides for budget home servers. Wolfgang’s Channel is good, and Hardware Haven and Raid Owl just finished a competition of building a sub-$200 home lab.
