
Building a home NAS on a shoestring budget with the Rock64 SBC (2018) - Naac
http://www.theramblinman.ca/2018/04/04/building-a-high-performing-home-nas-on-a-shoestring-budget-with-the-rock64-sbc/
======
henriks
I've been eyeing a NanoPi M4 [1] with a "SATA HAT" [2] for replacing my ageing
QNAP NAS. It should have similar specs as the OP, with the added advantage of
a 4-port SATA controller sitting directly on a PCIe bus.

[1]
[https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...](https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=234)

[2]
[https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...](https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=254)

~~~
dmos62
I tried searching the blog post or this thread for use cases, but didn't find
even a mention; it seems that people use these NATs with something like 4 to
16 TB capacities at home; but I can't imagine a non-professional reason to
store so much data.

Personally, if I wanted to store valuable stuff locally, like photos, I'm
guessing 250gb of space would be enough for a lifetime.

So what do people use these huge personal storage systems for?

~~~
pnutjam
Video and photos keep getting larger and larger.

~~~
inetsee
Especially with the cost of cameras that shoot 4K video coming down. You can
get a good camera that shoots 4K video for under $1000, (e.g. BlackMagic
Pocket Cinema Camera), and there are cheap cameras (under $100) that can shoot
4K.

------
trengrj
I shudder at the idea of using USB connectors for important data. I have
recently purchased a Kobol NAS [https://kobol.io/](https://kobol.io/). It is
amazing because it has the following features in a good price point:

1\. Open source

2\. 2GB ECC ram

3\. 4 x SATA

4\. Hackable GPIOs

~~~
fock
It only says "preorder now" or do I miss something? And given the price point
of 300USD (with taxes and shipping) you are well in the terrain of x86-Atoms,
heck you might even get a good deal on a Xeon-D...

~~~
yaleman
It's the same as the Helios in OP's article, seems to be a Kickstarter doing
limited runs.

------
bellinom
I built a very similar home NAS with the newer RockPro64 and a pair of 4TB
HDDs in RIAD1, all on top of Debian[0]. I found OpenMediaVault to be overkill
and kept me from really understanding what was going on. Plus there are a
million guides to setting up SMB, rsync, Borg, etc.

The RockPro64 hardware is great. Very performant, especially when using the
PCIe to SATA card instead of USB like the OP did.

[0] [https://ameridroid.com/blogs/ameriblogs/how-to-build-your-
ow...](https://ameridroid.com/blogs/ameriblogs/how-to-build-your-own-nas-
server-with-the-rockpro64)

~~~
Naac
I asked this on another thread, but I don't understand why you would see real
world difference between PCIe vs USB3.

When using this setup as a NAS, isn't your bottleneck the gigabit network from
machine to machine? You'll saturate the 1 Gigabit link ( or even 2 Gigabit
duplex ) before you can reach 5 Gigabits ( USB3 ) or 6 Gigabits ( PCIe )

~~~
pnutjam
RAID seems very popular for 2 disk setups, but I don't like the cost benefit.
With RAID under about 5 disks, you aren't getting much speedup, under 4 disks
you can't do a proper fail-out and rebuild of a larger multi-disk volume.

I use 2 x 4TB disks in my homeserver, but I keep one online and have a script
that brings up the other one periodically and rsyncs everything. This gives me
a local backup, something RAID lacks, so I'm protected from fat fingering or
accidentally deleting stuff. I also have very minimal downtime, because I can
mount that drive in the place of the primary drive in just afew seconds.

I run xfs on the primary drive, and btrfs on the mirror, so I can take
snapshots after I rsync and maintain differentials easily.

My point is, you should consider getting rid of RAID and just use the bare
drive or LVS Volume.

~~~
effie
Agreed, RAID makes little sense if you want a quiet home storage that is used
only occasionaly. Additional disk is better used for regular backups. If you
need to minimize downtime and have the storage accessible 24/7, then RAID
makes sense.

------
matthewaveryusa
I've been running a 8TB homeserver for the cost of an optiplex on eBay (80)
and 2 8tb external drives on Amazon (300). I cronjob an rsync every night and
that's that. Cheap, works great, and (surprisingly) I understand how it works.
I also have cloud storage for the subset of things I don't want to lose. A
thing I'm working on right now is for the rsync disk to be on a switch I
control with an Arduino/pi so it's only powered during the backup -- I reckon
the drive will last longer that way. Homeservers are fun :)

If you're ok losing 24hours of data and not a performance junky, the backup
plan becomes trivial and the raiding isn't really necessary.

~~~
rahimnathwani
Daily rsync alone isn't enough. Any data which gets corrupted on the main
drive will, within 24 hours, also be corrupted on the 'backup'.

If you're confident enough that your computer won't get stolen, burn, or
zapped by a power surge, then you can keep the same hardware setup you have,
but:

1\. Use borg backup (or restic) instead of rsync (so that you can restore to
any day in the past, not only to yesterday)

2\. Disconnect the 'backup' drive when it's not being used (so that it's
protected from malware or fat fingers).

Even better would be:

3\. Have a separate computer host the borg backups, and have it run 'borg
serve' in append-only mode (so that, no matter what you do the main computer,
you cannot destroy or corrupt past backups).

Even better:

4\. Have this separate computer in a different physical location (so that
you're protected from fire, theft and the like).

~~~
eikenberry
I didn't think corrupted data would change the size of the file or the mtime?
If it doesn't then rsync wouldn't overwrite the second drive as it would see
it as an existing, good copy. Unless you had rsync using checksum comparisons
of course.

~~~
rahimnathwani
You're probably right for corruption caused by hardware failure or filesystem
bugs. I was thinking about corruption in the wider sense, e.g. caused by
application bugs.

------
ti_ranger
"Building a high performing home NAS"

"I was averaging 60-113mbps depending on the size of files being moved. This
was a successful build in my mind! After selling my QNAP NAS, I came out ahead
on my expenses for the build."

113Mbps is considered "high performing"?

"on a shoestring budget with the Rock64 SBC"

"TOTAL: $172.39 CAD before tax"

This is without the cost of the hard drives, doesn't seem ot include the cost
of an enclosure, and results in:

* 1 Quad-core A53

* 2GB ram (the 4GB version is $45 USD without shipping, so it couldn't have been this one), which you can't ever change

* 0 SATA ports

* 1 USB 3 port

* 2 USB 2 ports

* 1x GbE

I would probably rather consider an HP Micro Server (e.g.
[https://www.amazon.com//dp/B079MFYDSL](https://www.amazon.com//dp/B079MFYDSL)
), which for $282 provides:

* 1.6GHz dual-core Opteron

* 2 DIMM slots, 8GB DDR4 provided

* 5x SATA ports (4x in the disk bays, 1 in the optical bay)

* 4 USB3 ports, 2 USB2 ports, internal USB port

* 2x GbE

* 2x PCIe slots

* Hardware RAID support (I wouldn't use it, but it's available).

It would meet all of these requirements the poster had:

* Shoestring budget, under $300 preferred

* Scalable, not locked into a certain number of drive bays

* Gigabit ethernet

* USB 3.0 (for fast backups to my backup drives)

 _Preferred: compatibility with open source NAS offerings (OpenMediaVault,
FreeNAS, etc.)

_ Low power usage (I don’t have high computing requirements for this system,
so it doesn’t need to be driving up my electricity bill to run every month)

(I guess the Rock64 may have lower power consumption, but I don't think vastly
lower).

I have a much older Microserver G7 (or NL54), which was much cheaper (I paid
about $100), and it's great.

Edit: formatting

~~~
kstenerud
Yup, I've been running an N40L microserver for almost 10 years now. Put 16 gb
in it & some hard drives and never looked back. It just works.

I first ran FreeNAS, but eventually moved it to Ubuntu 18.04 so that I could
run some containerized services on it (file sharing, Plex, and a remote
virtual desktop).

16gb RAM is about right for running ZFS. 8gb worked OK, but I'd notice
slowdowns from time to time.

If this machine ever decides to pack it in, I'll get a gen10.

~~~
zbentley
If you ever get the urge to play around with FreeNAS again, they really
improved linux emulation and virtualization; I've been pleasantly surprised
with how much I can get done with bhyve.

That's only if you feel like tinkering, though; Ubuntu's a great choice as
well.

~~~
pnutjam
I run opensuse on my home "NAS".I get so much more with a full Linux install
and it's still headless and let power.

I just use an old desktop with a pretty efficient CPU.

------
bburky
When I built an ARM based NAS, I chose to use the Banana Pi BPI-R2 because it
was one of the very few boards with 2x SATA ports using PCI-E. It worked fine
and got good speeds. It's difficult to run a current kernel on the BPI-R2
though (it is slowly creeping towards mainline). If I built another NAS again
I'd just use an x86_64 or aarch64 SBC with a PCI-E port and connect a good
SATA controller.

Full build log: [https://bburky.com/NAS/](https://bburky.com/NAS/)

------
robotmay
I'm surprised I don't see more people with my NAS setup. I run a HP Gen8
MicroServer which cost about £120 for the base machine a few years back. The
default specs were a bit feeble but perfectly serviceable for running a NAS,
though mine has now been modified a bit since then to sport a quad core E3 and
16GB of ECC RAM. If you pick up an adapter lead you can fit an SSD in the
optical drive bay (which I have done). One nice thing about the microserver is
it has two built-in ethernet ports, so mine run in a link-aggregation group,
which is well utilised (I run a lot off this little server, like Plex,
ZoneMinder etc).

I run ZFS on Ubuntu (ZFS is superb and one of the best things I've learnt in
years) with a RAID 10 setup (2x2TB mirrored pair, 2x4TB mirrored pair). I'm
actually just resilvering one of the 4TB drives right now as I finish
migrating to them from a couple of old 1TB drives. RAM usage was high when I
used dedup but now I've ditched that it's running much lower. I think the
hardware will start to struggle once I get up over 10TB of usable space, but
considering the cost of the actual machine I really don't feel like I've
wasted any money at all.

I picked RAID 10 for this because I feel like with only 4 drives available it
makes the most sense, weighing up resilver speed vs slightly better failure
recovery if it was RAIDZ. On bigger servers I tend to go for RAIDZ3 instead.

For backups I use syncthing on various machines to copy data to the server,
and then rsync the stuff I care about every hour (with a lockfile to stop
overlap) to rsync.net, which then performs all the snapshots. I used to run
borg but I swapped back to plain rsync because I felt more confident in being
able to restore from it. rsync.net is fantastic. I'm currently storing about
1TB with them, and although it looks more expensive than other options for
home backup, I feel like the lack of hassle is really worth it for me.

I'm not usually a fan of HP btw, but these little microservers are really well
built and I actually ended up using a ton of them at work as well; we only
ever had one failure (which I believe was due to PoE somehow being delivered
to it, which was really fun to debug :|). When this one eventually can't keep
up I suspect I'll just go for a newer model of it. The form factor is very
convenient for the home, especially if you don't have the convenience of a
spare room in which to put a rack.

~~~
d_k_f
A second vote for HP's Gen8 MicroServer!

I couldn't get the low voltage Xeons for a sane price in Germany, so I settled
for a second-hand i3, which turned out to be more than enough for what I'm
throwing at it.

I'm running ESXi as a hypervisor managing two Ubuntu VMs at the moment: a
router and a fileserver managing two volume groups (6 TB dump storage for
movies, music, etc. that's not too important and thus unmirrored, 2x2TB
mirrored storage for photos and other important data that should not get
lost). Thanks to the two network ports I can completely isolate the fileserver
from the open internet as only the router VM has access to hat port. If I want
to access my stuff from outside, I can VPN into the router and thus have
access to the fileserver.

The next points on the list is Plex or something similar so I don't have to
manually re-encode movies when my TV doesn't like the audio codec. Here, the
i3 might struggle a bit, but we'll see.

As for the cost: I spent 200€ on the server itself, 88€ on 16GB RAM, ~20€ for
the SSD case and power adapter cable and ~65€ on the SSD. The i3 was ~25€, so
I'm up to roughly 400€ for the entire server (plus storage costs, but you'll
have those anyways). Compared to what you'll get for that price it's an
absolute steal, especially when you compare it with several "low
budget"/homemade NAS builds floating around the net/youtube.

Bonus points: you can stack them on top of each other.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Heh. I've still got a gen7 happily chugging away - it is happier streaming
1080p x264 rather than x265, but aside from that we never notice it's so
feeble. That's easy enough - we only rip x264 now. It's heavily used, ZFS
performs flawlessly - running on FreeNAS, and runs a surprising amount of
plugins and jails without issue.

I haven't looked at gen 8 or 10 - where was 9? - since the arbitrary HP switch
in policy to say _you need an active support contract to download a BIOS
update._ For most people buying a MicroServer that's BIOS updates in first
year only, which is far too hostile.

I'm more likely to self-build using a U-NAS 8 bay or something else with more
bays next time around, or pick up a rack off ebay.

------
postpawl
You could also get a Dell Optiplex with a 2nd gen i5 from EBay for about $60 +
the cost of hard drives.

~~~
squarefoot
Mine is built around an even cheaper used Atom fanless Mini-itx board plus
Nas4Free (1) which is more than enough for serving multiple full HD videos (2)
around the house, so speed isn't that important; the network would be the
limit anyway.

(1) I know it's old, but attempting a live upgrade to XigmaNas would be risky,
so I'll reinstall it at the next maintenance stop.

(2) as files through NFS and SMB shares, not transcoded and streamed; ie, the
player does the dirty work, not the NAS.

~~~
W-Stool
I ran NAS4Free for years but found that I could not configure it to email me
an alert when the chassis fan failed or the RAID array degraded. You can guess
what happened - fan failed and a drive cooked. Was this ever addressed/fixed?
Otherwise I thought it was pretty great.

------
yCloser
USB for a nas?! nope nope nope

~2012 mini-itx AMD C60 does 60Mb/sec, at the time was ~60€

~~~
kingosticks
Can you explain why?

~~~
yaleman
Most external USB enclosures I've used run hot, die early and are dog slow...

~~~
kingosticks
I used an aluminium enclosure for a long time and no problems with heat. And
perhaps that's why there were also no lifetime issues either. "Dog slow"? Yeh
I agree but mine was USB 2.0. It's much less of an argument with USB 3.0 and
even less again if you don't need high performance for your use-case (e.g.
backups only).

So I don't think we have answer yet as to why you wouldn't use USB.

~~~
michaelt

      So I don't think we have answer yet
      as to why you wouldn't use USB.
    

The short answer is "USB has a widely known bad reputation"

How did that bad reputation arise? A combination of factors:

* USB 2.0

* Platforms like Raspberry Pi, where both disk and ethernet are on the same USB link.

* Sellers marketing products with the USB link bitrate (5 Gbit/s) rather than the rate of data transfer from the ideal disk.

* Embedded platforms that don't have the performance needed to saturate a gigabit ethernet link (or 5 gigabit USB 3 link)

* Articles like this, reporting "60-113mbps" without going into enough detail to determine which components are the limiting factors on performance.

------
jayalpha
"32GB MicroSDXC – $17.98 CAD"

You don't want to do this. Buy a Swissbit Card of you don't want data
corruption on your system.

~~~
cmurf
Yeah, even the name brand SD cards blow up for me after about 6 months. I've
switched over to the Samsung "FIT" USB sticks that fit flush with the port,
and boot off that. And leave the SDXC slot free for importing images from the
camera.

So far, my experience has been SD cards faceplant by going read-only. They
will mount rw, but a single write will cause a long hang, followed by a bunch
of sd driver errors, and then it goes read only. It is still readable but will
accept no writes, including blkdiscard (which gets translated into whatever
the sd card equivalent for TRIM is).

~~~
Scoundreller
Sounds like the SD card internals for boosting voltage to do the erase go bad.

I still wonder why EEPROMs don't have another pin for a high-voltage supply.

Especially for SSDs with multiple chips, would make sense to have 1 efficient
voltage boost, instead of in-silico charge pumps on each chip.

------
toyg
I’ve done something like this with a SolidRun CuBox and a cheap external
2-disk RAID1 enclosure connected via eSATA... 8 years ago. It’s still running
- I’ve only had to replace disks as they failed, which is expected, with zero
data loss. It appears as a Time Machine on the network, backing up a couple of
laptops, and as a shared SMB drive for bits and bobs.

To be on the safe side, I mounted /var on the enclosure, so the SD card in the
CuBox is not stressed, and that has not failed once in 8 years. It wasn’t the
cheapest thing (and it’s absolutely wasted on this task - it has good media
capabilities and wifi that I don’t ever touch), but it sits in a small recess
out of the way, and has been rock-solid. Every few months I dump all its
contents to Glacier because I fear the enclosure will fail before the little
box does.

I expect I’ll eventually replace the CuBox with a Raspberry Pi when it dies,
but the overall model is sound, for something as simple as a fileserver. Just
don’t open it to the internet - a lot of these small boards stop getting OS
updates from manufacturers after a year or two, and their custom chipsets make
it difficult to work with vanilla Linux - particularly if you need wifi or
bluetooth.

------
mastazi
> my old QNAP NAS would average around 17-22mbps transfer speeds

This seems a bit too low in my opinion, I would expect an average consumer-
grade NAS to perform a little bit better than that. Perhaps there was a
bottleneck somewhere (e.g. network issues)?

I didn't test transfer speeds on my cheap Thecus NAS (with 2X WD Red 3TB in
RAID 1) but now I'm curious so I think I will check when I get home.

What's your experience with NAS transfer speeds, HN people?

~~~
MayeulC
22 MBps sounds like what my former DNS-320 achieved. IIRC, encrypted data
transfer (WebDAVs instead of NFS) usually reduced the transfer speed a lot,
due to a weak CPU. The value above is the one I recall for encrypted transfers
(note Bytes, not bits).

~~~
Fnoord
IIRC I had about 60 MB/sec in 2008 with some old Phenom of mine with dedicated
Areca raid controller plus 4x 1 TB _and_ encrypted storage.

------
mwcampbell
Does either the Rock64 or RockPro64 run mainline Debian with the Debian
generic arm64 kernel yet? Or do you have to use a board-specific kernel like
the ones that Armbian provides?

~~~
metildaa
Yep, the community has done quite a bit of work to mainline support, Mali (old
and new) drivers were just recently mainlined.

[https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/17540-early-mainline-
image...](https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/17540-early-mainline-images-for-
rk3288-rk3328-and-rk3399/)

------
banana_giraffe
I've been thinking of setting up a NAS like this for a while. Am I missing
something, though, or does a setup like this need 5 or 6 power adapters to
work (one for the Rock64, one each for the USB enclosure, and possibly one for
the USB hub)?

Not a deal killer, for sure, but it becomes a mess of cables quickly.

~~~
pdelbarba
Check the allowable voltage input ranges for each and if they have overlap
just buy a big power brick (like a laptop charger), cut the ends off of each
of the supplied wall warts and solder+shrinkwrap them all together into a nice
neat harness. This has the added benefit of saving a tiny bit of power
assuming you get a decent main supply.

Tip: thread the shrinkwrap _first_ before soldering. This will save you much
swearing.

~~~
Scoundreller
You can also find barrel splitters. I use one so that my 12V router and 12V
modem both run off 1 wall-wart.

Look to be common for security cameras.

Like so:
[https://www.ebay.ca/itm/113713154440](https://www.ebay.ca/itm/113713154440)

~~~
voltagex_
Did you do any testing to figure out how many amps you're drawing from the
single wall wart? Although, modem/routers in normal usage are pretty low draw.

------
brokenmachine
Probably just my paranoia, but I'd be a bit nervous about corruption running
many large drives from a single usb3 port.

~~~
_jal
ZFS has a nifty, sort of low-rent safety that can be used for this sort of
thing - the 'copies' param. Just be sure to understand what it does and
doesn't give you.

[https://linux.die.net/man/8/zfs](https://linux.die.net/man/8/zfs)

I personally value the data I store long-term more than this, but most likely
would have played around with it when I was more cash strapped and
daring/stupid about it.

------
hrdwdmrbl
Is there any NAS that has design and simplicity as a primary focus?

I have hated all NAS that I've tried due to each one wanting to have more
features than the next and all resulting in slow complicated messes.

~~~
walterbell
Which features would you keep/prioritize?

~~~
hrdwdmrbl
Storing files in a resilient way (usually just RAID 1). Allowing those files
to be accessed from all my devices. Only doing what would be guessed by the
words Network Attached Storage. Don't give me stuff for security cameras,
transcoding, things for my thermostat, vertialization, email, etc etc.
Basically just a personal Dropbox.

~~~
hrdwdmrbl
And maybe make it look nice and also small. Maybe use laptop drives. Make it
wireless too. Focus on nice UI instead of looking like Windows 95

------
maeln
By the way, when using a backup software like Borg or Restic that are supposed
to have replication built-in, do you still need things like RAID (if you
intend to use the drive only for backup) ?

EDIT: I guess no : [https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html#can-
pro...](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html#can-project-name-
add-redundancy-to-the-backup-data-to-deal-with-hardware-malfunction)

~~~
asymmetric
I think the answer is actually yes, you need RAID as borg is not taking care
of replication for you.

~~~
maeln
Yes sorry, I meant yes, you still need RAID.

------
hello_tyler
Why don't these people just buy one of those power efficient i3's and throw it
in an old PC case ? Seems like a lot more power and flexibility compared to
using Rock64's. My 'nas' is just a headless linux computer with a bunch of
drives in there. My only complaint is that 6 HDD ports aren't enough. It can
stream HD video to multiple devices at the same time no problem which I feel
like would choke if you tried it on the Rock64.

------
baroffoos
I use a gnubee nas. Its an open source hardware nas that can run debian. Its
not a shoestring budget device but its a lot cheaper than the commercial ones.

~~~
shrimp_emoji
Lol the GnuBee is adorable!

But "recommended RAID levels are 0 and 1 under LVM and MD, and Linux MD RAID
10"[0]?

What you _likely_ want is a 1, and if so it seems easier to keep two drives in
your PC and rsync from one to the other[1]. (Also, such is the awesomeness of
rsync that the syncs from one _10 TB_ drive to another literally takes
seconds...)

I thought NASs' niche was more complex RAID levels which mitigate the data
corruption our last-gen filesystems are still prone to. :D

0: [https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-
cloud-2](https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-2)

1: Cron "rsync -aPq --delete {$source} {$destination} >/dev/null 2>&1". (The
scary delete flag deletes files on the destination that are no longer on
source, handling renames and unwanted data as RAID would.)

~~~
baroffoos
You can set it up any way you like really. You have access to a root debian
shell and can do anything at all that can be done on debian.

------
mmanfrin
It's a little more than a shoestring budget, but I built my NAS from an old
Supermicro server I bought on ebay. I found a 4U 24-bay machine for $1200 with
dual xeons, 256GB (!) of RAM, 2x PSUs. All I had to add was a RAID controller
($100~) and a flash drive for the OS (because I was being greedy and wanted
all 24 bays for storage).

It works great -- although it is as loud as a jet engine.

------
floatboth
(2018)

The ROCKPro64 with the PCIe slot has been out for a while.

~~~
Naac
Does PCIe vs USB3 matter when building a NAS in this case? Your bottleneck is
going to be the gigabit network anyway.

~~~
inyorgroove
PCIe might be good so you can use an used enterprise raid card in JBOD mode.
Probably can attach way more drives that way.

------
z3t4
Just go with a full tower, you will be able to fit more cheap HDD's. And use
ZFS mirrors.

------
hpaavola
I have Raspberry Pi 3 B+ hooked with two LaCie Porsche Design P'9220 1T drives
set up in RAID 1. I had to increase the USB current by configuring
max_usb_current=1 in /boot/config.txt and also use good USB charger and cable
(really, some of the cables I had were not good enough) to get it to work
reliably.

It's been working perfectly. Sure, it's not the fastest thing ever, but mostly
the limiting factor is our home WiFi, not the the RasPi.

EDIT: The USB drivers I use do not need external power supply, so the whole
thing needs only two cables; power supply and Ethernet. Ethernet cable is not
necessary if you are ok with WiFi speeds.

~~~
mseidl
I have a usb harddrive connected to an odroid c2, it used to be connected to
an rpi3, but if I'm not mistaken I got 2-3x the write performance when using
the odroid. I have an odroid n2 now, but I haven't bench marked it.

~~~
hpaavola
rpi3b+ got pretty good upgrades for networking and usb speeds compared to
rpi3b. But sure, it is not the fastest thing in town.

------
aloukissas
This is pretty cool! Back in 2012, as a hackathon project, we compiled our
then product (MagFS) to run on raspberry pi - and it worked beautifully
(minimal work needed, as the client was in C++, mostly compiler ifdef's).

For context: MagFS (sold to EMC, as part of the acquisition of Maginatics) was
a full-fledged cloud NAS (mostly following SMB2/3 semantics, although it was
also mostly POSIX-compatible) and used cloud objects (e.g. S3 or OpenStack)
for raw data storage instead of HDD blocks.

------
Nursie
I got tired of ARM-board NAS boxes a few years ago, the performance has always
been pretty bad, usually because of the USB attached storage. Although I had
an orion5x-based WD ShareSpace a few years ago with 4 sata connectors, and
that was terrible too!

These days I'm running a SFF PC with 7TB of SSDs wedged in it, seems to be
doing the job nicely.

------
andrewshadura
I've got a Qotom PC for this purpose. Mine, unfortunately, is an older model
with only USB 2 and SATA, but my Orico RAID box has got both USB and eSATA,
but even then since I run borg backups in the background, I don't miss much
performance over USB (I've been too lazy to reconnect it to SATA).

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edoo
Also for about $300 you can buy a used workstation with relatively beefy specs
and two 40Gbps fiber cards.

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tomaskafka
I just bought a used Synology NAS for about $30 and added HDD. Synology OS is
awesome, with everything I need wrapped in a nice GUI.

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jesuslop
What do you thing on using an Odroid XU4 for that? (with a big USB3 HDD with
multimedia basically)?

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mensetmanusman
If you consider peace of mind, backup in the event of fire, not having to
maintain hard drives after failure, energy cost (and Apple running iCloud on
renewables)... the $10/month iCloud account (2 TB) account is quite cost
competitive with doing it myself...

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lunchables
Depends on your requirements. I have 2x12TB drives in a NAS that I rsync. I
backup some of it to the cloud (software repos, processed photos, misc
documents, etc - maybe 200-300GB) and a lot of it just stays locally (raw
video, linux iso, all my original, unprocessed photos, etc).

I also have an old 10TB disk in a USB enclosure encrypted with LUKS that sits
in my cabinet at work which serves as my off-site backup. Every ~6 months or
so I bring it back and rsync it with a script and take it back to work.

Unfortunately, Apple doesn't even offer anything larger than 2TB, which is
terribly small for anyone who's serious about photos or video. I have hours
and hours of 4k60 (~400MB/min) video from events and vacations that I want to
store. And this was taking using the smartphone in my pocket, I'm not a
professional.

~~~
mensetmanusman
What’s your estimate for the ~cost of the setup, and how many years do you
think it will last? Curious if the cost/month is similar to what I calculated.

~~~
lunchables
Good question, I never considered it. The motherboard, CPU (i7 4770) and RAM
are a very, very old desktop setup.

I checked Amazon and the hard drives were purchased on 10/8/2017 and they were
$479/ea. The U-NAS case was $150 and the SSD was a random 120GB SSD I had
after upgrading my desktop (it was the smallest of the "spare" SSDs I had in a
drawer in my desk).

The 8TB HDD were Seagate Archive Drives that used to be the primary storage
until I upgraded, so they became offsite backups. Those were purchased
5/8/2016 for $248. The external enclosures I use were $19.99 ("ORICO Toolfree
blah blah" I can get you the exact model if you're interested but I assume you
can find something newer and better).

So direct cost, I'm not really sure. A lot of it was "free" for me in the
sense that it was spare hardware. But should be enough for you to guestimate
what a setup would cost.

How long it will last is really hard to say. I monitor the disk health via
smart and by keeping two copies I feel pretty safe. Luckily I'm also a Google
Fiber customer (which means 1TB free Google Drive) and I sync a lot of
critical stuff (software repos, personal photos, documentation like taxes,
etc) to Google Drive for a third backup (following 3-2-1 rule). Right now I
still have >1TB free on my primary 12TB drive, and the growth rate isn't very
high. The most intensive thing I store is video from my iPhone, so that's
really what dictates my rate of growth.

