I don’t know if I can claim a spare hard drive hooked up to a Raspberry Pi as a NAS, but it’s what I have - and it works quite well for my single-user use case.

I’ve got a Synology 918+ with 16TB in raid 10.

Of the synology software, I regularly use: Photos (photo backup and organization tool), Drive (a private “cloud” sync like Dropbox), the contacts and calendar services, and surveillance station, their security camera monitor/recorder. Via Docker, I also run dokuwiki, gitea, draw.io, minio, postgres, freshrss, firefly3, calibre, and a few others. Like others, Time Machine backups of laptops and backups of non-apple hardware use a lot of the space.

I also have my older Synology 213 running still just as a place to backup important stuff from the primary.

I used a Rasberry Pi 4 to make a pi-hole ad blocker. I then learned you could just plug in a harddrive to it (USB) to make a very simple NAS. I bought an SSD to USB case/adapter, and with basic tutorials online I now have a network drive. To reiterate, I have no programming skills. Both the pi-hole and now the NAS were from copy-paste command line walkthroughs.

It’s not a fancy “NAS” as far as redundancy or backup, but now all 4 of the gaming PCs (wife and kids have their own) can connect to the same drive for sharing stuff. I also use it to manually back up all our photos/videos. I love it.

It’s something I always wanted to setup for my personal files, docs, media etc. but get dissuaded once I see synology costs, hard drive requirements, RAID setup options and just generally power draw / heat&noise generation. Looking forward to answers here, I’d be very happy to get off cloud storage but not if it’s a second job maintaining and setting it up

I have a $60 ASRock mobo + Intel Celeron quad core combo. Stuck 16gb of Ram in it and two sata controllers. I think ran was the most expensive and the computer now costs $150 without the drivers. I have x8 4TB drives and a 60GB ssd running true nas. That gives me 24TB space and two redundant drives for failure tolerance. From there I run jails (FreeBSD containers) for NextCloud, MiniDLNA, and transmission.

Theres plenty of replies with options of decent, current NAS setups - so I’ll reply with my 1st NAS instead…

You could start with a Pi-NAS to save a lot of $$coin$$… start with a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB; it has gigabit ethernet, so it meets that baseline… since you’ll be running over the USB-3 BUS regardless, you can get away with buying cheap USB drives; there are many brands, but Western Digitals are pretty cheap… they go up to like 40GB now a days, but 4TB drives are only $100 or so… I went with two 8TB drives. Its better, IMO, to go with the larger 3.5" versions because they come with external power supplies. I found with the smaller 2.5" drives, the Pi could only power one sucking power over USB…

I used no RAID, as you have to jump thru a few extra hoops to get RAID setup over drives on the USB-3 bus… backup was done thru my Proxmox PBS server - but we’re not here for the safe backup talk, right?

All this was running OpenMediaVault, which is a pretty decent NAS software. It has support for all the connection types you want - and believe it or not, I also ran Plex in docker and got decent results; while I wasn’t able to do any transcoding, wireless playback worked quick enough for me - and I could even watch movies remotely…

I mention this setup b/c a 16TB Pi-NAS can be had for $300, all in… you can see speeds of 100MB/s but I found 40-50MB/s was an average because of WiFi or other bottlenecks.

Its cool to have options when building a NAS; I’ve since moved my NAS to a Proxmox VM on my Dell Poweredge server, but the Pi-NAS ran without fail for four years…

• pAULIE42o
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I have an older R710 running TrueNAS right now with 1tb of (usable) flash storage and 10Gb connection the to the rest of my lab.

I have another TrueNAS instance running as a Proxmox VM with a Lenovo SA120 DAS attached to it, which has 2x 10Tb drives in mirror mode for mass storage. It’s also technically connected via 10Gb to the rest of my lab.

I have a synology NAS, two bays with 4TB in raid.

Mostly used for Plex (Netflix alternative and for music streaming) but also find these useful:

Vaultwarden (password manager) Virtual machine (for torrenting) Sonarr (torrent indexer) Radarr (torrent indexer) Synology Photos (photo backup) Synology Drive (personal cloud storage) Joplin (notebook)

Probably some other stuff as well. I highly recommend mariushosting.com if you have or end up using a synology NAS. Amazing tutorials for just about anything.

Desktop PC running proxmox with a bunch of VM’s. Mostly focused around hosting Plex but some other stuff as well. Below are some of my VM’s. All are running Ubuntu server btw.

• HDDs get passed into this VM which uses mergerfs to pool them all together. Then I’m running an NFS server to share the drives with the other VM’s that need access.
• Torrent client, sonarr, radarr, etc. To automatically acquire content.
• Plex VM
• Gaming servers (hosts Minecraft, valheim, etc servers)
• externally exposed nginx instance, hosts sites such as overseer.
• internally exposed nginx instance, allows for https access to all internal services (sonarr, radarr, flood, etc).

I’ve got a ‘NAS’ setup on my desktop computer/server. I use it for almost everything. It runs VMs and games and self-hosted servers, etc, etc. It is Arch Linux but does it all. Plex/Sonarr/Radarr/QBittorrent.

24 TB of HDD in raid 10.

I haven’t found a good reason to keep a separate computer/server. It pretty much just always complicates the setup. If I need more separation, a VM is usually a better answer in most cases as far as I can see.

On Reddit, we had a r/selfhosted. Do we have something like that here, in the new frontier?

I’m using a Synology setup. I thought I’d grab an off the self option as I have a habit of going down rabbit holes with DIY projects. It’s working well, doing a one-way mirror off my local storage with nightly backups from the NAS to a cloud server.

Computer with Ubuntu Server, with a Ryzen APU (3400g), 16GB DDR4 RAM, and 2 x 4TB WD Red CMR Drives.

Use it as a media server for Jellyfin, and also as a file server using NFS. Works super awesome and I wish I had done this sooner

I use an old computer that is reasonably energy efficient and have Unraid. 3 NAS hard drives, 1 SSD for cache, a USB for the OS, and that’s it.

Using the dockers on inbuilt app store, I have Filebrowser, Syncthing, Qbittorrent, Mumble as the most used. Filebrowser faces outward and is a simple replacement for Nextcloud.

I’m not technologically minded but it wasn’t hard to setup or use. It mostly stores backups for photos.

@Gaywallet @technology I have a synology and I use it only for NAS type things and run minio on it via docker. It’s been up and running fine for about 8 years but now that I want to upgrade and add things like 2.5g ethernet, it is a pain. My upgrade path is getting a SFF case and building my own NAS with off the shelf components. It should be rock solid with FreeNAS/TrueNAS/UnRaid and easy to upgrade and tinker with over time.