are there any that is ZFS TrueNas safe? most are USB and i know its not recommended but i like to try if anyone knows which ones can actually work that TrueNas can pool 4 nvme together via USB?

please if any of these work/confirmed working or what brand do i need model to buy.

I have a WD My Cloud Ex2 Ultra that is nearing end of life support. What is a good replacement? I’m looking to store documents and videos that I can play on my TVs. Remote access would be a plus but not a dealbreaker. I also don’t want a subscription based system. TIA.

Hi. I just bought a used Ugreen dxp4800 NAS and have a question about what should I do. The person literally just put the NAS into a cardboard box with 0 padding at all and while I don’t see any obvious damage I’m worried if something got damaged inside during the shipping/handling.

If I spin it up and everything works fine, would you say it is safe to keep it or you wouldn’t risk it?

So, am a noob, though relatively tech savvy. I just can't be bothered to build my own custom NAS and learn everything right now. Maybe later, but right now I just want something easy to store everything and clean up the fragmented mess that is my data storage right now.

I already have 2x Ironwolf 4TB drives, and I'd buy two more, even though they're almost double the price I bought the old ones at 3 years ago... So anyway, 4 bay minimum. I'll do RAID5 (or with Synology, SHR) giving me almost 11TB of space.

Use cases would be general file archive to replace having them local on the PC and on Google Drive, media library, and video editing if possible (though I can live with copying it all to my PC's SSD while editing, I'm editing very occasionally)

Prices here would be

• Ugreen DH4300 Plus for 479€
• Synology DS423 356€ (Outlet unit, returned by original customer. Normal price is 447,99€)

So the Synology is 123€ cheaper

As far as I can tell, Ugreen has much better hardware, but Synology has better, more mature and reliable OS. Some people are saying you could install TrueNAS on the Ugreen, though that seems like a hassle, especially if you already have everything setup with their OS.

With regards to the media library stuff, like running Plex on it, is the HDMI connection of the Ugreen that necessary, if I have my main PC connected to my TV with HDMI anyway? And the TV is a LG C1. So couldn't I just stream the media to my PC which outputs to the TV, or even straight to my TV with some app? Or just access the file over the network on my PC and output to the TV?

Also, I'm sure I'll be upgrading after 2-3 years, and that's fine. I just want something ASAP, especially since we have no idea what's gonna happen to HDD prices soon.

I cant hardware reset, I cant access any menu’s and it ends up on this page. I paid a lot of money for this and the drives and I guess I learned a valuable lesson on 2 factor…
Plz help. 🥺

No pics allowed but it fails to mount and failed to load antivirus and ends up at a hdmi splash page stuck…

Totals first (all GBP):

Item Cost

Minisforum N5 Pro £799.00

Crucial 2×48GB DDR5 5600MHz £849.00

Samsung 990 Pro 2TB £291.50

8TB IronWolf Pro 7200rpm (ST8000NTZ01) £306.00

Unraid Starter (20% off) £30.49

Second 8TB IronWolf Pro £306.00

Total build £2,581.99

Hi All, just wanted to share that I built my first nas, and went for the minisforum n5 pro as felt its the best value for my use case. I will add more NVMEs and HDDs later as I have enough slots but not money 😂 but how do you guys feel about this build. Keen to run some local ai models on this system and the usual immich plus some VMs. Ajy advice for a beginner to this?

Hello,

I started looking into HomeServers, and after a day of reading on Reddit and watching videos, I am lost...

At first, I had two things I needed that made me look into it :

\\- I want, for me and my wife, to be able to save our photos automatically from our phones and to be able to look at them from all our devices, in and outside the house

\\- I want to set up different VLANs on my network to separate the computers and the IOTs on two different wifi networks, and the NAS on a third VLAN with a wired connection to the router/switch.

But then I also got interested in setting up a media server with torrent download (though my protonVPN), Vaultwarden, a cloud with documents and maybe some other stuff later (but probably nothing heavier than the media server).

So for the router, I am thinking about an TP-Link Omada ER706W. Power effective, easy to setup, all-in-one...

I didn't go for a PFSense/OPNSense option because I don't have the PC for it, and I would need to buy a mesh for the wifi I guess.

Then for the NAS, I am a bit lost.

\\- My first option was getting a Synology that would do all of this (DS225+). It seems very easy to use, it should be able to do everything I need, and it seems safe for someone with my level of knowledge.

\\- My second option was a cheaper Synology (DS124 or 223 or beestation), and a mini PC for the transcoding part

\\- My third option was a more powerful NAS that would run on TrueNAS (I was thinking of a pre built NAS with the possibility to install a different OS) with everything on it. The Ugreen seems to be the best option in terms of price and power consumption for this type of performance.

I love the idea of having everything opensource and to have something more powerful for a slightly lower price. But I am a beginner in cyber security and I am worried that it would be dangerous to run something all by myself compared to something easier to setup like DSM.

I would obviously like to setup a VPN tunnel for my connections to the NAS from outside (from my router and not the NAS itself I guess), and to completely block any access to the admin pages from devices that are not physically in the network (so no VPN).

Do you think it is doable for a beginner to setup TrueNAS safely, without having to constantly check it ? Is it worth the trouble ?

What do you think about these ideas of setups and do you think of a better idea (with the price and power consumption in mind) ?

Thank you !

I found a listing of used toshiba MG04ACA600E drives at 6TB for around 100usd each. 49K on hours, and no issues on smart other than g-sense at 171. 15 on start-stop count. They got a full rewrite from 3rd party with 0 errors on the sectors. Good deal?

My use case:

I have a macbook m1 pro 32gb and an iPhone. Both has lots of images and videos I did accumulate over years. It has pics of my trips and also material that I use for video editing in my social media channels. The pictures are important as they are from my family.

My gf has an iphone and a macbook. Her macbook is M3 pro

Hardware I have access for:

I have a ASUS TUF Gaming FX505 with AMD Ryzen 5 3550H, GeForce GTX 1650 and 2TB HDD and a 512GB SSD

The Asus laptop hasn’t been used for nearly 2 years. I used it as a ARR server but stopped later when I moved to a new place. Also I hate the sound of fans when it is running.

My goal:

1. Have a place that I can store all our media (it is around 2 TB for both of us, but will scale in the future)
2. We can access it from home as we need (the same network)
3. It would be good to classify the images somehow based on location or people. I know that me and my gf will have it easy in the future and not filter things and have this NAS (if it will be) as our trash-bag.

Research I have made.

1. I shouldn’t go with 2 bay NAS as it isn’t the best. People realize later that they need a 4 bay NAS so the 2-bay is just wasted money.
2. Using Immich is the best all in one solution for syncing the media from all our devices. It has also AI features for facial recognition.
3. ChatGPT recommended UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro or DXP4800 Plus

My budget

Around 800 euros for the setup not including the storage. My budget for the storage is another 800. I live in the Netherlands. It is more important to invest money in the storage because family media is important and I want storage solution that lives for long.

I saw some people buy an SSD for caching and HDD for RAID. I don’t know if the NAS or DAS I will get is going to have these.

Questions:

1. Based on my use case, what hardware do you recommend for me or a setup?
   1. Should I go with a mini pc and a DAS?
   2. Should I go only with a 4bay NAS and let immich do the AI processing on my macbook (or use the Asus laptop) as it is at home most of the time?
   3. Other options you recommend .... ?
2. What storage solutions do you recommend?

I've been going back and forth on this for a while and can't decide which route makes more sense.

This will mostly be for home use. I want somewhere to keep family photos, back up files from our computers, and store movies and TV shows so we can watch them around the house. Nothing too crazy, just something reliable that I won't have to worry about all the time.

At first I thought building my own NAS would be more fun and give me more flexibility, but then I started wondering if I'm just making things harder than they need to be. A pre-built NAS seems a lot simpler, but I'm not sure if I'd regret spending the extra money later.

For those of you who've already been down this road, would you still make the same choice? If you mainly use your NAS for family storage and media, would you build one again or just buy something like a Synology?

Curious to hear what you'd do if you were starting from scratch today.

I recently upgraded my NAS to a F4 425 plus that comes with 3x M.2 NVMe SSD slots. I've only ever had one with 2x HDD slots before. Looking to utilise this upgrade.

I mainly use my NAS for jellyfin and immich, and read storing the metadata and cache from them speeds up load times for thumbnails on mobile devices when scrolling. A lot of people have mentioned installing the OS on it as well, and keep the HDDs for media files only.

Ive seen some people mention you have to get TLC, avoid QLC, get it with DRAM... and so on, and then go on another post and see people recommend DRAMless, HMB, or just the cheapest NVMe they can get their hands on seeing as prices are crazy right now.

So my question is, what's your take on what to look for? Is there a feature you buy/avoid? Do you focus on TBW over IOPS? Will one person using these apps see any difference? Or is it only noticeable if you've got a dozen people using it at once? Do you just go for the cheapest and call it a day?

Hi everyone! I've built a few gaming PCs in the past and am setting up my first home server. I have my current hand-me-down parts from other builds and a few apps I'm wanting to run. Here's the setup

Specs:

* i5-13400 * ASUS Prime something mobo * 32GB (4x8gb) 3200mt/s DDR4 * Arc A380 * PCIe SATA controller * 1x256GB Nvme - boot * 1x512GB SATA SSD * 1x2TB Firecuda HDD * 2x3TB Hitachi HDDs * 4x8TB (2x Barracuda, 2x WD Red)

Plan:

* TrueNAS Scale OS * Plx Media Server (using i5's iGPU) * 24TB usable storage from 8TB drives * immich (running ML on A380) * 3TB usable storage from the hitachi drives * LANcache * 2TB Firecuda * TailScale / PIA VPNs * Vaultwarden to migrate from the online vault * Encrypted Google Drive backup for setup files and database * *Unsure of any use for the 512GB SATA SSD... maybe some sort of metadata cache*

I'm also thinking about running tailscale to setup a chatbot on my gaming pc in the future. would love any feedback or suggestions!

I've been using a D-link DNS-320 ShareCenter for over 10 years and it served my purposes just fine so as you can see my requirements are very minimal. Unfortunately it died so I need a replacement. I just need a cheap 2 bay NAS that I can attach to my network to store (mostly video) files and access the files from other devices on my network. I don't need to run apps or transcode video or cloud backup. I found the Synology DS223J and UGREEN DH2300, would these be good or are there other options?

Hello everyone,

I am still very new to the NAS world and am giving it another try XD
I finally got a Miniforum N5 Air
I am looking to setup this up.

I probably went overkill on the Ram (got 2x32gb)

I thought about running the apps and OS on a serverfriendly m.2 SSD and have 2 hdds with 4tb as storage.

I theory I also have 2 more m.2 ssds in my pc that I could use if it makes sense for the set up.

I want to build a family and friends NAS storage that has all data with remote access with speed. I want to have the group admin family friends and guests. With friends having access if I toggle it on or off. And guests having access for a limited time.

My question is how do I start.
Do I use unraid, truenas or the native OS? - and why?
And how should I set up my drives?
The current m2 ssd hast 1tb
I have 2 more 2tb m.2ssd
2x4tb ironwolf

Thanks for the help. I am kinda lost in the ChatGPT pit and feel like I paralysis and stuck with a direction

We are a very small design company with 4 users that would like to have a NAS system and backup for our data.

We were looking at Synology 925+ or maybe UGREEN DXP4800 after reading some other posts on here.

We would like a system around 64-128TB for sure but we also would like a backup that is no on a cloud service of the same data. Would you recommend buying 2 of whichever NAS system to back up each other? And are the aforementioned systems ideal for what we are looking for?

If you're planning to buy NAS drives soon, you might not want to wait any longer. The AI/datacenter buildout has hit hard drives hard:

• WD has said its entire HDD output is sold out for all of 2026; enterprise drives are quoted on ~2-year backorders.
• HDD contract prices jumped the most in 8 quarters, and the vast majority of drive revenue now goes to cloud/enterprise = very thin inventory for the rest of us.
• Reports have the average drive up around 46% in recent months. And it's not just an enterprise problem anymore - it's hitting the shelf.

I track cheapest $/TB daily across 8 countries, and bare drives are around $30-34/TB right now. For years that number kept dropping. But that flipped last fall - prices have been climbing since around September 2025, and with the supply reserved through 2026, the safe bet is it keeps going up, not down.

What's everyone seeing? Stocking up on drives now, or hoping it blows over?

Why are NAS units so expensive. Aren't they just a computer with multi HD's

What a. I missing?

I admit I know not about them but want and need one.

Help.me with a inexpensive way to do backup my network.