r/HomeNAS

Hi everyone, I was wondering whats the best prebuilt nas setup as I do not want to lose data with Truenas. I am pretty experienced with technology but do not want to risk with my data. I'm thinking about getting 2 2tb drives, (refurbished, can get it for ~60$ each) but I do not know which nas to get. Many of them are kinda expensive right now, but I do not need all the latest features, I just need auto sync and SMB. I use OpenVPN so I do not need to connect it to the internet. I'm also ok with it being a bit slow, as it would just auto sync when im home. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Hi everyone, I’m looking to get my first 2-Bay NAS mainly for photo and file storage across my family’s phones and devices, where we each can store all our individual stuff and access it privately.

My main use case is: • Backing up photos/videos from multiple iPhones • Easy file access for family members • Remote upload/download when outside the house • Reliable long-term use • Simple backups without too much maintenance • Preferably something beginner-friendly

I’ve been reading around and noticed a common discussion: Synology seems to have better software, while UGREEN seems to offer better hardware for the price.

I’m currently deciding between: • UGREEN DXP2800 • Synology DS225+

Which should i go with? Or if there are better recommendations, please let me know!

Also, i’m thinking to get the WD Red Plus hard disk, 8TBx 2 and do a RAID 1, or is mirroring unnecessary?

Hello Guys

Im currently looking for a NAS for at home to share with my family because we want to get rid of all the iCloud and OneDrive subscriptions.

In the moment every family member has its own OneDrive and we all have a Shared iCloud storage over Apple Family.

What are the best options for a NAS?
I heard from QNAP, UGREEN and SYNOLOGY.
What are the advantages of each?

What is the best option for such a Family usage?
Which would you reccomend and also what would you reccomend as Disks?

For me its important, to sync all the data from iCloud and Onedrive. Without to much effort later on.
Also its very important that there is no Risk of loosing the data.

I want at least 2 TB storage space.

Is there something else I need to pay attention to?

Edit:
I heard about Raid 1 and Raid 5.
What is important there?

I previously asked about a Urgreen or Terramaster NAS, but ive seen this unbranded prebuilt PC that I only need to add drives, Ram and an OS it the specs looks vastly better while being cheaper.

Does anyone have any experience with these machines? am I missing anything?

I am looking to run PleX or Jellyfin on my Apple TV and want to get a robust, cheap and relatively future proof NAS for it. What are the current recommendations? I don't need anything particularly advanced, I just would like to it play 4k movies without issue. Thanks in advance.

I'm just wondering, does anyone buy a NAS only for use as a Plex server and for their own media?

I'm looking at getting a NAS for home so I can store photos on there as well as Google Photos and Apple. Anyone got any recommendations?

Hello all,

I am hoping for some guidance. I am a coach for some youth sports teams that my son plays on and love to break down/share film with the families.

I am tired of having to juggle Google drive space to get the next game up and am hoping to host the video myself.

What hardware would you suggest that would have a set up that is on the simpler side?

Also, if you have had a similar use case, what pitfalls can you prepare me about so I can avoid them?

Thanks in advance

I’m preparing to set up my first NAS and I’d love to hear your advice.

What do you wish you knew when you started?

My use case will be photo/media storage and sharing to start but as I learn more I want to also set up a personal firewall, virtual machines to experiment and learn about coding, file sharing, and probably more once I get my feet under me.

I’ll be running a 2 bay UGREEN DXP2800 with (2) 14TB WD Ultrastar HDD, (2) 2TB SSD- one for cache and one for apps/programs. I have invested in upgrading the ram to 32gb also.
I still need to buy a switch compatible with the Deco system and a UPS. My budget is pretty low overall so I’ve been piecing it together a bit at a time.

My network runs off a Deco mesh system so I’ll be running LAN from the router to the server but it will likely need to be in an occupied room so noise control will be an aspect I need to account for. I have already set up Nord on the router for the household so I anticipate that applying to the server as well.

Once I get it running reliably I will want to access the contents remotely for up to 8 people, but I’m not in a rush to get everyone access until I know it’s solid, especially since I’m still learning about network settings and such.

Though I’m learning pretty fast I’ve never tried my hand at coding previously and I don’t use AI so recommended guides and tools are welcome but I won’t be consulting Claud or any other LLM.

In addition to this project I’m a self-taught graphic designer and am looking forward to exploring some 3D printing so if I can use this tool towards those goals also I’ll consider it a win. I also love to do some lightweight gaming when I have time.

Are there any guides or blogs you like to follow? Anywhere you pick up lots of tips online or any particular learning resources you’re glad you invested in? Any mistakes I should be forewarned of? Anything you wish you did different when you got started? Any place you’ve found particularly excellent software options or deals?

Lay it on me folks!

Hey everyone, this is my very first NAS experience and I hit my first snag.

I recently bought a UGREEN Hard Drive Enclosure (SATA to USB 3.0 HDD Caddy for 2.5/3.5 inch SSD HDD, Lay-Flat Docking Station with DC Power Adapter) for my home server.

I ran into a major issue yesterday when a planned temporary power cut occurred: once AC power was restored, the enclosure remained powered off and required a manual button press to turn back on.

Luckily I was at home, but I would have had a really bad time if I were away for weeks.

I immediately reached out to UGREEN Support to ask if there was a configuration for auto-power-on or an alternative product with power failure recovery. After providing my invoice, their support team confirmed that there is "no setting solution can solve" the issue and that they do not have a proper item that can auto-power after power loss.

Does anyone use a 2.5"/3.5" SATA enclosure that they can confirm will automatically power back on after a power outage? I need a product suitable for a remote, headless setup. Any specific model recommendations would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Hi! Super newbie here

I saw a listing for a suspiciously cheap price for a (albeit, used) 12 TB Exos Enterprise HDD, it's (converted) 100 dollars, whereas a new one would be more than 5x the price. The guy posted a CrystalDiskInfo report, it showed as healthy on all fronts. Once I get it, how can I check its health reliably?

Edit: Even though CrystalDiskInfo shows " healthy", what indicators in the software am I looking for? Because to me most of it gibberish. Like, even though it says "healthy", is there anything that can indicate its bogus?

To be clear, I can easily get my money back if it turns out to be a scam.

Looking to get my first NAS specifically to run home media server, to play content with all the bells and whistles there is (4K HDR Dolby Atmos/Vision), direct stream to TV (Sony Bravia 5). Currently contemplating either Asustor Drivestor AS1202T or Lockerstor AS6702T running the usual Plex/Jellyfin, does it matter if a NAS device has slower CPU? Or would this cause any microstutters/lags during the content playback?

The NAS is going to be used specifically to host media server, HDD in JBOD and no data backup is required (I have a separate DAS for archiving). Is there anything I'm overlooking here on the importance of NAS CPU?

Never had a NAS, but the more I dive into the requirements to meet the solution I’m looking for, the more I think NAS is the solution. But someone correct me if there’s a cheaper path. Looking to implement a solution this year.

For me (today) it’s a simple planned 2 use: family photo repository from all photos/vids (multiple users phones), backed up/copied/stored in a per person file structure and having that effort completed effortlessly (sounds like a few photo export software options are out there for to get photos off iPhone to storage device). Also, 4K /UHD media consumption on our living room tv over home network. Both of these will only continue increasing in storage size need.

Have and will maintain iCloud plan for family but downgrade from current 2TB to 200GB for offsite important doc storage; will delete photos as limits are hit from oldest to newest.
Will maintain monthly copying of photo/video and important docs onto cold storage external HDD.

Currently have a mishmosh of data on 3 externals, 1 is Time Machine. Have ~5TB data today and know that’ll increase; ~500GB stuff critical to backup. Constantly plug/unplug portable external for media on tv watched via VLC.

Thinking two 8TB seagate ironwolf in a 4 bay Raid 0, protecting for expansion later. I think the 7200 RPM is necessary for the 4K streaming?

Is a NAS necessary for this situation? All my feeds are filled with UGreen (great marketing)…would you recommend the 4300 for this use case or another model/brand? How about HDD selection? TIA

EDIT: clarified more than one person's phone photos I want to back-up and specified today's count of must-backup data.

I built my own NAS and I just finished long testing all my HDD's and they all passed (wooo 🥳) now I am thinking which route will I take for my precious storage. I have 4 10 tb HDDs with a 256 nvme for the OS and will be adding another ssd to run jellyfin. What OS would you guys pick in my situation?

My dad decided today that we (my dad, my brother, and I) should set up a network file system (NFS) hosted by one of our PCs, which are in the same room. After searching up information for this project, I realized how important people seem to think a UPS is. Since my dad does not like UPSs, I decided to try looking into why people consider it so important so that I could either show that UPSs are over-hyped and that I don't need it, or convince my dad that they are necessary and prevent him from implementing the NFS without one.

Unfortunately, I could only find threads explaining the importance of a UPS with very high-level explanations such as "to prevent data loss." What I am interested in is a bit lower-level, such as:

• Is a UPS more important for a NFS than a computer with entirely local storage and why?
• Is the UPS obsolete if I only have one for the NFS and not the computer using it?
• If the NFS is operating on one of the PCs and another PC is using it, can the capacitance of the NFS PC's power supply be enough, and is it even enough for a PC without a NFS to be "safe"?
• Is the scp command over SSH just as vulnerable to data corruption as communications with the NFS, and if it is, then why can't the NFS have the same protections?

Lastly, I would also like to know if anyone here has experienced data loss or corruption with their NAS or NFS from a missing or failed UPS. If you have, then I would appreciate any useful information that event provided you with.

I decided to include some detailed information about my planned setup. Firstly, my dad wants only the home directories on our PCs to be stored on the NFS. We are also planning on using our best PC as the NFS, which all three (including the host) PCs will connect to, and will not be using RAID due to having only one and not three available M.2 drives, but we might make a dedicated setup with RAID later on. Another idea we had was to have the NFS on a separate 10Gbps wired LAN, which would use the NFS host as a switch for the other PCs, cutting the independent router out of the system. Lastly-lastly, the software we are using for the NFS is nfs-common and nfs-kernel-server.

Addenda:

While NAS refers to a device, I have been informed that NFS strictly refers to a protocol, so each time I used NFS, I was really referring to a NAS that uses the NFS protocol.

The primary goals of this NAS are to allow me, my dad, and my brother to be able to use any of the three computers and be able to access project files and other documents that would usually only be available on one device, and to give the three of us some good experience. I don't think my dad intended to use it as a more secure storage with redundancy or as a backup, otherwise we would definitely be using RAID.

Not all of each user's home directories will be on the NAS. We have a way of implanting a local file/folder in a remote folder. Since making this post, I realized how bad it could be if certain folders were remotely stored and then accessed from computers with different Linux distros, so I will be putting more thought into what files are remote.

I will not be using 10Gbps ethernet because my motherboard is only rated to 1000 Mbps.

I made a post a few days ago asking if I should get WD Red Pro drives I found for cheaper than Seagate Ironwolf pro drives with more storage.

The consensus among most people was nobody had any bad experiences with WD, even if Seagate was generally higher quality, I should still get the WD since it was an extra 6TB for 50$ less.

Well I checked my order today, and as of yesterday, the price on those WD drives has gone up OVER 140$ EACH!

So thankful for the input I got when I did. It was able to give me the confidence to pull that trigger and saved me almost 300$ lmao.

hello! i’m just getting into NAS, but i do mainly want to use it for photo and video backup from my phone :) currently i’m using a hdd, but im almost maxing out the storage + im sad that i cant access the photos and videos on my phone directly :( i also have an icloud subscription for 2TB, but thats also running out soon and upgrading to a higher storage is taking a toll long term :/

i saw lots of reviews on the ugreen and synergy NAS, but it also seems like quite a lot of people use it for streaming/running a business/content creation editing etc. my use would likely be much more basic, but i do want it to be reliable and accessible from my phone! :)

does anyone have any recommendations on cost friendly NAS (and ideally some recommended harddisks to go with the recommended NAS) please :) also there’s quite abit of hardware/software lingo that i’m unable to fully understand, would appreciate if someone eli5-ed it :”)

thank you!!

I have no idea how to do it and I can’t really find information about it

This popped up on my Edge home page. I have no idea if this shopping site is legit. The drives are only warrantied for 3 months.

WD Purple Pro 18TB for $86.49

WD Red Plus 6TB for $38.49

I was hoping to set up some basic network storage to simplify moving files around the house (think putting movies and music on the media pc, moving STL files from my desktop to my 3d printing machine, etc) and it seems like even the cheapest single-drive NAS devices start at £150 - I don't understand what's in them that they cost so much?

I'd be more than happy to DIY something if they're just taking advantage of people who want an all-in-one solution, but I'm not entirely sure where to start with that.

Does anyone have any suggestions of what to look into? I was hoping to get something for more like £50 as I'm out of a job at the minute so can't really go overboard spending.

What I have:

• many hard drives
• many years of experience with linux, terminal use, and computer hardware
• a couple of random raspberry pis a
• router which might let me plug one (1) usb drive into it to add that to the network

What I don't have:

• Space or money to have another desktop pc running full-time
• experience with NAS software
• experience with nas hardware
• spare sata ports on my media pc

What I don't need:

• complicated software, random apps, or even a gui
• access to the storage from anything other than pcs and laptops within our wifi network
• super fast speeds
• anything running windows

What I might like:

• the ability to put my half a dozen random hard drives and ssds to good use
• RAID / redundancy (I think drives have to be the same size for RAID and mine are not)
• support for access from linux and macOS