Can anyone guide me (a newcomer) to the subtle art of storing everything I possibly want in a NAS? Also how do I build a NAS from scratch? Thanks for any help at all!
I’m looking to see the answers myself. I’m a data hoarder on a budget. I went and bought the cheapest 4ghz capable cpu (I run security cameras also) and matching non oem motherboard I could find on ebay. I slapped a ssd and a 8tb hdd on it and called it a day. I run this in my basement and have Debian with ssh, samba and an http server (no port forwarding of course for security reasons) with a search engine I wrote that I use to search and find stuff from a browser (I have a lot of movies).
There are probably better ways to do this but it generally works for me. If you’re interested in hoarding hundreds and hundreds of TBs you’d need to do something else. You could still fit a considerable number of drives in something like this thanks to PCI/pci-e raid cards.
YouTube is your friend. So is piracy. And torrents. And a must, get cheap HDD’s.
Why cheap hdds and not ssds?
HDDs are cheaper than SSDs per GB
Shuckable HDDs are even cheaper per GB
I’ve purchased several 18TB WD Red Pro HDDs for $249.37, or $13.85/TB. I’ve also purchased and price tracked shuckable HDDs and don’t recall ever finding a better $/TB than that.
SSDs are unnecessarily expensive when you’re looking at hoarding dozens or hundreds of terabytes of data. You won’t be gaming off your drives you use for hoardings so there’s really little benefit except in transferring stuff off them. Most of what people hoard tends to be media or documents which are find being played directly off even a slow modern HDD.
When they start making 12TB SSDs (or larger) at a similar $/TB, I’ll start using them over HDDs for hoarding.
I’d agree with everything except for “cheap” HDDs. Depends on how valuable your data is to you. And the best $/TB I’ve come across for an HDD, that I trust with my data, is the 18TB WD Red Pro HDDs for $249.37, or $13.85/TB.
If you are completely new, I would recommend a Synology. Very easy to use.
If you truely want to do one from scratch truenas I think is the goto project, (I personally go with pre-built solutions of external HDD or Synology/QNAP NAS).
It really depends on what your ultimate goal is.
NAS is great for centralized storage for multiple devices to access. But isn’t totally necessary if your just looking to store data and access that date on a single device at a time. don’t discount buying two external hard drives. one for storage and the other for backup.
If you really want a NAS Then there are many options. You could go a prebuilt solutions, Synology, QNAP, TerraMaster etc…
If you have an old computer laying around, that can be an option as well (Although power usage could be an issue. )
The biggest mistake I see new comers make, is thinking putting multiple drives together in a redundant configuration (RAID) is a backup. This isn’t the case you better off going with 2 single drives and have a daily backup between the two of them.
You’re going to have to do a bit of your own internet research first, and figure out what your goals are (how much data/space you plan on hoarding, how you’re going to use it, how much you’re willing to spend on hard drives, in addition to hardware, etc.) before anyone can better answer your question. You could start with something as small as a Raspberry Pi, to something as large as multiple rack mount HDD enclosures, or something kind of in between like a Synology. When you say “storing everything I possibly want,” that is extremely vague and you’re asking us to guess what you want.
I am glad you asked. The question to start with is what do YOU want to store? Narrowing it down would make this easier to determine what hardware you might need. For example, if you are storing video media for personal viewing, then an intel CPU with quicksync would be a great idea to have as it allows you to transcode your media on the fly with an app like plex, jellyfin, or emby.
