Selfhosted

yes, try freenas/truenas

It'll work fine. A NAS is just a PC. Try Unraid if you want a user friendly UI. It costs money but it's only a one off payment for a lifetime license, and they have a free trial.

You totally can, but since it will be on all day with 4 hdd look into wattages you want to live with. There are some small NUCs or Pi based NAS with low wattages. There is OpenMediaVault, FreeNAS/TrueNAS software to install

Anything that can can provide storage attached to the network is a potential NAS. It doesn't take a lot of power to just offer and store files. If you start getting into stuff like live transcoding or heavy encrypt/decrypt that's a bit different matter.

No reason why not. May be a little power-hungry depending on the spec but if you already have it go for it. FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) is the usually suggested OS to run: https://www.truenas.com/freenas/

Since you have 4 HDD slots probably run 4 disks in a RAID 5 so think of how much space you need. RAID 5 is n-1 so if you have 4x 10TB drives you will be left with 30TB of space before formatting. You can calculate here: https://www.raid-calculator.com/

Then either mirror the SSDs for OS and caching or just use one. Depends on your budget really.

Absolutely anything can be turned into a NAS, as long as you're aware of your own needs and the hardware's capabilities. A NAS is just a computer with some specific requirements.

When I first built my NAS, it only used parts that I got for free. A cheap micro ATX board with only two RAM slots, an i3-4160 CPU, 2x2G RAM, a worn-out SSD, and a 1T HDD. It couldn't run something like TrueNAS, but it was enough for Proxmox and some Alpine containers running services like Samba, Transmission, Wireguard, and a small Debian VM for me to fuck around with. The single storage disk means there is no redundancy, so I only store replaceable data on it, like TV shows and installers.

There are many hardware-focused channels on video platforms that offer guides for budget home servers. Wolfgang's Channel is good, and Hardware Haven and Raid Owl just finished a competition of building a sub-$200 home lab.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #377 for this sub, first seen 27th Dec 2023, 01:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Of course. Just put disks in and set up whatever remote filesystem and it's a NAS.

My NAS is just a very old Acer desktop from like 2011. I bought a Fractal Meshify 2 case which can hold I think 14 hard drives and moved the internals into that. Works great.

Eventually I had to get a pcie card for more data ports, and replace the power supply with one that’s more than 300w.

Another option is to use openmediavault.

I haven't looked at truenas.

My first NAS was an old desktop that I got for $300 running an FX-6300 and a GTX 550, I slapped a couple hard drives in there, installed Ubuntu, and made an SMB share.

I'd recommend installing TrueNAS Scale on a system rather than doing what I did in part due to it being so much better than what I was doing, but you could run it on a potato if you wanted.

Hell my latest NAS upgrade is going from a PowerEdge T610 (tower server from like 2010ish) running TrueNAS Scale to a normal desktop (from 2017) running TrueNAS Scale

If anything using normal desktop hardware makes servicing it easier than using old server hardware

This is what I do, using proxmox.

I do something similar to https://youtu.be/Hu3t8pcq8O0 for the NAS bit. Then I have a VM with docker containers for different services

Unraid is a great option for anyone, but beginners in particular. It does, however, cost money and isn't open source.

Yeah. That's what I used to do when I started out.

The simplest thing to do is install Debian on the computer and create partitions. You have 4 HDDs and 2 SSDs so it'd be stupid to create 6 separate partitions for each drive.

See in the BIOS if your motherboard supports software RAID1, so you are protected against drive failure somewhat. This will allow you to get something barebones running that'll use at least 2 drives with redundancy. I assume the mobo RAID1 is stupid and only allows for max 2 drives, so the other drives will be just laying around useless. If that's the case, probably use the 2 SSDs first. I see other posters recommending higher orders of RAID, but I only have 2 HDDs so I never really delved into that :P Perhaps that's sound

With a system like that you could probably set up some small NFS for sharing your files by configuring it manually from the terminal.

Note that going with raw linux is "simpler" in the sense that it's perhaps easier to wrap your head around or tinker with, but TrueNAS or Unraid have GUIs that will allow you to create e.g. the mentioned NFS share with a few clicks, rather than having to do it from the terminal. Depends on what you're looking for. You could move up to TrueNAS or Unraid once you've played with raw Linux enough for example.

Once you have that,

I only ever dealt with ZFS and TrueNAS. ZFS will allow you to create a "partition" (pool in zfs terms) from many drives at the same time, so you'd be able to use more drives than just the two from RAID1.

The drives that you have are probably shitty SMR drives whose write speed dramatically slows down once you're writing to them for a longer time. Consider buying CMR drives in the future, or just going all-SSD if it fits your usecase. ZFS hates SMR drives.

Yes most hardware can be a server, but i recommend hdds thats made for nases!

A NAS is basically some software running on a computer, so you can use a desktop as that computer, ideally with a light operating system (for example, Linux in text only mode).

HOWEVER: desktops are designed for far higher computational loads than needed by a NAS, plus things like graphical user interfaces and direct connection of user peripherals such as mice, so even when idle they consume a lot more power than the kind of hardware used in a typical NAS.

Also the hardware in a good NAS will have things like extra higher speed connectors for HDDs/SDDs (such as SATA) rather than you having to use slower stuff like USB.

So keep in mind that a desktop as NAS will consume significantly more power than a dedicated NAS (as the latter will probably be running on something like an ARM and have a power source dimensioned for a couple of HDDs, not to run a dedicate graphics card like a desktop has) and probably won't fit as many disks.

If you're ok with having most disks be accessed a bit slower and USB3 work for you (and, for example, if your NAS is on 100 Mbit Ethernet, it's the network that's the slowest thing, not USB3) then it's usually better to use an old notebook rather than desktop because notebooks were designed for running of batteries hence consume significantly less power.

Frankly I would advise against using an old desktop as NAS mainly because in a year or two of continued use you'll have paid enough in extra electricity costs vs using a NAS to pay for a simple but decent dedicated NAS.

Yes, you can. What do you want to use it for? If its just a NAS you could use TrueNAS but if you want more services I would use proxmox.

If you are wanting tiered storage (ie SSDs as cache) then TrueNAS is probably the right answer as it uses ZFS and is very flexible.

My NAS is an mATX mobo with an i5, 64G RAM, 8 disk drives, 3 nvme drives, and an ARC GPU for video transcoding.

Disk drives are all mirrored. One nvme runs NixOS which is easy enough to redeploy if the drive dies. One nvme is cache on top of the disk drives. Last nvme I use for temp fast storage like Jellyfin transcoding.

Its more of a combo NAS/server as I run most self hosted apps on it (tor node, monero node, jellyfin, *arr stack, etc).

Unraid as I understand it will do that

Sure. My NAS I use for backups is also made from ancient desktop PC running ownCloud. The system is slow-ish by today's standards, but since I had it already, I could invest in bigger SSD for data storage.

yep

https://www.truenas.com/

Just google perfect media server

Saving for later

Yes. Go look at TrueNAS Scale

As others have said, you certainly can.

If your current system is a Windows PC then a super easy way to go about it is to purchase a product called Stablebit DrivePool which will allow you to combine multiple hard disks into one drive, and then do duplication of data you find important. Share that virtual drive as a Share that your other systems can see. DriePool is a super reliable product. Only downside other than the one time cost is that its redundancy is based on file duplication, which has the benefit that you can pull your drives out and use them elsewhere as any one file is always contained on a single drive, but unlike parity based solutions it’s super space inefficient to retain duplicate copies. It’s a tradeoff between simplicity and time to recover in a failure versus maximising disk use and reducing costs. Depending what your NAS is for, maybe you don’t need that redundancy but. You can also team it up with another product called SnapRaid (which is free) which can make your redundancy parity based.

I ran DrivePool for years on Windows and it’s a great product. Windows itself isn’t overly optimised for this use case, but as a predominately Mac household having access to Windows on a headless system was handy if I had to run the odd Windows only apps, so using Windows had its perks.

While Windows and a PC will cost more to operate, you’ll potentially be out well ahead if you don’t have to buy additional hardware. It’s likely worth running what you have into the ground rather than buying new hardware. There’s guides on some things you can do to optimise Windows too.

I’ve since moved to using UnRaid which is a paid product (one time purchase) designed specifically for NAS on your own PC. Great solution but I’d say that the barrier of entry is much higher than a Windows box. Still very versatile product. Moved to that as over time I’ve used a bit more Linux in my life, and I also had reduced need for Windows as the NAS OS.

Haven’t tried TrueNas but that’d be an alternative to UnRaid.