[ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

[DJ-Pfulio]

On 11/30/18 3:26 PM, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
> Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
> QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
> whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
> motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.

If you have more money than time, buy, but expect to be inflexible for
everything you might want in the future.  Did the NAS boxes ever get
over their approved disk model lists?

If you have more time than money, build your own.  It is pretty amazing
what $150 will get you if you have an old case laying around.  Adding
more disks through external storage arrays is pretty easy now, thanks to
USB3.

I've described my NAS setup here a few times over the years. It has been
running non-stop for over 5 yrs now. Every few years a HDD will fail,
which is a non-issue because rsync mirrors are used for the huge data
areas.  No RAID, since this data doesn't need to be HA.  I use ext4 with
LVM.  The disks are 4TB or 8TB in size, in pairs.
D1 --> bD1
D2 --> bD2
D3 --> bD3
.... you get the idea. Simplicity.

If I were starting over today, I'd use ZFS to be notified about data
corruption, but I probably wouldn't use RAIDz.  No need for HA on this
storage.

If you are looking for storage cases, check out Addonics.com to get some
ideas.  I haven't looked recently.

If you go cheap on the disk arrays, be certain to put the WWN for each
disk somewhere it can be seen without removing.  It is easy to know
which disk fails by WWN, but cheap JBOD arrays don't have lights next to
each disk showing Ok/Failed.  When looking at 8-4TB disks with 1 failed,
it is nice to know which should be pulled.  Or spend $300+ for a fancy
array that has the lights.