Ask HN: What type of personal NAS would you recommend?

Well for a whole home I don't recommend and WD cloud products, they don't have the performance and cross-platform protocols that make sense for more than 1 computer.

I always comeback to FreeNAS, which I have had configured various ways. I recently updated all my core hardware to mac mini so it has power/sleep modes that save that energy consumption...however payback is a lot longer than a PC..

In the end it will always be a challenge of performance vs. energy consumption.

I am quite happy with my Synology DS920+. I mostly use it for backup and hosting Docker containers. I was surprised by how much software is produced by Synology itself and either comes included with the machine or is available as a package - LDAP, WebDAV, SQL, Plex, replication/cloning/backups, and a host of other services.

One thing that surprised me was RAID - I am not very experienced with home servers and such and was really disheartened by how much of my disk got eaten up by RAID. I was using the Synology Hybrid RAID which I think is similar to RAID 5.

TL;DR Synology is pricey but full featured and very pleasant, understand your RAID configuration before you purchase disks.

EDIT: Another thing I will say is that docker compose is not supported IIUC, so just watch out for that if your configuration depends on that (like mine initially did).

I personally use unRaid, but i also like to tinker, and very much have had to tinker with it. I would recommend it if you want power, flexiblity, etc. (i personally choose it over FreeNAS for the VM's).

My friend however wanted a no hassle solution, he brought Synology and it just works, he's never had to mess with it. To quote him: "if Apple made a NAS"

I made HRCloud2 [1] a couple years ago. I intend to give it some love once I'm done with some other projects.

[1] https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2

As always with tech its : Speed. Quality. Price. Pick Two.

You have carefully omitted your budget. Your budget will likely ultimately determine your options.

Otherwise I'll tell you to get a 10Gb switch and build a five node CEPH cluster. :-)

This advice makes me extremely unpopular in NAS forums, but I strongly recommend you never use any other RAID option than RAID-1. When a disk goes bad, you have a single mirror disk that you can directly and immediately connect to your computer and recover from. With any of the NAS proprietary RAIDs, or something like RAID-5, you'll need to somehow hook up 3 or 5 disks to your computer to have any chance of a recovery.

The NAS gurus always say "RAID is not a backup", and it is true you should have additional backups. But no backup solution is perfect, none get updated every day, especially if you plan on keeping the backup off-site. For most users, the NAS is the backup. All I'm saying is that when a disk fails on your NAS, you'll be in panic mode and will want the easiest, most direct path to data recovery, and there is no RAID option in this scenario preferable than RAID-1.

Synology seems like a good choice to me. Rarely heard a bad word about them. I consider going DIY to save a few nickels but if I had a larger NAS budget I would definitely go for Synology.

I have an HP Microserver N54L and it's been incredible. I use XigmaNAS (similar to FreeNAS) and it's been rock solid for many years.

I highly recommend Synology. QNAP and FreeNAS seem really great in a lot of ways, but Synology is the solution for people who want something solid that takes up as little of their time as possible. Avoid Drobo and Seagate.

I would make your first / boot drive a SSD, and put WD Reds in the rest, 2 drive redundancy if you want to be super safe.

In addition, I recommend using the built-in cloud backup software to backup high-value data to Blackblaze B2.

Happy to answer any other questions.

What if you don't want to hack/tinker and want a Drobo-level solution that isn't Drobo? (My Drobo is very old and I don't want to upgrade to a new Drobo.)

Running a 2-drive Synology DiskStation, because MacOS backs up literally every hour, and shingle storage on NAS drives requires data relocation after write, the NAS-type hard drives are noisy and LOUD. It will be loud as long as your Macbook or iMac is on and is used. On the contrary Windows backs up weekly so its never a noise problem when my wife with Macbook is away. This has to be hidden somewhere where it won't overheat and also will not bother you with clicking/crunching the data.

At this point i have installed it and i stopped looking around for other solutions. It works for Windows, it works for Mac, i did not try Linux, but i don't really backup my Linux data, its all in Github anyway.

Is your data safe? Definitely as safe as 2 NAS-type drives can be. Did not experience data loss, but don't trust a comment on the internet, look for some research and statistics if you can find.

I'm currently speccing out my NAS upgrade and plan to go with ODROID HC2 using a scale out filesystem. I plan to test both cephfs and glusterfs, although I have more experience with the latter.

This is a different NAS model, in that each hard drive has its own micro server attached. Which I like, because it means that I won't be constrained by a NAS chassis, and it mitigates a lot of single points of failure. Plus it will scale in both performance and capacity as I add drives.

The HC2 costs about 50 bucks each, so it's the cost of a drive, +$50 and some maintenance overhead to keep the small cluster running. Starting off with 2 or 4 drives it's cheaper than most comparable synology or similar traditional NAS and for my use case is far more robust and flexible.

There's 101 interesting solutions out there, but for me, Unraid looks like a really appealing community and offers the ability to tinker more than others.

If you want more of a "set it and forget it" simple approach, the big players you listed (Synology and others) can work amazingly well.

I've had my Synology DS918+ for about a year, and overall I've been happy with it except for one huge mess with encrypted folders completely wrecking my Dropbox for a few weeks. Here's what happened:

I wanted to have a backup of my Dropbox on my NAS, so I used Synology's CloudSync service to back up to an encrypted folder. Unfortunately Synology's encryption actually encrypts each file individually, which Dropbox happily syncs to all of the computers that use that Dropbox, making all of those files unusable!

In the end, I had to write a script that detected which files were encrypted (files start with `__CLOUDSYNC_ENC__`), then use a WINDOWS ONLY decryption utility provided by Synology to decrypt and finally get back to a clean state. Then I wrote another script to move the decrypted files back into the proper path in Dropbox while correcting the newly decrypted files with the original metadata (creation date) from the encrypted bad files. What a pain!!

I'm still not sure of a good way to achieve my original goal of backing up Dropbox while still protecting my data with encryption. Let me know if anyone has a solution!

Whatever your needs, consider separating by function.

If you want something simple and standalone that just works, buy a MacMini and a DAS.

If you need a cold storage backup server that you only boot once a month, build that.

If you want something that you can assign to a Windows domain and scale, maybe some Intel NUCs would work.

A netbooted, POE-enabled Raspberry Pi 4 or two can do quite a lot, depending on your needs.

I've use several proprietary consumer NAS products over the years, and mostly I've found they make great gifts to friends after a year or two.

Why not buy a simple Linux box with a bunch of large harddrives? Then you can install whatever you want on it, and you don't have any unwanted corporate cruftware preinstalled.

What are you currently spending so much maintenance time on? My experience with Debian+ZFS is that once you spend some time setting it up, it just works. I would think FreeNAS would be similar, assuming you pick a straightforward setup. If you want to downsize, look into 2 or 3 disk mirror setups and low power motherboards.

As for trust, you can trust anybody for anything. Should you is a different question. I rest easy knowing there will never be an article about a product I critically rely on deciding to sell me out. And needing to navigate least-worst commercial options seems like a much larger maintenance burden.

I had a terrible experience with the Western Digital products[1], and a much better one with Synology. The nice thing about going with product from a vendor, versus building your own, is that they provide a lot of niceties that aren't easy to maintain yourself. Like...

- Whatever crazy tunneling and so forth that they do so that I can access the admin interface over the internet regardless of how brain-dead my home ISP router is. Synology is very good at this.

- Mobile apps that make it fairly easy to do stuff like "sync any photos after I take them to the NAS, but only when the phone is on WiFi, and optionally delete it from the phone after the sync is confirmed.".

Also worth looking at with Synology is their support for really cheap offsite backup, like Backblaze B2. I was able to set something up to protect against say, a house fire, and be selective about what I was sending, and it's something like $1/month for that peace of mind.

[1] For example, it's fairly easy to mostly brick them and the recovery process is having to send hand-crafted/altered ICMP packets to it during boot and hope that coaxes it into a BOOTP mode. They are also quite underpowered and just go unresponsive for minutes at a time. The WD products are awful all around.

I think I was in a similar situation as you - after having a kid my already dwindling time and appetite to play with backups waned even further. I ended up buying a Synology DS418j NAS a couple years ago and it's been adequate. I wouldn't quite rave about it, but I also haven't experienced anything better.

I've thrown tens of thousands of photos at it, and my only complaint there is the background processing to generate thumbnails is very slow, especially with "Live Photos" from iPhones (which are essentially photos with short videos attached). If I upload a couple thousand of those, the NAS might not finish generating the thumbnails for over day, so if you browse using the apps Synology provides for photos, you just see lots of placeholders for a while.

I did have a (SeaGate IronWolf) disk fail on me already, and the NAS did it's thing correctly - it made audible beeping alerts (which were definitely attention getting as the NAS had never played a sound prior to that). When I swapped in a new disk I was easily able to instruct the NAS to add it to the RAID array and recover, and everything was back to healthy pretty quickly.

If I were to shop for a replacement I'd be tempted to look for something with a beefier CPU as the thumbnail generation thing is occasionally annoying. But honestly the CPU is mostly idle most of the time, so if I did get a more powerful NAS the CPU would probably be idle 99.9% of the time instead of 99% of the time.

zfs and rsync on FreeBSD

I have a Readynas (now owned by netgear) 'prosumer'-ish nas. 6 bays desktop form factor. It's great, i replaced an older readynas (pre-netgear) which i got about ~10 years out of. It's actually functional except for the power supply. I couldn't find a replacement fast enough for my needs so I upgraded, bodged a normal pc power supply to do a data transfer. It was so old I couldn't just put the old drives in the new chasis and preserve the data.

how much time is freenas administration taking? That's what i use, and i barely need to spend time on it, so i'm not sure how much time you can save switching. If the issue is power, then you can stick with freenas as well just with a very small system. If, you just don't want freeNAS and you want something that should be more turnkey, any device with 2 drive slots and raid 1, with a plug-in or something to automatically sync to backblaze or similar will be fine.

Ideally you want to follow 3-2-1 (3 total copies, 2 local, 1 offsite) for backup, so I'd recommend the following setup:

A small FreeNAS box. Like, 3 hot data drives at most, small. If you really want to save on power and are willing to take a hit on performance, you can use something as small as a raspberry pi. (again, if you don't want freenas, then swap this for anything with 2 drives that can RAID 1 and can automatically sync with backblaze or similar).

On the local PCs pick a specific folder to back-up instead of everything, since you'll only have a small backup.

Personally, I would stay away from anything that isn't ZFS backed, but i've heard good things about synology. I wouldn't trust any solution from an HDD mfg, because i don't think their code is that good for that sort of thing (eg https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/2/22561140/wd-cloud-os-3-sec...)

It depends on your needs, but here is my expierience. I like my data encrypted, no cloud and backed up, so my config is:

1. Intel NUC + Internal 2TB NVME SSD (24/7)

  - Encrypted with LUKS
  - All-Day-Data like personal Photos, Music, Audiobooks shared via SFTP / SMB
  - Low Power consumption + good performance

2. Dell T20 + 32GB ECC RAM with encrypted ZFS 10TB RAID 1 (wake on lan / on demand)

  - FreeNAS
  - Backup Server for NUC and all other clients
  - ZFS Snapshots for Ransomware protection

3. Alix APU 4GB with ZFS (24/7, off site at my fathers home)

  - disaster backup for my most important data
  - sync via zfs send with one specific dataset from machine 2

Its pretty low power, but also low on storage - it took a while to find out that the data for my all day use is < 2TB. This is often not enough for most people...

I can recommend to use an cheap old machine as NAS with ECC RAM (a must) and ZFS, like a

  - Dell T20
  - HP N54L 
  - HP gen8. 

OS can be FreeNAS/TrueNAS, napp-it or another reliable one. I never had problems with these and once configured, there is hardly any effort to maintain them.

What I don't recommend is:

  - Raspberry PI based (not reliable, slow)
  - Custom build (expensive, much effort)

Soho NAS like Synology are ok-ish, but I don't like them - Bad things happend to me. Broken filesystems, damaged files, non-working backups, slow performance and so on. But that was a while ago, maybe now they are better :-)

It would help a lot to reduce the scope by knowing some requirements you may have in terms of storage size/number of disks/specs/performance/features/integrations/etc.

Without knowing anything else, for a small and power-efficient setup I can recommend the Odroid HC4 with Armbian (manually upgraded to Bullseye; Bullseye builds are currently broken but building Buster and then upgrading works fine) and a ZFS mirror of whatever SATA drives you choose. I use one as a backup sink.

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/

As for drives, I've been committing myself for Toshiba recently. They have a good reputation for reliability/durability and reasonable cost-performance.

If you're going for SSDs, that market segment is in a bit of constant flux.

For something beefier and way more extendable I've been writing about my experiences with ASROCK RACK's X570 boards here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28302303

Though, from what I understand you may get lower idle power consumption from the right Intel CPU/chipset combo than AMD Ryzens as of now. This is just something I gathered from others' remarks and not something I researched or benchmarked properly myself so take that with a grain of salt.

I never used a prebuilt QNAP/Synology but I'm curious what it is that takes time for you these days that you hope to cut down on? A DIY can be pretty much as fire-and-forget once you have it set up and on the flip side you still have plenty of room for tinkering with containers and whatnot on Synology et al... Like, is there ongoing maintenance you have to do on your FreeNAS box just to keep things in place or is it more a personal tendency to keep changing things that makes it never ending?