I have built 2 NAS that borrow ideas from his blogs. One uses the Silverstone CS382 case (6x 6TB SAS) and the other uses a Topton N5105 Mini-ITX board (6x 10TB SATA). I'm quite happy with both.
Very sad that HDDs, SSDs, and RAM are all increasing in price now, but I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool with Seagate Barracudas on sale at $10 / TB [1]. This seems like a pretty decent price even though the Barracudas are rated for 2400 hours per year [2] but this is the same spec that the refurbished Exos drives are rated for.
By the way, interesting to see that OP has no qualms about buying cheap Chinese motherboards, but splurged for an expensive Noctua fan when the cheaper Thermalright TL-B12 perform just as well for a lot cheaper (although the Thermalright could be slightly louder and perhaps be a slightly more annoying spectrum).
Also, it is mildly sad that there aren't many cheap low power (< 500 W) power supplies for SFX form factor. The SilverStone Technology SX500-G 500W SFX that was mentioned retails for the same price as 750 W and 850 W SFX PSUs on Amazon! I heard good things about getting Delta flex 400 W PSUs from Chinese websites --- some companies (e.g. YTC) mod them to be fully modular, and they are supposedly quite efficient (80 Plus Gold/Platinum) and quiet, but I haven't tested them out yet. On Taobao, those are like $30.
This is Black Friday pricing at least, if you're willing to shuck. Seagate drives are still sub-$10/TB which... a single 24-26TB is enough for all my photos (ever), media and some dataset backup for work. I'm planning to backup photos and other "glacier"-tier media like YouTube channels to BluRay (a disk or two per year). It's at the point where I'd rather just pay the money and forget about it for 5-10 years.
I built the case from Makerbeam and printed panels, an old Corsair SF600 and a 4 year old ITX system with one of Silverstone's backplanes. They make up to 5 drives in a 3x5-1/4 bay form factor. It's a little overpowered (a 5950X), but I also use it as a generic server at home and run a shared ZFS pool with 2x mirrored vdevs. Even with inefficient space it's more than I need. I put in a 1080ti for transcoding or odd jobs that need a little CUDA (like photo tagging). Runs ResNet50-class models easily enough. I also wondered about treating it as a single-node SLURM server.
I researched a bunch of cases recently and the Jonsbo, while it looked good, came up as having a ton of issues with airflow to cool the drives. Because of this, I ended up buying the Fractal Node 804 case, which seemed to have a better overall quality level and didn't require digging around AliExpress for a vendor.
Built a NAS last winter using the same case. Temps for HDDs used to be in mid-50s C with no fan and about 40 with the stock fan. The case-native backplane thingamajig does not provide any sort of pwm control if the fan is plugged in, so it's either full blast or nothing. I swapped the fan for a Thermalright TL-B12 and the HDDs are now happily chugging along at about 37 with the fan barely perceptible. Hddfancontrol ramps it up based on the output of smartctl.
Case can actually fit a low-profile discrete GPU, there's about half height worth of space.
Are there any NAS solutions for 3.5" drives, homebrew or purchased, that are slim enough to stash away in a wall enclosure? (This sort of thing: https://www.legrand.us/audio-visual/racks-and-enclosures/in-... , though not that particular model or height.) I'd like to really stash something away and forget about it. Height is the major constraint, you can only be ~3.5" tall. And before anyone says anything about 19" rack stuff, don't bother. It's close but just doesn't go, especially if it's not the only thing in the enclosure.
I concluded that was not possible with this particular model last time I looked, though I should try again (sadly I didn't take notes). It may well have been that the required part was simply out of stock everywhere.
Or it might have been that the lovely, lovely human beings who installed this thing somehow screwed it up so that no extender would ever fit. They had a habit of doing that. Unfortunately, the best way to summarize the electrical in this new-construction house is that Mistakes Were Made™.
I have the Terramaster F8 SSD Plus with 8x4TB NVME SSDs as the drives. It's definitely not the most cost effective way to build a NAS vs spinning disks, but I wanted small and quiet, which this is. It would probably fit in a wall enclosure, so depending on budget/how badly you wanted it to fit/drive space required this would probably work as a solution.
I too was in the market recently for a NAS, downgrading from a 12 bay server because of yagni - it's far too big, too loud, runs hot, and uses way too much energy. I was also tempted by the jonsbo (it's a very nice case) but prices being what they are it was actually better to get a premade 4 bay model for under $500 (batteries included, hdds are not). It's small, quiet, power efficient, and didnt break the bank in the process. Historically DIY has always been cheaper, but that's no longer the case (no pun intended)
The Jonsbo N3 case which is 8x 3.5" drives has a smaller footprint than this, which might be better for most folks. Needs a SFX PSU though, which is kind of annoying.
If you get an enterprise grade ITX board that has a 16x PCIe slot which can be bifurcated into 4 M.2 form factor PCIx4 connections, it really opens up options for storage:
* A 6x SATA card in M.2 form factor from Asmedia or others will let you fill all the drive slots even if the logic board only has 2/4/6 ports on it.
* The other ports can be used for conventional M.2 nVME drives.
I recently got a used QNAP TS-131P for cheap, that holds one 3.5" drive for offsite backup at a friend's house. It's compact and runs off a common 12V 3A power supply.
There is no third-party firmware available, but at least it runs Linux, so I wrote an autorun.sh script that kills 99% of the processes and phones home using ssh+rsync instead of depending on QNAP's cloud: https://github.com/pmarks-net/qnap-minlin
I wonder how many consumer level HDDs in RAID5 will take to saturate a 10Gbps connection. My napkin math says that from 1,250 MB/s we can achieve around 1,150 MB/s due to network overhead so it means about 5 Red Pro/ Ironwolf Pro (reading at about 250–260 MB/s each) in RAID5 to saturate the connection.
Wait. You build a new one every -year-?! How does one establish the reliability of the hardware (particularly the aliexpress motherboard), not to mention data retention, if its maximum life expectancy is 365 days?
For some people, building a NAS, or a fuller home-lab, is a hobby in itself. Posts like this are generally written by one of those people for an audience of those sorts of people. Nothing wrong with that. I was someone like that myself, some time ago.
On a more cynical note: if the blog is popular enough, those affiliate links might be worth more than a few pennies and a post about previous years builds with links to those years choice of tech, will not see anything like the same traction. It wouldn't get attention on HN for a start (at least not until a few more years time, when it might be part of an interesting then-and-now comparison).
I would like to point people to the Odroid H4 series of boards. N97 or N355, 2*2.5GbE, 4*SATA, 2 W in idle. Also has extension boards to turn it into a router for example.
The developer hardkernel also publishes all relevant info such as board schematics.
Yep, I've had mine running for over a year now without issue. It idles at 34w with all 4 drives running. I ended up making a custom "case" for it: https://github.com/cbsmith402/storage-loaf
Obligatory comment every time one of these threads comes up that Synology, sure, the hardware is a bit dated but… as far as set and forget goes:
I’ve run multiple Synology NAS at home, business, etc. and you can literally forget that it’s not someone else’s cloud. It auto updates on Sundays, always comes online again, and you can go for years (in one case, nearly a decade) without even logging into the admin and it just hums along and works.
I love synology; bought one around 2018, runs nicely until this day; received last DSM 7.3 update so will be supported until 2028 but I will probably keep it running until it dies as I don't expose it to The Evil Internet anyway
does everything and more I need it to (backups, photos, storage, jellyfin, various media servers, torrents etc.)
Synology also has a bit of a software moat with its BTRFS-backed SHR implementation. You can throw in drives of arbitrary size and it'll automatically maximize the available free space. ZFS can't do that, though AnyRaid should make it possible in the future: https://docs.hexos.com/blog/2025-05-22.html
I started a new job a couple months ago and a week hasn't gone by where I haven't said "For less than we're paying annually for [some software / SaaS], we could buy three Synologys sized to do that thing, at least as good if not significantly better, with a high-availability cluster on-prem plus a remote replica, with no more administration overhead than we have now."
And invariably the conversation turns to hardware specs. SMDH.
I would have chosen the i3-n305 version of that motherboard because it has In-Band ECC (IBECC) support - great for ZFS. IBECC is very underrated feature that doesn't get talked about enough. It may be available for the N150/N355, but I have never seen a confirmation.
I think the worry about power consumption is a bit overblown in the article. My NAS has an i5-12600 + Quadro P4000 and uses maybe 50% more power than the one in this article under normal conditions. That works out to maybe $4/month more cost. Given the relatively small delta, I'd encourage picking hardware based on what services you want to run.
I upgraded my home backup server a couple of months ago to a Minisforum N5 Pro, and am very happy with it. It only has 4 3.5” drive slots, but I only use two with 2x20TB drives mirrored, and two 14TB external drives for offsite backups. The AMD AI 370 CPU is plenty fast so I also run Immich on it, and it has ECC RAM and 10G Ethernet.
The N5 Pro is a good machine, but I have to recommend the Aoostar WTR Max over it, having used both. It's a few hundred bucks cheaper ($680 post-tax for a quality SFF case + mobo + CPU + power + fans!!) and has an extra drive bay and a couple of additional NVMe slots (three Gen4 2x and two 1x), despite being only ~13% larger. Also, the drive caddies on the N5 Pro were driving me crazy: the plastic clips holding the disk in place require quite a bit of force to dislodge and feel like they could snap at any moment. (And once they inevitably do, there's no screwholes to use as a backup.)
TL;DR - please stop wasting tons of resources putting together new servers every year and turning this into yet another outlet for "I have more money than sense and hopefully I can buy myself into happiness". Just get old random hardware and play around with it and you'll learn so much that you will be able to truly appreciate the difference between consumer and enterprise hardware.
This seems awfully wasteful. One of the main reasons for which I've built my own homeserver was to reduce resource usage - one could probably argue that the carbon footprint of keeping your photos in the cloud and running services is lower than building your own little datacentre copy locally and where would we be if everyone builds their own server, then what? Well, I think that paying Google/Apple/Oracle/etc whoever money so that they continue their activities has a bigger carbon footprint than me picking up old used parts and running them on a solar/wind only electricity plan. I also think I'm going a bit overboard with this and I'm not suggesting to vote with your wallet because that doesn't work. If you want real change this needs to come from the government. You not buying a motherboard won't stop a corporation from making another 10 million.
Anyway, except for the hard drives, all components were picked up used. I like to joke it's my little Frankenstein's monster, pieced together from discarded parts no one wanted or had any use for. I've also gone down the rabbit hole to build the "perfect" machine, but I guess I was thinking too highly of myself and the actual use case. The reason I'm posting this is to help someone who might not build a new machine because they don't have ECC and without ECC ZFS is useless and you need Enterprise drives and you want 128 GB of RAM in the machine and you could also pick up used enterprise hardware and you could etc...
If you wish to play around with this, the best way is to just get into it. The same way Google started with consumer level hardware so can you. Pick up a used motherboard, pick up some used ram, a used CPU, throw them into a case and let it rip. Initially you'll learn so much and that alone is worth every penny. When I built my first machine, I wasn't finding any decently used former desktop form hp/lenovo/dell so I found a used i5 8500t for about 20$, 8 gb of ram for about 5$, a used motherboard for 40$, case was 20$ and PSU was $30. All in all the system was 115$ and for storage I used an old 2.5inch ssd for boot drive and 2 new NAS hard drives (which I still have btw!). This was amazing. Not having ECC, not having a server motherboard/system, not worrying about all that stuff allowed me to get started. The entry bar is even lower now, so just get started, don't worry. People talk about flipped bits as if it happens all day every day. If you are THAT worried, then yeah, look for a used server barebone or even a used server with support for ecc and do use ZFS, but I want to ask, how comfortable are you making the switch 100% now over night without having ever spent any time configuring even the most basic server that NEEDS to run for days/weeks/months? Old/used hardware can bridge this gap and when you're ready it's not like you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You now have another node in a proxmox cluster. Congrats! The old machine can run LXCs, VMs, it could be a firewall it could do anything and when it fails, no biggie.
Current setup for those interested:
i7 9700t
64 GB DDR4 (2x32)
8, 10, 12, 12, 14 TB HDDs (snapraid setup and 14 TB HDD is holding parity info)
HDD have to be bought new, as well as anything mechanical (eg fans). But for motherboards, CPU, RAM and SSD, there is great value in buying used enterprise hardware on ebay. It is generally durable hardware that spent a quiet life in a temperature controlled datacentre, server motherboards from 5 years ago are absolute aircraft carriers in term of PCIe lanes and functionalities. Used enterprise SSDs are probably more durable than a new retail SSD, plus power loss protection and better performance.
The only downside is slightly higher power consumption. But just bought a 32 core 3rd gen Xeon CPU + motherboard, 128GB RAM, it idles at 75w without disks which isn't terrible. And you can build a more powerful NAS for a third of the price of a high end Synology. Unlikely that the additional 20-30w idle power consumption will cost you more than that.
In A DC environment sure. In a home NAS not so much. I'm on Unraid and just throw WD recertified drives of varying sizes at it (plus some shucked external drives when I find them on offer), that's one of its strengths and makes it much cheaper to run.
I did something similar last year. Market for mITX NAS boards is pretty bad. I went for ASRock N100DC-ITX – it has 2x SATA ports, but there's also PCIe 3 x4.
The main benefits of this board were:
* it's not from an obscure Chinese company
* integrated power supply – just plug in DC jack, and you're good to go
UGREEN has apparently inked deals to drop their DXP2800s into (some) Walmarts, which also included bringing in some 10/12TB Toshiba N300 Pro drives as well to go with them on the shelves. Being a super-rural American, I was a bit surprised to see this on my local shelf as a nearly turnkey solution in an area where there's nothing remotely close to a Best Buy, even.
Even more surprisingly: they've been sold by Walmart below minimum advertised prices at UGREEN a few times normally...
I appreciate Brian's posts and they've helped me learn to build my own NAS systems, but there's a scammy angle to his articles.
All of the merchant links are affiliate links, which he (illegally) does not disclose.[0] He's effectively acting as a sales rep for these brands, but he's presenting himself as an unbiased consumer.
The affiliate relationship incentivizes Brian to recommend more expensive equipment and push readers to the vendors that pay Brian the most rather than the vendors that are the best for consumers.
I recognize that it's an unfortunate truth that affiliate links are one of the few ways to make money writing non-AI content about computer hardware. I'm fine with affiliate links, but the author should disclose the conflict of interest at the top of the post before getting into the recommendations.
In the interest of full disclosure, I also write about NAS builds on my blog, so I somewhat compete with Brian's posts, but I stopped using affiliate links five years ago because of the conflict of interest.
If you're not familiar with how affiliate relationships create dangerous incentives, I recommend reading the article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] tl;dr - All the top mattress-in-a-box reviewers were just giving favorable reviews to the company that paid the best affiliate rates, even going so far as to retroactively update old reviews if the payout rates changed.
"The Guides are intended to give insight into what the FTC thinks about various marketing activities involving endorsements and how Section 5 might apply to those activities. The Guides themselves don’t have the force of law."
Though I think the sentence immediately after the one you quoted is also relevant:
> However, practices inconsistent with the Guides may result in law enforcement actions alleging Section 5 violations.
My understanding is that there's no law that says, "You have to disclose if you're an affiliate earning commissions on a recommendation," but the FTC is saying that they interpret Section 5 of the FTC act to imply that, and they may prosecute people under that interpretation, which they have done.[0, 1]
Are there any tape based solution which can be used at home? I don't care about time retrieval. It's more for home archival purpose.
I have two NAS servers (both based on Synalogy). But I need something where I can back it up and forgot about it till I want to restore the stuff.
I am looking at a workflow of say, weekly backup to tape. Update the index.
Whenever I want to restore a directory or file, I search the index, find the tape and load the same for retrieval.
NAS can be used for continuous backup (aka timemachine and timeshift). And archival at a weekly level.
73 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 77.4 ms ] threadI'm not sure what the benefit would be since all it's doing is moving information from the drives over to the network.
ref: https://blog.briancmoses.com/2024/07/migrating-my-diy-nas-in...
By the way, interesting to see that OP has no qualms about buying cheap Chinese motherboards, but splurged for an expensive Noctua fan when the cheaper Thermalright TL-B12 perform just as well for a lot cheaper (although the Thermalright could be slightly louder and perhaps be a slightly more annoying spectrum).
Also, it is mildly sad that there aren't many cheap low power (< 500 W) power supplies for SFX form factor. The SilverStone Technology SX500-G 500W SFX that was mentioned retails for the same price as 750 W and 850 W SFX PSUs on Amazon! I heard good things about getting Delta flex 400 W PSUs from Chinese websites --- some companies (e.g. YTC) mod them to be fully modular, and they are supposedly quite efficient (80 Plus Gold/Platinum) and quiet, but I haven't tested them out yet. On Taobao, those are like $30.
[1] https://www.newegg.com/seagate-barracuda-st24000dm001-24tb-f...
[2] https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/en/content-fragm...
I built the case from Makerbeam and printed panels, an old Corsair SF600 and a 4 year old ITX system with one of Silverstone's backplanes. They make up to 5 drives in a 3x5-1/4 bay form factor. It's a little overpowered (a 5950X), but I also use it as a generic server at home and run a shared ZFS pool with 2x mirrored vdevs. Even with inefficient space it's more than I need. I put in a 1080ti for transcoding or odd jobs that need a little CUDA (like photo tagging). Runs ResNet50-class models easily enough. I also wondered about treating it as a single-node SLURM server.
Case can actually fit a low-profile discrete GPU, there's about half height worth of space.
It adds enough depth to fit plenty of regular-sized components.
Or it might have been that the lovely, lovely human beings who installed this thing somehow screwed it up so that no extender would ever fit. They had a habit of doing that. Unfortunately, the best way to summarize the electrical in this new-construction house is that Mistakes Were Made™.
I am starting to seriously consider taking a thin 2.5" or M.2 form factor machine and running SATA cables out to an external drive cage though....
If you get an enterprise grade ITX board that has a 16x PCIe slot which can be bifurcated into 4 M.2 form factor PCIx4 connections, it really opens up options for storage:
* A 6x SATA card in M.2 form factor from Asmedia or others will let you fill all the drive slots even if the logic board only has 2/4/6 ports on it.
* The other ports can be used for conventional M.2 nVME drives.
There is no third-party firmware available, but at least it runs Linux, so I wrote an autorun.sh script that kills 99% of the processes and phones home using ssh+rsync instead of depending on QNAP's cloud: https://github.com/pmarks-net/qnap-minlin
For some people, building a NAS, or a fuller home-lab, is a hobby in itself. Posts like this are generally written by one of those people for an audience of those sorts of people. Nothing wrong with that. I was someone like that myself, some time ago.
On a more cynical note: if the blog is popular enough, those affiliate links might be worth more than a few pennies and a post about previous years builds with links to those years choice of tech, will not see anything like the same traction. It wouldn't get attention on HN for a start (at least not until a few more years time, when it might be part of an interesting then-and-now comparison).
The developer hardkernel also publishes all relevant info such as board schematics.
I’ve run multiple Synology NAS at home, business, etc. and you can literally forget that it’s not someone else’s cloud. It auto updates on Sundays, always comes online again, and you can go for years (in one case, nearly a decade) without even logging into the admin and it just hums along and works.
does everything and more I need it to (backups, photos, storage, jellyfin, various media servers, torrents etc.)
Plus, DSM has a spectacular web interface.
And invariably the conversation turns to hardware specs. SMDH.
Either way, it's a great time for home NAS.
This seems awfully wasteful. One of the main reasons for which I've built my own homeserver was to reduce resource usage - one could probably argue that the carbon footprint of keeping your photos in the cloud and running services is lower than building your own little datacentre copy locally and where would we be if everyone builds their own server, then what? Well, I think that paying Google/Apple/Oracle/etc whoever money so that they continue their activities has a bigger carbon footprint than me picking up old used parts and running them on a solar/wind only electricity plan. I also think I'm going a bit overboard with this and I'm not suggesting to vote with your wallet because that doesn't work. If you want real change this needs to come from the government. You not buying a motherboard won't stop a corporation from making another 10 million.
Anyway, except for the hard drives, all components were picked up used. I like to joke it's my little Frankenstein's monster, pieced together from discarded parts no one wanted or had any use for. I've also gone down the rabbit hole to build the "perfect" machine, but I guess I was thinking too highly of myself and the actual use case. The reason I'm posting this is to help someone who might not build a new machine because they don't have ECC and without ECC ZFS is useless and you need Enterprise drives and you want 128 GB of RAM in the machine and you could also pick up used enterprise hardware and you could etc...
If you wish to play around with this, the best way is to just get into it. The same way Google started with consumer level hardware so can you. Pick up a used motherboard, pick up some used ram, a used CPU, throw them into a case and let it rip. Initially you'll learn so much and that alone is worth every penny. When I built my first machine, I wasn't finding any decently used former desktop form hp/lenovo/dell so I found a used i5 8500t for about 20$, 8 gb of ram for about 5$, a used motherboard for 40$, case was 20$ and PSU was $30. All in all the system was 115$ and for storage I used an old 2.5inch ssd for boot drive and 2 new NAS hard drives (which I still have btw!). This was amazing. Not having ECC, not having a server motherboard/system, not worrying about all that stuff allowed me to get started. The entry bar is even lower now, so just get started, don't worry. People talk about flipped bits as if it happens all day every day. If you are THAT worried, then yeah, look for a used server barebone or even a used server with support for ecc and do use ZFS, but I want to ask, how comfortable are you making the switch 100% now over night without having ever spent any time configuring even the most basic server that NEEDS to run for days/weeks/months? Old/used hardware can bridge this gap and when you're ready it's not like you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You now have another node in a proxmox cluster. Congrats! The old machine can run LXCs, VMs, it could be a firewall it could do anything and when it fails, no biggie.
Current setup for those interested:
i7 9700t
64 GB DDR4 (2x32)
8, 10, 12, 12, 14 TB HDDs (snapraid setup and 14 TB HDD is holding parity info)
X550 T2 10Gbps network card
Fractal Design Node 804
Seasonic Gold 550watts
LSI 9305 16i
The only downside is slightly higher power consumption. But just bought a 32 core 3rd gen Xeon CPU + motherboard, 128GB RAM, it idles at 75w without disks which isn't terrible. And you can build a more powerful NAS for a third of the price of a high end Synology. Unlikely that the additional 20-30w idle power consumption will cost you more than that.
In A DC environment sure. In a home NAS not so much. I'm on Unraid and just throw WD recertified drives of varying sizes at it (plus some shucked external drives when I find them on offer), that's one of its strengths and makes it much cheaper to run.
The main benefits of this board were:
* it's not from an obscure Chinese company
* integrated power supply – just plug in DC jack, and you're good to go
* passive cooling
Really hope they make an Intel N150 version.
https://www.ugreen.com/blogs/news/ugreen-makes-strategic-ent...
UGREEN has apparently inked deals to drop their DXP2800s into (some) Walmarts, which also included bringing in some 10/12TB Toshiba N300 Pro drives as well to go with them on the shelves. Being a super-rural American, I was a bit surprised to see this on my local shelf as a nearly turnkey solution in an area where there's nothing remotely close to a Best Buy, even.
Even more surprisingly: they've been sold by Walmart below minimum advertised prices at UGREEN a few times normally...
All of the merchant links are affiliate links, which he (illegally) does not disclose.[0] He's effectively acting as a sales rep for these brands, but he's presenting himself as an unbiased consumer.
The affiliate relationship incentivizes Brian to recommend more expensive equipment and push readers to the vendors that pay Brian the most rather than the vendors that are the best for consumers.
I recognize that it's an unfortunate truth that affiliate links are one of the few ways to make money writing non-AI content about computer hardware. I'm fine with affiliate links, but the author should disclose the conflict of interest at the top of the post before getting into the recommendations.
In the interest of full disclosure, I also write about NAS builds on my blog, so I somewhat compete with Brian's posts, but I stopped using affiliate links five years ago because of the conflict of interest.
If you're not familiar with how affiliate relationships create dangerous incentives, I recommend reading the article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] tl;dr - All the top mattress-in-a-box reviewers were just giving favorable reviews to the company that paid the best affiliate rates, even going so far as to retroactively update old reviews if the payout rates changed.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
"The Guides are intended to give insight into what the FTC thinks about various marketing activities involving endorsements and how Section 5 might apply to those activities. The Guides themselves don’t have the force of law."
Though I think the sentence immediately after the one you quoted is also relevant:
> However, practices inconsistent with the Guides may result in law enforcement actions alleging Section 5 violations.
My understanding is that there's no law that says, "You have to disclose if you're an affiliate earning commissions on a recommendation," but the FTC is saying that they interpret Section 5 of the FTC act to imply that, and they may prosecute people under that interpretation, which they have done.[0, 1]
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/160523lordt...
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/1...
I have two NAS servers (both based on Synalogy). But I need something where I can back it up and forgot about it till I want to restore the stuff. I am looking at a workflow of say, weekly backup to tape. Update the index. Whenever I want to restore a directory or file, I search the index, find the tape and load the same for retrieval.
NAS can be used for continuous backup (aka timemachine and timeshift). And archival at a weekly level.