Support I need a NAS, please advise

[Li Kao]

Title says it all, really. I am tired of not having access to my media unless I power the pc on.
But Christ on a bike, are those costly.

I suppose it’s minimum 4 bay, and even then that’s not much to work with if I need to sacrify half the hdd to backup.

My PC currently consists of
C 1to ssd windows
D 1to ssd linux
E 4to ssd
F 4to ssd
G 4to hdd

Drawer
H 4to hdd

How do I handle that amount of data withput sacrificing a newborn (and not buying shit) ?
The minimum backup would be 12to but I obviously would like some headroom.

 

[Wereverine]

I converted an old mITX living room PC into a NAS by adding a couple of Western Digital 6TB Red drives and a USB drive running FreeNAS. I've since upgraded the capacity to 12 TB and upgraded the OS to TrueNAS Core (the new name of FreeNAS). If you're a DIYer and have an old PC lying around, that is something you can try. I don't have ant experience with premade solutions.

 

[Nebulys]

I don’t have any experience with off the shelf NAS solutions, but they are expensive.

I recycled an old Intel Mini ITX build into an Unraid server.

It allowed me to run Plex and other services 24/7, and connect my server to the apps on my devices.

I have four 16TB hard drives on the server, with three acting as storage (for 48TB total) and the other acting as my parity drive. Parity allows one drive to fail without data loss. It’s not backup, but the first line of defence against drive failure, and keeps the server ticking while I wait for the replacement to arrive.

 

[LEANIJA]

Here's a good, detailed (and long video) about the installation and setup process for TrueNAS Scale, a Debian-based NAS operation system, that is pretty good. Complete with hardware considerations and all that. I hope this helps you a bit, and others who might want to set up a NAS. I've set up TrueNAS before, just with a laptop to see how it is, and it worked quite well. Never ended up using it "full time" since I was planning to eventually get a proper NAS solution (like from UGreen or something)....but then never did that either