I am looking into getting a NAS setup at home, but have to consider wanting it to just work and work for my family who are not technically advanced. They use computers fine, but being asked to open a terminal would require letter by letter instructions.

So my question, what is the current recommendation for a simple home NAS for files and video (family trips, etc) storage?

  • ColdCreasent
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    Simplest I’ve found personally is using an old Pc and getting a PCIE sas/SATA expansion card to allow more drives to be added if you need more than the normal data limit. Use windows server 2019 or 2022. The trial periods for these are 180 days that can be renewed another 5 times which gives a long time before you reinstall the OS. Then you share the folder/drive like normal. It’s simplest because it’s still a GUI and windows.

    You can also pool drives so that multiple drives appear like a single drive, this is supported in windows itself (I forget the name in settings) or you can look at something like “drivepool”. I use this to have a “main pool” with a few large drives and then a “backup pool” which is mostly old 1tb or larger drives and use a program like “cobain reflector” to automate a backup of the main pool. Nice thing about “drive pool” is, if the server goes down for any reason, I can still pull each drive out and read whatever is on each drive without having to process them back into a “pool”. The files are just natively visible. Feel free to ask for extra info if anyone is interested.

    • redballooon@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      old Pc

      Watch power consumption though. It matters for a device that runs potentially 24/7

      • ColdCreasent
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Very true. It runs at good throttled speeds and the biggest power consumers are the hard drives themselves. Not to mention everyone else recommending different OS but no mention of hardware except people recommending synology boxes.

        • redballooon@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Oh I would recommend Synology too, but since many already did there’s no reason to do this again.