I want to create a NAS for my family at home. I am already pretty sure about using TrueNAS as software, but the hardware is still open.
What hardware do you recommend for 2TB of usable Storage (+a second drive for mirroring the first one) that is used by 3 people for pictures, videos, and documents?
Maybe you could pickup a old workstation and drop a few drives in it. It is fairly affordable and would allow you to get your feet wet. For ZFS you really want lots of ram so make sure you get enough.
How are you going to mount the storage? Do you need some sort of shared authentication? I personally would either use software Nextcloud or Synching or an active directory deployment via Samba.
I planned to use nfs, since it is one of the options of TrueNAS and it works on both windows and linux.
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Probably just go with SSD storage because 2T is fairly low for hard drives these days. Still a pretty good idea to do a mirror.
Pretty much any CPU that isn’t a raspberry pi will comfortably max out a gigabit Ethernet connection.
HDD has 100x the storage capacity vs SSD. What are you talking about?
If you are really sure about the disk space requirements you can easily get one of the endless mini PCs with a N100 or a small Intel on it and chuck two NVMe’s in it and let these run as RAID1.
Have a decent backup plan,though.
I use my old desktop. It’s totally overkill, but it’s also free since I was going to throw it out instead.
If you’re set on TrueNAS, then just build a box to do that.
If you want a low power solution, go with Synology or Qnap.
2TB is insanely small for a NAS. At that point, you could honestly just run a Pi 5 with M.2 HAT and a 2TB SSD for something like $200 total. Could always buy a second Pi for mirroring and even locate it in a friend or family member’s house for mirroring and backup.
I use a Pi 4 with 7 TB of external SSDs just fine at home. It also hosts a pi.hole ad blocking server, my 1TBish jellyfin music streaming collection, my network share for kodi, an always-on VPN for my phone and laptops, and a few other small services. I’m sure I could upgrade for better read/write speeds. But everything is performant enough as is, and it’s completely silent and fan-free in my living room by the router. Honestly for most services a Pi with a passive cooler will perform admirably.
2TB is perfectly fine for a NAS. Not everyone needs high capacity
Of course, nothing wrong with it. In fact it makes OP’s quandary a lot easier! I’m looking into something with 20TB or so of capacity myself, and that’s given me an appreciation for how much simpler it is to solve this problem at 2TB.
Consider how the NAS will be used. Is it just file storage, or will you want to stream from it?
If just file storage, you can use lighter hardware.
I’m running a 5 year old Dell Small Form Factor desktop as my NAS/media server. It’s power draw is under 12 watts unless I’m converting files. There’s room for 3 data drives (boot drive is M2). It has no problem streaming, unlike my consumer NAS. And it cost way less.
It will be used just for file storage. But what exactly do you mean by “lighter hardware”? april said anything more than a raspi, so better than the quad-core Arm Cortex A76 processor @ 2.4GHz from the raspi 5? (ik that truenas is for x86 and not arm)
Just that you don’t need a beast of a machine (with it’s higher cost and power consumption) to just serve files at reasonable performance. If you want to stream video, you’ll need greater performance.
For example, my NAS is ten years old, runs on ARM, with maybe 2gigs of ram. It supposedly can host services and stream video. It can’t. But it’s power draw is about 4 watts at idle.
My newer (5 year old) small form factor desktop has a multi-core Intel cpu, true gigabit network card, a decent video card, with an idle draw of under 12 watts, and peaks at 200w when I’m converting video. It can easily stream videos.
My gaming desktop draws 200w at idle.
My SFF and gaming rig are both overkill for simple file sharing, and both cost 2x to 4x more than the NAS (bought the NAS and SFF second hand). But the NAS can’t really stream video.
Power draw is a massive factor these days, as these devices run 24/7.
RPi is great for it’s incredibly low power draw. The negative of RPi is you still need enclosure, and you’ll have drives that draw power attached to it. In my experience once I’ve built a NAS, RPi doesn’t draw significantly less than my SFF with the same drives installed, as it seems the drives are the greatest consumer. As I mentioned, my SFF with 1TB of storage draws 12 watts, and RPi will draw upwards of 8 watts on its own (my Pi Zero draws 2, but I’d never use it for a NAS). It’s all so close that for me the downside of RPi isn’t worth the difference in power.
