discussion Budget NAS or DAS discussion - educate me please

[Bond007]

I am considering putting something together for bulk storage of important family photos/videos/etc. Right now I am just using a 2 location mentality (1 copy on a computer, and 1 copy on an external drive that is intermittently connected).

I think that I may pull everything from the computer and switch that to either a basic 2 bay NAS or DAS (NAS would be nice, but we don't need continual access to it). Likely in a straight RAID 1. I believe that is just a mirror of the 2 drives, so if one fails you still have everything...right? I will look into if I go with a prebuild box, build one, or use an old computer. I will also have to look into was OS/software to use.

Any thoughts, opinions, advise based on my ZERO knowledge in RAID/NAS/DAS, etc?

 

[sswilson]

First question is how much data are you currently dealing with, and how much extra do you expect to be using over the next little while?

Backup/redundancy depends largely on the number of drives you intend to use.

Mirroring two drives gets you backup but cuts your available data in half. Systems that depend on parity scale over more drives in that the largest drive can provide redundancy for an infinite number of drives of equal/smaller capacity.

I personally went with unraid (mainly for ease of use) but it's not exactly cheap.

edit: If you haven't already seen it... this was my recent foray into rolling my own NAS:

Completed Thread 'DIY Networked Attached Storage'

Mar 18, 2025

Figured I'd throw this in here since it is essentially a PC server build.

Looking to build a media server that can be accessed through client apps on either Firestick and/or Google TV (need to be native apps available in their respective stores, I don't want to side-load and have to play whack-a-mole with firmware updates). Haven't decided yet, but it sounds like Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin will probably be what I'm looking for. I'm also leaning heavily towards unraid mainly for ease of use and a large community of help tutorials.






edit...

• sswilson
• Replies: 141
• Forum: Case Mods, Worklog & Gallery

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[sswilson]

If you've already got PC hardware on hand which has 4X Sata ports, and a case that can handle 4X 3.5" drives you could conceivably grab 4 used 10GB drives from the BST which would give you 30GB usable with parity backup in unraid.

edit: The nice thing about Unraid is that the license is hardware agnostic. That lets you move it over to new hardware when/if you decide to upgrade.

 

[Bond007]

Thanks for the info @sswilson . To answer the questions you posed (with some return questions embedded):

1. I do not currently have a PC that would be suitable to use, so whatever route I go will be purchased
2. currently storing around 4TB, with slow growth over time (I was eyeing the 10TB drives...it is what prompted my brain for this idea). I think that would suffice for now.
3. I am ok with room for future growth, but from a cost perspective I don't think I will be going above 2 drives out of the gate. Return question, if only using 2 drives, would RAID1 be the only/best option, or is there another choice?

Cost/reliability would be my main priorities.

 

[moocow]

I'm currently on hardware RAID 5 but have been hearing about how much of a PITA when it comes to rebuild and UNRAID / software RAID is better. But I'm also on Proxmox VM with the RAID completely passed to the VM. If I move the RAID to another machine or rebuild the VM, that won't impact the content. How does UNRAID or software RAID handle this kind of situation? Does it write some kind of data to the drive partition so it knows what's what?

 

[sswilson]

Thanks for the info @sswilson . To answer the questions you posed (with some return questions embedded):

1. I do not currently have a PC that would be suitable to use, so whatever route I go will be purchased
2. currently storing around 4TB, with slow growth over time (I was eyeing the 10TB drives...it is what prompted my brain for this idea). I think that would suffice for now.
3. I am ok with room for future growth, but from a cost perspective I don't think I will be going above 2 drives out of the gate. Return question, if only using 2 drives, would RAID1 be the only/best option, or is there another choice?

Cost/reliability would be my main priorities.

If you decide to go the self rolled route with unraid you could still go with 2X 10TB drives w/ parity as opposed to mirrored drives. That would still give you the same 10TB storage as a mirrored setup, but would allow you to add more drives to the mix in the future if the need arose. The downside to using a parity setup over a mirrored setup is that recovering from a failed data drive requires rebuilding that drive's data on a new drive while a mirrored setup would still have the data intact on the second drive.

A starter unraid (up to 6 drives) licence is currently $49 USD which gets you 1yr of OS updates.

I'm not sure how the 2 bay pre-built NAS's work WRT redundancy but I'd guess they're probably just mirrored between two drives.

 

[Caldezar]

If you decide to go the self rolled route with unraid you could still go with 2X 10TB drives w/ parity as opposed to mirrored drives. That would still give you the same 10TB storage as a mirrored setup, but would allow you to add more drives to the mix in the future if the need arose.

^^This^^

Even if you start with 2 drives, I would HIGHLY recommend going with Unraid w/parity. Do some research on Unraid and ZFS and you'll likely come to the same conclusion. Even 2 bay Synology's are $400-500 these days, which don't offer any expansion. You can snag solid, older hardware as the base to your setup for very cheap. Use the same 2 drives and expansion is as easy as dropping in a new drive and adding it to the array.

Just remember that a NAS does not need a ton of hardware performance to operate. You only need to bump things up if you'll be using it for containers or VM's. I grabbed an old HP ProLiant Gen8 Micro Server w/4 bays, running a Xeon e3 1270 and 16GB ECC RAM for around $200 a while back. It's overkill for a pure NAS, but allows me to use containers if needed. IMO it's just about the perfect solution for a home NAS that isn't intended to get to huge size. I'm currently running 4x 10TB drives w/parity for a total of 30TB usable storage.



**Edit** I modified mine to allow for an additional drive in the form of an SSD in the top cavity inside. I dropped in a 1TB drive and use that as a cache drive. Not necessary, but it was a creative project with practical use.

 

[JD]

Canada Computers is throwing in a free 4TB IronWolf with the UGreen 4-bay unit... https://www.canadacomputers.com/en/...e-3-5-internal-sata-sata-600-st4000vn006.html

Granted this isn't the "Plus" model that most people review, but still, it's an Intel N100 with 8GB of RAM and dual 2.5G NICs. Pretty certain you can install your own OS too.

 

[sswilson]

Canada Computers is throwing in a free 4TB IronWolf with the UGreen 4-bay unit... https://www.canadacomputers.com/en/...e-3-5-internal-sata-sata-600-st4000vn006.html

Granted this isn't the "Plus" model that most people review, but still, it's an Intel N100 with 8GB of RAM and dual 2.5G NICs. Pretty certain you can install your own OS too.

That looks like a decent unit, but it's almost $600 before you add any drives (other than the token 4TB). $300 worth of used hardware would be much more power hungry, but do essentially the same job after adding a $75 (cdn) unraid license.

 

[Izerous]

TrueNAS, open media vault and others out there with free tiers. You can even go with free proxmox sitting ZFS raid pools and run whatever you want in the pool without a license cost overhead.