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Budget NAS or DAS discussion - educate me please

sswilson said:
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.
Click to expand...
Always a bit of a premium on these prebuilt units, but if you want the compact form factor and hotswap bays, I'd say the price is reasonable. Cheaper than your equivalent QNAP or Synology.

The 2-bay unit is obviously much cheaper, $360 - no drives, single NIC. I just would never advise buying any 2 bay unit as eventually you'll want to add more disks.
 
xentr_thread_starter
Hmmm..I am definitely not ready to jump into a $600 unit+drives+sofware fees. That is way more than I expected it would be. While I understand the suggestion from a long term perspective, it would be a show stopper.
 
Personally.... I'd grab a couple of those 12TB Exos from the BST and pair them with a used motherboard combo + case. That'd still probably run $400 (ish) if you throw in an unraid license, but it'd get your feet wet with something you could expand on as your needs increase.
 
I know Aoostar is cheaper for example: https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-wtr-pro-intel-n150-4-bays-nas-mini-pc?variant=50145480802602. Sometimes you can stack with AliExpress coupons as you'll find them sold there too. I don't think they provide any form of OS. I imagine there's many other off-brands like this.

I think you just have to decide what level of support you want, and what level of involvement/tinkering you want to do. Turn-key solutions come at a premium cost up front, but can save you time & money in the long run.
 
Bond007 said:
Do you or anyone else have much experience with free options like those? Any major issues or downsides that come with free?
Click to expand...
I was a little frustrated trying to TrueNAS Scale doing what I wanted. But I wanted not just file storage but also virtualization, and it was the virtualization part I was fighting with the most trying to get docker and VMs working that way I would expect.

Instead I'm using a rackmount QNAP NAS that I picked up used at a good price and instead of fiddling with trying to get scale to do what I wanted for virtualization I moved to proxmox. The learning curve was kind of understanding ZFS pools and such, once over that hump using TrueNAS just for file storage is pretty straight forward.

Random YT video here and there to help explain a few things, the official discord channel being a little less helpful than hoped.
 
Personally, I think the easy way to set up a basic NAS is to use DrivePool(30USD), set it up as a share in Windows. If you want parity, Snapraid, it's a little harder for some to use, you can just use DrivePool and run duplicates, IE, like a raid1 setup. Drivepool uses an NTFS file system. You do have the option to use ReFS, you must then use storage spaces ( which I don't like ). The great thing about it you can use any size drives and add or subtract drives without losing data on said drives. Super fast and easy setup.

Anaboiz has a sales thread with some great prices on used drives.
 
UNAS 2 was announced today.... might be an interesting thought ;)

ca.store.ui.com

UNAS 2 - Ubiquiti Store

UniFi Network Attached Storage with (2) 3.5" HDD bays, 2.5 GbE networking, USB-C connectivity, and an included PoE++ adapter, all in a compact footprint.
ca.store.ui.com ca.store.ui.com

Cool that it's powered by PoE++ as well.
 
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