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You are opening a Pandora’s box :). There is truly no easy answer - too much depends on your budget, needs, OS of choice, etc. A good way to start is to follow

by vtail 8y ago

You are opening a Pandora’s box :). There is truly no easy answer - too much depends on your budget, needs, OS of choice, etc. A good way to start is to follow a few subreddits, like r/datahoarder or r/homelab to get some inspiration and understand what are the options etc. But since you still need an answer, here is something to get you started: 1) For fanless and ease of setup, buy a Synology/QNAP NAS, and install additional software there - $300+ w/o disks. 2) For future proof, buy Dell T30 on eBay for $300 and install FreeNAS on it.

pdimitar 8y ago
Eh, why Pandora's box? It's true I didn't give tons of details though. ...Is there any other option than Linux for a server OS? Like, practically? I know there are a bunch of others but speaking about everyday classic needs... is there really a choice? Budget -- I never did mind paying $1000 instead of $150 but it has to be worth it. I don't want to sheepishly buy the latest and greatest, especially after seeing many times in my programming career how a very modest machine (when properly tuned) can be a very decent server that can last you all the way until you need rented dedicated servers in several data centers. (Example: I gave up on the idea of an OpenVPN server on an RPi 3 after making a research on the expected bandwidth. It would be too small.) Thanks for the recommendations! Writing them down (not joking).
- vtail 8y ago
  I was half-joking, of course, and what I meant is that it’s an optimization problem with multiple dimensions and tons of trade-offs. E.g., - low power or performance? - ease of use vs. tunability? - closed vs. open-source? For the server OS, your choices are practically either Linux or FreeBSD (FreeNAS is based on the latter). If you don’t need zfs for NAS, OpenBSD becomes another interesting option - assuming the hardware is supported, is rock solid and easy to administrate, but may have some learning curve. Tinkering with something like RaspberryPi is not a bad idea - you will spend $50 or so but will learn a ton and in the process will understand your own requirements better. However, if you want NAS, I recommend buying a server-class hardware (like T30 mentioned above) and invest time in understanding how to use zfs and do reliable backups, assuming your data is valueable. I personally don’t think you should aim for lower power for NAS with any serious amount of data.
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    Sounds like a lot of learning I have to do. I am not opposed to it; everything gets more and more hijacked to closed gardens so I feel more of us should go the extra mile and find out how open-source things work. Just not sure when will I be financially secure enough for it. Thank you, I am definitely writing down everything written in the thread. I will get to tinkering at some point.

by vtail 8y ago

pdimitar 8y ago

Eh, why Pandora's box? It's true I didn't give tons of details though. ...Is there any other option than Linux for a server OS? Like, practically? I know there are a bunch of others but speaking about everyday classic needs... is there really a choice? Budget -- I never did mind paying $1000 instead of $150 but it has to be worth it. I don't want to sheepishly buy the latest and greatest, especially after seeing many times in my programming career how a very modest machine (when properly tuned) can be a very decent server that can last you all the way until you need rented dedicated servers in several data centers. (Example: I gave up on the idea of an OpenVPN server on an RPi 3 after making a research on the expected bandwidth. It would be too small.) Thanks for the recommendations! Writing them down (not joking).

vtail 8y ago
I was half-joking, of course, and what I meant is that it’s an optimization problem with multiple dimensions and tons of trade-offs. E.g., - low power or performance? - ease of use vs. tunability? - closed vs. open-source? For the server OS, your choices are practically either Linux or FreeBSD (FreeNAS is based on the latter). If you don’t need zfs for NAS, OpenBSD becomes another interesting option - assuming the hardware is supported, is rock solid and easy to administrate, but may have some learning curve. Tinkering with something like RaspberryPi is not a bad idea - you will spend $50 or so but will learn a ton and in the process will understand your own requirements better. However, if you want NAS, I recommend buying a server-class hardware (like T30 mentioned above) and invest time in understanding how to use zfs and do reliable backups, assuming your data is valueable. I personally don’t think you should aim for lower power for NAS with any serious amount of data.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  Sounds like a lot of learning I have to do. I am not opposed to it; everything gets more and more hijacked to closed gardens so I feel more of us should go the extra mile and find out how open-source things work. Just not sure when will I be financially secure enough for it. Thank you, I am definitely writing down everything written in the thread. I will get to tinkering at some point.