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To me choosing a specialized hardware was motivated by these two factors: - power management - semi-closed source applications On power management, I don't u

To me choosing a specialized hardware was motivated by these two factors: - power management - semi-closed source applications On power management, I don't use the NAS box continuously, and there can be long gaps between accesses. Having the box "sleep" for 95% of the day, and wake up the disks only for one or two bursts of activity is interesting to me. I tried doing that with DIY solutions, including Raspberry Pi+SATA disk type of arrangements. Overall it didn't work great and was a PITA. On the semi-proprietary apps, I am thinking about Synology's apps. I could totally live without them, but it's a nice addition to the package, they're easy to install, seem to be well maintained and work decently well.

dkarp 5y ago
As someone who normally rolls their own and has a half dozen raspberry pis around the house, I have a Synology NAS. As you said, it's very low energy and zero noise (rubber feet and quiet fan). It's also effortless to set up and run with their RAID system and syncing etc is very good. It'll let me know if there is a problem with a drive, it keeps itself updated and I've never had to reboot it. I do not use it for Plex as it wouldn't be able to handle it. They are a bit under powered but they're very optimised for their main purpose, Network Attached Storage, and that's the most important thing for me. It is also very neat and tidy, unlike most home made solutions.
- NortySpock 5y ago
  Would OpenMediaVault on a Raspberry Pi have met your RAID and sync needs? I keep eyeing OMV but haven't splurged on running a NAS with multiply-redundant drives separate from my application server; currently it's just an RPi4 as a docker host, with rsync keeping two USB drives in sync with each other.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    I’m obviously not very good at this, but my issue with OpenMediaVault was less the software side than finding hardware to reliably work with it. For instance trying with an old low profile PC, wake on lan didn’t work half of the time so I gave up, and just let the drives sleep. But they would also fail to wake up sometimes. All in all a NAS is not that expensive (I have one I bought for 400 or so, and it’s lasting for 15 years now…), so it’s hard to justify the endless tweaking of a solution that could work the same if done well. BTW even with a commercial NAS , ssh access is configurable, major scripting languages are there, and recent ones have docker I think. For the really custom stuff, like you I use Raspberry Pis that mount the NAS files as needed.
  - dkarp 5y ago
    Probably, at least on the software side! But then I'd need to find a RAID enclosure and a something to run OMV on. The NAS was around £150 with all that built in
rob74 5y ago
> Having the box "sleep" for 95% of the day, and wake up the disks only for one or two bursts of activity is interesting to me. Have you really managed to get that to work? I got a QNAP TS-230 a few months ago hoping I could do just that, but it turns out that even this smallest NAS box they are offering isn't really designed with this "occasional use" in mind. There are so many user questions about this (https://www.qnap.com/en-us/how-to/faq/article/why-are-my-nas-drives-not-entering-standby-mode https://www.qnap.com/en-us/how-to/faq/article/why-are-my-nas...) that they even built a half-baked utility that's supposed to give you a hint which process is preventing the drives from going into sleep mode, but it's not a great help. I have disabled all services (photo indexing with face recognition and other such crap) except for the most basic ones, but still the drives are happily chugging along, flashing their LED every few minutes, not spinning down. I know that it's basically a Linux computer, and there are probably utilities I can install to diagnose the issue better than with the above-mentioned software, but isn't this something that's supposed to work out of the box, or at least be easy for an average user to accomplish?!
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  I have an old Synology, so it miht be different. I run relatively few stuff on it too, with no client that consistently access the shares though samba/nfs (I cluster the scripts that run automaticaly around the same range of time, and they unmount after they’re done). I wonder if your system is not writing logs from a monitoring service (something checking your dynamic DNS, or waiting for remote connections, or pinging the internal servers to see if they’re alive). I stopped most default services, including sync (it’s done more rarely via a user script instead), and yes, it can be a PITA to understand what’s running out of the box.

dkarp 5y ago

As someone who normally rolls their own and has a half dozen raspberry pis around the house, I have a Synology NAS. As you said, it's very low energy and zero noise (rubber feet and quiet fan). It's also effortless to set up and run with their RAID system and syncing etc is very good. It'll let me know if there is a problem with a drive, it keeps itself updated and I've never had to reboot it. I do not use it for Plex as it wouldn't be able to handle it. They are a bit under powered but they're very optimised for their main purpose, Network Attached Storage, and that's the most important thing for me. It is also very neat and tidy, unlike most home made solutions.

NortySpock 5y ago
Would OpenMediaVault on a Raspberry Pi have met your RAID and sync needs? I keep eyeing OMV but haven't splurged on running a NAS with multiply-redundant drives separate from my application server; currently it's just an RPi4 as a docker host, with rsync keeping two USB drives in sync with each other.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  I’m obviously not very good at this, but my issue with OpenMediaVault was less the software side than finding hardware to reliably work with it. For instance trying with an old low profile PC, wake on lan didn’t work half of the time so I gave up, and just let the drives sleep. But they would also fail to wake up sometimes. All in all a NAS is not that expensive (I have one I bought for 400 or so, and it’s lasting for 15 years now…), so it’s hard to justify the endless tweaking of a solution that could work the same if done well. BTW even with a commercial NAS , ssh access is configurable, major scripting languages are there, and recent ones have docker I think. For the really custom stuff, like you I use Raspberry Pis that mount the NAS files as needed.
- dkarp 5y ago
  Probably, at least on the software side! But then I'd need to find a RAID enclosure and a something to run OMV on. The NAS was around £150 with all that built in

rob74 5y ago

> Having the box "sleep" for 95% of the day, and wake up the disks only for one or two bursts of activity is interesting to me. Have you really managed to get that to work? I got a QNAP TS-230 a few months ago hoping I could do just that, but it turns out that even this smallest NAS box they are offering isn't really designed with this "occasional use" in mind. There are so many user questions about this (https://www.qnap.com/en-us/how-to/faq/article/why-are-my-nas-drives-not-entering-standby-mode https://www.qnap.com/en-us/how-to/faq/article/why-are-my-nas...) that they even built a half-baked utility that's supposed to give you a hint which process is preventing the drives from going into sleep mode, but it's not a great help. I have disabled all services (photo indexing with face recognition and other such crap) except for the most basic ones, but still the drives are happily chugging along, flashing their LED every few minutes, not spinning down. I know that it's basically a Linux computer, and there are probably utilities I can install to diagnose the issue better than with the above-mentioned software, but isn't this something that's supposed to work out of the box, or at least be easy for an average user to accomplish?!

makeitdouble 5y ago
I have an old Synology, so it miht be different. I run relatively few stuff on it too, with no client that consistently access the shares though samba/nfs (I cluster the scripts that run automaticaly around the same range of time, and they unmount after they’re done). I wonder if your system is not writing logs from a monitoring service (something checking your dynamic DNS, or waiting for remote connections, or pinging the internal servers to see if they’re alive). I stopped most default services, including sync (it’s done more rarely via a user script instead), and yes, it can be a PITA to understand what’s running out of the box.