6 ms·

Wait. You build a new one every -year-?! How does one establish the reliability of the hardware (particularly the aliexpress motherboard), not to mention data r

by mvkel 11mo ago

Wait. You build a new one every -year-?! How does one establish the reliability of the hardware (particularly the aliexpress motherboard), not to mention data retention, if its maximum life expectancy is 365 days?

p1necone 11mo ago
Looks like they built a new NAS, but kept using the same drives. Which given the number of drive bays in the NAS probably make up a large majority of the overall cost in something like this. Edit: reading comprehension fail - they bought drives earlier, at an unspecified price, but they weren't from the old NAS - I agree, when lifetimes of drives are measures in decades and huge amounts of tbw it seems pretty silly to buy new ones every time.
- adastra22 11mo ago
  MB and other elements are more concerning than the drives.
  - zdragnar 11mo ago
    For system failure, yes, but not if data retention and recovery is your primary concern. When building a device primarily used for storing personal things, I'd much prefer to save money on the motherboard and risk that failing than skimping on the drives themselves
    - embedding-shape 11mo ago
      Eh, cheap motherboards aren't a panacea that can't hurt the rest of the hardware, I personally don't skimp on motherboards, and would much rather skimp on the drives themselves as I have redundancy and 1-2 drives failing wouldn't hurt too much. And data retention is my top priority. Motherboards have fried connected hardware before, poor grounding/ESD protections, firmware bugs together with aggressive power management, wiring weirdness and power related faults have broken people's drives before. What I've never heard about is a drive breaking something else in a system, but broken motherboards have taken friends with them more than once.
      - adastra22 11mo ago
        Not sure why you are being downvoted. The MB is a single point of failure in this system, the drives are not. I’ve experienced many drive failures over the years, but never lost data due to RAID. Failing MB or PSU on the other hand has wiped out my entire system.
        machomaster 11mo ago
        I have lost data due to errors in bios raid by Intel.
    - aynyc 11mo ago
      You actually want reliable MB & RAM to ensure data doesn't get corrupted in memory first. Since you have various ways of writing data to disks that offer you resiliency.
    - bostik 11mo ago
      Don't skimp on the power supply either. A dodgy PSU can torch all devices attached to it. How do I know? I've had two drives and one MB fail in quick succession thanks to a silently failing power supply.
- throwaway2037 11mo ago
  This is the funniest edit have read in while.
  - mvkel 11mo ago
    Waiting for the edit to the edit
    - p1necone 11mo ago
      In my defense - the paragraph under the 'Storage' header reads like what I said to me, whereas the 'Bulk Storage Hard Disk Drives' header says something kind of contradictory to that. ('Collection of brand new parts' vs 'my own decommissioned hard drives')
SirFatty 11mo ago
How else is one to get the clicks?
- cube00 11mo ago
  Plus the commission from the undisclosed Amazon affiliate links in the post. They're tagged for the post and year so must be worth it to go to that trouble rather then using generic tag for the whole blog. tag=diyans2024-20, tag=diynas2025-20,tag=diynas2026-20
  - whynotmaybe 11mo ago
    On a more rhetorical side, should they be disclosed? Isn't that assumed nowadays that every link to a marketplace is an affiliate link?
    - toast0 11mo ago
      Social enforcement is probably all we can get, but yes, they should be disclosed. I'ma a fan of using 'affiliate link' as the anchor text, but it might offend one's html sensibilities. A brief one sentance blurb about commisions before the affiliate links start is sufficient.
    - dspillett 11mo ago
      > should they be disclosed? Yes. > Isn't that assumed nowadays that every link to a marketplace is an affiliate link? Other people doing something wrong is seldom a good reason to do it wrong yourself. My own personal pettiness: If an article declares the existence of affiliate links, I'll use those links more often than not. If they don't, I'll make an effort to revisit the links without the affiliate IDs. If an article presents both affiliate and non-affiliated links, I will generally use the former, and I'll trust the writers opinions a little more than otherwise. I actually keep a separate browser for buying things once they have been researched, to slightly inconvenience the tracking of me generally, so I won't be linked by “last affiliate” tracking unless fairly decent profiling is in action (which it won't be: sellers won't make that much effort just to pay money out to affiliates), only if I copy over the affiliate-id decorated link (or the original source article and click the link in that environment).
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
briancmoses 11mo ago
Somebody else shared this, but I'm the blog's author. I think you're asking good questions, but they're not from the point-of-view of the people who actually benefit from these blogs. I've answered the "You build one every year?" question quite a few times over the years. These blogs have a shelf life. After about a year, newer hardware is available that's a better a better value. And after 2-3 years, it starts to get difficult to even find the many of the parts. I don't replace my NAS every year, but every now and then I do keep my yearly NAS for my own purposes, but 2026 won't be one of those years. > How does one establish the reliability of the hardware...? One guy on the Internet is--and always will be--an anecdote, I could use this NAS until its hardware was obsolete and I'd still be unable to establish any kind of actual reliability for the hardware. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or money required to elevate beyond being a piece of anecdotal data. However, there's a sizable audience out there who have realized that they need some kind of storage beyond what they already have, but haven't implemented a solution yet. I think if you put yourself in their shoes, you'll realize that anything is better than nothing in regards to their important data. My hope is that these blogs move that audience along towards finding that solution.
- mvkel 11mo ago
  > One guy on the Internet is--and always will be--an anecdote It seems like you have a specific person in mind as the audience member (yourself?), but the piece could benefit from a wider view. Given your hardware choices, reliability seems to not be a factor at all, but near-term cost (at the expense of long-term cost). I'm not expecting you to personally test your hardware choices, but make choices based on the aggregate accounts of others, like the rest of us. I would imagine the mean audience member would want to buy something they can set and forget, which would necessitate the reliable choice. That is wholly different than a person who is excited about tinkering with a brand new NAS each year
  - briancmoses 11mo ago
    You should give me the benefit of the doubt when it comes to understanding the audience! I've got at least fourteen years of writing these blogs and then interacting with the people who engage with them. I think I have a decent understanding with what resonates with the audience. I've found that audience to be large enough that I'd rather focus my efforts on creating content this audience continues to find useful. An engaged audience is far more interesting to create content for than a wider audience. The audience does want something that they can set and forget, which they've been doing for about as long as I've been writing these blogs. The few recipients of these actual DIY NAS builds (via raffles, giveaways, auctions, etc) have used them for years. For years, people have been telling me about how they used one of my previous DIY NAS buids as inspiration years ago and have told me how they have worked for them over the years. I expect in the not-to-distant future, someone will be telling me the same about this particular NAS. Despite disbelief and insistence otherwise, I'm insanely confident that this DIY NAS will be reliable for years to come.
dspillett 11mo ago
> Wait. You build a new one every -year-?! For some people, building a NAS, or a fuller home-lab, is a hobby in itself. Posts like this are generally written by one of those people for an audience of those sorts of people. Nothing wrong with that. I was someone like that myself, some time ago. On a more cynical note: if the blog is popular enough, those affiliate links might be worth more than a few pennies and a post about previous years builds with links to those years choice of tech, will not see anything like the same traction. It wouldn't get attention on HN for a start (at least not until a few more years time, when it might be part of an interesting then-and-now comparison).

by mvkel 11mo ago

p1necone 11mo ago

Looks like they built a new NAS, but kept using the same drives. Which given the number of drive bays in the NAS probably make up a large majority of the overall cost in something like this. Edit: reading comprehension fail - they bought drives earlier, at an unspecified price, but they weren't from the old NAS - I agree, when lifetimes of drives are measures in decades and huge amounts of tbw it seems pretty silly to buy new ones every time.

adastra22 11mo ago
MB and other elements are more concerning than the drives.
- zdragnar 11mo ago
  For system failure, yes, but not if data retention and recovery is your primary concern. When building a device primarily used for storing personal things, I'd much prefer to save money on the motherboard and risk that failing than skimping on the drives themselves
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
    Eh, cheap motherboards aren't a panacea that can't hurt the rest of the hardware, I personally don't skimp on motherboards, and would much rather skimp on the drives themselves as I have redundancy and 1-2 drives failing wouldn't hurt too much. And data retention is my top priority. Motherboards have fried connected hardware before, poor grounding/ESD protections, firmware bugs together with aggressive power management, wiring weirdness and power related faults have broken people's drives before. What I've never heard about is a drive breaking something else in a system, but broken motherboards have taken friends with them more than once.
    - adastra22 11mo ago
      Not sure why you are being downvoted. The MB is a single point of failure in this system, the drives are not. I’ve experienced many drive failures over the years, but never lost data due to RAID. Failing MB or PSU on the other hand has wiped out my entire system.
      - machomaster 11mo ago
        I have lost data due to errors in bios raid by Intel.
  - aynyc 11mo ago
    You actually want reliable MB & RAM to ensure data doesn't get corrupted in memory first. Since you have various ways of writing data to disks that offer you resiliency.
  - bostik 11mo ago
    Don't skimp on the power supply either. A dodgy PSU can torch all devices attached to it. How do I know? I've had two drives and one MB fail in quick succession thanks to a silently failing power supply.
throwaway2037 11mo ago
This is the funniest edit have read in while.
- mvkel 11mo ago
  Waiting for the edit to the edit
  - p1necone 11mo ago
    In my defense - the paragraph under the 'Storage' header reads like what I said to me, whereas the 'Bulk Storage Hard Disk Drives' header says something kind of contradictory to that. ('Collection of brand new parts' vs 'my own decommissioned hard drives')

SirFatty 11mo ago

How else is one to get the clicks?

cube00 11mo ago
Plus the commission from the undisclosed Amazon affiliate links in the post. They're tagged for the post and year so must be worth it to go to that trouble rather then using generic tag for the whole blog. tag=diyans2024-20, tag=diynas2025-20,tag=diynas2026-20
- whynotmaybe 11mo ago
  On a more rhetorical side, should they be disclosed? Isn't that assumed nowadays that every link to a marketplace is an affiliate link?
  - toast0 11mo ago
    Social enforcement is probably all we can get, but yes, they should be disclosed. I'ma a fan of using 'affiliate link' as the anchor text, but it might offend one's html sensibilities. A brief one sentance blurb about commisions before the affiliate links start is sufficient.
  - dspillett 11mo ago
    > should they be disclosed? Yes. > Isn't that assumed nowadays that every link to a marketplace is an affiliate link? Other people doing something wrong is seldom a good reason to do it wrong yourself. My own personal pettiness: If an article declares the existence of affiliate links, I'll use those links more often than not. If they don't, I'll make an effort to revisit the links without the affiliate IDs. If an article presents both affiliate and non-affiliated links, I will generally use the former, and I'll trust the writers opinions a little more than otherwise. I actually keep a separate browser for buying things once they have been researched, to slightly inconvenience the tracking of me generally, so I won't be linked by “last affiliate” tracking unless fairly decent profiling is in action (which it won't be: sellers won't make that much effort just to pay money out to affiliates), only if I copy over the affiliate-id decorated link (or the original source article and click the link in that environment).

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

briancmoses 11mo ago

Somebody else shared this, but I'm the blog's author. I think you're asking good questions, but they're not from the point-of-view of the people who actually benefit from these blogs. I've answered the "You build one every year?" question quite a few times over the years. These blogs have a shelf life. After about a year, newer hardware is available that's a better a better value. And after 2-3 years, it starts to get difficult to even find the many of the parts. I don't replace my NAS every year, but every now and then I do keep my yearly NAS for my own purposes, but 2026 won't be one of those years. > How does one establish the reliability of the hardware...? One guy on the Internet is--and always will be--an anecdote, I could use this NAS until its hardware was obsolete and I'd still be unable to establish any kind of actual reliability for the hardware. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or money required to elevate beyond being a piece of anecdotal data. However, there's a sizable audience out there who have realized that they need some kind of storage beyond what they already have, but haven't implemented a solution yet. I think if you put yourself in their shoes, you'll realize that anything is better than nothing in regards to their important data. My hope is that these blogs move that audience along towards finding that solution.

mvkel 11mo ago
> One guy on the Internet is--and always will be--an anecdote It seems like you have a specific person in mind as the audience member (yourself?), but the piece could benefit from a wider view. Given your hardware choices, reliability seems to not be a factor at all, but near-term cost (at the expense of long-term cost). I'm not expecting you to personally test your hardware choices, but make choices based on the aggregate accounts of others, like the rest of us. I would imagine the mean audience member would want to buy something they can set and forget, which would necessitate the reliable choice. That is wholly different than a person who is excited about tinkering with a brand new NAS each year
- briancmoses 11mo ago
  You should give me the benefit of the doubt when it comes to understanding the audience! I've got at least fourteen years of writing these blogs and then interacting with the people who engage with them. I think I have a decent understanding with what resonates with the audience. I've found that audience to be large enough that I'd rather focus my efforts on creating content this audience continues to find useful. An engaged audience is far more interesting to create content for than a wider audience. The audience does want something that they can set and forget, which they've been doing for about as long as I've been writing these blogs. The few recipients of these actual DIY NAS builds (via raffles, giveaways, auctions, etc) have used them for years. For years, people have been telling me about how they used one of my previous DIY NAS buids as inspiration years ago and have told me how they have worked for them over the years. I expect in the not-to-distant future, someone will be telling me the same about this particular NAS. Despite disbelief and insistence otherwise, I'm insanely confident that this DIY NAS will be reliable for years to come.

dspillett 11mo ago

> Wait. You build a new one every -year-?! For some people, building a NAS, or a fuller home-lab, is a hobby in itself. Posts like this are generally written by one of those people for an audience of those sorts of people. Nothing wrong with that. I was someone like that myself, some time ago. On a more cynical note: if the blog is popular enough, those affiliate links might be worth more than a few pennies and a post about previous years builds with links to those years choice of tech, will not see anything like the same traction. It wouldn't get attention on HN for a start (at least not until a few more years time, when it might be part of an interesting then-and-now comparison).