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Don't throw away your old PC–it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
- superkuh 11mo agoWhile there are use cases for NAS, generally, if you have a desktop PC it's far better to put the hard drives in it rather than setting up a second computer you have to turn on and run too. Putting the storage in the computer where you'll use it means it'll be much faster, much cheaper, incomparably more reliable, with a more natural UI, and it'll use less eletricity than having to run 2 computers. Now if your NAS use case is streaming media files to multiple devices (TV set top boxes, etc), sure, NAS makes sense if the NAS you build is very low idle power. But if you just need the storage for actual computing it is a waste of time and money.
- ubercow13 11mo agoWhy do you think it'd be more reliable? That's one of the main advantages of a NAS
- superkuh 10mo agoIt's pretty simple: 2 computers have twice the parts and having twice the parts means there are more chances for something to die. But it goes beyond this too. Far less software stack complexity (the big one), no flaky network link, no complex formatting that cannot be recovered with common tools, etc. KISS.
- lateforwork 11mo agoUnfortunately PCs have mechanical devices that give out after a few years. I am referring of course to fans. I use a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu and Samba as my NAS. It is cheap and reliable.
- eloisius 11mo agoI do too, but I’m looking to get proper solution soon. A Pi is a pretty lousy NAS. It can’t even power two drives so you can’t have redundancy unless you get a powered USB hub. And even then, I used one of those for a while and the drive connected to it prematurely failed. I think maybe because the power supply wasn’t stable.
- GlibMonkeyDeath 11mo agoI have a Pi4 running Raid 1 NAS with two SSD drives, and an externally powered USB hub. Unfortunately, it crashes every 6 months or so and needs a power cycle. Haven't been able to track down why, but I also suspect a power supply issue. Initially I naively tried to run the two drives right off the USB3 ports in the Pi, and that basically crashed within a day - but that is of course because I was exceeding the power draw. An external hub and supply helped, but didn't fully fix the issue.
- lateforwork 10mo agoI use a powered USB hub, haven't had a problem in 5 years.
- strken 11mo agoI've had more SD cards die on me than fans. I don't think any have died in the past five years, even.
- PaulHoule 11mo agoI can’t remember replacing fans because they stopped spinning but I have EOLed them because the bearings went bad and they started to screech.
- gilrain 11mo agoIs there a particular brand you buy? Mine always fail after about 5 years… and I try a new brand each time. Not cheap fans, either; usually $15-20 per 120mm unit.
- type0 11mo agoI tried using different sd cards with RPi but kept having issues with broken filesystem few months after, it was probably caused by bad power supply and electric surges.
- jhgb 11mo agoYou don't HAVE to boot RPi4+ from an SD card. RPi4 and RPi5 can boot from an external SSD just fine. I don't recall the last time I used an SD card in an RPi but it must have been years.
- type0 10mo agoYeah, that's what i have done, but it becomes bulky which doesn't always fits the project
- baq 11mo agoNoctua, but $20 might not be enough for the cheapest one depending where you live. I’m not buying anything else and I’m also swapping out any non-noctua fan in my parts when possible (e.g. bought a scythe cooler due to ‘interesting’ dimensional constraints and swapped its fan with a noctua one.)
- xandrius 10mo agoI have fans for the early 00s. Also a fan is like $10? Things which are more vital than that are the disks, power supply, rams.
- NikolaNovak 11mo agoI appreciate the message of this article. I've played with half a dozen types of home NAS / RAID / storage solutions over the decades. The best way I can describe it is: There are people who just want to use a car to get from A to B; there are those who enjoy the act of driving, maybe take it to the track on a lapping day; and there are those who enjoy having a shell of a car in the garage and working on it. There's of course a definite overlap and Venn diagram :-). My approach / suggestion - Understand what type are you in relation to any given technology vs what is the author's perspective. I will never resent the time (oh God so much time!) I've spent in the past mucking with homelabs and storage systems. Good memories and tons of learning! today I have family and kids and just need my storage to work. I'm in a different Venn circle than the author - sure I have knowledge and experience and could conceivably save a few bucks (eh not as given as articles make it seem;), as long as I value my time appropriately low and don't mind the necessary upkeep and potential scheduled and unscheduled "maintenance windows" to my non-techie users. But I must admit I'm in the turn-key solution phase of my life and have cheerfully enjoyed a big-name NAS over last 5 years or so :). The trick with old computers harnessed as NAS is the often increased space, power, and setup/patching/maintenance work requirements, compared to hopefully some learning experience and a sense of control.
- kotaKat 11mo ago> My approach / suggestion - Understand what type are you in relation to any given technology vs what is the author's perspective. Similarly what I was once told when looking at private planes was "What's your mission?" and they've stuck with me ever since, even if I'm never gonna buy a plane. One person's mission might be backing up their family photos while someone else's mission is a full *arr stack.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago> But I must admit I'm in the turn-key solution phase of my life and have cheerfully enjoyed a big-name NAS over last 5 years or so :). You know, I thought I was too, so I threw in the towel and migrated one my NAS to TrueNAS, since it's supposed to be one of those "turn-key solutions that doesn't require maintenance", and everything got slower, harder to maintain and even managed to somehow screw up one of my old disks when I added it to my pool. The next step after that was to migrate to NixOS and bit the bullet to ensure the stuff actually works. I'd love to just give someone money and not having to care, but it seems the motto of "If you want something done correctly, you have to do it yourself" lives deep in me, and I just cannot stomach loosing the data on my NAS, so it ends up really hard to trust any of those paid-for solutions when they're so crap.
- neogodless 11mo agoI've self-hosted web apps (typically IIS and SQL Server) for over 20 years. While using desktops for this has sometimes been nice, the big things I want out of a server are - low power usage when running 24/7 - reliable operation - quiet operation - performance but they don't need much So I've had dual Xeon servers and 8-core Ryzen servers but my favorites are a miniForums with a mobile Ryzen quad core, and my UGREEN NAS. They check all the boxes for server / NAS. Plus both were under $300 before upgrades / storage drives. Often my previous gaming desktop sells for a lot more than that ... I just sold my 4 year old video card for $220. Not sure what the rest of the machine will be used for, but it's not a good server because the 12-core CPU simply isn't power efficient enough.
- newsclues 11mo agoFind a cheap low power CPU to swap in. Or tune it in BIOS to use less power (some CPUs have an eco mode that make this easy). Sell the gaming GPU and put in something that does video out, or use a CPU with an iGPU. Big gaming cases with quiet fans are quiet. Selling the GPU and tuning or swapping the CPU can put money in your pocket to pay for storage.
- neogodless 11mo agoIt is water-cooled and whisper quiet aside from the GPU fans. So yes there are options.. but right now selling the RAM alone might pay for a whole mini-server. I'm going to try to sell it locally to a PC gamer though, get some proper use out of it!
- Kirby64 11mo agoThis is literally impossible with most server grade stuff. It’ll never be as efficient as the low power modern stuff.
- whatevaa 10mo agoServer boards (like with xeons) won't have eco modes and will not be made for such use case. Nor server cpus. Idle servers are wasted money, so they are not designed for such use cases. Big case also means big space.
- iammjm 11mo ago“I repurposed an old gaming PC with a Ryzen 1600x, 24GB of RAM, and an old GTX 1060 for my NAS since I had most of the parts already.” Wouldn’t running something like this 24/7 cause a substantial energy consumption? Costs of electricity being one thing, carbon footprint an another. Do we really want such a setup running in each household in addition to X other devices?
- zahlman 10mo agoSheesh. The described "old gaming PC" is much more powerful than the machine I'm using to post this.
- dijit 11mo agosure, but the co2 emissions from a new machine would take about 10 years to offset, by which time this thinking has made you replace it.. twice.
- leobg 11mo ago? It’s not like the machine would be custom built for him. Are you saying it’s fine to drive a huge truck if you’re single and just need to get around the block to buy a pack of eggs, just because the emissions are nothing compared to those required for making that smaller, more efficient car that you could buy instead?
- Groxx 10mo agono, they're saying the emissions needed to create that smaller, more efficient car may vastly exceed their car's emissions during its entire lifetime under their use. so it may be a net loss.
- ahtihn 10mo agoThe break-even point for the small car vs truck is much lower, so there it makes a lot more sense to switch.
- onionisafruit 10mo ago
- kentiko 11mo agoThe first thing you should consider doing with you old device is selling or giving them away. This helps lowering the need for manufacturing more hardware, it prevents the hardware becoming e-waste in a drawer, and it put pressure on the market to lower it's prices. Sure, you can reuse as a NAS, but someone probably needs it more.
- rini17 11mo agoThe electronics went so cheap recently, so selling it to strangers is rarely worth the effort. Then there's a question, what OS are you going to put on an old PC. And then even if they are, say, only using browser, and would be okay with linux, modern browsers need 8GB of memory at least.
- catlikesshrimp 10mo agoI am running Win 10 LTSC on "HP 205 G3 All-in-One Desktop PC" with 4GB RAM. Not the best experience, but plays youtube and can output to HDMI. I am not saying you are wrong in general.
- mvx64 10mo agoI know I am in the minority and my uses/needs/requirements are not average, but I am perfectly fine with running Xubuntu on the following hardware: 1) 4GB 2011 Thinkpad with HDD (yeah really) and 2) 4GB 2009 Phenom desktop (was Win10 until a month ago). By fine I mean running all these at the same time: firefox with several tabs, development tools, Blender and GIMP. All snappy and fast. Even the HDD in the laptop is only an annoyance during/after a cold boot. Then it makes no difference. I daily drive both for the past 8-15 years. The laptop sits at ~10-15W idle and the i5 in it is a workhorse if needed. Of course there are uses for better hardware, I am not dismissing upgrades. But the whole modern hw/sw situation is a giant shipwreck and a huge waste of resources/energy. I've tried very expensive new laptops for work (look up "embodied energy"), and Windows 11 right-click takes half a second to respond and Unity3D can take several minutes to boot up. It's really sad. edit: To be honest I have to add a counter-example: streaming >=1080p60 video from YT is kind of a no-no, but that's related to the first sentence of my post.
- powerclue 11mo agoBetter? No absolutely not. Capable? Without a doubt. I have a multi bay nas and it's like 1/6the the size of my pc case. My nas also makes removing and replacing drives trivial. There's a million guides online for my particular nas already and software written with it in mind. It also draws a lot less power than my gaming pc and has a lot quieter operation. It's difficult for me to accept it's better given all the above.
- Havoc 11mo agoReusing existing hardware is a great gameplan. Really happy with my build and glad I didn't go for out of the box. >In general, you want to get the fastest boot drive you can. Pretty much all NAS like operation systems run in memory, so in general you're better off running the OS from some shitty 128gb sata ssd and using the nvme for data/cache/similar where it actually matters. Some OS are even happy to use a usb stick but that only works for OS designed to accommodate this (unraid I think does). Something like proxmox would destroy the stick. Also, on HDDs - worth reading up on SMR drives before buying. And these days considering an all flash build if you don't have TBs of content
- embedding-shape 11mo ago> Something like proxmox would destroy the stick. Never used proxmox myself, but is that the common issue of "logs written to flash consuming writes"? Or something else? The former is probably just changing a line in the config to fix, if it's just that. > And these days considering an all flash build if you don't have TBs of content Maybe we're thinking in different scales, but doesn't almost all NAS' have more than 1TB of content? My own personal NAS currently has 16TB in total, I don't want to even imagine what the cost of that would be if I went with SSDs instead of HDDs. I still have SSD for caching, but main data store in a NAS should most likely be HDDs unless you have so much money you just have to spend it.
- gessha 10mo agoThere’s enough people out there(not me) that there’s a market for all-SSD NASes.
- Havoc 10mo ago> Maybe we're thinking in different scales, but doesn't almost all NAS' have more than 1TB of content? Depends on what you’re storing. With fast gigabit internet there just isn’t much of a need to store ahem Linux isos locally anymore as anything can be procured in a couple mins. Most people just aren’t producing that much original data on their own either (exceptions exist ofc - people in video making space etc) Plus it’s not that expensive anymore. I’ve got around 6TB of 100% mirrored flash without even trying (was aiming for speed and redundancy). Most of it used enterprise ones. Think I paid around 50 a TB. Re proxmox - some of their multi node orchestration stuff is famous for chewing up drives at wild rates for some people. People losing a 1% of ssd life every couple days. Hasn’t affected me so haven’t looked into details
- rini17 11mo agoAfter I had a reckoning with bitrot, would muchly recommend to use something with ECC memory for NAS. And a checksumming filesystem with periodic scrubing that won't get corrupt on you silently.
- foobarian 10mo ago> checksumming filesystem with periodic scrubing Do you know a system that does this? Looking for this too
- Palomides 10mo agobtrfs and zfs
- QuiEgo 10mo agoZFS, Btrfs, or SnapRAID in a chron job (not a file system, but accomplishes something similar). ZFS is the “gold standard” here
- Marsymars 10mo agoSnapRAID is awesome, it's been bulletproof in recovering multiple failed drives for me, but note that you have to have your sync and scrub operations appropriately configured to get bitrot protection.
- QuiEgo 10mo agoI have had good experiences with SnapRAID as well. I use this script to run it (in a Chron job), which is highly configurable: https://github.com/auanasgheps/snapraid-aio-script https://github.com/auanasgheps/snapraid-aio-script
- mjevans 10mo agoSame, but I also discovered a wonderful bonus in the difference between True ECC DDR5 and just the on chip BS stuff. ECC DDR5 boots insanely fast since the BIOS can quickly verify the tune passes. This is even true when doing your initial adjustment / verification of manufacturer spec.
- teiferer 11mo ago> old gaming PC with a Ryzen 1600x, 24GB of RAM "Old", right. That old PC I'm about to throw away has 2 GB of RAM.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- patja 10mo agoYes it is a NAS and it is cheap and convenient to repurpose hardware. But for anything where your data is important isn't ECC memory still critical for a NAS in this day and age?
- mjevans 10mo agoYes, and my desktops utilize ECC too for that reason. I only lack ECC in the places it's really difficult to avoid that tremendous drawback. E.G. a Steamdeck is or smartphone are both relegated as toy devices that are not for serious computing.
- MisterTea 10mo agoI've been building and running various home servers for years. Currently I have a n eBay special FreeBSD quad xeon (based on the desktop socket) with 64GB ECC and a cheap SAS/SATA card running two ZFS arrays. On a side note: I hate web GUI's. I used to think they were the best thing since sliced bread but the constant churn combined with endless menus and config options with zero hints or direct help links led me to hate them. The best part is the documentation is always a version or two behind and doesn't match the latest and greatest furniture arrangement. Maybe that has improved but I'd rather understand the tools themselves.
- xandrius 10mo agoSure, if you're going to reuse something which would be thrown away or left to dust otherwise (foolish but I'd imagine someone does that). But don't do this just so you can upgrade your current pc. I'd vouch more for old laptops, which are generally not upgradeable, come with built-in UPS, if you remove the screen is as thin as a notebook and can handle low usage. Then you can connect either directly or via other interfaces a bunch of disks and you're golden.
- RandomBacon 10mo agoI'm looking for the quietest 6 bay NAS possible. I have a beQuiet case and six 30TB HDDs, and I plan to put the Ubuntu with a Plex server on a NVME SSD and do a ZFS 4+2. Can anyone point me to a better/quieter set-up? Thank you in advance.
- nfriedly 10mo agoMy home server / NAS is essentially just my old gaming desktop + some extra hard drives. It runs Unraid with Nextcloud, Plex, and a few other services. It's great, and generally pretty low maintenance. I'll also point out that there are a lot of folks out there who don't have very large demands when it comes to computing, and would be served perfectly well by a 5-10 year old system. Even low-end gaming (Fortnight, GTA V, Minecraft, Roblox, etc.) can run perfectly fine on a computer built with $300-400 of used parts.
- waswaswas 10mo agoAt San Francisco electricity prices of ~$0.50/kWh, using an old gaming PC/workstation instead of a lower power platform will cost you hundreds of dollars per year in electricity. The cost of an N100-based NAS gets dwarfed by the electricity cost of reusing old hardware.
- lelele 10mo agoBut do you really need to keep it on 24/7? What about a wake-on-LAN solution?
- reddalo 10mo agoYou wouldn't want to consume your hard disk spin-up count every day.
- Marsymars 10mo agoDoes WoL... actually work with non-industrial server and networking gear? Any time I've looked into it, it's seemed interminably finicky.
- crtasm 10mo agoAnecdata: I use it every day to wake my windows desktop PC and to hibernate it: ssh -f desktop 'shutdown /h'
- TacticalCoder 10mo ago[dead]
- jcalvinowens 10mo agoI've been running homebuilt NAS for a decade. My advice is going to irritate the purists: * Don't use raid5. Use btrfs-raid1 or use mdraid10 with >=2 far-copies. * Don't use raid6. Use btrfs-raid1c3 or use mdraid10 with >=3 far-copies. * Don't use ZFS on Linux. If you really want ZFS, run FreeBSD. The multiple copy formats outperform the parity formats on reads by a healthy margin, both in btrfs and in mdraid. They're also remarkably quieter in operation and when scrubbing, night and day, which matters to me since mine sits in a corner of my living room. When I switched from raid6 to 3-far-copy-mdraid10, the performance boost was nice, but I was completely flabbergasted by the difference in the noise level during scrubs. Yes, they're a bit less space efficient, but modern storage is so cheap it doesn't matter, I only store about 10TB of data on it. I use btrfs: it's the most actively tested and developed filesystem in Linux today, by a very wide margin. The "best" filesystem is the one which is the most widely tested and developed, IMHO. If btrfs pissed in your cheerios ten years ago and you can't figure out how to get over it, use ext4 with metadata_csum enabled, I guess. I use external USB enclosures, which is something a lot of people will say not to do. I've managed to get away with it for a long time, but btrfs is catching some extremely rare corruption on my current NAS, I suspect it's a firmware bug somehow corrupting USB3 transfer data but I haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/20251111170142.635908-1-calvin@wbinvd.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/20251111170142.635908-1-...
- vardump 10mo agoI have had zero issues running ZFS on Linux for the last 10 years. (Not saying there were no issues that have annoyed or even caused data loss.)
- queenkjuul 10mo agoI've even been using ZFS on Linux with USB enclosures for 5+ years with no issues.
- jcalvinowens 10mo agoThis is the first time I've ever had a problem with the USB enclosures. And its fantastically rare, roughly one corrupt 512b block per TB of data written. With a btrfs-raid1 it's self-correcting on reads, if I didn't look at dmesg I'd never know. I've figured out it only happens if I'm streaming data over the NIC at the same time as writing to the disks (while copying from one local volume to another), but that's all I really know right now. I seriously doubt it's a software bug.
- geor9e 10mo agoA Synology NAS is very low wattage. In a year, it saves enough electricity to pay for itself, compared to leaving my old PC on 24/7.
- pipeline_peak 10mo agoI always found NAS interesting but never had a personal use for a large amount of storage these days. All the music and videos I watch are through streaming. I don’t have a personal business or anything that requires more than 1 tb.
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo agoA modern fanless NUC clone with a low power consumption processor will eclipse any recycled PC for utility computing.
- asimpson 10mo agoI've used a HP EliteDesk 800 G4 SFF (with an i5-8500) as a NAS/home server for several years now. It's quiet, power efficient, has space for 2 HDDs plus additional nvme slots and regular PCI-e slots. These type of machines are cheap to get on eBay, I highly recommend getting one.
- amai 10mo agoOld Mac Book Pros are very silent and could be used as good NAS. Unfortunately Apple doesn't support modern versions of Mac OS for them, and also doesn't offer any security patches. So the hardware is still quite capable, but the software is too unsecure and unstable to really recommend old Macs as NAS.
- fragmede 10mo agoDepends on the person administering the machine. Linux is an option that can run a recent version with security updates.
- QuiEgo 10mo agoAdding to the chorus of responses here: I did what this article suggested for a time, but found a purpose-built NAS was way nicer than repurposing an old gaming PC. Using an old gaming PC for a NAS is kind of like trying to use an old track car that you've taken out the interior, added in a roll cage, and welded the doors shut as your kid's first car. Like yeah it will totally work, and they can impress all of their friends as they cosplay as the Dukes of Hazzard, but it's really not optimal for the task at hand. I just upgraded my NAS setup to a Terramaster F4-425 Plus (running Debian) and it's great. The N150 CPU in it sips power, and the whole thing is tiny and easy to hide away in a media cabinet. One ultra-quiet Nocuta fan is all that's needed to keep it cool. It's so nice to use the right tool for the job. EDIT: I'd recommend all of these guides / articles, I basically cherry-picked what I liked from all of them and ended up with something I'm really happy with: * https://perfectmediaserver.com https://perfectmediaserver.com * https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs/blob/master/mkdocs/docs/extended_usage_patterns.md https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs/blob/master/mkdocs/docs... * https://blog.muffn.io/posts/muffins-awesome-nas-stack/ https://blog.muffn.io/posts/muffins-awesome-nas-stack/ * https://drfrankenstein.co.uk https://drfrankenstein.co.uk * https://trash-guides.info https://trash-guides.info
- OCTAGRAM 10mo agoOld PC makes more noise than anything I can buy