The best NAS I’ve ever used wasn’t one I picked off the shelf. It was one I cobbled together from old desktop hard drives, an old gaming PC, and a small SSD for a boot drive. It’s been working for years without a problem and beats even expensive modern NAS in many ways that matter.
NAS are not as special as you might think
NAS does not require fancy components
Network Attached Storage (NAS) sounds a little fancy because it’s a complex tech product that requires expensive hardware and a master’s degree to set up.
The reality is actually quite different. If you open a commercial NAS, you’ll find a low- to mid-power CPU, 2GB and 8GB of RAM, one or two. network adaptersand a bunch of ports for storage – that’s it. Critically, CPUs are mostly always chosen for efficiency rather than raw processing power.
You don’t need special storage either
NAS PC hardware isn’t anything special, and neither is the storage. You can and even use any driver you want mix it up drivers. I’ve seen some very successful home NAS units built with a surprising mix of repurposed laptop drives, desktop 3.5-inch drives, and NVMe SSDs.
It took a little more work to ensure that any really important data was reliably backed up, but it’s been working without a hitch for a few years now.
- Storage Capacity
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2 – 26 TB
- Work load
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550TB/year
- suitable for
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NAS
Western Digital’s Red Pro NAS hard drives come in sizes from 2TB to 26TB.
You can build a great NAS from spare parts
Low requirements make them easy to set up
Since a NAS doesn’t require anything special, you can connect one to almost anything. Any desktop computer built in the last 10 years will do just fine, and most laptops will too – even those with built-in battery backup so they won’t be affected by short outages. If you have a Raspberry Pi 4 (or less) sitting around, you can turn it into a NAS.
They won’t all have the same bells and whistles and will vary in performance, but they’ll all be able to perform the most basic function of a NAS: storing files on your network.
In most cases, you’ll find that a desktop PC actually outperforms off-the-shelf NAS. Desktops are primarily built to be as fast as possible at a given price point, and they often have GPUS. A single GPU offers you a huge performance boost in some tasks like AI or media encoding. If you are using the NAS as a Jellyfin server or run Immich to back up your photosgreat to have.
There are a few minor drawbacks
However, electricity is the honest price of this approach. An older i5 desktop can draw around 50 watts (W) of idle power, compared to under 10W for a modern N100 box. At $0.18/kW, this continuous draw could cost you about $80 per year.
A selection of software, from the lightest to the most capable
NAS software is just as important as the operating system
The operating system you install on your old hardware is just as important as the hardware itself, and it’s important that you match the software with the hardware you have. There are four major options available.
I would recommend OpenMediaVault especially if you are using an older computer. It is based on Debian and can run with up to 1GB of RAM. Works on almost anything.
If you want the most features for a great price – for free – get TrueNAS. It is built on top of OpenZFS and provides end-to-end checksums and snapshots that are essential for data integrity. The downside of TrueNAS is that it requires at least 8GB of RAM and ZFS – file system— works optimally if you plan your hard disk pool a bit in advance.
If you have a chaotic mix of salvaged disks of different sizes, Unraid lets you easily mix different disk sizes and add new disks at any time. The only “downside” is that Unraid costs between $50-$110 depending on your license and $250 for a lifetime license. It’s a well-polished app, and if you use it regularly, it’s worth the price.
The last option is Proxmox which gives you more flexibility. Proxmox is a hypervisor that allows you to create and run virtual machines or containers. Instead of turning your rescued computer into a dedicated NAS, you turn it into a Proxmox server and then run the NAS operating system in a container or virtual machine. It’s not resource efficient, but it allows you to use your computer in a million other ways apart from that just use it as a NAS. A combination of Proxmox and TrueNAS is how I configure my personal server and I’m very happy with it. If you have a powerful enough computer, I would recommend it.
The NAS is only part of the backup
Whatever you do, treat this as a backup NAS, not the only copy of your data. Apply the 3-2-1 rule: NAS is duplicate. Before deleting anything from the original device, you must add an offsite or cloud backup destination.
You can also use a DIY NAS to back up another drive that you store offsite. It’s not completely foolproof, but it will ensure that a fire or broken pipe doesn’t destroy all physical copies of your data.
