Since some years, I really enjoy hosting things. Hosting basically means running software on a computer, so that it can be used by others. A classic example would be to host a Minecraft server for some people to play together. So far, I do this mostly by renting servers from companies and hosting it there. This is nice, as some problems are left for professionals, such as hardware, electricity, storage, backup, security, etc.
But there is a catch: Storage comes at a premium. To rent multiple terabytes of space is quite expensive and can quickly cost up of 50€ per month. As I don’t want to spend such money on a monthly basis, I would like to have my own computing at home, that has access to plenty of storage space. This storage is often called a Network Attached Storage (NAS). I have thought about getting / building one for a longer time but not gotten around to start the topic. Here is what I set out to do:
Have a NAS at home. It should fulfil the following criteria:
- This NAS should be secured against hardware failure with a RAID system.
- It should have at least 10TB of net storage size.
- It should be able to have enough resources to run many programs
Nice to have criteria:
- It should be fairly portable and easy to take to different places.
- It should be able to make use of old hard drives I have laying around
- It should not be a commercial or closed-source product
- It should offer its storage to local computing, e.g. raspberry pies or small servers
Research
The first thing will be getting a good picture of what is possible and how other people are doing things. At this moment, I do not have a good overview of the options. I also have an old PC with many hard drives laying around that potentially could be repurposed as a NAS or server. But at this moment, I cannot judge if this will be conflicting with the RAID criteria.
As a first step, I did a general research online and noted the choices of others. Especially some communities on reddit are very helpful with this, where some users share everything about their builds. Here is a sorted list of hardware and software I found through 1.5h of research:
- Rack / Casing
- PiRacks
- Printed on Makerworld
- Rackmate
- Microrack on Makerworld
- Comms2go
- Triton RKA-10
- Digitus Soho
- LabRax Printed
- Computing
- Beelink MiniPC
- Raspberry Pi 3x
- HP minis (G3)
- B350 MB, with a Ryzen 1500X and 16 GB of G.Skill Ripjaw memory
- HP Elitedesk
- Mac Mini
- Lenovo Thinkstation
- Dell 7060 minipc: 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB SATA SSD and i5 8500T
- Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q
- Lenovo P330
- WVX 2025 Mini PC with 12GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, N100 Processor
- Storage
- 2,5" SSD
- m.2 NVMe bootdrive
- 2x 4 TB Ironwolf drives for TrueNAS
- Synology NAS DS920+ : 4x 10TB HDD Western Digital Red PRO and 2x 512GB nvme SSDs
- 6x 14 TB SAS Drives
- SSK Aluminum 2.5" drive enclosure with 4TB Samsung 870 EVO SSD
- 2 x Teamgroup MP34 4TB, RAID 1; 1 x SanDisk Extreme Pro MicroSD 32GB
- Switching
- Unmanaged Switch
- D-Link DGS-1005P
- Atroodac Mini gigabit Ethernet Switch
- Power
- 60W USB power hub (6 ports)
- Metalfish 600 W FlexATX PSU
- CanaKit 45W USB-C PD PSU
- Software
- Proxmox 4x
- Kybernetes
- TrueNAS 2x
- OpenWRT
- Screen
- Routing
- Orange pi rv2 running openwrt
- Mikrotik RB5009UPr+S+IN
- GL.iNet GL-AR300M16 WiFi Router in Repeater mode
- Linksys WRT3200ACM
- Cooling
- 120mm fan
- Argon THRML 30mm
- KVM
- Complete Systems
- UGREEN DXP4800 Pro
- Synology
Well, this is quite a lot. I should not be surprised, but building a NAS or Homelab (or whatever you call it) is as diverse as building a PC yourself. This should be no surprise, as it basically is a PC. I learnt a lot from this first research. A lot of people use Proxmox, and I do not know yet what this is. Many people print their own casings or rack mounts. For computing, it seems like people just use what they have accessible, but with a focus on mini PCs or raspberry pies. As a next step, I think I will research Proxmox, Synology and UGREEN products.