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.

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.

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?

>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

* 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-...

It's difficult for me to accept it's better given all the above.

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.

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://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs/blob/master/mkdocs/docs...

* https://blog.muffn.io/posts/muffins-awesome-nas-stack/

* https://drfrankenstein.co.uk

* https://trash-guides.info

"Old", right. That old PC I'm about to throw away has 2 GB of RAM.

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.

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.

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.

But for anything where your data is important isn't ECC memory still critical for a NAS in this day and age?

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.

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.