NAS (computing)

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5-Bay NAS Server

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a server that's connected to a local network for file storage and server hosting. Most NAS systems often use a RAID array for drive redundancy, They're most commonly used for storing documents, video editing, software development and other important backups. NAS systems are easy to build once you know a bit about networking and storage management and some people often buy prebuilt NAS systems like Synology, QNAP, Western Digital and Seagate. It's also recommended to buy a minimum of four hard drives for more redundancy if you are doing a volume stripe.

Use Cases

• Backing up old installations
• Password management
• Project storage
• Videos, Photos and Audio
• Streaming servers
• Home automation (Home Assistant, OpenHab, Zigbee, MQTT)
• Game server hosting
• Cryptocurrency mining

Why use a NAS?

Using a NAS is important in an age of losing digital ownership, you can host docker containers and virtual machines to host your own services instead of paying for a subscription^🗝️ because you can host services such as Jellyfin, Home Assistant, KeePassXC, File Hosting and game servers and not have to worry about services being randomly cut off because a shareholder leaked. Not only that, most of the services don't rely on a internet connection to function because it's all locally hosted on your very network and it's easy to service problems yourself. You can also set up firewalls that prevent it from getting pinged outside the network and set up encryption to prevent theft of data from disposed hard drives.

What to choose when building

When building a NAS that is either multi-purpose or a specific use case, we recommend the following hardware choices.

1. Buy HDDs/SSDs that are built to last, for example: Western Digital, Sandisk and make sure they're all the exact same model for RAID partitioning.
2. Use a standardized motherboard, proprietary ones won't fit into other cases.
3. Preferably get Side-band ECC memory, however this might be the expensive option for how the market is going right now.
4. Get a case that can fit more than 4 drives, they're usually advertised as NAS cases.
5. If you are hosting multiple servers, get a good CPU and a graphics card for mathematically intensive calculations.

Notoriously bad hardware to avoid

• Seagate, Toshiba and HGST (High failure rate)
• Nvidia Graphics cards (Driver issues)
• Broadcom NICs (Broadcom really hates Linux/Unix systems)
• ADATA and Kingston (Shitty RAM)

Operating systems

There are multiple different operating systems for a NAS, some have specific use cases while others have more flexibility.

• OpenMediaVault
• TrueNAS
• UnRAID
• Proxmox VE

File systems

When setting up a NAS, you will need to choose your file system, especially if it is a DIY NAS and you do not want to choose one of the operating systems listed above as they manage this automatically.

• ZFS - Best for maximum data integrity and self-healing. It features built-in checksumming, self-healing, copy-on-write, compression and so much more. As expected, it uses a lot of RAM and 16 GB is highly recommended.
• Btrfs - Best for a balanced approach. It supports metadata mirroring, file-level checksums, copy-on-write (CoW), and snapshots. It uses less RAM than ZFS.
• ext4 - Best if you want a low-resource NAS. The only trade-offs are no built-in snapshots and compression, meaning virtually nonexistent data integrity and self-healing.

Things you should do when setting up

• Add a DHCP lease to the MAC address for static local IP.
• Set up a RAID configuration.
• Add more than one DNS server to avoid issues.
• Enable SAMBA/FTP/SFTP/NFS/rsync/Syncthing/Rclone for file transfers.
• Configure Wireguard for secure outside networking.
• Turn off telemetry if your NAS operating system has it enabled.

Prebuilt NAS systems

• Synology
• QNAP
• Ugreen
• Cisco
• Orico
• Terramaster
• TrueNAS (Good luck buying that and a server rack)