This dude was surprised that a celeron - from 8 years ago - can have trouble with BR-rip transcodubg on the fly, and didn’t bother to look for a solution like, oh I don’t know, having plex transcode it at rest and save a copy (it’s lazy but takes 60 seconds to set up). Then we find that the guy gets hit with ransomware, which is a bit sus because it (probably) means default ports, obviously accessible to the wan, with little/no security hardening; then we find that he doesn’t have any backups at all (raid is not a backup plan, fucks sake) and so he goes all 12-gauge shotgun on this custom box to the tune of 3k.
Dude knows just enough to get himself into trouble, but no idea how he got in trouble or methods for avoiding it.
3000$ …
The home NAS case market is so frustrating. For my next build, I’m going to design a 3D printed interface to use an 8-bay supermicro backplane like the BPN-SAS-747TQ, build a simple aluminum box around it with 2x120mm fans in the rear, and just run SATA and power to a PC case sitting next to it. It would even be straightforward to have activity lights and everything. Good drive temps, low noise, cheap and replaceable backplane, cheap enclosure, and full freedom of PC case choice to optimize for size or cooling or whatever. Sure, it’ll be a bit bulky and a bit ugly, but I’d much rather take those downsides over noise, cost, or heat.
I 3D printed a custom PC case:
I went for a eBay 4u server case, no hotswap bays or anything, just 13 or so 3.5" slots with a a row of 3x120mm fans behind them. Sits in the garage out of sight all for £45 delivered.
My issues are that I live in an apartment, so size, heat, and noise are large considerations, and that I want hotswap drive bays. What chassis did you get for £45? Does it use an ATX PSU or something else? What are the drive temps? Always under 30°C? 35°C? 40°C?
This one https://www.logic-case.com/products/rackmount-chassis/4u/4u-standard-chassis-15-x-35-hdd-sc-415h/ Got the price wrong it was £50, and 15 drive bays, I populate every other one. Temps are about 25 at the moment, but it is sat in the garage, which is always cooler than the house. I think I just run it with the 120mm fans (and CPU and PSU) but quieter ones as the ones that came with it sounded like an aircraft taking off.
That’s a great case! Seems they don’t have a US reseller, so I doubt I’ll find any on my side of the Atlantic. Glad you got a gem!
I’m not opposed to standard mid or full towers for a home NAS, but the common ones have so few 3.5" bays.
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I can totally understand your frustration! I wish there was a product available that could do everything I want, but there isn’t, and I have access to a 3D printer through my local makerspace. I will say that there are a bunch of ways to get prints made and shipped to you if you don’t have access to one. I also think that lots of people 3D print things when they don’t need to. When I make the enclosure that I mentioned, only the bare minimum will be 3D printed, and the rest of the enclosure will use off-the-shelf parts, a readily available backplane, and will be able to be built with simple tools.
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Spending 3000$ to assemble a PC and installing TrueNas as is not new nor informative to me. I’m not a huge fan of rich people spending thousand of dollars building a power hog a call it a nice NAS.
The post would be more interesting if, at least, it would show the assembling (not stolen photos) and the software settings. For a really interesting post I would like to see a before/after benchmark of performance and power consumption.
I don’t think any server, especially self hosting should be CISC based like x86 architecture but RISC like arm or RiSC-V. The power usage is a order of magnitude less. Also really building yourself would probably cost hundreds and not thousands of dollars.
There’s a crap tonne of youtube videos showing people building them on the cheap and quite a few that use low-powered Celeron boards to keep power usage down.
Celeron is x86 and quiet bad at its job as far as I have always seen. Benchmark would be nice.
It depends on your needs. If you need your NAS to also run your home server, you may need more (yet a N100, say, has h265 HW decoding) but for just running storage, a up to date Celeron will be more than adequate.
