Been dithering forever about how to replace our aging home NAS device - a ReadyNAS Duo from 2008?
It's still performing bravely, streaming just fine to our Plex server via 1Gb ethernet, then via wi-fi to the TV. But it's time to upgrade the capacity, speed, and abilities.
Off-the-shelf devices from Synology, Q-NAP, Asustor, etc, are functionally capable, but I'm irked by the creeping lock-in of proprietary OS, apps, or disk formats, & they all over-charge for the hardware you get. /1
Alternatively, building a device myself from individual components, while geekily appealing, is not the project I intended to bite off right now, and would be a timesink.
In the middle ground are the pre-built devices to run Linux on. This skips all of the time and risk of having to assemble my own hardware components, while still giving freedom to run whatever OS/apps/filesystems I want, and generally come with a substantially higher spec for the same price. /2
High profile pre-built devices like the Lincstation N1, ZimaCube, and Aoostar R1, are much higher-specced (and higher priced) than I need for a modest home NAS - more comparable to a >$500 >4 bay Synology.
Well-known single-board solutions like the Rasberry Pi are mostly just a bit underpowered.
I added 2 x 4TB of NAS-friendly HDDs for $226 (both using CMR, not SMR, and one Seagate, one WD, to reduce chance of them both failing at the same time), and I'll use an SSD I already own as cache. /4
This is the same total price I would have spent on a comparable 2-bay Synology device, with significantly slower hardware, only 1GB of RAM, much worse connectivity, and no storage.
It's far from the performance of more expensive options, but is still leagues ahead of what I need, and what my home LAN can support, so it seems like a sensible economy.
@tartley, I went in the direction of building an x86 homeserver to eventually transition away from my DS218+ Synology NAS. One thing in your thread confused me - did you accidentally use MB instead of GB for RAM measurements?
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