Planning my first NAS (!)

Self-Hosted & Services
1

Hi,

I am new to all of this and wanted to hear your thought and suggestions about my plan I gathered after researching with zero prior knowledge. Thanks in advance!

  1. My main goals are having a local storage of family photos and docs, a secondary goal is streaming media to other devices(not more than 1-2 simultaneously). Also wanted to keep cost as low as possible - both upfront hw cost and recurring power consumption cost. In addition wanted to prepare to the future, when maybe I will need some more disks(but this is quite far down the road).
  2. I thought about an firebat t8 intel n100 mini pc with 16gb ram, 500 gb ssd and an external enclosure with 2x4tb hdds. The hdds are for the data I don’t want to lose, and the ssd is more for media to stream(i dont care about losing some movies if the drive fails). I plan to use omv and run it from a 64 gb flash drive(i understood i have to use a specific plugin for that)
  3. is it ok to buy this mini pc from ebay? the seller seems reputable with some thusands of reviews all positive. But I never bought hardware from ebay and am afraid of getting garbage.
  4. I learned that raid is not a backup, so wanted to make a periodic backup of the first hdd into the second one. As stated earlier, no backup for the ssd and since the flash drive is tiny so will backup it too to the hdd(I saw it should be supported in omv)
  5. Didn’t decide yet regarding remote backup, i want the cheapest solution, but also to make sure its robust and easy to use. Will be glad to get some wisdom from you and hear how you do it. I understood there is a plugin for that, and that many recommend to use rsync, bit i am quite clueless about the tradeoffs here.
  6. Regarding the disks enclosure, are there cons for connecting it via usb 3.0 compared to disks directly connected via sata? If I want more storage in the future, I will be able to just buy additional enclosure and connect it via another usb 3 port with no problems right?
  7. Any suggestions regarding selecting the enclosure? Things to look for? Caveats? I thought about Maivo K35272U3 just since it seems like the cheapest I could find in my area.
  8. I understood there are disks specifically made for nas use(wd red and seagate ironwolf), will i have any gain in using them? Or maybe in such a minimalist solution their extra features won’t benefit much? Any other suggestion for reliable cheap disks? Performance is not much of a concern for my usecase. I tend toward the ironwolf since I understood they are more reliable and should last for longer, and heard some WD red are SMR which is considered inferior.
  9. Is the selection of omv make sense? Tried to read about truenas as well but didnt really understood the differences.
  10. I plan to use immich as a google photos alternatice and jellyfin for streaming content

I know it came out a very long post, so huge thanks if you read it all the way to the end. Can’t wait to hear your inputs! Thanks again!!

2

Welcome to Serverbuilds.

Looks like have have done a lot of research and are on the right path. Here are my thoughts on some of your questions:

N100 is very cost / power efficient platform and should work great for your purposes.

3 ) Yes it should be fine to purchase a mini pc from ebay. You can check the feedback of the seller and ideally find one that takes returns if you have an issue with the mini pc.

Ali Express is another option that may be a bit cheaper than eBay although you will likely have to wait a few weeks to receive your purchase.

I have had good luck with CWWK for low cost Chinese network appliance mini pc / motherboards. They sell on Ali Express, eBay, and also through their own website: https://cwwk.net/

4 ) Instead of using 2 stand-alone drives and periodically backing up data from one to the other, I would recommend putting both drives into a single array, either a JBOD set up with one drive as a parity drive, or if you are planning on only ever using the 2 drives you could set them up in a RAID1. That way data is always saved to both drives at the time of writing and you should be able to retain all of your data in the case of a single drive failure at any time.

This is the default setup for Unraid, I’m not familiar with OMV it is possible you might need to do a little additional set up to get this working, but I assume it would be an out-of-the-box option.

5 ) For remote back-up you will either need another server somewhere with enough drive capacity to hold your backups or use an online service. An online service will be the least effort but it will likely have a monthly charge. There are lots of options for what software to use, Rsync is simple, effective, and free so long as the back-up target supports it.

6 ) I would highly recommend connecting the drives directly via SATA. USB while it seems like it would be good on paper, is actual quite flakey in real world usage and can have poor performance in the best case, and lead to drives disconnecting and data being lost in the worst.

Some people have had success with external USB storage, but I personally would not recommend it, especially if performance and reliability are important to you.

8 ) I wouldn’t bother with NAS specific drives. They cost a lot more and really what you are paying for is a longer warranty and possibly data recovery services. I typically prefer cheaper, even used drives, and just plan for drive failures by using parity to protect agains single drives failures and off-site backups to protect against multi drive failures.

You should avoid SMR drives for NAS usage.

9 ) I have never used OMV but plenty of people do and seem to like it. I would try out a few OS’s if you can and see what you like the best, before committing to one.

Good luck with your build, let us know how it goes.