Most enthusiasts should never buy a NAS. Instead, you should use the following

Without a doubt, a NAS is one of the most useful additions you can make to your home or small office. A NAS opens the door to always-on file sharing, backups, cloud independence, and more.

If you’re sold on the benefits of a NAS, you may be wondering which route to take. Of course, there are off-the-shelf NAS devices you can buy, but as a tech enthusiast, you can do better.

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Reuse old hardware

The hand of the Creator can give new life and meaning to what was once gone

As an enthusiast, you’ve probably looked at manufacturers’ sleek all-in-one NAS enclosures Synology And QNAP. These offer an enticing buy-and-forget experience, but they’re simply more hardware that may end up in the trash sooner than you think.

Any self-respecting tech enthusiast probably has old hardware lying around. It’s okay, we know you didn’t throw it away, your secret is safe with us. Be it an old PC or perhaps a Raspberry Pi, if you’re thinking about setting up a NAS, it’s time to repurpose these devices for a new task.

The requirements for a NAS operating system and all the apps and services running on it are very low. For example, a quad-core PC from 10 years ago is not only fine, it will probably outperform most dedicated NAS devices. In addition, you benefit from an open PC platform that offers you many options R.A.M. and install additionally SATA Controller if you are building a storage monster.

If you like projects, nothing beats building your own NAS. It’s a great way to learn about it LinuxFile systems and storage technologies. It can also be very satisfying to build it with parts you’ve long forgotten, thereby reducing the amount of e-waste. Starting to build a NAS this way just gives you a sense of performance and utility before moving on to bigger things.

Build the ultimate NAS

Why settle for less when you can do your best?

Source: WikiMedia Commons

Reusing old hardware for your NAS project is all well and good, but you may not have this type of equipment around, or you may just want to start fresh. Whatever the reason, starting from scratch or upgrading from a home-built NAS means you don’t have to stick to the limitations of your old hardware or kit.

Most NAS operating systems such as Unraid or TrueNAS SCALE have relatively low initial hardware requirements. However, if you’re building something that you plan to run a lot of apps, services, and virtual machines on, you’ll want to make sure you start with a high-performance CPU, lots of RAM, and plenty of room for multiple drives to be housed in your suitcase.

As an enthusiast, building a system from scratch can be a project in itself, just choosing the components to build. As with any PC build, you can make decisions regarding power consumption, graphics cards, storage capacities and more. Creating a system with lots of CPU power and memory also allows you to run more apps, services, and virtual machines for home labs.

Build a highly efficient, low-power NAS

Building a NAS that uses hardly any power is a challenge for any enthusiastic builder

Source: AsRock

We should all be concerned about electricity consumption these days. Installing a wind turbine and solar array to power your power-hungry NAS may not be an option, but there are other ways available to reduce the power consumption of your always-on NAS.

Creating a NAS from scratch that uses very little power can be a major challenge for experienced and novice builders alike. Instead of choosing a high-power CPU, motherboard, and power supplies, you can build your system around components that use the least amount of power.

Going down this route will be a very different adventure than choosing the best performing parts. Creating and optimizing a home-built NAS to use as little power as possible can be incredibly time-consuming and mentally and financially rewarding.

Building a system with a tight power budget requires choosing a high-efficiency power supply along with CPU and motherboard, which can pose a challenge for future expansion and upgradeability. You need to carefully consider what workloads you want to run now and potentially in the future. Beyond the hardware, you can also further optimize the consumption of a NAS by limiting the power consumption of the various components via UEFI/BIOS or via the operating system itself.

What’s wrong with commercial NAS devices?

Absolutely nothing, there are some incredible prebuilt NAS devices out there. We would definitely recommend buying an off-the-shelf job to anyone who doesn’t enjoy a small project. If you’re ready to build your own building, there are distinct advantages to not going this route.

First, it can be incredibly cheap. If you have old equipment, you are probably 90% in favor of building a NAS.

Dedicated NAS devices aren’t particularly cheap; you’ll pay a premium for the convenience of a complete solution. It can get expensive if you upgrade to higher-end NAS boxes that have better CPU and expansion capabilities. If you are able to build your own device, you can almost certainly save money while building something more powerful and expandable. Even if money isn’t an issue, as an enthusiast you’ll have a lot more fun building it yourself.

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