I want to create a NAS for my family at home. I am already pretty sure about using TrueNAS as software, but the hardware is still open.
What hardware do you recommend for 2TB of usable Storage (+a second drive for mirroring the first one) that is used by 3 people for pictures, videos, and documents?
Probably just go with SSD storage because 2T is fairly low for hard drives these days. Still a pretty good idea to do a mirror.
Pretty much any CPU that isn’t a raspberry pi will comfortably max out a gigabit Ethernet connection.
HDD has 100x the storage capacity vs SSD. What are you talking about?
What decade do you live in? It’s closer to 2-4x nowadays, and 2TB is nothing
If you’re set on TrueNAS, then just build a box to do that.
If you want a low power solution, go with Synology or Qnap.
Maybe you could pickup a old workstation and drop a few drives in it. It is fairly affordable and would allow you to get your feet wet. For ZFS you really want lots of ram so make sure you get enough.
How are you going to mount the storage? Do you need some sort of shared authentication? I personally would either use software Nextcloud or Synching or an active directory deployment via Samba.
I planned to use nfs, since it is one of the options of TrueNAS and it works on both windows and linux.
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If you want to roll your own, I’ve had good luck with ASRock Rack motherboards.
I really like my Synology NAS, but if I had to do it again, I would roll my own with one of the Mini-PC’s from Amazon. They’re essentially just as expensive as the Synology hardware and you can make due by installing Rockstor or something similar. You won’t get the same experience as the Synology setup, but IMO it’s not really worth the underpowered hardware. I would much rather have something significantly more powerful like the Mini-PC to be able to run containers on without having to worry about system resources.
I did the opposite and used it as an excuse to upgrade my main PC, with the parts that got replaced being inherited by the new server.
Perhaps an unwise move due to it not being optimised for power savings, and looking at your particular use case it wouldn’t be a smart move.
Depending in where you want to have this NAS, one of the more important factors to consider is how quiet you can make it. If you only have a few HDDs they’re not too loud, but ssds are silent. It can also be worth getting some good fans and making sure you can mount them in a way that doesn’t cause unnecessary vibration to have it be real quiet.
Consider something like the aoostar R1 with Intel N100. Small and low power like a commercial consumer NAS but cheaper and you can chuck whatever OS you want.
I use my old desktop. It’s totally overkill, but it’s also free since I was going to throw it out instead.
I couldn’t really tell you about which hardware to get, but its worth considering a 35w CPU as this machine will be on all the time. Also adding a network card, having more bandwidth is really handy for a NAS
I personally use a dual core pentium with 16GB of RAM. When I first installed TrueNas (FreeNas back then), I only had 8GB of RAM, but that proved to be not enough to run all the services I wanted, so I would suggest 12-16GB. Depending on the services you want to run any multi-core x86 CPU that allows 16GB of RAM to be used should be adequate. I believe TrueNas recommends ECC RAM, but I don’t think using consumer grade RAM and hardware has caused me any problems. I’m also using an old SSD for the system drive, which I is recommended now (I used to use 2 mirrored USB thumb drives, buy that’s not recommended anymore). Very importantly, make sure the HDD(s) you get are not shingled drives; made that mistake initially, and performance was ridiculously bad.
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