No reason why not. May be a little power-hungry depending on the spec but if you already have it go for it. FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) is the usually suggested OS to run: www.truenas.com/freenas/
Since you have 4 HDD slots probably run 4 disks in a RAID 5 so think of how much space you need. RAID 5 is n-1 so if you have 4x 10TB drives you will be left with 30TB of space before formatting. You can calculate here: www.raid-calculator.com
Then either mirror the SSDs for OS and caching or just use one. Depends on your budget really.
Maybe I’m dumb but looking at wikipedia I’m a bit confused. Seems like you can do this on almost any linux distro. What is the reason behind setting up a dedicated OS, cost of operation, stability, performance?
kinda the same reason people suggest something like linux mint over slackware, gentoo, arch, etc… mint is easy to install and is preconfigured to be an easy to use user desktop environment. you can configure any other option to be have like that, but they tend to be a bit more “DIY”, which is great if you know what you’re doing!
dedicated NAS OSes will have good software out of the box that make it easy to configure and manage various common disk-related configurations (RAID, SMB, NFS, etc). you can certainly do all this yourself, but it might not have a pretty, unified user interface, or you might have to deal with software that isn’t compatible with some version of a library that’s in your distro of choice… all resolvable things, but they take time to solve: anywhere from installing a package manually to applying a kernel patch and recompiling the kernel to get something to work
Power consumption is the main issue. If it’s an old, power hungry desktop and you live somewhere with expensive electricity, it can be quite costly to run. If you have an energy efficient desktop or have cheap power then it will be fine. Just make sure it has a good quality power supply if it’s going to run 24/7.
Yep. Just install Linux, plug it into your router, set a static ip, and install the nas software ya want.
There are plenty of approaches. ChatGPT is great at debugging issues and helping ya through the setup. I did this with a raspberry pi and external usb drive the other week.
Some people even use Raspberry Pis as their NAS. I use an old MacBook (5th gen i5) as a home server with 2 external hard drives as a NAS, which also runs a few docker containers like Jellyfin. Before that, I was using an old PC with 1st gen i3 for all these things.
You totally can, but since it will be on all day with 4 hdd look into wattages you want to live with. There are some small NUCs or Pi based NAS with low wattages. There is OpenMediaVault, FreeNAS/TrueNAS software to install
Note that there is some reliability drawback of spinning hard disks on and off repeatedly. maybe unintuitively HDDs that spin constantly can live much longer than those that spend 90% of their time spun down.
This might not be relevant if you use only SSDs, and might never affect you, but it should be mentioned.
You could totally turn on as needed, WakeOnLan is good for that. But typically when people run a NAS it is for streaming audio, video, file sync and backups and maybe docker running other services so the NAS is typically on 24/7 so it is available on demand. But it doean’t have to be 100% uptime if you don’t want it to be. For example I have two OpenMediaVaults one on a pi and one an old IomegaNAS. The pi is on always with an attached drive, and serves Samba Shares and DLNA/DAAP shares. Has docker running syncthing, CUPS print server, Trillium Notes, and homeassistant; so makes sense for it to be on all day, especially because my wife’s system backsup to it daily automatically. The converted Iomega NAS is mainly a backup machine sInce it is old and not as performant (only has 100 network speed. So that gets turned on to do a bulk backup and not much else.
I have both Fractal Design and SilverStone cases… love them… but the internal layout is not 100% of the consideration
Have a think about airflow and cabling… some of them have weird air flow designs and if you’re putting the machine inside something, or next to something, then that can make more impact on day-to-day use.
For example, I have a Node 304 (not enough drive space for you) because it fits nicely inside Ikea shelving. But the front air flow under the front bezel did mean I keep that machine near the front of the shelf, not pushed back.
And also consider hotswap drive bay caddies that fit smaller drives into large drive bays. Sometimes these have weird power connections, but if you don’t have them do you have enough PSU leads? So, are they absolutely essential? Possibly. Possibly not…
Maybe not the answer you were lookong for, but those are my main considerations now…
My first NAS was an old desktop that I got for $300 running an FX-6300 and a GTX 550, I slapped a couple hard drives in there, installed Ubuntu, and made an SMB share.
I’d recommend installing TrueNAS Scale on a system rather than doing what I did in part due to it being so much better than what I was doing, but you could run it on a potato if you wanted.
Hell my latest NAS upgrade is going from a PowerEdge T610 (tower server from like 2010ish) running TrueNAS Scale to a normal desktop (from 2017) running TrueNAS Scale
If anything using normal desktop hardware makes servicing it easier than using old server hardware
Anything that can can provide storage attached to the network is a potential NAS. It doesn’t take a lot of power to just offer and store files. If you start getting into stuff like live transcoding or heavy encrypt/decrypt that’s a bit different matter.
As a self taught self-hosting enthusiast i wouldn’t recommend ansible to a beginner. I know that sounds backwards as absible makes everything easy and does all the work for you but that’s also part of the problem. It would be like jumping behind the wheel of a self driving car without knowing how to drive at all. When (not if) something goes wrong it could go wrong hard and you’d lose the whole instance.
It’s better to start with some other self hosted projects that interest you to get a feel for the process and software like docker then work your way up to bigger things like lemmy. I consider myself fairly versed in the process and lemmy still gave me some issues to set up and my pixelfed instance still won’t federate despite my best efforts. I’m pretty sure i know the issue, i just need to get around to fixing it.
Last thought, the raspberry pi is a pretty impressive little pc for it’s size and price point but you might find yourself quickly burning through resources depending on the number of active users you have and how heavily you use it.
Learning how to use your pi to run a reverse proxy to a self hosted blogging site would give you plenty of hands on starter experience. Run docker and portainer and mess with docker config files from a webgui to see what work and what doesn’t.
You could set up a dns based ad-blocker like pihole and a vpn like wireguard to tunnel your phone back into your home network so you have ad-blocking on the go, too. That’s a semi beginner protect with plenty of tutorials to pick from.
You could run nextcloud, syncthing, or immich to make your own cloud at home but that might need more than a basic pi setup.
It’s a great software to run. I like to watch youtube tutorials that explain things step by step so i can understand what happens. If i find a good video i’ll see what other software that channel may have a tutorial on and if that software may interest me.
So, I’m not new to this (omg it’s been 6+ years now wtf) but I don’t host a lot of stuff, and it’s been pretty easy to poke at; I’ve got:
plex
minecraft (bedrock and java)
freshrss
rustdesk
home assistant
vaultwarden
pihole
actual (budget software)
Running in docker containers, along with a few of the built-in plug-and-play services on my nas. Of that list, plex, minecraft, freshrss, rustdesk, and vaultwarden were very easy to setup in my situation. Rustdesk is a really good remote control program/service, vaultwarden is a fork of the bitwarden server, and plex was almost comically simple to get going as a media host.
I hadn’t heard of CasaOS before; looks very cool. I am currently on TrueNAS and it’s been fine, but I had been running it in a VM because it wasn’t a good fit for running other things along side it. This seems like an interesting solution, thanks!
Agree with others here. Ansible isn’t for beginners and neither is a Lemmy instance.
Try some other projects first, maybe some docker containers that involve a reverse proxy.
For example, NextCloud is a very useful thing to set up as a project, but I would say that you specifically need the new Pi 5 with plenty of RAM for that. The Pi 4 doesn’t handle a full NextCloud installation well.
selfhosted
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.