Home NAS and self-hosted services

From a list of companies to avoid. Items 12 & 13 may be of interest.

Companies to Avoid - Defensive Computing

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Looks like more of a personal grievance list.

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But if we’re talking about HDD, WD actually acquired HGST which were on my “good list” for a long time (until I moved away from HDDs completely). Otherwise, yeah, I also had bad times with WD/SanDisk NANDs

Perhaps it is just anecdotal, but I’ve seen SSDs fail at a much higher rate than HDDs. Even those that were constantly powered on in my server sitting in a datacenter. Now admittedly some of those were early days SSDs and they improved, but even some that I bought only a couple of years ago have non-recoverable read errors.

The only NAND storage which failed on me were SD cards and some SandDisk USB sticks. None of the actual SSDs ever lost data. I had a case of Samsung Pro with bad firmware, but it was also my fault not to check for firmware updates. I discovered the disk reporting bad blocks but firmware update fixed it and the drive serves me well since then.

One must not buy a NAS to have a NAS. Also a solution for that old Window 10 PC that can not be upgraded.

https://www.howtogeek.com/turned-old-windows-pc-into-inexpensive-nas/

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Yup. I re-used my old computer as a NAS after I replaced it. Though you have to check that it is not so old as to be very power inefficient. Sometimes it can be cheaper in the long run to buy something more power-efficient than re-use older power-hungry machines.

You also have to set them up properly. Yesterday, my machine rebooted and on reboot the OS sometimes re-orders the drives. I’d specified drives by their volatile name instead of using their immutable GUIDs and so had to change that to get it working again.

I always had a small (3TB) NAS for backups and media.
In the past played around with a RPi for Kodi etc, but now smart tvs are quite powerful, so the NAS just hosts the files and the Pi is loaded with Octoprint and makes 3d printing a much easier experience allowing me to manage my old machine.

In the past couple of months moved on to a more proper homelab setup with an old mini PC. Put Proxmox on it and are running a debian instance for sonarr, radarr, and some other small utilities, and a home assistant instance which is slowly getting populated with small D1 mini boards with temperature/humidity sensors that I’m soldering myself to pass the time :slight_smile:

Unemployment projects are nice, really enjoying this time so far, and hopefully won’t have time to get bored… I think at some stage I’ll make a small custom NAS as well, but for now I like tinkering with the existing setup

I had RPi/Kodi once too, though now I just have my TV close to the computer so can play videos directly to the TV.

I put Proxmox/ZFS onto the server machine in the end. I avoided ZFS for a while, but using it makes things so much easier as you have a single pool to draw capacity from and don’t need to guess/pre-allocate the right amount for each partition and have the hassle of adjusting with lvm later.

For media playback in 4K RPi is too weak, even version 5. It can work but it’s frustrating how slow it is to start playback, switch streams etc. There’s a lot of small mini PCs based on Intel Adler Lake (N100, N150, N97, etc) which are cheap and power efficient. It’s surprising that it’s possible to get one ~200 chf with 8 to 16GB of ram and SSD.

Still? Because the RAM and SSD today will cost about 200 Fr!

Yeah, I thought about the same, who knows, seems like this is still an old stock. Precisely looking at more popular solution, RPi prices already went up, because of the soldered RAM.

Wow. You’re right. I see some configs which come with RAM and SSD (only 4GB/128GB) and cost less than barebones ones which come with no RAM/SSD.

I didn’t even know these HATs exist, but obviously it’s nothing practical

Anyone here using Paperless ngx on a home NAS? If so, what is your experience?

It seems to be the default recommendation for self-hosted documents. I haven’t used it but they have a (slow) demo here: https://demo.paperless-ngx.com/

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