Ask HN: MiniNAS Experience

I used the radxa piNAS. It worked but bridging SATA off usb isn't ideal. So, i recommend avoiding any home-brew solution which claims sata but is usb connected.

Secondly don't skimp on the disk. Ssd or hdd buy the best you can. I ran with shucked WD sata portables and the failure rate over two years was high. I now run with patriot SSD but there's a sense I underspecced.

Hard Disks and ssd run hot. A lot hotter than you might think. Cooling is noisy. So if your dream is passive no fan be warned, things doing storage just run hotter than you might think even if no rotating disk. Hot hard disks will be happier if it's thermally stable. Shorter life, but better than if the temps cycle. Hot ssd seem just to be hot.

Pick a unit which can run truenas, and start on scale not core because core is dying out. If you want a BSD nas look at sylve. Scale does docker and VMs. I run core, I wanted BSD. I am now on an Intel architecture, the pi wasn't strong enough to do nas and virtuals.

Even if you don't want truenas pick one which can because it means it's fully generic. Packaged nas solutions from the hw vendor can lock you in.

I truly believe zfs beats the alternatives. Snapshots, good redundancy, monitoring, good tooling. That's why I went BSD and truenas. The Linux zfs story has got better.

It's a myth you can't run zfs without ecc but it's better with ecc.

It's a myth you can't run zfs with less than 4gb but if you want to run virtuals and avoid stalls under write you want more than 4gb.

It's a myth you can run dedupe on low end hardware. It's a lot of work for less benefit. The default compression in zfs is good. I've never bothered with zlog disks at home, but for write intensive work they help. (We do at work, mirror ssd for log, hdd for the big space)

You still need 3-2-1 backup. Off-line zfs snapshots work for me and some cloud for the third leg.

The post earlier on today about Intel n100 based tiny nas looks interesting. They target ssd, 4 to 6, they look generic, they can do bigger memory models.

Building your own is for fun, not dependencies unless unavoidable. It's probably less reliable unless you really invest time and effort.

Tune zfs for your filesize. There's heaps of stuff online about optimal sizing for postgres and the like.

Not sure what you mean with MiniNAS but buying a small 2 disk synology and setting up proper backups for everything was definitely a decission I would always do again.

It just works and comes with many additional packages