this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Instead of trusting DLink with an off the shelf NAS, it might be easier to build your own with a Raspberry Pi running openmediavault hooked up to a couple of USB hard drives. It's worked well for me for over 6 years now with no issue and could cost way less.
“Easier“, no. Not for the average person on the street.
Don't get me wrong, I've built several NAS over the years (dropped OMV for just Arch and the packages I want) and loaded OpenWRT (etc) on routers
But, building my own NAS, servicing my own car, repairing my own house, felling my own trees, at some point I'll just lack knowledge and buy something simple / pay someone to do it... and that's where cheap consumer electronics fits (unfortunately)
Except a lot of it doesn't fit because tons of it is predatory trash sold as functional when one or two things can go wrong and ruin everything.
It's hard to expect the layman to need something technical, not know enough technically to do it themselves, but have enough surface knowledge to not get ripped off. It's like threading a needle of the perfect level of wisdom.
Like I'd wager the common every dude would look for a connected hard drive, maybe Western Digital because of the market saturation, but there's just so much garbage online that half works.
Then there's interconnectivity issues, software not being available cross-platform after already spending hundreds on hardware, Apple problems.
The average user is just set and ready to be ripped off at like, all angles.
Yup, and that's why I largely recommend DIY. If you commit to DIY, you will do the necessary research to not get too ripped off, and you can usually start w/ stuff you have laying around anyway. In my case, I upgraded my old Phenom II from 15 years ago to a Ryzen 1700, so I used the old Phenom PC as my NAS and just needed to buy some drives (got WD Reds). I have since upgraded my 1700, so now that's what's in my NAS.
If you're unwilling to put in the work to DIY, I recommend cloud services instead. This solves two problems:
So either commit to DIY, or use off-the-shelf cloud products. I cannot recommend anything in between.
I built my own with an old PC, and it's pretty easy. You can install TruNAS or OMV if you want, but I ended up just installing my distro of choice (OpenSUSE Leap in this case), set up BTRFS on my NAS drives in something similar to RAID 1, and set up a few services (Samba, Jellyfin, etc). TruNAS or OMV will make that initial setup a lot easier, so do that if you're not confident.
The Raspberry Pi is not nearly fast enough for what I want it for, and I had an old PC laying around, so I figured I might as well reuse what I have. I started w/ a Phenom II x4 from 15 years ago, and recently upgraded to my Ryzen 1700. I plan to upgrade my NAS hardware whenever I upgrade my gaming PC to keep things recent-ish. Total power draw is somewhere around 50W, so a fair bit more than a Raspberry Pi, but only like 2x more due to the drive overhead (I use NAS-grade HDDs).