this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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44
Simple NAS hardware for home use? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Yo.

I'm new to the game. Like 2h fresh. I'm fairly technical, being a millennial and a programmer.

What I want to do, is to have a NAS server I can host movies from and watch them on my phone in my bed - or on my projector.

Extra points if I could host my ebooks and music there and run a torrent client. Extra extra points if I could connect to it from outside my home network (and stream)

I've read about about Plex and Jellyfin.

I'm here to ask you about hardware advice.

Will QNAP or Synology be enough for my needs and can I install custom software there? I don't really want to create hardware from scratch.

Google says yes, but I trust reddit and random articles like I trust a fox not to eat chickens.

Edit: preferably something with WOL that goes silent and fanless when not in use, or something I can shut down with a button

Edit: thanks everyone, right now I'm thinking of using GMKTec or QNAP and am comparing options, prices and number of issues people have on the internet. I'm not a hobbyist and the less I have to work on it the better.

Edit: I've ordered GMKTec NucBox G3 Plus 16 GB 1T for 195$ from their site as my starter kit. Should work for my needs.

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[–] dieTasse@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

(Alternative below) Buy 5 - 7 years old computer with decent specs (i5 i7, 16 gigs ram, don't care about hard drives but prefer ones with ssd) for about 60 - 100 bucks. Buy 250 gigz+ ssd (if it's not included) and any desired number and sizes of nas grade drives (this is where you don't want to save money if you want this full fledged nas). Don't forget UPS! Install TrueNAS. Profit... Ok not profit but enjoy. For movies definitely jellyfin (keep your distance from plex really). Audiobookshelf for audiobooks but also ebooks! Amazing software that one.

Alt. Buy raspberry pi, two usb hard drives, install open media vault and same apps as above. Setup data duplication from one drive to the second one with rsync (directly in omv ui). Omv is not as polished as true nas but its cheap and it lets you dip your feet in homelabbing first, in two to three years you will gain experience and vision to do your dream homelab (or at last try 😀) if the pi is not enough.

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 22 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Will QNAP or Synology be enough for my needs and can I install custom software there?

Probably? Most likely yes, today. Next week 2 month / year when you decide to run something else or more, not so much.

I don't really want to create hardware from scratch.

A desktop running NAS like software will work.

From another comment from op

I don’t want to hear the fans

You put a NAS under load and you’re gonna a hear fans.

I want something that turns on and off as necessary.

Run enough things on your NAS and it’ll never have the time to turn off.

[–] some_dude@lemm.ee 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Heh. "Under load"

[–] ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Thank you.

Next week 2 month / year when you decide to run something else or more, not so much.

Could you maybe give me an example of what that could be? I might be not knowledgeable enough about what I could do with it.

I don’t want to hear the fans

To be precise, only when not in use. When it's working then yeah, its gonna cool down somehow.

[–] Colloidal@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago

I have an always-on 2020-ish corporate desktop with TrueNAS. When idling, that thing is silent. I have to look at LEDs to make sure it's running.

[–] alekwithak@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

You said it yourself.

Extra points if I could host my ebooks and music there and run a torrent client. Extra extra points if I could connect to it from outside my home network (and stream)

To start, if you're using it to torrent your media then you're going to want it running in the background because you need to seed your torrents. Aside from it being the right thing to do, keeping a good ratio is necessary to get into good private trackers. And torrents aren't great for music, at least not in my experience, so you'll probably want soulseek as well. That also requires sharing in the background. You could buy a seedbox and torrent through that, but if you were going to go that route you could just do everything you're trying to do through a seedbox instead of getting a NAS, and it wouldn't take long for the subscription costs to surpass the costs of self hosting.

So now you've got qbittorrent, soulseek, Plex, and Kavita or similar for ebooks. What else could you want over time? Do you want to host audiobooks, too? Comics/manga/magazines? Maybe you want to streamline and automate the downloading process. Maybe your mom can't stream her favorite show anymore so you decide to share your library with her. Maybe you want to be able to search and download anything from any device anywhere, and maybe you want your mom to be able to as well.

Why stop there. Maybe you want to self host your own file and picture cloud storage as well. Maybe Mom's, too. Maybe you want to start blocking ads on your network at a DNS level. Maybe you want your phone to use your home network even when you're out and about. The possibilities increase exponentially once you start getting into self hosting.

I don’t want to hear the fans

That being said I have a good number of the above tasks running on an HP elitedesk mini g9 and it stays pretty quiet. The spinning disks make noise though lol

Edit: After reading through the rest of the replies I understand your situation a bit more. I see you don't want to build something or run it on your current desktop. It's hard to tell you which way to go without knowing at least your current budget and storage expectations. Because you can get a Synology and it will work out of the box for your needs right now, as someone said, but, you will be throwing money away that could better go towards more storage or compute, and in the end you're limited to their walled garden. As someone else said, you'd be much better off with TrueNAS as your OS. It all depends how much time, energy and money you're willing to throw at the problem. That is to say, are you looking for a hobby or are you looking for a solution? In any case, installing Plex on your desktop is the easiest and most common first step. You can set up a small library and test it out, see how loud it gets and how much power it draws if that's your concern. You will be streaming media to your bed by bedtime. Learn how to use it, then when you figure out your next steps it is easy enough to migrate, or just start over with the wisdom you've gained along the way. And YouTube is a good enough resource for this. There's a variety of steb-by-step NAS builds. And though there are definitely guys on there that don't know what they're talking about, if you watch enough NAS building videos you'll catch on quick enough to the necessary components. Anyway hope that helps.

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

Thank you for articulating what I was trying to get at with OP.

[–] ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Thank you~!

I want to spend as little time on it as I can. Then I'd like to minimize the initial cost of it, or at least cost of exploitation.

I'm fairly busy with my hobbies (Lego and Arkham Horror LCG), so I'm looking for the solution. I'd rather spend more money than more time.

On the other hand, if I waste money on garbage I'm going to be cross and do it from the scratch again, so I'm trying to hedge my options before I commit - if that makes sense.

[–] alekwithak@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

Well like I said you can start running servers right now for free with your desktop. Then your best bet is in my opinion going to be buying a NUC, Elitedesk, or another smaller form factor PC, this will save you on energy costs and noise, and flashing truenas to it (Or you can run everything you need to in Windows or Linux or containers if that's what you're comfortable with) and using either external hard drives or getting a hard drive array and using that to store everything. This is going to cost more than a Synology and takes a little setting up but it's infinitely expandable and will suit your needs whatever they become. And don't forget the 3-2-1 rule of backups. These rules are written in blood. And RAID is not a backup, I learned that one the hard way, myself.

[–] Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Read this. I've got an m920q from Lenovo (I think it's 920) and it does all of that. I want more Nas from it, and I might get another PC to be that, but it does great.

[–] alekwithak@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago

Totally fair. I'm actually in the process of building a dedicated Proxmox VM host / TrueNAS server to ease up on my little media server, but for a quiet and powerful yet economical little package these mini PCs are great for the task. After all this time the only modification I've had to make was adding a 2.5Gb compatible NIC.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Fanleas cases, no fan, no noise. https://www.monsterlabo.com/

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Sure, at an obscene price.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 0 points 3 days ago

I got lucky and picked one up for $200

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 0 points 3 days ago

I got lucky and picked one up for $200

[–] muusemuuse@lemm.ee 17 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Skip the NAS. They all suck. Roll your own server out of literally anything. Install jellyfin. Enjoy

[–] paequ2@lemmy.today 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Same thought! I tried a NAS once and it was just a slower, more locked down version of a regular server I could build myself.

I'm not sure I fully understand the point of a NAS. I guess, is it supposed to be an off-the-shelf server for non technical people?

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago

People are using NAS for things they aren't meant to do. They are a storage service and aren't supposed to be anything else. In a typical data center model, NAS servers are intermediate storage. Meant for fast data transfers, massive storage capabilities and redundant disk fault tolerance. We are talking hundreds of hard drives and hundred gigabit connection speeds inside the data center. This is expensive to run, so they are also very energy efficient, meant to keep the least amount of required disks spinning at any given moment.

They are not for video rendering, data wrangling, calculations or hosting dozens of docker containers. That's what servers are for.

Servers have the processing power and host the actual services. They then request data from a NAS as needed. For example, a web service with tons of images and video will only have the site logic and UI images on the server itself. The content, video and images, will be on the NAS. The server will have a temporary cache where it will copy the most frequently accessed content and new content on demand. Any format conversion, video encoding, etc. Will be done by the server, not the NAS.

Now, on self-hosting of course, anything goes and they are just computers at the end of the day. But if a machine was purpose made for being a NAS server, it won't have the most powerful processor, and that's by design. They will have, however, an insane amount of sata, PCI-e channels and drive bays. And a ton of sophisticated hardware for data redundancy, hotswap capacity and high speed networks that is less frequent in servers.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 days ago

Make sure you use a filesystem with snapshots, it'll save a lot of headaches.

[–] upbeatWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 3 days ago

Going to throw you off your trail by recommending Stremio + real_debrid/premiumizer/torbox + torrentio for movies and TV shows plus for torrenting. You have to pay for real-debrid/premiumizer/torbox but the other 2 are free.

Calibre for ebook management

[–] HiTekRedNek@lemm.ee 4 points 3 days ago

Prebuilt is almost always the wrong answer. That holds true in way more fields than just technology as well.

The phrase "bought versus built" comes to mind.

You can almost always build exactly what you need for less money or headache than you think.

Will you maybe spend a little more than buying some cheap one-off? Possibly. However, the best part of building it yourself is that you'll also typically know exactly what you've got, and if you use off-the-shelf parts, replacements and upgrades are easier in the long run.

TCO. Total Cost of Ownership.

[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yes. Synology will do this fine. They’ve been cunty recently so I recommend QNap.

I recommend adding Tailscale for remote access.

[–] unphazed@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

I conveniently was given a Synology ds412 by Amazon many years ago (and being as I had just been fired from the phone job with them due to a "mistake" in hiring me, I figured I'd keep it. Also learned that when you work security, don't piss off secretaries while doing the job, even as a contractor). I still use it. Not powerful, but it serves up most video alright, and is ok as a download space.

[–] BombOmOm@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

If you have a desktop, throw a hard drive or two in it and you have a NAS. Software (like you mentioned Plex or Jellyfin) does the rest. Even if you only have a laptop, a hard drive in a standard USB enclosure will perform this role just fine.

[–] ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Thank you, but I don't want to keep my desktop running. The cooling noise, the electricity. Did I mentioned the fans? They are quiet but I can hear them, I want something that goes silent and wakes up when needed.

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

There are some passively cooled (i.e. no spinning fan) SFF Desktops (HP, DELL, etc.) or you could get a Raspberry Pi 5 and stick it into a Geekworm case. Power consumption with these devices should hover around 5W, maybe slightly higher under load. The Desktops most probably support WoL. The Raspberry Pi doesn’t.

[–] Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Also in my experience the raspberry pi isn't all that great for a NAS considering you are reliant on using USB hard drives and also need a separate powered USB hub for them

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Which Pi did you try? Since the Pi4/CM4 (can even work with SAS drives) and especially with the Pi5 you can build some nicely performing NASes.

[–] Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I think I used a Pi 4B, either the 8 or 2 GiB model because that's what I had lying around.

I never tried a compute module but instead upgraded to a lenovo tiny pc.

[–] BombOmOm@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

A note on the fans specifically, you can buy quiet fans. In general, the larger the fan, the lower the speed you can run it and the quieter it is. You can also setup fan curves so they are only doing anything of note when the computer is pumping out heat (given your statements, that would be basically never).

The electricity usage is a pretty notable thing. Though, if you take the graphics card out of a desktop (use integrated graphics, a dedicated graphics card in a server is just wasted electricity) and set the OS to power saver (this mostly means it won't boost the CPU to higher clocks), it really won't use much power. Compared to buying dedicated NAS hardware, you may never recoup the energy costs between the hardware you have and the lower-power hardware you need to buy.

If you don't already own one, a Kill-A-Watt is a great tool to have. Tells you how much energy a device is using. Biggest thing I found was my TV had a vampire draw of 15W. Literally draws 15W while off. This got the TV put on a power strip I turn off when I'm not using it.

Now, with all that said, sometimes you just want what you want. And there is nothing wrong with that. My goal here is to make sure you don't feel you have to pick one option over the other.

[–] kewko@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Damn 15w is huge! What's the brand? Does it have smart (WiFi) power on? Does it help if you switch it off?

[–] BombOmOm@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

It's a very old 1080p Sharp TV. I know it does have WiFi which I have not setup, but that certainly doesn't mean the WiFi is off.

I'll have to see if there is some way to disable the WiFi completely and re-measure it.

[–] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

preferably something with WOL that goes silent and fanless when not in use, or something I can shut down with a button

Recently I saw a Traefik plugin that can send WOL packets to a machine when a service that is hosted there gets a network request. It also shuts down the device when it's not in use. You can set it up with a low power always on thing, like a rpi. I also have a buddy that set it up in a more diy way without Traefik so it's definitely something that can be done and will save you a lot of electricity in the long term.

As for the NAS, if you want to start small and cheap, there are N95 mini PC's for like 100-150$. Attatch an external multi TB drive to it via usb and viola there is your first NAS. It will also draw way less power than a full tower PC and still be basically plug and play.

You can do surprisingly much with very little hardware these days. And because the cost is so low you can upgrade later to exactly what you need. Only by trying out will you find out what you care about and want exactly. Online people keep suggesting their own personal preferences.

[–] Untrending@feddit.org 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

So what you can do hardware wise is either any usff pc with 2 drives (used Lenovo's are fairly popular), or diy build with an Intel n150 board and some drives. Both are usually very silent since they don't have active cooling. If you spend the money for ssd's then it's completely silent.

Wouldn't go with off the shelf nas, since it's a trend to move more and more behind subscriptions and you never know how long you'll have a feature.

For Software:

I'd definitely go with jellyfin. Plex is commercializing hard.

Remote access is easy and secure with tailscale

For ebooks calibre-web

Music and torrent i don't know enough to suggest anything

Base system maybe some truenas and all services as containers

[–] paequ2@lemmy.today 1 points 3 days ago

Music

I've been using Navidrome for a while now and it's been great!

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 days ago

Silent and fanless: look for a Monsterlabo case. It is all heatsink. Buy a fankess power supply, or buy a PSU that is overrates for the load and fanless under 30% load.

Its the setup I have. I can render video and other work loads and you don't even know the system is on

[–] jaypg@lemmy.jaypg.pw 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How much data do you plan on storing? If you're going to stay under a couple terabytes then you could get away with one of the Bmax or GMKtek mini PCs for under a couple hundred bucks. They're silent, decent amount of RAM, often have a slot for a second SSD and they're tiny enough to throw anywhere.

I myself have one being delivered today, but on Amazon there's a GMKtek mini PC with an Intel N150, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD on sale for $195. Plex and Jellyfin support the Intel Quicksync engine for transcoding and you can fit several containers/apps in 16GB

If you grow out if it down the road then you'll have a good idea by then what hardware you need to upgrade to.

[–] ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Thank you for the tip. Regions sucks, its 350$ for me :(

Edit: and its 195 through gmktec website

[–] habitualcynic@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

I got an Aoostar WTR Pro for this exact purpose. I went with jellyfin over plex due to plex enshittification, haven’t had any issues yet. You can find smaller NAS devices if you want. I avoided Synology because something felt off, and now they’re enshittifying too.

I like the people suggesting to build your own, that’s my next plan.

[–] scott@lemmy.org 4 points 4 days ago

My HP Z440 was cheap on eBay and kicks ass. Only weird hitch about it is it won't boot without some sort of GPU in it so I got a GTX 970 on Facebook for like $20.

[–] Godort@lemm.ee 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

It really depends on how much you value your time and how good you are with configuration

A QNAP or Synology will work and be pretty simple to configure out of the box. Installing custom software is possible, but can be tricky as they require you to enable sideloading and custom apps can be hard to find. Both have supported app stores with available apps to do what you're looking for (QNAP has apps for both torrents and Plex. Not sure about Synology)

However, you will get way more bang for your buck by building one from scratch using something like TrueNAS and the Arr stack, but this can require a fair bit of technical knowledge about configuring containers and securing network services(Especially if you want them to be accessible remotely)

Most people here do selfhosting as a hobby and as a result, the time spent trying new configurations is negligible as it wouldn't be much of a hobby otherwise.

[–] FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Synology NAS’s are amazing, can’t recommend them enough. Their software is what makes them so good.

You can run Plex server on them, can run docker containers for all your *arr services and even a container with a VPN for torrentin (all depends on the model obviously).

[–] Ton@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

It's an unpopular opinion here, but I agree with you. I've been running a single disk Synology for a decade or so, replaced the original one about 4 years ago.

The software is pretty sleek and it would fit OPs requirements perfectly. I don't care for some power hungty Intel based PC sucking kWhs of power each day, just to host some media.

Mine boots up at 19:00 and shuts down at 01:00. It has a built in Torrent client that even my partner can use.

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Do not promote these Synology jerks.

Synology's software is awful. Simply controlling NFS shares is an exercise in insanity, and don't get me started on ACLs.

Further, synology is a real bastard company currently trying to enshittify hardware (disk) upgrades, among other terrible practices:

https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1kmx5td/can_we_still_trust_synology_users_catch_quiet/

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/nas/synology-requires-self-branded-drives-for-some-consumer-nas-systems-drops-full-functionality-and-support-for-third-party-hdds

Full disclosure, I myself am running an old ds211j for backups. It's way out of updates, and there isn't much of a 3rd party image collection for synology hardware, but it works fine and lives in its own locked down subnet.

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