[znpy]

I wouldnt trust my data with this kind of devices. There's nothing wrong per se, but I have my doubts about how easy you can find replacement parts if something breaks in, say, a year or two.

If you really depend on your data and want it to be safe, i'd recommend spending the extra money and either getting a proper nas (synology/qnap) or go the proper diy way (aka an x86 box and truenas/unraid).

you really don't want to be in the position where you absolutely need your data but the replacement parts are two-weeks far in the future because they're travelling via snail mail or worse, relying on 2nd-hand spare parts off ebay.

edit: not to mention, the gigabit ethernet port is a bottleneck. you would probably hitting the bottleneck even by using four rotational disks.

[whalesalad]

If you aren’t using hardware raid or another disk management tool that locks you in to one manufacturer or worse one unique controller - you should be able to take your disks to any other machine and rebuild your array.

At least, that’s how you should be constructing a home NAS if that’s what you’re doing.

The same situation can arise with a popular/managed solution like qnap/syno.

I have a DS918 and really love it (it’s one of those set it and forget it machines) but I don’t totally know how it works. It’s Linux of course, but it’s sorta a black box.

So I think there is a lot to be said for DIY as long as you are aware of the drawbacks and engineer around them accordingly.

[dsr_]

As a household backup device, rather than a NAS, this is actually pretty good.

Use mdadm RAID-10 across four spinning disks, or RAID-1 across a pair and have two slots free. If the board fails, you can plug them into any other Linux box with SATA ports available.

Most people have no better than 1Gb/s ethernet available in their house anyway. One expects a backup or restore to take a while, but also not to be interactive.

It's probably cheaper to repurpose an old desktop, but this will probably use less power, even when both are asleep.

[IgorPartola]

ECC and zfs/btrfs I think are a must for any data you care about. RAID 1 isn’t going to save you when you can’t tell which copy of the given block is the corrupted one.

[dsr_]

It completely depends on what your specific circumstances are, and something is always better than nothing.

(Also, you aren't getting ECC RAM at this price point, no matter what.)

What's a good use case for this? A house with a few laptops, a desktop and one server. Everything uses the server as their datastore. The server runs ZFS, but even ZFS can run out of luck, so you send over a snapshot to the backup device every day or three. It's insurance.

[znpy]

> Most people have no better than 1Gb/s ethernet available in their house anyway

This is partially true. Most people have no better than 1Gb/sec per single computer. That means that a single pc using the full 1Gb/sec would saturate the nas network I/O and degrade performances for all other clients.

Which may or may not be okay... You just know to be aware of that.

[dsr_]

I keep saying backup, and other people keep re-saying NAS. These are different.

A NAS can serve as a backup.

Not all backups are suitable as a NAS.

Now, let me restate: Most people have no networks capable of significantly more than 1Gb/s between two hosts in their house. Complaining that a backup server is also attached at 1Gb/s is not going to cause people to discover that they have already purchased 10Gb/s switches, or LACP switches, or even acquire 2.5Gb/s switches.

Of the people who have 10Gb/s switches in their house, approximately none of them are going to look at this very low cost, low performance, low power system and say "yes! this is my new primary backup system!"

[toast0]

LACP switches aren't too bad. I picked up a pair of 16-port switches with vlan and LACP (1-4 ports) via web interface for around $100 combined.

2.5G or 10G switching is still too expensive for me.

[m3at]

For the DIY way, I recommend the Helios64 if you're looking for an ARM SBC with a complete NAS package: https://kobol.io/

[znpy]

I have seen that, it's a really nice alternative.

[pmiller2]

If you're concerned about availability of parts, why not just keep some cold spares around? It's not like we're talking about expensive and specialized hardware here.

[njharman]

If you absolutely need your data its not only on one device.