[embedding-shape]

> But I must admit I'm in the turn-key solution phase of my life and have cheerfully enjoyed a big-name NAS over last 5 years or so :).

You know, I thought I was too, so I threw in the towel and migrated one my NAS to TrueNAS, since it's supposed to be one of those "turn-key solutions that doesn't require maintenance", and everything got slower, harder to maintain and even managed to somehow screw up one of my old disks when I added it to my pool.

The next step after that was to migrate to NixOS and bit the bullet to ensure the stuff actually works. I'd love to just give someone money and not having to care, but it seems the motto of "If you want something done correctly, you have to do it yourself" lives deep in me, and I just cannot stomach loosing the data on my NAS, so it ends up really hard to trust any of those paid-for solutions when they're so crap.

[Uvix]

I wouldn't call TrueNAS, or anything where you're installing an OS on custom hardware, "turn-key". That's saved for the Synologys and UGREENs and Ubiquitis of the world.

[limagnolia]

You can purchase TrueNAS hardware + Software pre-configured. It is not clear what the individual you were responding to was doing, but I have personally experienced many off the shelf, supposedly ready to go IT solutions that require as much tweaking and admin time as a custom solution. But different folks have different skill sets, too.

[attendant3446]

The problem with Synology type NAS is that they still treat you like a product. If you go this way, you have to accept the limitations. Or you have to do everything yourself.

[tylerflick]

Are people doing more than serving SMB shares with their NAS’s? I feel like I’m missing out on something.

[hengheng]

Depending on how you build it, you could run homeassistant next to your smb, which lends itself to all sorts of add-ons such as calibre-web for displaying eBooks and synchronizing progress.

Of course, gitea and surroundings, or similar ci/cd can be a fun thing to dabble with if you aren't totally over that from work.

Another fun idea is to run the rapidly developing immich as a photo storage solution. But in general, the best inspiration is the awesome-selfhosted list.

[maxvu]

Running a home server seems relatively popular for all kinds of things. Search term "homelab" brings up a culture of people who seem largely IT-adjacent, prefer retired DC equipment, experiment with network configurations as a means of professional development and insist on running everything in VMs. Search term "self-hosted", on the other hand, seems to skew towards an enterprise of saturating a Raspberry Pi's CPU with half-hearted and unmaintained Python clones of popular SaaS products. In my experience — with both hardware and software vendoring — there is a bounty of reasonable options somewhere in between the two.

[shepherdjerred]

I use mine for a ton:

- Home Assistant

- GitHub backups

- Self-hosting personal projects

- File sync

- golink service

- freshrss RSS reader

- Media server

- Alternative frontends for reddit/youtube

- GitHub Actions runners

- Coder instance

- Game servers (Minecraft, Factorio)

Admittedly, this is more of a project for fun than for the end result. You could achieve all of the above by paying for services or doing something else.

https://github.com/shepherdjerred/homelab/tree/main/src/cdk8...

[spiffytech]

People want all kinds of things besides literal SMB shares:

- Other network protocols (NFS, ftp, sftp, S3)

- Apps that need bulk storage (e.g., Plex, Immich)

- Syncthing node

- SSH support (for some backup tools, for rsync, etc)

- You're already running a tiny Linux box in your home, so maybe also Pihole / VPN server / host your blog?

You've got compute attached to storage, and people find lots of ways to use that. Synology even has an app store.

[WXLCKNO]

I'm running Truenas Scale on my old i7 3770 with 16GB DDR3.

Obviously got a bunch of datasets just for storage, one for time machine backups over the network and then dedicated ones for apps.

I'm using for almost all my self hosted apps.

Home Assistant, Plex, Calibre, Immich, Paperless NGX, Code Server, Pi-Hole, Syncthing and a few others.

I've got Tailscale on it and I'm using a convenience package called caddy-reverse-proxy-cloudflare to make my apps available on subdomains of my personal domain (which is on CloudFlare ) by just adding labels to the docker containers.

And since I'm putting the Tailscale address as the DNS entry on CloudFlare, they can only be accessed by my devices when they're connected to Tailscale.

I think at this point what's amazing is the ease with which I can deploy new apps if I need something or want to try something.

I can have Claude whip up a docker compose and deploy it with Dockge.

[queenkjuul]

I just retired my 3770 server last month, it was a good system

[WXLCKNO]

Unfortunate that hacker news doesn't have reply notifications but I'm curious what you did when retiring it.

Just recycle the parts? Was it your main and only server?

I have that server running Truenas, I have another PC I had built for friends and family for Plex only, and I have a third one running an ethereum validator which is the most powerful but only does that.

It's not stuff that would sell for any price i'd care to get and just throwing it away / recyling it feels bad since it still works.

[WarOnPrivacy]

I still have one powering a firewall. The only pressure to replace it is power consumption.

[NikolaNovak]

There's a range. A lot of people treat their NAS as their home server - torrents, downloads, media server, even containers and everything that goes with it.

I played with it as well - it's fun and rewarding and potentially optimized, but also... Can be a lot of work and hassle.

For myself when I say turn key solution, I should specify that I'm also doing more of a "right specific device for specific purpose ", so my NAS is now a storage device and nothing else.

[SubiculumCode]

I personally don't get what they are serving with a home NAS? Movies/Music/Family Photos is all I can think of, personally...and those don't seem that compelling to me compared to cloud.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Any substantial movie/series collection can be more over a TB and thus not cost efficient to host in the cloud.

I've been running a server with multiple TB of storage for many years and have been using an old PC in a full tower case for the purpose. I keep thinking about replacing the hardware, but it just never seems worth the money spent although it'd reduce the power usage.

I have it sharing data mainly via SSHFS and NFS (a bit of SMB for the wife's windows laptop and phone). I run NextCloud and a few *arr services (for downloading Linux ISOs) in docker.

(Currently 45TB in use on my system)

Edit: as no-one is asking, I base my system on mergerfs which was inspired by this excellent site: https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/mergerfs/

[WarOnPrivacy]

> and those don't seem that compelling to me compared to cloud

I tend to be cloud-antagonistic bc I value control more than ease.

Some of that is practical due to living on the Gulf coast where local infra can disappear for a week+ at a time.

Past that, I find that cloud environments have earned some mistrust because internal integrity is at risk from external pressures (shareholders, governments, other bad actors). Safeguarding from that means local storage.

To be fair to my perspective, much of my day job is restoring functionality, lost due to the endless stream of anti-user decisions by corps (and sometimes govs).

[Uvix]

Also ebooks and software installers, but those and movies/music are my main categories.

Cloud costs would be... exorbitant. 19 TB and I'm nowhere near done ripping my movies. Dropbox would be $96/month, Backblaze $114/month, and OneDrive won't let me buy that much capacity.

[wltr]

And you can buy those disks for… $300 or $400 apiece, I guess? A onetime purchase.

[QuiEgo]

Another use case is hobby photography. Video storage (e.x. drone footage), or keeping a big pile of RAW photos. The cloud stuff becomes impractical quickly.

[slumberlust]

I host mine locally to backup the cloud or in case Google just screws my account one day.

[Marsymars]

Not much more, but the extra bits probably differ for different people.

My (Synology) NAS also serves as a Time Machine backup and hosts an LDAP backend for my.

[makeset]

How does that work for you? Last I tried, any interruption during a remote Time Machine backup corrupted the entire encrypted archive, losing all backup history.

[Marsymars]

It's a secondary backup method for my household but seems to have been chugging along for years without issues for me.

[Uvix]

I'm hosting a couple of apps in Docker on mine. (Pihole, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, and Bitwarden.)

[ErroneousBosh]

I run NFS and Postgres to enable multiple-machine video editing.

[imiric]

It's curious that you would choose NixOS for a system that "just works". As much as I like the core ideas of Nix(OS)—reproducibility, declarative configuration, snapshots and atomic upgrades/rollbacks—, having used it for a few years on several machines, I've found it to be opposite of that. It often requires manual intervention before an upgrade, since packages are frequently renamed and API changes are common. The Nix store caches a lot of data, which is good, but it also requires frequent garbage collection to recover space. The errors when something goes wrong are cryptic, and troubleshooting is an exercise in frustration. The documentation is some variation of confusing, sparse, outdated, or nonexistent. I'm sure that to a Nix veteran these might not be issues, but even after a few years of usage, I find it as hostile and impractical to use as on the first day. Using it for a server would be unthinkable for me.

For my personal NAS machine, I've used a Debian server with SnapRAID and mergerfs for nearly a decade now, using a combination of old and new HDDs. Debian is rock-solid, and I've gone through a couple of major version upgrades without issues. This setup is flexible, robust, easy/cheap to expand, and requires practically zero maintenance. I could automate the SnapRAID sync and "scrub", but I like doing it manually. Best of all, it's conceptually and technically simple to understand, and doesn't rely on black magic at the filesystem level. All my drives are encrypted with LUKS and use standard ext4. SnapRAID is great, since if one data drive fails, I don't lose access to the entire array. I've yet to experience a drive failure, though, so I haven't actually tested that in practice.

So I would recommend this approach if you want something simple, mostly maintenance-free, while remaining fully in control.

[gunalx]

You only really ned to deal with breaking api bianually though. I have really have had use of being able to quickly recover once my bootdisc fails and isntantly being able to have the same machine upp and running again.

[NikolaNovak]

I appreciate your perspective and effort, as I said, I was there too :-). Nothing you mention would be considered "turn key" by anybody other than very specific subset of Hacker News audience, and may inadvertently prove my point :-).