NAS - self build or buy premade?

[Saracen999]

Another thing i found today is that the Asustor models only do image and music transcoding, according to their user guide and website they do not do movie/video transcoding.

Yes, they do. At least, the model I was looking at does, it having the same graphics-enabled Quad-core Celeron as it's current-gen QNAP and Synology competitors. I wonder quite what models the guide/website was to, but the current J4125 models do. The one my brother has may or may not, but it's a previous generation and it's not somethig he wants or needs, so he doesn't do, use or need Plex. But I've watched the Plex server tests on the latest ones, including watching Plex (with a Plex pass) on a Lockerstor 4 do hardware transcoding. One comment, though, was that it seems to use more hardware resources to do it than the equivalent QNAP or Synology competitors, leaving less free to doother NAS tasks. Maybe their own video software doesn't support hardware transcoding, but Plex on their hadware does.

[loztech]

Should I build my own and use freeNAS or get off-the-shelf QNAP/another?

If self build what should I go for? Should I get x570 to load it up with nvme (and expand in future) or would b550 for nvme caching and a mix of sata SSD and HDD be good enough?

The specs of off-the-shelf seem a bit crappy to me.

Hi,

I'm currently in a similar position to you. I don't have any spare hardware so it'll be a fresh build. The hobbyist in me wants to build, but that turnkey benefit of a prebuild is very enticing, coupled with the fact that the overall cost may not be much between the two.

I've got my eyes on a Synology RS1221+. I've chosen this for its 10GBe support via it's expansion port, bay count and chassis depth (as I'm limited on space).

Many thanks to all who have commented on this thread. Plenty of food for thought.

Thanks.

[Jay-Bruce]

I'm quite happy with my DIY unRAID box
Based on an old 3rd gen i5, pair of 256GB SSDs and 3x2TB disks
This was an old tower that I wasn't using very often so I added another SSD and disk to and now run windows as a VM with GPU pass through.
It now runs various applications installed form the communithy applications library (very useful!) including Nextcloud which handles photo and video backup from our phones
Worth a look, there's some good youtube install/config videos of various must have apps too

Single board computers (Rpi, odroid HC2, etc) have a lot to offer for NAS. Lower idle power consumption but still plenty of performance for NAS duties, low cost, and they do all the useful things that prebuilt ones do if you prod the software right (openmediavault UI is less polished than commercial ones, but I figured it out and my computer skills end at plugging equations into python. It does let you automatically backup over USB without much fuss). Even an athlon 3000G is a seriously heavyweight NAS - unless you have some demanding VMs in mind I doubt you need AM4

There as an old rule of thumb in the early days of Ethernet that you needed 1Hz of CPU for every bps of network speed. That mapped from 10MHz CPU with 10Mbps networking at the time, but seems to have roughly stayed with us. So with 1GbE as still the standard, a 1GHz ARM or Atom core can usually keep up with one direction of transfer (some 1GHz chips are better than others). So a low end 1.5GHz quad core is quite workable.

I did some tests once with my AMD E350 18W APU with dual Bobcat cores, and one core at 1.6GHz could just about saturate both transmit and receive on the low end Realtek network chip the machine used (cheap chip about than 1.8Gbps total) as long as I used tcp test programs to generate simple test data. Actually serving real data, I needed the other core.

The jump to 10GbE, and you need something way more beefy and/or some hardware acceleration. Once you hit 100GbE, you probably want an FPGA driving it not a CPU. Just like they use in big network switches.

Thanks for sharing that experience, I came to this thread looking for info on DIY NAS stuff, and your comments have nudged me in the right direction. I'm thinking a media-centre/server + NAS + private cloud storage + webrpoxy could be an interesting project for an old xeon box I have that's begging to be repurposed, and with genuinely useful end results.

I'm currently considering an socket 771 xeon, and until reading your comments I was wondering it a teenaged CPU would "cut it", but in light of your rule of thumb there, it will kill it. Thanks for the info :-)

[spacein_vader]

Thanks for sharing that experience, I came to this thread looking for info on DIY NAS stuff, and your comments have nudged me in the right direction. I'm thinking a media-centre/server + NAS + private cloud storage + webrpoxy could be an interesting project for an old xeon box I have that's begging to be repurposed, and with genuinely useful end results.

I'm currently considering an socket 771 xeon, and until reading your comments I was wondering it a teenaged CPU would "cut it", but in light of your rule of thumb there, it will kill it. Thanks for the info :-)

While the hardware you already have is always a good place to start, as you build and find out what you make use of more your requirements my change, albeit potentially still cheaply.

Decommissioned xeons tend to be available cheaply and are good all rounders, what they are not however is particularly efficient. I went the same route with my media server, only to learn that for most of what the CPU was doing (video transcoding,) a 35w dual core 7th gen pentium was far more efficient at doing the same job with its iGPU.