Hello. Any helpful advice would be gratefully received.
Q1. What do you think of the following mini PC + 4-bay hard drive dock as a NAS/home server?
Q2. Biggest performance bottleneck?
Q3. Will the harddrives work in a RAID array over the USB connection?
PELADN WI-6 Pro Mini PC, Intel N100 12th gen, 8GB DDR4, 256GB M.2 PCIe SSD, 1Gb ethernet
£ 132.42 GBP https://amzn.eu/d/0iTa2m5v
to connect over USB-C 3.2 cable to
SABRENT 4 bay hard drive docking station
£ 249.99 GBP https://amzn.eu/d/05KsjoJ2
I live alone, so don't have lots of people using my LAN and internet connections. I already have a gigabit LAN with switch. Netgear D6220 modem/router for WiFi AC and internet (35Mbps down, 8Mbps up).
4x 3.5 inch SATA hard drives (WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf) seems to give me the amount of storage I need plus options to expand, and it allows me to use RAID (or an alternative system for redundancy) so one drive can "die" without loss of data. Also NAS hard drives are still the best value per GB by far, even given their downsides compared to SATA SSDs (and especially M.2 NVMe SSDs). Though I will get one SSD as a cache drive to improve the speed of data exchange.
In order of importance, I want a NAS / home server for:
- Backup & storage - incl. a few family members remotely
- hopefully in future, a remote family member will have their own NAS and we can each host a backup of each other's NAS data, providing us both with an off-site backup.
- Data sync (replacing OneDrive etc.) - local & remote, only me
- Photos sync & management - incl. a few people remotely
- Films - only me, currently to a VLC app on an Amazon Fire TV stick, but maybe Plex / Jellyfin in future?
- Home Assistant - local & remote, with USB zigbee hub, to control LED lights and to add to in future
- Tinkering - writing websites, Linux, VMs, containers
While "cloud" options generally work well for a reasonable price, I'm persuaded by the arguments for having my own NAS so that I "own" my own data - so my data isn't dependent on a multi-national company.
The more “turn key” options, of buying a Synology DS923+ or QNAP TS-464 box or similar, put me off because I’ve been burnt too many times over the years by being locked in to a proprietary system that then stops functioning fully when the company stops supporting it - or it reaches the point when it can’t be upgraded easily. Also from what I’ve seen online, their software (with the possible exception of Synology’s DSM) isn’t sufficiently better than what is available for free and open-source. And you seem to get less computing power for the money with a pre-built system.
Operating systems: I'm thinking "TrueNAS Scale", or possibly "OpenMediaVault" if TrueNAS Scale is too complicated for me!
I'm hoping that my proposal at the top of this message could be a reasonable compromise between "turn key" and "build-my-own" that would mean I could use warranty support for the Mini PC and harddrive dock hardware while not paying the extra for a pre-built unit...? Hopefully too it is reasonably energy efficient and price efficient...?
However if I bought separate components and built my own system (an alternative possibility) it would be harder to get such support as each component’s maker wouldn’t necessarily help if each component wasn’t working with another component.
Thank you, in advance.
