Project new NAS
Around 8 years ago I purchased a Synology NAS which has been working great since. I only had a power supply failure, which could be easily replaced. Drives have been running smoothly without any problem.
However, since last year I have two problems with it:
- The storage is full
- It is annoying to mount data from the NAS on VMs of my hypervisor
I could've just added a new drive to tackle the first problem, but the rest of the hardware is getting quite old and I would like a new approach with integrated compute power. So during fall of last year I started a project to build a new NAS.
At first I was looking at cases with hot swap bays for the hard drives. When Jonsbo announced the N6 case it felt like the solution I wanted, but they weren't really available up until January/February of this year.
Then the memory shortages started happening, when I saw the prices rising I quickly made the decision to grab a few sticks for this new build and search for other components afterwards.
When the RAM arrived, I was looking into the rest of the build. But, quickly the prices of other parts were also rising quickly, such as the CPU, HDDs, SSDs. And the Jonsbo N6 wasn't available yet. Inevitably, I spent more money on this project than I liked, but mid January I had all the parts so I can start building.
Somewhere in the end of January I completed the build, I now have a nice NAS with a 14600K processor, 96GB of RAM, 2x4TB NVME SSD in a ZFS mirror. It's quite power efficient and silent, while still allowing me to use the performance when needed. And then my perfectionism kicked in, the NAS has been standing on my desk ever since. I put Proxmox on it, but never added the HDD's and never moved my workloads and data to this new build.
I'm still debating about the software I want to use for the storage environment. I'm planning to install Nextcloud for my cloud drive, where my documents live, but I still need to think about good software for accessing bigger data over my network using SMB or NFS. TrueNAS seems like a great fit, but feels a bit like too much overhead for a few TB's of shared storage. On the other hand, just running Samba feels a bit too hacky for 'production' data.
If anyone has recommendations for a lightweight yet reliable SMB or NFS setup within a VM or LXC, I’d love to hear your thoughts 😊.
I wish I had finished this project sooner, but I want to make sure I’m taking the right approach, so it’s taking longer than expected. Hopefully I can finish this project soon, giving myself some mental room to work on the next thing of the project list.