Re: NAS

On Wed, Apr 01, 2026 at 06:55:59PM -0700, bch wrote:
> 
> 
> I’m entertaining the idea of a storage appliance, and wondering: does anybody have a recipe for building their own, or experience with whether or not it’s worth it? I suspect the single biggest issue is getting some small device w enough i/o to hang a RAID set off of it. What are the preferred boards for that. Other option is just treating it like a consumable and getting a buffalo device and accessing via Samba or such and trusting/hoping everything is working well.
> 

A few years ago I was looking at the same thing and really struggled to find
something that was a small form factor with enough sata slots to suit, that
was without considering the cost.

I eventually gave up and bought a qnap nas because it ticked all the boxes I
had. The nas not only provides nfs and smb but also has an android
app that I can use to sync the photos from all our devices. I was even able
to set up a wireguard tunnel from our devices to the qnap so we could sync
photos to home when we were travelling.  The nas supports virtualisation too,
I run a NetBSD vm on the nas which I use mbsync on to synchronise my email
from my provider locally (allowing me to undo their stupidity of randomly
moving mail to a spam folder).

Under the hood it is running linux, apart from some minor quirkiness with the
networking the qnap has worked well for me. It is a neater hardware package
than I could create myself and the seamless android integration was a real
plus.

-- 
Brett Lymn
--
Sent from my NetBSD device.

"We are were wolves",
"You mean werewolves?",
"No we were wolves, now we are something else entirely",
"Oh"