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Dzeimis ,

Sure. My NAS I use for backups is also made from ancient desktop PC running ownCloud. The system is slow-ish by today’s standards, but since I had it already, I could invest in bigger SSD for data storage.

possiblylinux127 , (edited )

Yes, you can. What do you want to use it for? If its just a NAS you could use TrueNAS but if you want more services I would use proxmox.

If you are wanting tiered storage (ie SSDs as cache) then TrueNAS is probably the right answer as it uses ZFS and is very flexible.

Taleq ,
@Taleq@lemmy.world avatar

Some ppl pointed out you can. NAS it’s just a tiny computer with a dedicated enclosure running 24/7 with a lot of services running to do multiple things because…is running 24/7! Is you just want to upload some files for a backup is better an external HDD through USB. Connect, upload, disconnect.

If you want your computer do more things you have to check how the computer handle these services by software or hardware(hardware better) A list of questions:

  1. It support aspm (yes/not)
  2. It support virtualization.
  3. BIOS come with a dedicated raid chip
  4. How many video codecs the processor/iGPU can decode
  5. Ethernet port is, at least, gigabit
  6. RAM is >4GB
  7. You’re willing to spend time configuring and taking care of the thing

If a few of questions, or all, are NO I think it’s better to invest in an external USB HDD case.

EncryptKeeper ,

My NAS is just a very old Acer desktop from like 2011. I bought a Fractal Meshify 2 case which can hold I think 14 hard drives and moved the internals into that. Works great.

Eventually I had to get a pcie card for more data ports, and replace the power supply with one that’s more than 300w.

Richard ,

As others have said, you certainly can.

If your current system is a Windows PC then a super easy way to go about it is to purchase a product called Stablebit DrivePool which will allow you to combine multiple hard disks into one drive, and then do duplication of data you find important. Share that virtual drive as a Share that your other systems can see. DriePool is a super reliable product. Only downside other than the one time cost is that its redundancy is based on file duplication, which has the benefit that you can pull your drives out and use them elsewhere as any one file is always contained on a single drive, but unlike parity based solutions it’s super space inefficient to retain duplicate copies. It’s a tradeoff between simplicity and time to recover in a failure versus maximising disk use and reducing costs. Depending what your NAS is for, maybe you don’t need that redundancy but. You can also team it up with another product called SnapRaid (which is free) which can make your redundancy parity based.

I ran DrivePool for years on Windows and it’s a great product. Windows itself isn’t overly optimised for this use case, but as a predominately Mac household having access to Windows on a headless system was handy if I had to run the odd Windows only apps, so using Windows had its perks.

While Windows and a PC will cost more to operate, you’ll potentially be out well ahead if you don’t have to buy additional hardware. It’s likely worth running what you have into the ground rather than buying new hardware. There’s guides on some things you can do to optimise Windows too.

I’ve since moved to using UnRaid which is a paid product (one time purchase) designed specifically for NAS on your own PC. Great solution but I’d say that the barrier of entry is much higher than a Windows box. Still very versatile product. Moved to that as over time I’ve used a bit more Linux in my life, and I also had reduced need for Windows as the NAS OS.

Haven’t tried TrueNas but that’d be an alternative to UnRaid.

possiblylinux127 ,

I would strongly discourage using hardware raid. Hardware raid abstracts away some of the complexity at the cost of flexibility and potentially reliability. I have yet to come across hardware raid that does proper error checking for example.

Aceticon ,

A NAS is basically some software running on a computer, so you can use a desktop as that computer, ideally with a light operating system (for example, Linux in text only mode).

HOWEVER: desktops are designed for far higher computational loads than needed by a NAS, plus things like graphical user interfaces and direct connection of user peripherals such as mice, so even when idle they consume a lot more power than the kind of hardware used in a typical NAS.

Also the hardware in a good NAS will have things like extra higher speed connectors for HDDs/SDDs (such as SATA) rather than you having to use slower stuff like USB.

So keep in mind that a desktop as NAS will consume significantly more power than a dedicated NAS (as the latter will probably be running on something like an ARM and have a power source dimensioned for a couple of HDDs, not to run a dedicate graphics card like a desktop has) and probably won’t fit as many disks.

If you’re ok with having most disks be accessed a bit slower and USB3 work for you (and, for example, if your NAS is on 100 Mbit Ethernet, it’s the network that’s the slowest thing, not USB3) then it’s usually better to use an old notebook rather than desktop because notebooks were designed for running of batteries hence consume significantly less power.

Frankly I would advise against using an old desktop as NAS mainly because in a year or two of continued use you’ll have paid enough in extra electricity costs vs using a NAS to pay for a simple but decent dedicated NAS.

Chriswild ,

If they were to run some applications on the side it would validate the power usage. Like if it also was a Plex server it could be more reasonable to use more power.

Could also really hinge on the electricity cost for their region. At 10 cents a kwh and a delta of 100 watts we’d be talking 87 dollars a year assuming it’s always running at a delta of 100 watts.

I doubt there will be a 100 watt delta especially newer architectures that idle really well.

Aceticon ,

Whilst a 100W delta seems unlikelly, a 50W delta seems realistic as the kind of stuff you have in a NAS will use maybe 5W (about the same as a Raspberry PI, possibly less) whilst the typical desktop PC uses significantly more even outside graphics mode (part of the reason to use Linux in text mode only is exactly to try and save power there). It mainly depends on what the desktop was used for before: a “gaming PC” with a dedicated graphics card from an old enough generation (i.e. with HW from back before the manufactures of GPUs started competing on power usage) will use signiificantly more power than integrated graphics even in idle mode.

That said, making it a “home server” as you suggest makes a lot of sense - if that thing is an “All In One” server (media server, NAS, print server, torrent download server and so on) loaded with software of your choice (and hence stuff that respects your privacy and doesn’t shove Ads in your face) it’s probably a superior solution to getting those things as separate standalone devices, especially in the current era of enshittification.

Merlin404 ,

Yes most hardware can be a server, but i recommend hdds thats made for nases!

lntl ,

yes, try freenas/truenas

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

It’ll work fine. A NAS is just a PC. Try Unraid if you want a user friendly UI. It costs money but it’s only a one off payment for a lifetime license, and they have a free trial.

Oderus ,

+1 for unRAID. I did the same when I got tired of Netflix increasing prices while dropping content. Also got annoyed with my cable because it’s expensive and good content is rare.

Bought a 12th gen i5 desktop on sale and 4 x 10Tb drives and installed unRAID on a USB key.

Easiest thing I’ve done in years and it’s 100x better than Netflix and 1000x better than cable.

pineapplelover ,

Or truenas

conrad82 ,

This is what I do, using proxmox.

I do something similar to youtu.be/Hu3t8pcq8O0 for the NAS bit. Then I have a VM with docker containers for different services

ULS ,

Another option is to use openmediavault.

I haven’t looked at truenas.

Corgana ,
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

TrueNAS is very good at being a NAS. I used it for some time but eventually moved to CasaOS because it’s better at being a home server.

patchexempt ,

I hadn’t heard of CasaOS before; looks very cool. I am currently on TrueNAS and it’s been fine, but I had been running it in a VM because it wasn’t a good fit for running other things along side it. This seems like an interesting solution, thanks!

Corgana ,
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

No problem! I really like it!

ShellMonkey ,
@ShellMonkey@lemmy.socdojo.com avatar

Anything that can can provide storage attached to the network is a potential NAS. It doesn’t take a lot of power to just offer and store files. If you start getting into stuff like live transcoding or heavy encrypt/decrypt that’s a bit different matter.

unsaid0415 ,

Yeah. That’s what I used to do when I started out.

The simplest thing to do is install Debian on the computer and create partitions. You have 4 HDDs and 2 SSDs so it’d be stupid to create 6 separate partitions for each drive.

See in the BIOS if your motherboard supports software RAID1, so you are protected against drive failure somewhat. This will allow you to get something barebones running that’ll use at least 2 drives with redundancy. I assume the mobo RAID1 is stupid and only allows for max 2 drives, so the other drives will be just laying around useless. If that’s the case, probably use the 2 SSDs first. I see other posters recommending higher orders of RAID, but I only have 2 HDDs so I never really delved into that :P Perhaps that’s sound

With a system like that you could probably set up some small NFS for sharing your files by configuring it manually from the terminal.

Note that going with raw linux is “simpler” in the sense that it’s perhaps easier to wrap your head around or tinker with, but TrueNAS or Unraid have GUIs that will allow you to create e.g. the mentioned NFS share with a few clicks, rather than having to do it from the terminal. Depends on what you’re looking for. You could move up to TrueNAS or Unraid once you’ve played with raw Linux enough for example.

Once you have that,

I only ever dealt with ZFS and TrueNAS. ZFS will allow you to create a “partition” (pool in zfs terms) from many drives at the same time, so you’d be able to use more drives than just the two from RAID1.

The drives that you have are probably shitty SMR drives whose write speed dramatically slows down once you’re writing to them for a longer time. Consider buying CMR drives in the future, or just going all-SSD if it fits your usecase. ZFS hates SMR drives.

PupBiru ,
@PupBiru@kbin.social avatar

i’d avoid BIOS-based RAID… it doesn’t really offer many benefits over linux-based raid like MDADM, and MDADM offers a LOT of up-sides for portability, repairability, diagnostics, etc

lemmyvore ,

BIOS RAID tends to be the worst of both worlds, it’s not real hardware RAID and it’s not as flexible as full software RAID.

Gormadt ,
@Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

My first NAS was an old desktop that I got for $300 running an FX-6300 and a GTX 550, I slapped a couple hard drives in there, installed Ubuntu, and made an SMB share.

I’d recommend installing TrueNAS Scale on a system rather than doing what I did in part due to it being so much better than what I was doing, but you could run it on a potato if you wanted.

Hell my latest NAS upgrade is going from a PowerEdge T610 (tower server from like 2010ish) running TrueNAS Scale to a normal desktop (from 2017) running TrueNAS Scale

If anything using normal desktop hardware makes servicing it easier than using old server hardware

zzzz ,

Unraid is a great option for anyone, but beginners in particular. It does, however, cost money and isn’t open source.

comfydecal OP ,

Thanks for the resource, might be good to at least research. Thanks!

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