this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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How does one get a NAS without spending an arm and leg these days? I started pirating because I was broke, I don't have triple digits to spend on hardware.
An old PC with a bunch of hard drives (they shouldn't be NAS drives necessarily) + TrueNas. The main cost will be the hard drives which is about 20$/TB
$20/TB is a bad deal.
You can get WD Red Pro’s on sale twice a year for $16/TB.
Further you can order unused data center and enterprise drives for anything from $11-$16/TB and those things are built to take way more use and abuse than home users can throw at them.
I would not pay above $17/TB for traditional magnetic spinning disk storage.
That's like incredibly less than what I have been able to find. Where exactly would they be on sale for that cheap?
Don't want to buy used since you never know when they will go south on you
https://diskprices.com/
Beware MDD at the top is alleged to sell drives they’ve refurbished which are essentially used but with wiped smart. Other cheap deals… check sellers. If it’s not sold and shipped by Amazon it could be slightly used drives (usually third party sellers do a mix so some people get brand new, others not so much). Also beware third party sellers and Amazon itself often sell OEM drives without warranty. I always check the serials online before opening the anti-static bag to make sure it’s in warranty.
Also: shucks.top
You need to wait and watch for the good deals but they come around multiple times a year.
Also, understand there are certain storage ranges to get these prices. Generally 8-18TB drives are best deals per TB. You pay a premium for 20-22 top size drives as well as for smaller drives like 2-4TB. 14TB seems to be the current sweet spot most of the time.
Lastly. Understand SMR drives are alright for backups but not ideal for streaming high bitrate content from or using to seed files. CMR is better.
Those are some amazing resources, thank you!
Is there an easy way to check if a drive is CMR? The ones I looked at didn't mention either.
Looking up technical specs for the drive it’s often mentioned on data sheets (often as conventional magnetic recording drive or else shingled if SMR). Other than that third parties have compiled lists and many but not all Amazon pages in tech specs mention it if you look closely. Try searching drive-model and cmr and then smr and see what comes up. Beware some drive families different sizes of drive may be cmr vs smr. WD red pro and ultra star DC line are all CMR, WD blues many are SMR. WD black as far as I know are all CMR. WD red (non-pro) can be SMR I believe.
I’ll be honest, the real difference is getting a 7200 vs 5400 RPM drive, particularly one with a larger cache, I’d always go for 7200 except for purely offline backup stuff.
In terms of external drives and shucking, it’s largely a crapshoot. You can try searching what drives others found in a model, however they’re subject to change.
Bottom line: If money is tight and it’s just you, you can absolutely do SMR and 5400 RPM external drives and have a smooth experience as long as we’re talking re-encodes not raw Blu-ray remuxes (I have seen an external 5400RPM SMR drive choke and fail trying to smoothly play a file at 24MB/s bitrate but it worked fine with 10MB/s re-encodes, even those with burst rates of 17MB/s). If you can afford a bit more try to go 7200 and CMR.
how is 4 dollars of difference a big deal?
OP said money was tight.
And why pay more for less? Over the purchase of 3 hard drives I save enough to get a fourth “free” off the difference in savings.
$4x14tb=$56 for example.
But please. Continue to pay whatever you want. More cheap drives for me.
When you have 100tb
You can even start with an old laptop and external drives. Plenty of people shuck them anyway, so you're not exactly overpaying. They'll just be a bit slow. But if you're mostly planning on streaming video that doesn't matter too much.
If you do have a little to spend, you can do a 'naskiller' build. Just search for it and pick one. Basically some people put together lists of cheap, reliable used hardware you can get to build a pretty great nas, with different flavors. 'Quiet' 'fast' 'compact'. I built one and went all out. I think it was about 600 bucks without the drives. Build up from there.
I use a mini-PC and as many of these drive stations as needed: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WR9N3KW I started with HDD's but SSD's work much better with those stations. Bonus: Those guys can clone drives without a computer or anything.
Look up zima board. That's what I use for now.