budget NAS 4TB-8TB range

If you don't need anything fancy, you can get 2 bay QNAP/Synology/Buffalo NAS on eBay for pretty cheap. Especially the older models

Newer ones can be a pretty penny

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If you don't need anything fancy, you can get 2 bay QNAP/Synology/Buffalo NAS on eBay for pretty cheap. Especially the older models

Newer ones can be a pretty penny

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The buffalo linkmaster looks interesting and affordable. Is there anywhere to read up on thsoe?

Here's a turnkey "eBay Refurbished" Dell OptiPlex with a 1 year warranty for $152.81.

LINK
i5-6500
8GB RAM
4TB HDD
Windows 10 Pro

Unfortunately, there's no 8TB option. You could select the cheapest HDD option and swap in your own HDD.

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dont recognize any of the names out there right now like Qnap

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FWIW they’re arguably the best product out there (I own a Synology). So don’t let a funny name let you put it in a lower tier than it belongs.



You essentially only want an SMB share it seems like. Router-attached-USB or UNRAID on the Optiplex posted would almost certainly be sufficient. Also, essentially any Linux distro would do just fine to host a file share, and you you say “media server,” so there are most of your favorite media servers (Plex, Emby, jellyfin, etc) on just about every Linux distro (and on most of the boxes) If you want to dedicate some processing power to it rather than just have a raw share.

I went with synology in the end because I wanted a test bench solution for an office product I was consideri implementing, it has upgradeable ram, and really its software is a tad “easier” than the rest. I’m no tech dummy, and I understand how low powered-to-crappy the hardware I’m buying is, but it has been a pretty wonderful device to be a backup server, I let it hold the data for a plex share but host it on a different device, it is capable of Docker and VMs (even specifying different shares/drives per VM), but I bought a $100 off-least 8500T USFF box to host proxmox (with a Fedora instance + HomeAssistant (and I’m about to migrate my instance of AdGuard Home from the HA Add On to the Fedora VM, because it seems that any update on the device even just being available breaks the instance of AdGuard Home (for anyone who has struggled through the stream of consciousness and wants to weigh in, tell me why I’m an idiot)). I had a project I was going to try rsync for but found another solution prior to even dabbling.


If you want RAID, you need one of the ones you mentioned. If you just want a file share (and would be happy with a removable drive, like you say), just get a box like above or an ultra SFF like this tiny, formidable monster (or one of its brothers with only 16gb ram for about $30-40 less, as 32GB ram is overkill for this solution) + an external HDD or 6 of your liking like this WD 8TB one for $168. Granted, if I wanted to do this, I at this point care enough about aesthetics to not buy an external drive to connect to a device so tiny, I would buy a bigger desktop (like above) with a few internal drives. Just about every other solution you will find will be:
1) worse hardware, so you’d better be getting better software than you could roll on your own (this goes for almost all “tiny” and “pi” devices)
2) more expensive.

2 Bay Qnap is your best bet. I have been using a 4 bay model for quite some time now for plex.

Thanks for all the replies everyone. I'll go look at Qnap and Synology first and maybe the Buffalo if I still need to go cheaper.

I am just looking for an SMB share. I run plex and other servers off of my main PC and just use the NAS as a network storage drive because it makes it easy to switch between Windows an Linux on my PC/server. I wanted something small and headless because my NAS just sits on a shelf in my IT space and I want something that uses very little power.

I guess my last question is how reliable is RAID0 these days on like a 2-bay NAS? I ran RAID0 in a PC about 10 years ago and it only lasted about 1 year before the first corruption issue hit and lost all the data.

I do keep an offsite backup of anything I cant afford to lose on my NAS. Mainly family videos. So those get sync'd to a drive at another location. So should I lose a RAID0 array, it wouldn't be too bad but that remote site doesn't have broadband so restoring would take a LOOONG time. I guess I'm just saying this because the speed of RAID0 might be nice and I dont need a RAID1 capable NAS.

Thanks again everyone!

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how reliable is RAID0 these days

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As reliable as the drives. Make sure you’re buying NAS-grade drives. That said, for the application, I don’t know what ‘bump’ you’ll get in performance from RAID0 vs just a hosted SMB share without the RAID (saving you the purchase of a disk up front and giving you the ability to add it later)

I am interested but looking that up, I think even the used price is going to be well above my budget. That is a pretty powerful product.

Interested

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