I am wondering about low-cost NAS boxes. Does everyone here build their own using a generic PC architecture, or is there a ready-made NAS enclosure with perhaps only two drive slots that can reasonably be turned into a TrueNAS?
I would like to have something relatively inexpensive to suggest to relatives and friends.
The UGREEN NAS series can readily run pretty much any OS you like, including TrueNAS. The DXP2800 is a two-bay unit for $349. But youâd probably want to use one of the NVMe slots for the OS installation.
Itâd be a pretty low-end systemâyou wouldnât want to plan on running VMs or much in the way of apps on itâbut from what Iâve seen, theyâre about the best going in terms of a pre-made NAS for TrueNAS.
A more generic PC is the ASRock DeskMeet X600, which supports AMD AM5 processors and ECC memory. (Of course the CPU must support ECC memory if you want that function.)
It has 2 NVMe slots and seems to support 2 x 3.5" HDDs. (Or 2 x 2.5" drives, SSD or HDD, though 2.5" HDDs tend to be SMR which is not suitable for ZFS.)
You select the CPU based on performance, Apps, VMs, power consumption, price and heat.
There are other older DeskMeet models which may vary in storage support.
Iâve seen reports it will actually take more, but I donât know that Iâd want to trust them. But if âbackup destinationâ (presumably over SMB) is your only use case, itâll be fine.
How much skills do you have in building your own HW?
Do you want new or second hand is also OK?
Do you only need storage or you want VMs or containers?
What network speed you want?
No VMs or virtualization of any kind. 1 Gbit/s will be fine. Itâs not for a super-high-end home network.
Iâd like to keep it to as little assembly as possible. I donât want to deal with having to select, purchase and install a separate processor, for example. I think the UGreen rig will be perfect.
I should mention that I have been somewhat leery of low-priced Chinese hardware (see the TP-Link router issues). My concern is mostly mitigated by the fact that in my case the UGreen NAS would be running a third-party open-source OS.
The only real complaint that I had was that the fan was a bit noisy. It kept the drives at an acceptable (to me) temperature. I re-sold a few on eBay (~10) and I I didnât get any negative feedback from the handful of folks who wound up them, either. Thatâs not a very big sample size, but I think itâs encouraging.
If I couldâve fit all of my data on 20-24TB HDDs, I wouldâve used one of these for my off-site NAS critical data.
@Davvo , in my review I set up a replication task and pushed my media dataset over to this toaster-shaped NAS while it was sitting on my desk in alongside my primary NAS. The temperatures were around ~43-47 degrees Celsius while that task was running.
i never clicked through to see the DXP2800 has two m2 slots in addition to the two 3.5" bays?!
if i did a truenas boot device on a usb flash drive could i then build a redundant l2arc or zil on the m2 drives for two mechanical drives?? i have been needing local network storage at my other house and i donât need much lateral movement there so two mechanicals in a mirror would be perfect, especially if i could hotwire it with l2arc.