Low-cost 2-drive NAS box?

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.

How much is “low-cost” for you?

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Good question! $700 or lower with two hard drives in it.

Meaning the cost of the drives is included in that 700? Quite difficult to have a ready-made solution compatible with TN, especially for that price.

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 you’d probably want to use one of the NVMe slots for the OS installation.

It’d be a pretty low-end system–you wouldn’t want to plan on running VMs or much in the way of apps on it–but from what I’ve seen, they’re about the best going in terms of a pre-made NAS for TrueNAS.

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Or €349

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.

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The application is simply being a backup destination for a low- to medium-end household. No VMs or apps.

Will TrueNAS work with just 16 GB of RAM? That’s the max the DXP2800 can use.

Sure.

I’ve seen reports it will actually take more, but I don’t know that I’d want to trust them. But if “backup destination” (presumably over SMB) is your only use case, it’ll 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. It’s not for a super-high-end home network.

I’d like to keep it to as little assembly as possible. I don‘t want to deal with having to select, purchase and install a separate processor, for example. I think the UGreen rig will be perfect.

OK, then it is settled!
Use it with out any problems!
Just one last recommendation: dont buy SMR drives for the storage.

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Yes. I remember the flags raised by an Ars Technica article they published, when SMR first came on the scene.

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.

These “AOOSTAR” R1 Mini PCs might be right up your alley at $319

It’s running an N100 CPU, 16GB DDR4 RAM, includes a 512GB NVMe SSD, Intel i226-V 2.5Gbps NICs, and has two drive bays for 3.5" HDDs.

For $199 you can buy it without the RAM and NVMe SSD, in case you wanted to customize it a little for your needs.

If you’re willing, these are abundant on AliExpress even cheaper.

I’ve owned a couple and had no issues with TrueNAS SCALE while I was using them.

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How was the heat of the drives?

I run it on 48 gb of Samsung RAM, no issues so far.

I will try one of those. It’s going to get here in a week. Thanks very much for pointing this model out to me!

You’re welcome, @DominikHoffmann ! I reviewed one my blog and used it for quite a bit of time:

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 didn’t get any negative feedback from the handful of folks who wound up them, either. That’s not a very big sample size, but I think it’s encouraging.

If I could’ve fit all of my data on 20-24TB HDDs, I would’ve 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.

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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 don’t need much lateral movement there so two mechanicals in a mirror would be perfect, especially if i could hotwire it with l2arc.