My NAS was getting increasingly annoying.
It would give error messages about not being shut down properly after scheduled restarts.
Apps would sometimes work and sometimes not. I had to manually stop and restart my video library each time to make it work. It was slow, it was refusing to do more than one thing at a time.
So, I finally started it up. Shunted all the data to external drives, setup the box from scratch.
Between it being fresh, and me knowing better what I’m doing and how I want things from the get-go, it’s running better than ever, better even than when I got it a few years back.
Interesting, while it was offline and being setup I found myself realising how integral it’s become to my day. So much stuff I went to do, only to discover I needed my box.
It was intended as a file backup and server, but so much has changed since then, I’ve grown used to having it here!
Still tempted to get an upgrade, maybe later this year if things workout well with the cash.
Wanted to share this with a community who can appreciate the feeling of having something working well!
Separate your services if possible. NAS just needs to store files. Eggs in one basket, fault tolerance yada yada.
That’d be great. Love to get a bigger better setup and just leave this one to run the surveillance system
Tiny/mini/micro.
You can grab a used box for under $200. Most I’ve picked up have been around $100-$125, then I drop in a new m.2 for the host, maybe add/change ram depending on what I got it with.
Data lives on the NAS (really multiple for me, but besides the point here), and you’ll get waaaayyyyy more compute with a usff PC like that than you will with a pi or what a NAS can offer. They also run really light on power when you aren’t putting the CPU to work, so budget friendly in a bunch of ways.
I’ve got a goal after a move my wife and I are planning to run the whole shebang on solar, with battery and a switch to utility power. I’ve got 10 of these little monsters now, after a recent addition, and its quite doable from my measurements of actual power usage.
Which is a really long way of saying you may want to look at some tiny/mini/micro PCs.