Not a great time price-wise to be building a NAS, but I have been doing so for the last two weeks. Inside a Jonsbo N6 case, which is pretty nice with an 8x SATA backplane and drive bays (unlike the earlier Jonsbo variants).

I ended up on shucking 4x the 14 TB WD Elements Desktop. They contain helium drives, the WD140EDGZ in my case, and are about a third cheaper than 4x the 12 TB WD Red Plus drives (which are air-filled). The shucking was easier than I expected too, and the performance seems very comparable. The warranty is a definite downside (European, so no Magnuson-Moss), but I think I can even get them back in their enclosure should they fail during the 2-year warranty period.

I've put some second hand 256 GB M.2 SSDs in there as boot drives. It was a bit of a struggle to get it to work in a way that failure of one of the drives doesn't hold up booting, combined with LUKS, TPM keys and ZFS on root. Learned a lot about systemd-boot which I have never used before, but feels a lot saner to me than grub ever was. So now I have a large script which debootstraps a Debian based NAS into being.

I noticed that there are a lot of ZFS myths and cargo culting. For example TFA mentions ECC RAM, which in some circles is a must-have because ZFS would wreck your pool during a scrub otherwise, which is a myth. It's also very expensive, especially this year. You also don't need much RAM for ZFS, L2ARC doesn't use much RAM at all, to name a few others.

Still doubting about setting `dnodesize=auto` (which is the default), because there are some horror stories about that [1]. And it seems impossible to find a cloud storage provider with reasonable prices that supports `zfs send`. Rsync.net upped their minimum order to 10 TiB recently, which is far too much for my use case.

[1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/11353

[2] https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html

Some other things I find useful on NASes:

Install avahi-daemon. Samba will automatically register with it to advertise SMB/CIFS to macOS and Linux clients over DNS-SD.

Install wsdd2 so that your server will be auto-discovered by Explorer on Windows 10+ clients with SMB 1.0 disabled, too.

Your Linux hostname is probably lower-case, but by default, Samba publishes a capitalized rendering of the hostname to NetBIOS and Avahi. If this bothers you, set “host-name=something” in the [server] section of /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf, and set “mdns name = mdns” in the [global] section of /etc/samba/smb.conf.

If you have macOS clients, you should enable vfs_fruit in your Samba configuration: https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_fruit..... There are some compatibility reasons to do this, but mostly it means you can set the “fruit:model” so that your server has a fun icon in the Finder sidebar.

To avoid the creation .DS_Store files, you can disallow them: https://ryanoberto.github.io/blog/2015/04/01/disabling-the-c.... I think you can also set “fruit:resource = xattr” to store Finder preferences in xattrs, but I haven't tried it.

Although macOS deprecated AFP in favour of SMB years ago (and are slated to remove AFP client support altogether in the upcoming macOS 27), SMB client support in macOS is still pretty miserable. The upcoming macOS 27 is set to drop AFP support, but until then I will continue to run Netatalk side-by-side with Samba. Netatalk also registers itself with Avahi, and macOS will (tellingly) use AFP preferentially to SMB, so clients will talk to the right daemon automatically.

Having built a nas recently (luckily before ram/diskpocalypse) there seems to be a huge difference between making a small nas (say 4 disks) and a big one. With a small one you are essentially building a pc, and the differentiating factor is the software. Mobo, memory, case, PSU… buy consumer (cheap) stuff and you’re ok. Above that you have to start buying very expensive business oriented stuff,disk enclosure, better psu… the costs increase more that linearly , especially if you don’t live in the US and can easily get used stuff from eBay.

And that stuff is often not just more expensive, but uglier and noisier. I ended up making my own “enclosure”

I think it's appropriate to link to my blog post about building such a NAS but with very different technologies: dm-integrity, mdadm and XFS. The reason being that as a C/C++ dev following OpenZFS development closely, I found the focus on ginormous features over general stability and the constant problems due to the SPL/separate page cache too worrying.

Sure, I traded the convenience of kitchen sink (or Swiss army knife for the more charitable souls) ZFS for some initial pain, but I'm very happy with my choice today.

https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2025/06/nas-setup-l...

Where can I have a discussion with other developers about storage?

Is here okay?

I want to have physical storage over here, and logical storage over there, and I want to control the mapping from one to the other. I want to talk about encryption, replication, latency. Make "time machine" available on this logical storage. And then I buy some new physical storage, and it joins the story. This physical storage is over at my friend's house for backup. This physical storage is slow and archival. This is a device for writing archival media, and there's a brand new media in it, go ahead and write to it. Show me the health report on all of the physical media, and show me what you've done to protect the logical storage. Graph my usage and make suggestions about when to add more physical storage.

Buying physical storage with power and wifi, and configuring it with a QR code that's on an e-ink display - seems like it should be the most obvious thing in the world, that we should all be really used to doing by now.

What am I missing?

That's what I did after my 15 year old Synology DS1010+ built in USB DOM failed. Put a network booted debian on it via netboot.xyz with zfs and now i get to reuse those 15 year old 2TB still chugging along disks. Fully open source, pretty nice way to keep old hardware going. It's my tertiary backup that wakes up once a week pulls in some open weights LLM models that I hoard just in case and goes back to sleep.

I came to the same conclusion when I built my NAS. Just Nix for the system, zfs for raid and docker compose for any service I might want to run. https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2025-08/03-diy_nas_on_nixos

I'm sure people have reasons for taking these things as far as they do with ZFS, and everything else that goes into what is commonly considered a "NAS." But I've found great convenience in a tight NFSv3 config running from a single high capacity HDD with ext4 on a Linux machine (primary system that's always on anyway while I'm around/awake) making things available to my other devices for the electricity and overhead cost of one machine instead of multiple.

I try to keep my network configuration restrictive by default, so I'm not too concerned about possible security arguments running it from my main machine. I've probably committed some great sin here, but is plain NFSv3 and secondarily Samba (for compatibility) really not enough?

I still pay for snooty, and the reason for that is that when a disk goes bad (not if; when) I pop its tray out, replace the disk, pop the tray with the disk back in, click a couple of widgets, and that’s it. I know it will be rebuilt properly.

(And I know I have to do that, because when the disk fails it beeps and lights a led near the bad disk)

It’s easy to build a NAS such as the one described in this article, but in the long run, data loss is significantly more likely.

Also, any guide like this that doesn’t guide you through “disk 3 failed, this is how you safely replace it” is imho incomplete, even if it doesn’t go through telling you how you know a disk has failed.

I run conceptually the same thing, but on FreeBSD instead of Debian. Different set of trade offs; not per se better or worse, just different, and in the end works just as well.

I found cockpit to be incredibly useful for managing NAS and VPS. Even though any configuration is not an issue with LLMs, having a dashboard with toggles, formatted logs and such is helpful, and I can even run shell commands on phone without ssh. In the NAS case, you can easily see the results of backup/maintenance cronjobs, manage samba (which is a huge pain in the ass to get to work properly on iPhone), and monitor disk usage

I'd love reading some blogs about what's the best usage for actually minimal computers, any suggestions?

It always gets me how the world of self-hosting is usually introduced from claiming that you can start giving a second life to a Raspberry Pi or a forgotten laptop, and suddenly the next blog you read calls "minimal" a beast machine meant for racks and semi- or professional environments.

Bought a ThinkCentre M910q with an internal SSD and 16 GB of RAM for €200 a couple years ago... Right now I got it chugging along with TrueNAS + 2 USB disks in ZFS Mirror (sitting in a closed cupboard so no chance of cable disconnections).

For me, "minimal home server" means a small computer that fits on a cabinet on the living room, is practically silent, and has a very small power consumption profile (less than a decent Hetzner otherwise the cost wouldn't be worth it). I have a mini-PC in mind, but people think of Dell PowerEdges. Even if given for free, I would never install at my home a PowerEdge for a home server.

I guess it must be the difference between living on a flat vs a 2 story house :-)

I used this blog post as one learning resource while building my own NAS a while back: https://xyny.art/blog/2026-building-nas/

Building a NAS from scratch is really fun! A small hinderance, but definitely part of the fun as well, is the lack of a "complete resource" on the topic covering how to do every single thing you need to do. Part of the point of my blog post is actually to bring to the internet yet another opinionated NAS setup "guide" (eventhough I would hesitate to call it a guide, but if I ever had to do the same thing again I would definitely read my own post first).

Tangential, but about this:

> I am creating a RAIDZ1 (RAID 5) zpool. That means 1 drive redundancy in-case of failure

A friend once told me that RAID5 has a high latency cost, because every Write requires a Read to update the stripes across all drives, and while this made sense when drives were expensive, nowadays you might as well do a RAID10 instead, and trade space for latency.

Is this still true with ZFS RAIDZ1?

This is pretty much what I did, except that since I use Proxmox I used that to manage the volumes and then just did a pass-through mount to an LXC that runs Samba - that way I get a decent, simple GUI to monitor and manage volumes and can do user management inside the LXC.

I really, do not want to have a big server rack lying around at my house. I have a couple of SSDs that are not being used and 3 USB HDD drives. I also have a PN50 that I am not using as well.

I am thinking of buying a USB bay with 5 SSD slots in it and then 3 HDD drive. My use case is very, very cold. It is mostly just readonly data with some rclone sync every week.

Does anyone have a suggestion? I am pretty much relying on ZFS to do all the redundancy for me.

Given the current "crisis", I wonder if older off-the-shelf NAS from QNAP, Synology, Asus, UGreen etc. could be re-flashed using FOSS.

If you use LVM you can have a similar pool of storage with 1GB RAM or even less, instead 8GB (ZFS requirement).

Caveat: LVM does not have built-in snapshots like ZFS has.

Just yesterday I was brainstorming with ChatGPT about this. I have an ancient QNAP plus a slightly less ancient NUC running PiHole, Wireguard and other services. Both need replaced, so why not combine them?

I don't know much about ZFS, but it sounds like I need to learn. Docker may have conquered the world, but I plan to stay with LXD for services.

The one thing I take issue with: an appliance like this runs 24/7. It should be low power and fanless. A processor like the N100 seems like the obvious choice.

This post mentions https://github.com/wyager/zfs-backup for (offsite) backups. Why would they recommend this over something more established like https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid? Has anybody tried it?

Rather than 'plain' debian you can put it on Proxmox, and enjoy the bliss of Proxmox Backup Server.

My homelab "NAS" is unfortunately just a few USB based external disk enclosures, externally powered. Is there no way of making these reliable ? Every so often (maybe once a month) I get timeout errors or some kind of issues with at least one of the disks.

I've been thinking about setting up something like this for a while. I have a Broadwell dual socket Xeon workstation that I'm going to upgrade to Proxmox. Would it be reasonable to run something like this as an LXC or VM or would you put it in the base kernel?

I made 2 Raspberry Pi5 NAS's. one with 4x 6TB and one with 4x 12TB.

Used mergerfs and snapraid, and a simple NFS share. Absolutely perfect for Proxmox backups, our pictures, media, etc, etc. No fuss, easy replacement of drives without needing to keep drives of the same size around.

I'm good with ZFS, have been for years now managing storage for $COMPANY. And I still freaking love using zfs send/receive with proxmox ;-)

But for most at home stuff: mergerfs and snapraid are just more logical.

Can anyone recommend a good server for a homelab to use for a storage purpose like this?

To be totally honest, I don't think I can live without ZFS anymore. Deduplication and snaphots in 2026 are a must.

A friendly reminder since it's probably relevant: when's the last time you tested disaster recovery for your own setup? If you haven't verified recovering it, you don't have an offsite backup.

I had a cloud backup (Backblaze B2, using rclone and encryption) for my home NAS. Some unlucky drive failures later, I was getting ready to recover from my Backblaze backup... and then I couldn't find/remember where I saved the rclone encryption backup.

I lost all data in that NAS, including irreplaceable personal/family photos, due to that mistake. My lesson to share: please verify you can indeed recover from backups.

One alternative for those who don't want any of the major NAS vendors, just use RHEL10. It's free up to 16 licenses, it's ultra stable, cockpit is a very mature gui for a lot of maintenance tasks.

It's a set and forget OS that will run for years without requiring your attention. But these days it has decent container support for hosting services on.

Needs a 2024 in the title maybe.

Also, are there neal.* besides .fun and .computer?

I'll check all the other TLDs real quick...

Also you can use zfs on a proxmox host and use that both for NAS duty and for the VMs.

For some reason people insist on doing truenas on top of proxmox and then introducing a networking layer between everything they do. Noooo…

To this day I still use a ZFS array for my critical backup storage. I've migrated over to using snap raid + mergerfs for my larger Linux iso storage array. Simple enough and I can pull a drive on it's own without any other stuff.

Has anybody used unraid for his Home Server? Is it worth it?

unraid.net

personally, after buying X380, using my old T430 as a mini NAS..(also immich) with a ZFS mirror. works wonderfully :3

this is really cool. I've been dealing with an aging Synology nas and this is something I can pick up, evaluate performance and how safe it is to serve as home for my data.

I killed 2x 4tb Nvme drives on Pciexpress with ZFS raid1 under proxmox, got them replaced, tried again on both pci-express and usb adapter kept getting io problems there too with zfs, drive gets disconnected during scrub or high load, tried already kernel or power management options for pciexpress and usb without sucess, managed to reproduce with high load.

or proxmox ( especially community edition) is fucked or zfs is still unstable, surprisingly with different drives on different interfaces I obtained same results, didnt swap proxmox for clean os, that might being some changes since modules and options would be different i guess. ( drives firmware etc are fine and performing well when inspected with proprietary windows tools)

just search zfs nvme pcie or usb problema or disconnect and you see similar stability problem for different users in different cases (os, drives etc), but also unraid and others, maybe somewhere is rithe right combo of options/glitches but didnt find it yet

Very cool

Yeah no. When it comes to backups and data storage, I would rather use a proven reliable system that’s been used and tested by millions of other users, keep these hacky stuff for your hyperland set up.

Stopped reading at "Debian".

Running ZFS on anything but Solaris/Illumos/FreeBSD is asinine.

ZFS is a permanent second-class citizen on Linux (due to usual open-source politics). This will never resolve.

I don't want to trust my data to some half-assed out-of-tree solution that may or may not break in a week.

FreeBSD ZFS support has matured and is outstanding. Quality-wise it has reached parity with Illumos.

If you can afford Solaris then you're probably not building your own NAS from parts of lesser computers.