Hi to people who like to burden ourselves with technology at home, and love to discuss it online with me. This is your chance.

Hopes aka Constraints

1. Local backup disk share

I'm hoping to share a disk or two at home for a family of 5, each with 0.5-5 TB of data on their personal computers. Primary use would be personal computer backup, but I'd hope to gather family media history there as well.

2. Local services

I need to run at least Home Assistant and Unifi network server. They may live on a separate box, but could live on the NAS given sufficient oomph (seems mainly RAM constrained).

3. Internet services

I also hope to some day open selected services (web apps, maybe ssh/rsync) to the internet now that we have excessively sufficient connection (and relatively safely separable networks) for that.

The internet services (think, say, Friendica) should be able to utilize some of the disk space of the NAS (assuming I don't end up with a full web server with its own disks) but be kept safely out of the disk space for local (family) use. (Preparing for potential 0-days here might provide us with some fascinating design puzzles :))

4. Budget

Looking at the prices of NAS boxes, I don't want to shell out hundreds of euros. I hope to keep this hobby project under 200 euros (not counting later extensions nor maintenance). Prices of the disk drives themselves would not be counted into that budget; they're maintenance (start with what i have, buy more as necessary).

5. Quality

All I would need would be a box that could sustain >1Gbps over both Ethernet and SATA (or USB3) running Linux (or BSD?). Electricity consumption while idle should be minimal.

The solution should be reasonably expected to keep running for years, idling ~6h twice per day.

6. Availability to Finland

I should be able to get the solution in Finland. Any additional taxes should be counted as part of the budget.

I'll provide a bit more background and some potential solutions below.

#hardware #DIY #NAS #Linux