Hi,
I used to run my old PC as a home server, and I populated it with two 8TB hard drives and an "old" 64GB SSD. I set up mdadm such that there would be a system partition with RAID 10 across partitions on both hard disks and the SSD, the former using --write-mostly. This worked great, because the disks would only spin up very rarely, as the system would run off the SSD most of the time, but I still had redundancy just in case the SSD failed.
But I didn't care for maintaining this server (updates, etc.) and it had a fairly high idle power draw. So about a year ago, I decided to get a NAS to essentially "set and forget". I settled on a Synology DS423 and it now contains three 8TB drives in a hybrid raid (14.5TB capacity). I also added a small python web service via SSH, which I use to control a custom LED light fixture that I built.
But I'm not really happy with this NAS. I like the web interface and the simplicity, and that it takes care of itself, but what bothers me most is that the disks have to spin up all the time, even if I just access my python web service or the NAS UI. Or even at random times that I cannot explain. I primarily access it via NFS, so maybe something triggers it, but I use automounting on my client and the disks spin up even if I don't access the shares. If this NAS supported SSD cache support, I would try it, but I'm not even sure if that would work as I'd expect it to. For example, even with SSD cache, it appears that Synology places the OS on the hard drives as well.
Long story short, I think I want to replace this NAS with something that fulfils all my needs, namely:
What would you do? Is there a NAS that fulfils these requirements? If not, what distro would you run and on what kind of hardware?
Thank you for your advice.
I used to run my old PC as a home server, and I populated it with two 8TB hard drives and an "old" 64GB SSD. I set up mdadm such that there would be a system partition with RAID 10 across partitions on both hard disks and the SSD, the former using --write-mostly. This worked great, because the disks would only spin up very rarely, as the system would run off the SSD most of the time, but I still had redundancy just in case the SSD failed.
But I didn't care for maintaining this server (updates, etc.) and it had a fairly high idle power draw. So about a year ago, I decided to get a NAS to essentially "set and forget". I settled on a Synology DS423 and it now contains three 8TB drives in a hybrid raid (14.5TB capacity). I also added a small python web service via SSH, which I use to control a custom LED light fixture that I built.
But I'm not really happy with this NAS. I like the web interface and the simplicity, and that it takes care of itself, but what bothers me most is that the disks have to spin up all the time, even if I just access my python web service or the NAS UI. Or even at random times that I cannot explain. I primarily access it via NFS, so maybe something triggers it, but I use automounting on my client and the disks spin up even if I don't access the shares. If this NAS supported SSD cache support, I would try it, but I'm not even sure if that would work as I'd expect it to. For example, even with SSD cache, it appears that Synology places the OS on the hard drives as well.
Long story short, I think I want to replace this NAS with something that fulfils all my needs, namely:
- As little maintenance necessary as possible (automatic updates, long-term support)
- As few disk spin-ups as possible (primarily to avoid noise). I want the system to run of solid state (SSD or USB stick) and the disks should only spin up if I actually access data or for automatic maintenance (scrubbing, SMART, etc.). Even better if it supports something like my previous mdadm setup where I can use SSDs to read data without spinning up related drives in the same RAID unless I'm writing data.
- Noise insulation if possible (disk noise was a lot less audible in my old PC, which had sound insulating side panels)
- Low idle power consumption (less than 10W when disks are not spinning)
- Gigabit ethernet is enough
- I would want to run the following services. Natively, via Docker, or snap, I don't mind.
- Nextcloud
- Immich
- Small custom services I create myself
- Nice to have: Frigate
- Price is not important, as long as it's good value.
- Nice to have: a familiar (linux-like) shell to do stuff on via SSH. I admit I'm not super familiar with Synology, but having to use synogear for basic things struck me as odd.
What would you do? Is there a NAS that fulfils these requirements? If not, what distro would you run and on what kind of hardware?
Thank you for your advice.
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