Man that sucks! Mine is an old HP work station from ebay for $75 with a cheep SSD for the operating system and 2 4tb 3.5" hard drives for storage. Nothing fancy at all lol. Its been running 24/7 for close to 3 years now. If it truly died today I couldn’t be mad at it.
1 Like
It has been on for ~1 year straight. Has 4 seagate 4TB ironwolf hds in a 10 channel sata controller and an ssd with the os. May be the power supply… Separating the 2 sticks of ram and trying them individually in each slot did nothing. Fans spin up, hard drives spin up. But no output. It is a ryzen 5g processor.
1 Like
I’m my experience the PSU is more often than not the culprit so that’s where I’d usually start.
1 Like
That will be the next swap component. Thanks for the tip.
2 Likes
Wow just saw all this. I was unaware of those options!!! This summer i need to start a truenas!!!
1 Like
If you’re looking at NAS options, perhaps consider the power consumption aspect.
I went with a Synology Realtek chipset based NAS for my modest 2 bay requirement because of the power draw. It’s in the 20W range vs my colleague’s gruntier but similar sized Intel based unit at a couple of hundred W. Anything based on general PC hardware is likely to be in the low hundreds of watts at a minimum.
With my power price being ~20c/kWh, each W of draw is around ~9kWh a year or roughly $1.50. So a 200W always-on NAS based on general purpose hardware would cost me $300 a year in power while my Realtek chipset unit costs closer to $30-40. I’ve had it for something like 15 years now (wtf) so that’s a LOT of money it has saved me over that time…
4 Likes
I also have a Synology 2 bay NAS that I’ve had for almost 12 years. I’ve been very happy with it.
1 Like
Yeah, my only complaint with them is that their approach to licensing for adding cameras to the surveillance package is ridiculously expensive compared to other offerings. I ended up with a separate low-power NUC running Blue Iris that has been pretty sweet while also staying in the 20-30W range.
2 Likes
I had a big PC with a graphics card and a RAID in it. It ended up being 25% of my house’s electricity use. The problem isn’t the power when in use (we don’t use it most hours of the day). But the idle power is too much. I added wake on lan and auto shutdown. That would have been fine, but my wife would rather keep it on so she has instant access. Otherwise, she won’t use it.
I use a nextcloud pi with an icy box for raid. I think you can’t really use less energy. 
1 Like
When the current hardware starts to give me trouble I will probably look into something like this. Mine isn’t too terrible right now but could always be better. With everything in the network closet I am sure I am at a couple hundred watts if I really looked. Its all running on a single APC UPS so its not too terrible.
I am a network engineer! I am very familiar with all aspects. Started in this field in like 96 or 98 
About 15 years ago i had about 30 servers in a data center.
2 Likes
That’s exactly why my primary PC is an Intel NUC and I kept the gaming rig as an ‘only on when needed’ thing. My partner’s PC is a laptop that she also leaves on all the time, although hers does sleep itself after 15 minutes.
That combination works pretty well. Originally I had them both running through a pretty meaty KVM switch that could do dual displayport. A while back I upgraded to a Gsync monitor so couldn’t use the KVM anymore so now I just manually switch the input on the monitor to go between my main PC’s 2nd monitor and the gaming PC. Then I upgraded my mouse to one with 1000Hz reporting which upset the KVM switch so now I just use 2 mice and the KVM switch only switches the keyboard. I’ve kept the KVM switch in place because it allows me to do stuff like hook up a 3rd or 4th PC but that happens seldom enough that I might end up just swapping to a keyboard only switcher (or even making one).
For sure. My experience is that the decisions are a bit different when it’s my own money. For work all our decisions are more focused on performance with TCO as a secondary consideration. At home it’s the other way around for me, usually, which leads to notably different outcomes.
1 Like
People getting the equipment from data centers kill me. Home labs do not need to be that way!! If thwy only knew we used to have to run 220 on them because 110 made too much heat!
1 Like
Yeah, no kidding. When I was at uni we used to scavenge old gear that was being ripped out. A free 24 port rackmount switch seems like awesome value for money until you realize that it has half a dozen tiny fans in it, screams like a banshee and is costing you a couple hundred bucks a year in power.
When I was working from home I ended up with a full height rack in my spare room with a bunch of stuff in it. It had a couple of simulation PCs in it that were quad core Xeons with a few hundred GB of RAM each. I was used to working with them at the previous job but it’s hilarious how you just kinda get used to the noise. It was only once they were in a spare bedroom and I could clearly hear the fans ramp to 100% on a reboot from literally the entire opposite corner of the house that I actually had context for just how bloody loud the things were. The other thing that was amusing was that because of all the iLO management stuff, they drew more power when completely shut down than the rest of my home networking gear combined, so I ended up having them off at the wall unless they were being actively used.
My brother, who is way less tech headed than even I am, says that his off-site storage is less than the real cost of replacing drives etc.
When I look at it like that, he’s got a point. For years I’ve been threatening to replace my secondary backups with something offsite, but well, you know…
By the way - I hardly understand a word in the 37 posts above. I have a Mac you see, and Time Machine and SuperDuper just chug away on the small array of drives mounted under my desk.
I really think I should do more, but let’s just say you blokes keep convincing me that I shouldn’t! 
3 Likes
I think I would rather replace my current set up here with something that draws less power, and then move the current set up somewhere else “off site” like my parents house where I’m not paying for the power 
and use it as an offsite back up before I pay for a monthly service.
If it’s not particularly sensitive information is there a reason not to just use Dropbox or something?
My $100/year Dropbox subscription costs me less than the power you’d be paying for with your NAS. In terms of TCO my low power NAS ‘might’ be less than $100 a year but at significantly less utility than I get from the Dropbox account.
There’s a place for both but if I could only have one, it’d be Dropbox or an equivalent.
I do still periodically do a local backup but that’s in case of Dropbox itself getting hacked/ransomwared or something on my PC going haywire and forcing Dropbox to delete everything without me noticing. Under that set of circumstances that can just as easily be a USB key in a drawer.
Edit: To clarify, it’s not even really the off-site backup from Dropbox that I’m using it for, it’s the always-on and immediate sync between a wide variety of devices etc. If I design something in OnShape on my Linux PC, I download the .3MF file and stick it into a folder on Dropbox. I then switch to my workhorse PC and the file is immediately there locally so I can import it, slice it and send it to the 3D printer. If I want to save the project from the slicer then I can do that and if I go down to my office I can load the software on my office PC, adjust the project settings, re-slice it and send the updated version to the 3D printer again. If I want to send someone a photo I can take the photo on my phone, open gmail on my PC, go to add files, go to Dropbox and choose ‘sort by newest’ then grab the photo straight from there, etc. etc.
2 Likes
Google One is 2TB for $100/yr. We use that for anything that cannot be lost. I have an encrypted folder inside for anything sensitive. But it is both easier and harder to use somehow. Unless I have a local copy of the thing, it is tricky to find anything and there is a lot more latency on larger files.
But now that I’m not doing sensitive govt work, it is nice to be able to just use google docs and just have a copy anywhere I go.
1 Like