Agreed. The products I have used above, DrivePool, SnapRaid and UnRaid are all software solutions. This was important to me because I was reusing hardware and had a real eclectic mix of drives from 14TB NAS drives to 256GB laptop drives that I wanted to get more life out of.

The only hardware limitation is the parity based apps SnapRaid and UnRaid need your largest drive to be the parity one. Makes sense but in a situation like mine where I had a 14TB drive and the next closes was 8TB, that parity drive wasn’t well utilised. Not a big issue but.

As others have said, you certainly can.

If your current system is a Windows PC then a super easy way to go about it is to purchase a product called Stablebit DrivePool which will allow you to combine multiple hard disks into one drive, and then do duplication of data you find important. Share that virtual drive as a Share that your other systems can see. DriePool is a super reliable product. Only downside other than the one time cost is that its redundancy is based on file duplication, which has the benefit that you can pull your drives out and use them elsewhere as any one file is always contained on a single drive, but unlike parity based solutions it’s super space inefficient to retain duplicate copies. It’s a tradeoff between simplicity and time to recover in a failure versus maximising disk use and reducing costs. Depending what your NAS is for, maybe you don’t need that redundancy but. You can also team it up with another product called SnapRaid (which is free) which can make your redundancy parity based.

I ran DrivePool for years on Windows and it’s a great product. Windows itself isn’t overly optimised for this use case, but as a predominately Mac household having access to Windows on a headless system was handy if I had to run the odd Windows only apps, so using Windows had its perks.

While Windows and a PC will cost more to operate, you’ll potentially be out well ahead if you don’t have to buy additional hardware. It’s likely worth running what you have into the ground rather than buying new hardware. There’s guides on some things you can do to optimise Windows too.

I’ve since moved to using UnRaid which is a paid product (one time purchase) designed specifically for NAS on your own PC. Great solution but I’d say that the barrier of entry is much higher than a Windows box. Still very versatile product. Moved to that as over time I’ve used a bit more Linux in my life, and I also had reduced need for Windows as the NAS OS.

Haven’t tried TrueNas but that’d be an alternative to UnRaid.

It’s definitely worth thinking about your use case and whether a second hand mini-pc of some sort is a better option. Along with the Pi itself many people are probably going to need a new case and quite possibly a power adapter too given the new power profile. An older PC where that’s taken care off, and where you probably have a 120GB SSD included, could be the better option for some people.

I’m struggling to find where I heard about this, but if you post to Twitter (or I guess it’s X now) and tag @Sync, they should get back in touch with you and offer you a bonus 10GB for the positive outreach.

Since I don’t know about where I heard about the offer originally, the next best thing might be my post which Sync responded to as evidence of the bonus. Along with one or two other bonuses which one may have been a referral, I’m at 17GB on the free account which is pretty decent, and certainly not as burdensome as the referral process one has to go through with Dropbox to grow the free tier there.

They’re a great service from the time I’ve spent with it and worth a go.

I think the key question is to ask what about Googles solution is driving them to look elsewhere. Once that’s known it’s possible to work out if NextCloud deployed in house or via a partner is the right way forward, or if another cloud offering might be more suitable.

If those were my requirements then I’d be looking at Synology.

Currently using a Windows PC with Stablebit Drive Pool to pool about 10HDDs into one consolidated pool. Nice way to get a stack of storage and to repurpose an old PC I already had, but for a low effort option Synology would be my pick based on all the reports I’ve heard about it being a top notch option. My PC is fine but when things break you need to be able to troubleshoot a Windows setup, which is fine but maybe not for “mum and dad”.

Just pick a NAS from them that does what you need. Whenever I look at them it seems to be about determine how many drives you need and whether you want a high performance one (to run Plex servers and the like) or a low spec one that just does storage and some less intensive stuff.

Yeah I find some of their monetisation stuff makes me a bit uncomfortable, such as their cypto stuff integrated into the browser and enabled by default. There was other articles that when browsing to certain site, the browser would inject their affiliate links (https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology)

In some respects I actually prefer Google’s approach to monetisation over Brave, although I don’t install that either. Having a browser billing itself as privacy focused while manipulating traffic to insert affiliate links leaves a bad taste and distrust of the company.

I use Safari by default and Firefox as a fallback nowadays. Very rarely need to run a chromium browser.

A number of people have touched on the perimeter security, but you can also look at your internal network too and whether you have the systems being exposed on vlans with firewalls preventing connectivity from those systems back to your other stuff that doesn’t need to be exposed. Could help cover you if a system is compromised due to bad config, zero day exploit, or whatever, by limiting the ability to then go sideways through your network to exploit other systems. Depending on what you are hosting there may be zero requirement for your externally facing server to need to talk to the majority of devices on your network, or the talk could be one way only (internal facing to external facing).

Cheers. Seems to be incrementing ok with my posts today, but total seems like it was reset or is incrementing only from the past 24-48 hours of comments, so is short 50 or so.

Servers still performing well since my last post but 5 hours earlier.

Minor thing but over night both wefwef and Memmy clients are showing the wrong comment score (karma) against my profile, and given they are showing the same amount I assume it’s related to API fed data. Value was correct yesterday. Easy for me to confirm given I have only 2 dozen posts and the value has dropped to single digits.

Not a biggie, but figured I’d report it in case there was some issue causing that. Might be some optimisation around indexing or something has intentionally or unintentionally impacted that.

Otherwise the service feels much more stable currently. No timeouts today where it’s been very frequent the past few days. Nice job. 👍

For me it’s a HomeAssistant instance. Great product that has some very tangible use cases that can benefit ones household in terms of being able to implement nice automations etc, and also a great hub in that it supports such a broad range of products and services. As an Apple user in particular its one of the great ways to get non HomeKit certified devices working with Siri/Homekit on my other Apple products.

It also makes installing addons a breeze including other products people have mentioned here such as AdGuard Home (as a PiHole alternative) and the like.

A few years ago I’d say it wasn’t for the average Joe, but I think the product has really matured and is much simpler than it used to be. There’s a strong community out there too.

For multimedia I’d say Plex personally, but Jellyfin would be another option. Good way to manage personal media libraries.