Building a home NAS on a shoestring budget with the Rock64 SBC (2018)
I&#x27;m surprised I don&#x27;t see more people with my NAS setup. I run a HP Gen8 MicroServer which cost about £120 for the base machine a few years back. The default specs were a bit feeble but perfectly serviceable for running a NAS, though mine has now been modified a bit since then to sport a quad core E3 and 16GB of ECC RAM. If you pick up an adapter lead you can fit an SSD in the optical drive bay (which I have done). One nice thing about the microserver is it has two built-in ethernet ports, so mine run in a link-aggregation group, which is well utilised (I run a lot off this little server, like Plex, ZoneMinder etc).<p>I run ZFS on Ubuntu (ZFS is superb and one of the best things I&#x27;ve learnt in years) with a RAID 10 setup (2x2TB mirrored pair, 2x4TB mirrored pair). I&#x27;m actually just resilvering one of the 4TB drives right now as I finish migrating to them from a couple of old 1TB drives. RAM usage was high when I used dedup but now I&#x27;ve ditched that it&#x27;s running much lower. I think the hardware will start to struggle once I get up over 10TB of usable space, but considering the cost of the actual machine I really don&#x27;t feel like I&#x27;ve wasted any money at all.<p>I picked RAID 10 for this because I feel like with only 4 drives available it makes the most sense, weighing up resilver speed vs slightly better failure recovery if it was RAIDZ. On bigger servers I tend to go for RAIDZ3 instead.<p>For backups I use syncthing on various machines to copy data to the server, and then rsync the stuff I care about every hour (with a lockfile to stop overlap) to rsync.net, which then performs all the snapshots. I used to run borg but I swapped back to plain rsync because I felt more confident in being able to restore from it. rsync.net is fantastic. I&#x27;m currently storing about 1TB with them, and although it looks more expensive than other options for home backup, I feel like the lack of hassle is really worth it for me.<p>I&#x27;m not usually a fan of HP btw, but these little microservers are really well built and I actually ended up using a ton of them at work as well; we only ever had one failure (which I believe was due to PoE somehow being delivered to it, which was really fun to debug :|). When this one eventually can&#x27;t keep up I suspect I&#x27;ll just go for a newer model of it. The form factor is very convenient for the home, especially if you don&#x27;t have the convenience of a spare room in which to put a rack.