I have an old Alienware r8 and several 2-4 TB HDDs gathering dust in a closet. The Alienware actually runs remarkably quiet and it occurred to me I could turn it into a DIY NAS.

I’m not entirely sure where to start though. Some immediate questions:

  • What’s a good NAS OS to install?
  • Any fun things I can do besides plex transcoding with a 1080 GPU?
  • Would it make sense to run a Pixelfed/Mastodon server off this guy?
  • Can I run a RAID on it without buying a separate HDD bay?

Background:

I already have a Synology NAS running Plex. It transcodes 1080p fine which is really all I need it for.

Other than a Plex port forward, I have zero experience putting services out on the public web (but would like to learn!).

  • MorphiusFaydal@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    If you’ve got two 3.5" bays, you could do a RAID 1 (or a mirror in ZFS terms) with them both. This works very nicely with a small SSD for booting. My TrueNAS server has a 120 GB SSD in the M.2 slot that TrueNAS is installed on, then I have an array of spinning disks that forms the main storage array.

    If you are planning any sort of play environment that you might want to keep (like a Pixelfed instance) I’d strongly recommend RAID just for availability in the event of a drive failure. But more than that, backups. They are of number one importance. Before you turn up anything of any importance, figure out a backup strategy.

    • TacoEvent@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      1·
      19 hours ago

      Thanks! I’ll stick to the RAID 1 option then. I was looking at S3 Glacier for backup when it comes to that. But I really don’t want to worry about it too much until I’ve really got something going that I plan to use longer term.