Recommendation for a tiny 2 bay NAS?

[netuddgi]

Hi folks,

I am considering building a tiny 2 bay NAS for home/personal use. Main purpose: file storage (eg. mostly photos, personal documents) and backup with the only hard criteria of being able to use encryption on two 1TB drives (Raid 1). I am new to FreeNAS and was struggling to find recommendations for such low needs (most people seem to use much bigger hardware here). If I bought a non-FreeNAS product it would be something like QNAP TS-231P, I am essentially looking for the FreeNAS alternative of it. I'd prefer to buy a pre-built hardware but not afraid of using screwdrivers either.

Any recommendations in this direction would be welcome. Thanks!

 

[HoneyBadger]

I don't know of any easy 2-bay solutions, but the HP ProLiant Microservers are a popular 4-bay option.

The older Gen7 (N54L, N40L, N36L) models should still support sufficient RAM for FreeNAS, although they're becoming a little harder to find second-hand.

 

[Arwen]

In someways, you can build a 1TB Mirrored NAS with 2.5" disks, even SSDs. Western Digital even makes 1TB 2.5" Red NAS drives.

If you you do go for something small, consider allowing for 1 extra 2.5" or 3.5" bay for backups.

 

[sretalla]

2.5" disks, even SSDs

If you don't already have the HDDs and wanted an all-flash option, the Intel NUC has options with one M2 and one 2.5" bay... you could run off a USB stick and use the 2 drives with 1TB options of each type to get the result.

Depending on the reasons why you want a mirror, you could also go for the M2. SSD and a spinning disk as separate pools with a replication job and snapshots, which could mean you would be cheaper and could even have a bigger HDD capacity and use the additional storage to keep more snapshots than you have on the SSD.... worth a thought.

 

[Arwen]

Gee, I forgot about my minature server. It's a fitlet-H, has room for 1 mSATA & 1 x 2.5" <=9.5mm high drive. Right now I have mine loaded with an 1TB mSATA & a 2TB 2.5" spinner, (non-NAS drive). I mirror the Linux OS, but not the media or files. Those get backed up to my FreeNAS. So I stripe the remaining space with ZFS from both mSATA & the 2.5" spinning drive to get me close to 3TBs of usable space. It's a great little box, and works well for my use as a server, (better than a NUC in someways).

Pros: It supports 2 x DDR3 upto 8GB per SO-DIMM; Dual Intel Ethernet; Several USB 3 ports; Can be run headless; Quad core AMD64; Very cheap UPS is available from same company

Cons: It does not support ECC; It's a AMD lower power CPU;

The same company, fit-pc.com, makes a newer model, which uses Intel CPUs & is a smaller chassis than mine, it's called a fitlet2.


Note that neither my fitlet-H nor the newer fitlet2 are cheap. They are designed to run 24x7 for many years in various roles, like signage and stuff. They ARE cheap for what they are, top quality boards and chassis, well supported peripherals, like Intel Ethernet chips and Intel Wifi. I ran some old fitPC-1s for 5 years without any hardware issues. Only got rid of them because they were x86 only, (non-64 bit).

 

[droeders]

I saw this post the other day. Nothing I have a use for, but it might give you some ideas for your project:

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/silent-fanless-freebsd-desktop-server/

 

[netuddgi]

Thanks for the recommendations! I seem to have exaggerated how small it needs to be: I'm fine with something that fits two 3.5" drives but not bigger than that (eg. does not have empty slots). I also did not realize earlier that an extra drive is needed for booting FreeNAS itself, good to know.

For budget reasons I was not considering SSDs for storage but that's a great future upgrade option to have. The Intel NUC seems to have the right form factor I want, will further explore this direction.