On Wed, Apr 01, 2026 at 06:55:59PM -0700, bch wrote: > > > I’m entertaining the idea of a storage appliance, and wondering: does anybody > have a recipe for building their own, or experience with whether or not it’s > worth it? I suspect the single biggest issue is getting some small device w > enough i/o to hang a RAID set off of it. What are the preferred boards for > that. Other option is just treating it like a consumable and getting a > buffalo device and accessing via Samba or such and trusting/hoping everything > is working well. >
A few years ago I was looking at the same thing and really struggled to find something that was a small form factor with enough sata slots to suit, that was without considering the cost. I eventually gave up and bought a qnap nas because it ticked all the boxes I had. The nas not only provides nfs and smb but also has an android app that I can use to sync the photos from all our devices. I was even able to set up a wireguard tunnel from our devices to the qnap so we could sync photos to home when we were travelling. The nas supports virtualisation too, I run a NetBSD vm on the nas which I use mbsync on to synchronise my email from my provider locally (allowing me to undo their stupidity of randomly moving mail to a spam folder). Under the hood it is running linux, apart from some minor quirkiness with the networking the qnap has worked well for me. It is a neater hardware package than I could create myself and the seamless android integration was a real plus. -- Brett Lymn -- Sent from my NetBSD device. "We are were wolves", "You mean werewolves?", "No we were wolves, now we are something else entirely", "Oh"
