> On Apr 2, 2026, at 14:51, Brett Lymn <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. You’re not the first person who’s mentioned QNAP. Specifically “QNAP TR004 DAS” was mentioned to me. -bch > 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"
