Re: NAS

[bch <brad.harder%gmail.com@localhost>]




> On Apr 2, 2026, at 14:51, Brett Lymn <blymn%internode.on.net@localhost> 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"