This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The number one concern with a NAS is the power draw. I can’t think of many systems that run under 30W.
Why would I throw it away, when I can give it to someone who needs it more, or sell it? Using it as a NAS will use up more power than just buying a mini PC and using that. I calculated the costs and the energy savings would pay for one in two years. My NUC uses 6-7W idle.
I'd use an old PC as a NAS but turned it on only on demand, when it was needed. Which does hurt its convenience factor a little.
Note: talking about desktops.
My old PC and laptop are too loud to use for anything really. It‘s unfortunate but the noise is too much.
I see what you mean, and I have that (old PC with a bunch of 2.5" HDDs formatted as ZFS).
For me power consumption is more important than performance, so I'm looking for a lower power solution for photo sharing, music collection and backups.
I've got a Lenovo sitting by the TV, quietly running Jellyfin along with ESde. Might not run Win11 but it works fine for what I use it for.
Don't throw away your old PC
Literally first-world problems, right? There's absolutely no need to tell that to someone that don't live on a rich country. Old gear always finds some use or is sold/donated away.
This is likely also true when you start serving stuff and need transcoding etc.
Why do I need transcoding, if I may ask? My TV always plays the served file directly. 🤷♂️ Is there anything to gain by transcoding, especially on the local home network?
Storage space, ensuring quality settings, supporting more device than "your tv", smaller bandwidth requirements.
Gotcha. I guess I have no need then. 👌
I got an old server and it has a hardware raid card on it. I installed trueNAS on it. Shows 18tb raid right away (24tb 4tbx6). And it does not help that I'm new to this stuff.
Is hardware raid any good for truNAS? should I just get a pcie to sata and connect drives individually?
or
TrueNAS is better when it sees raw disks and not HW raid. There are still useful parts in TrueNAS if you have a HW raid volume like file sharing, synchronization, apps (docker), etc. But the true power lies in zfs which needs raw disks.
When I looked into this I found that, for TrueNAS, using ZFS with RAW disks is generally preferable.
I wound up writing custom firmware to my hardware RAID card so that it would be effectively “transparent” and yield direct hardware access to the disks.
