Offtopic question now that you mentioned running a Linux NAS... Which hardware are you using? Because I'm interested in building a home NAS but I don't seem to find any small box ready to hold several disk that isn't ridiculously expensive.
I have had Fractal Design's Node 304 as a home server / NAS for the last 3,5 years. It's quite reasonably priced, the provided fans are quiet enough and can be replaced later on with Noctuas. It doesn't offer disk hotswap but otherwise it's quiet and I can suffer the downtime ;-) + can handle 6 3,5 HDDs :)
For the past 7 years I run Ubuntu + ZFS with a Xeon E3 + ECC RAM + SuperMicro MoBo inside a NORCO 20-bay 4U chassis. This was a great setup for years since I needed 40TB+ and at the time of build 2TB drives were the best price per gb. Now, I’m moving back from a house to an apartment, so I need something much more compact and quiet and went with a TrueNAS Mini XL, since it’s one of the few tower-like form factors with enough hot-swap bays for me. It runs nice and quiet, and comes with 10GigE. TrueNAS (the OS) has been a pleasure to use too, but it’s obviously a bit more limited than a full Linux install. I now have it loaded with 10TB drives.
ZFS is the hero here. I tried many solutions in the past (mdadm on ext, btrfs, XFS, hardware RAID) and got burned by rotten bits and confusing UX leading to user error data loss. But in the past 7 years running ZFS I haven’t lost a single bit, and been continuously impressed with the incredibly easy to use CLI and “intelligence” of the file system itself. Snapshots, send/receive, datasets, everything is just so well refined. It felt ahead of its time a decade ago, and still does today. Moving the file system from Linux to the FreeBSB based TrueNAS was effortless.
I run FreeNAS (FreeBSD based) on HP Microservers. ECC RAM, 4 drive bays, ...
The older Gen8 boxes Just Work.
With FreeBSD, the newer Gen10 boxes would hang the first time you boot, you need to pause it and set the hw.pci.realloc_bars loader variable to 1. Haven't tried a new install recently.
Details here: https://www.virten.net/2017/10/fix-for-freenas-on-hpe-micros...
Not “small”, but I vertically mounted a 4u chassis (front-side down so cool air comes in from the bottom and hot air is exhausted out the top) and it actually feels not much bigger than a standard ATX tower, except I have 9 HD bays.
The case was $120CAD, and the mobo/cpu/ram (i3) were another maybe 300.
Caveat: I’m not running ZFS, and just do classic “data lives in two places on-site and one off-site” backup
It's not the cheapest, but has idrac "remote control bios". So I never have to sit next to the box.
It houses 4 disks + you can add SSDs via PC and it has ECC RAM.
Plus I added a couple of years "Next business day on site" warranty, so I'm pretty safe against long downtimes.
I recently bought a Chenbro SR30169 for my backup storage. It’s super compact but also quite noisy.
Instead, I’d recommend getting a µATX tower with sound dampening preinstalled. The extra interior space also makes installation and maintenance a lot easier.
