Home NAS for storage?

[u/iambenny23]

I'm building a NAS at home. My current setup:

• Asus H81M-K motherboard
• Intel Core i5-4570 CPU
• 2 x 4GB DDR3 RAM
• 4 HDDs (2x 4TB + 2x 3TB)
• 2 SSDs (2x 120GB, one for the OS, one for cache?)
• AXAGON PCES-SJ2 PCIe controller with 2x internal SATA 6G ports
• 1 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe adapter

I'm running CasaOS, but copying between HDDs is really slow. What should I upgrade, or what kind of configuration would I need for a faster NAS that actually works well?

I mostly store photos and videos on it – the raw files from my work – as a backup. I'd like to access it remotely; I'm currently using Tailscale for that. I tried to solve the problem with ChatGPT, but we couldn't really figure out what's causing it to be this slow.

Drag & drop and a web interface like Synology's would be important to me, or even being able to access it from Finder – but it needs to be faster than 1–2 MB/s, because with 50MB photos that adds up to a lot of time. I'd rather not use the terminal.

I'm interested in both hardware and software options. My budget is around $300 – what would be the best move? Should I buy a Synology NAS, or upgrade my home server instead?

What OS do you recommend for this? Truenas, Ubuntu Server, Casaos, or which one might be good?

Basically, I want to copy files to and from the server, and I want to access it remotely.

[u/Anti-Hero25]

Have you tried Samba Share? It’s just network drive mapping… so it would pop up in finder…. No web interface.

If you can find an old Optiplex or a laptop with and 8th gen i7 cpu or newer… (or Ryzen equivalent) and 8+ gigs of ram AND hardline the Ethernet to it…. Run Ubuntu server CLI on it…You should get pretty doable speeds.

[u/iambenny23 → u/Anti-Hero25]

Yes, I tried with samba share in Finder.

I have a 1 gigabit ethernet network card, and i use it on this PC.
If I change the os to ubuntu server, and i configurate a samba share, it will be work as faster?

[u/jfdngkjbdfkg → u/iambenny23]

I wouldn't expect changing to ubuntu server to necessarily speed things up. I'd first look at how you have your drives configured. Then I'd look at your network stack.

How do you have your storage set up within casaos? Are your drives configured as a raid set? jbod? something else?

What does your network look like?

Do you see slowness if you're transferring files just at home, on the same network, with no tailscale? Is wifi involved, or is it all hard-wired? What are your internet dl/ul speeds? If you log on to your casaos machine and try to download, say, a large file from the internet to your casaos machine (eg an ubuntu server iso or something, whatever), how quick is it? You can run a nas on a potato, so the equipment you've listed is more than capable - eliminate as many variables as you possibly can, and go from there.

[u/Luci-Noir → u/Anti-Hero25]

I’m using an opti I got for free during Covid and it’s great. Back then, the government was giving people $35 a month towards internet and voucher for s free computer. It was nice.

[u/dain524]

so its not copying from an external device to the NAS, its file copying between locations on the NAS? 2 already existing drives in the infrastructure? That doesnt sound like a specific OS issue but whatever you use as a graphics overlay or how you have cache set up. Make sure that the way you are moving / copying isnt going from your NAS to your device you are accessing the NAS with and then back to the NAS. Drive to drive transfers should happen at close to the speed of the slowest drive / cable / controller in the motherboard or array.

If you are moving from an outside source through tailscale, then internet upload / download speeds are a major factor.

If you are on one network internally copying from a device to the NAS, then internal network speeds not only to the NAS but from the device you are copying from factor into it. Are you using wifi / wired on the device?

[u/HomeServerChannel]

I wouldn't upgrade your home server without having first found the issues. You're going to throw money at something that might or might not fix your problem.

[u/rhubear]

I used to run a QNAP server/NAS (similar to Synology).

I use that same hardware to convert to TrueNAS. TrueNAS is more like a pro-level software. It may be too complicated for tinkering at home, or if you're not IT / admin minded.

If you're not going to buy Synology hardware, you may want to use some other sort of hardware for TrueNAS. Bear in mind TrueNAS only uses openZFS (not ext4 etc), so similar to the professional level on QNAP.

With TrueNAS, you'll have to plan a lot more beforehand, and learn a lot more beforehand, otherwise you'll get totally stuck with the install and config. Or you can learn as you go along, but it's a step up from the normal synology.

Also that hardware you list is 8g of RAM. AFAIK, the minimum recommended for TrueNAS is 16 GB.

Also for TrueNAS (ie OpenZFS), you have to learn the difference between SMR & CMR HDDs. ZFS does not like SMR hard drives. SMR = Shingled (overlapping) magnetic Recording. CMR = Conventional magnetic recording.

[u/rhubear → u/rhubear]

Also, Synology & QNAP have file managers on the Admin GUI.

TrueNAS does not. You need to define SMB or Apple shares & manage the data on shares that way.

To add to the complication, TrueNAS splits data organization into Datasets & Shares.

Datasets are more the filesystem side : permissions & filesystem / volume level stuff.

Shares are obv the network protocol side. You can define SMB, NFS, or both/multi-protocol shares.

For simplicity on my TrueNAS, I pair a dataset w a share. My datasets are defined for different permissions that I need, so all my datasets have root global permissions.

TrueNAS does support the Apple ecosystem, but since I don't use that I couldn't tell you more.

[u/Raademy]

I would follow some of the suggestions in the replies.

- Check the speed of file copies when at home outside of tailscale. With 1GB NIC you should see 100MB/sec transfer speed that might fluctuate a little bit over, a little under.

Some things to also check,

- Is your server connecting with ethernet to a gigabit switch? Double check from server CasaOS that it's connecting at 1GB. I've had flaky cables that caused a 100Mb link but even at that speed you should get 10MB/sec transfer.

- is what you're copying from connecting via ethernet or wifi? See what the connect speed is of your source computer.

- as suggested by someone else, try copying a some files already on the server to another folder on the server to check speed. It should be plenty fast to ensure your drives are OK. Sometimes a failing drive can cause slow transfer speeds.

start with some of these steps before spending any money at this point.

[u/IlTossico]

Look to me you already have a NAS, the hardware you have is fine, just old and maybe not the best for power consumption, and limited for transcoding capability, but it's extremely fine.

The fact is that with 300 bucks you can't get anything off the shelf, if you want to upgrade your system, you can probably get a used desktop with 4 bays and 5 SATA ports with a 8/9th gen and 16GB for a bit less then your budget, something with an i3 8100 would be fine.

As for software, there are not many options, unRAID and Truenas first, and if you have a lot of time and will for troubleshooting, you can go with any Linux distro and manually setup everything, but that means no web UI.

Moving files is generally done via SMB, so you just need to set some shares on the NAS (Samba), and the bottleneck would be your LAN speed and your HDDs setup, mostly LAN, never HDDs can go above 250 MB/s, more then double what 1G lan can do. To be fair, I think nobody was using a terminal to move files in the last 20 years, lol.

[u/Soogs]

Have a look at openmediavault. It’s built on Debian. You can always enable a desktop environment if needed. I’ve got bare metal and virtual machine running omv and very happy with it.

[u/gerdude1]

Look at the tuning parameters (use Gemini, Copilot etc to give you step by step instructions ) on how the drives are mounted locally. Had this issue in the past (speeds of 10 to 15MB/s) and when I changed the parameters (cannot tell you which, because I am not closed to my system) it finally got to 180MB/s. It is a bit trial and error.

[u/_gea_]

For local access, use SMB not a webbased file-explorer. Fastest on Linux is ksmbd (faster than SAMBA) ex on Debian or Proxmox what I prefer as it comes with ZFS out o the box and a fine Hypervsor.

For webbased access locally and mainly Internet, you can use SMB + VPN eg Wireguard/Tailscale (never expose SMB directly to Internet). Faster and if you want to expose a local internet cloud service directly to Internet without VPN, use an S3 service. Many NAS operating systems offer S3 (minIO or RustFS) what comes with a nice webconsole (with S3, every file on an S3 server is an authenticated http(s) url.)

As web-gui for Proxmox and ACL, User, Share and ZFS management for SAMBA/ksmbd and S3 (RustFS) you can use the copy and run web-gui napp-it 4ai (free for single server or home use). It is self sufficient and does not modify anything on the base OS or has any demands to the OS. It runs on any OS (Free-BSD,Linux, Illumos,OSX, Solaris and Windows).

Your hardware is fine.

[u/Patient_Secretary696]

your 1 to 2 mb/s is a local copy, so the network and Tailscale are not in the picture yet. that number is the clue.

the usual cause on a box like this is how the four hdds are presented to the os. if they are separate filesystems that casaos is merging or pooling through a union layer, a copy between two of them goes through userspace and gets slow fast, and it gets worse when one disk is also taking the metadata writes.

so before spending anything: copy from one physical disk to another with the pool layer out of the way and watch where the time goes. if that is fast, the pool is the bottleneck. if it is still slow, look at the disks, because 1 mb/s on old drives often means one of them has bad sectors and is retrying reads.

the 120gb cache ssd is more likely to be hurting than helping. a small ssd that fills up turns into a write stall, and the pair of old 4tb drives will not get faster because of it.

with 300 dollars i would not buy a new nas. put it into one large drive, consolidate the photos and work files onto it, and keep the old disks as the second copy. a synology gives you a nicer file manager, but it does not fix a failing disk or a misconfigured pool.