Raspberry Pi vs ASUSTOR NAS Head-to-Head Part 2 - the VERDICT!

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

Hey everyone! Marco here from ASUSTOR again! As with the last video, we are thankful for the opportunity to collaborate with Jeff and feel free to let us know your comments, questions, criticisms and praise in this comment reply thread. I do get notifications and remain as happy as ever to listen to what you have to say. Can't guarantee everything but everything will be taken seriously.

[@JeffGeerling]

Thanks again for sending the Lockerstor, Marco! I learned a lot while making these two videos.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

@@JeffGeerling We learned a lot from you too!

[@YouTubeGlobalAdminstrator]

I think the most important aspect for me is software support. Synology offer I believe 7 years, which is the benchmark for me.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

@@KZbinGlobalAdminstrator Hi! We've only begun to retire our oldest products this year due to hardware limitations as they are 32 bit. They are 10 years old.

[@garyhuntress6871]

I'm not surprised at all that Jeff found plusses and minuses of both approaches. I'm really intrigued by the app support of the Asusstor. My home NAS has 10 drives. Maybe Asus can/will accommodate larger home solutions? Bottom line? I want both :D

[@JeffGeerling]

I can't believe you didn't use ZFS. You don't know storage unless you only use ZFS.

[@jonathanschober1032]

The self-awareness is gold

[@kwinzman]

Very true! And ECC RAM. Oh wait...

[@paulmaydaynight9925]

ZFS over packet writing raid0 Universal Disk Format SCSI DVD's ^_~

[@philipm1896]

Did you just heart your own comment 😂. Anyway zfs has a trade off that nobody seems to talk about, they are all quite happy to brush it under the carpet, also if you loose 1 vdev everything is lost. Anyway good video

[@WilliamJasonSherwood]

Obviously a long term project but was looking at SNAP RAID and if you can get it running on a Pi with low enough overhead it could be the real deal for Pi NAS OMV type storage.

[@izzieb]

The Asustor is nice, but we sure did enjoy watching you figure out how to make your Pi NAS work.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

We do appreciate the compliment!

[@gorillaau]

I came to see what hoops one needs to jump through for the Raspberry Pi.

[@byron-k7s]

I chose a halfway point between these two options. The QNAP TR-004 is a usb 3 raid enclosure that I plug into my raspberry pi 4, 4gb. Since the raid calculations are performed on the QNAP side, the raspberry pi only has to deal with the SMB stuff. Performance and reliability are both quite high. I also chose OMV for the relative ease of setup.

[@SomeTechGuy666]

Bingo, we have a winner !

[@niteshkumarpatel]

What is omv?

[@drdiesel1]

Great video, 17mins of results which probably took 30+ hours of work!

[@JeffGeerling]

Heh... the estimate is a bit low :)

[@iainwade]

Liked once because I agree that boxed nas’s as super capable, approachable and performant these days. Wish I could +1 again for raid is not a backup + 3-2-1 promotion.

[@kuhluhOG]

any recommendations for the 1? finding something trustable which doesn't cost much/monthly is pretty hard

[@iainwade]

Not paying monthly is probably cheaper overall but might cost more upfront. Some ideas: - Take an encrypted disk to work and leave it in a drawer. - Give a nas box to family/friend and backup over the internet.

[@PerryStevPT]

@@iainwade simple and easy. Never thought of that, thanks

[@r0galik]

For my own purposes I made a NAS of similar size out of a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Terra Master USB 3 DAS. So far it works quite well - with RAID5 (ext4) speeds are pretty much enough to saturate the Rpi Ethernet interface. Beats over the counter NAS systems in configurability.

[@TurboPotato]

dear god this is THE MOST comprehensive home lab testing I've ever seen. The fact you're only at 6k views of this writing is insulting. Jeff you're a f&$@ing GOD.

[@theSquashSH]

Super video! I applauded for CA$2.00 👏

[@DomiaAbrWyrda]

I am actually amazed that the Pi was that much cheaper For all my projects, I found that if you diy the same spec as a mass-produced product, the diy is always a bit more expensive (Yes, the Pi NAS had lower specs, but still, impressive how much cheaper it was)

[@bobsmith-qu2oq]

Of course it was cheaper. FFS the ironwolf drives alone makes this a stupid comparison video. Like comparing a 1960's beat up van to a current mustang.

[@DomiaAbrWyrda]

@@bobsmith-qu2oq oh were the HDD specs that much different? I didn't watch the pre-built NAS part of the video and just assumed he bought similar drives

[@seanvogel8067]

@@bobsmith-qu2oq , I thought he used the exact same drives?

[@TurboPotato]

Super video! I applauded for $10.00 👏👏👏

[@jrgengreve6654]

As usual a nice presentation and interesting information. I own a similar 4 bay NAS but have converted to use two linux driven low power computers - one at home, the second is remote. Using "normal" linux allows me to setup data sync between the two and simultaneously run proxmox, docker, nextCloud amd more. That gives me so many more possibiies. And - no cloud involved ... Thanks for the good videos!

[@SzDavidHUN]

Fun fact: you can spin down HDDs from command line with `hdparm -y /dev/sda/` They will automatically spin back up when needed (or you can spin them back up manually too). You can set the auto spindown time and set various parameters with that command.

[@LucasHartmann]

You can use hdparm to auto sleep the drives when idle, while keeping the pi awake. This should lower power consumption considerably.

[@ericcooley9407]

No clue what sent me your channel, but I'm very glad. Sounds like a lot of what I'm curious about.

[@jamess1787]

Omg. I remember that video snippet from years ago. Totally forgot about it. Create some unusual vibrations and temporarily delay the IO. Brilliant.

[@maxhammick948]

NB - OMV does support having the drives spin down when not in use. It's not a full shutdown, but as a single spinning HDD uses more power than an overclocked pi then it's most of the power consumption saved. On the "disks" page select the drive you'd like to spin down and then hit the "edit" button to find the relevant options. Also, since you mentioned odroid, the HC2 or HC4 are really nice solutions if you don't need 4 bays on your NAS and are OK with gigabit. There's also the H2+ for 2 bays and 2x 2.5G LAN, and at

[@tjairicciardi9747]

awesome series on nas. LEarned so much, cant wait to explore NAS

[@nccyr1]

Great review, thank you for spending the time to cover the details.

[@scttstnfld]

Thanks!

[@JeffGeerling]

Thank you!

[@paullandry6573]

Thanks for a great video and as always, thanks for including the outtakes. I loved the "I can assure you the kids are walking upstairs right now" line! 🙂

[@Hermiel]

Brother's got some Big Disk Energy. Remember: It's not the size of your Pi NAS; it's how you use it.

[@MrSleepybrains]

Thanks for the video Jeff! I love the sense of humor you bring to your videos, and your love of sci-fi! I would love to see more DIY videos for home users from you!

[@jimb3668]

I built a 4 bay (16TB) NAS using a RPi4 (4GB), mediasonic 4 bay enclosure. Raspian and OMV5. Acrylic case and cooling fan. Works well. (100MB/s typical throughput). I liked your profile of each solution. It's intersting to know that overclocking the Pi doesn't give you much. Cheers

[@ronaldglider]

really like the blunt honesty! -- and the conclusions drawn

[@kylestych]

I was researching Pi NAS options the DAY before you released this. GET OUT OF MY HEAD! Seriously though, thanks and big ups for that rclone script

[@JeffGeerling]

I'm considering doing a more in-depth video on backup and talking about that script later this year.

[@al048604]

Yes! Please do!

[@T3hBeowulf]

​@@JeffGeerling I would love to hear your experience with Rclone. My current setup for satisfying the "3" and "2" in 3-2-1 is "Jenkins + custom rsync scripts". I chose Jenkins for visibility around scheduling and to handle cross-platform backups with its various agents. I'm still missing an automated solution for "1" and tend to sneaker-net that every so often.

[@JeffGeerling]

@@T3hBeowulf I definitely need to do a video on rclone, it sounds like. It's pretty simple if you are okay storing your '1' backup in Backblaze, S3, S3 Glacier, or the like.

[@thomasipad7719]

I love the bloopers at the end!!! Please continue to add them :-)

[@CraigMullins1]

Do you have any videos comparing different nas's like the Lockerstor / synology. low cost , mid range , high end?

[@wstrater]

Can’t wait until you release your rclone video! In case you previously didn’t know you were releasing an rclone vidieo, consider yourself informed. :)

[@madr8b]

Another great vid on a great channel. I just built a simple pi nas for about 200. I don't need the 2.5 Ethernet, 1gb works great for me. I have 6TB (2TB I already had) of storage on open media. I haven't had any real issues with my setup. I think if you are just looking for simple file storage and video storage/playback, with no real extra's, the pi is a great way to go and it is cheaper for sure. Great vid Jeff, thanks for all you do. Don't get too mad at red shirt Jeff for the HD, I am sure he was just curious. 😁

[@alexanderstohr4198]

11:04 - the pcie bridge is plugged "off" along with the 2.5Gbit networking - only the SATA board is plugged and networking goes to the native 1 GBit port on the PIs base board.

[@madeyeQ]

I've tried using NAS units from different vendors, including an Asustor 2 bay unit. They all suffered from the same problem, they felt bloated. Too many things that I would never use and the things I wanted to use were not included. The Asustor I used had the ability to boot from USB so I opted to install centos on a USB SSD and used that for a while. (I removed the internal eMMC ADM drive). That enabled me to do just about anything, but unfortunately it was not powerful enough for what I wanted. I ended up building my own NAS from a desktop PC, mounted it in a 19" server case with a 5 drive bay and am using that with Debian and ZFS. I don't need a fancy web interface, but that's probably just me ;-) Now I can use it as a NAS, for my docker containers, as a web server for my homepage, local git hosting and what-not. And of course it works flawlessly with my UPS. I have been running this kind of setup for more than 10 years now. (the Asustor was somewhere in the middle of that timespan).

[@mariosistampoulas375]

Great tip. It's not just the storage capacity. Important is also the network speed. Raspberry Pi is very slow for sharing data. You need lots of drives and very fast network. Ethernet and internet. So that's a lot of money to invest.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

I'd love to hear about the things that you wanted to use but were not included.

[@madeyeQ]

@@ASUSTOR_YT I have been trying to remember what exactly it was I couldn't find, and must confess I just can't remember it. It might even be something that is available now in the NAS SW store. I know of one thing though that will keep me away from a prebuild NAS. Notifications. I hate them like a disease. And it's not limited to neither one vendor nor a NAS. Even on my phone I do everything to disable all notifications. Except for receiving a phone call or SMS I don't want to see them. Again that's just me ;-)

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

@@madeyeQ Hi. We don't send notifications unless you enable them specifically.

[@rider68-12]

Looks good. I like you take on this. I have used a similar setup. I was just 6 drives in a raid5.

[@cahirpl]

Brilliant videos Jeff. Very well explained and narrated. Really enjoyed it.

[@AnotherNerdHere]

Thanks Jeff. Interesting as always. I appreciate you doing what would be much more difficult for me.

[@lis6502]

8:16 duuude, i am glad that i am watching this at the daytime, not hearing these footsteps being all alone in the dense darkness of the night ;d Cool and sensitive mics though!

[@Airbag888]

The wait was excruciating.. Finally p2

[@BxKRs]

Long story short, I need NAS now, so I’ll buy an Asustor or similar, but I like to tinker, so I’ll get the other stuff and struggle through it for fun. Thanks for being so thorough!

[@roger.monitor]

I am testting with OMV now after a question from the members of our GNU/Linux workgroup. Have build three different PC and one laptop with a broken screen, a HP Pavilion dv7 which has two drive bays. Put one 160 Gib HD in for OS, did not have a smaller one and one 1TB HD. Works well, next will be loading the OS on a SD or USB and than put in two 1TB HD. The 3 PC are one 15 year old Dual core AMD with pata drives and two 10 year old Intel Dual core all with four sata. Ones they are working they go to other members so they can do their testing and or tinkering. Dose not matter of they are botching the OS. I have an other laptop that I amgoing to dismantel and put in an old PC case and make a OMV nas that way.

[@amundjones9319]

I have a pi NAS that is only two, very neat boxes... The pi in a case w/ heatsink and all the ports moved to the same side (except the SD card on the opposite side, of course), and a USB3 external storage that lets me plug in 4x 2.5" drives. I already had a box of 250GB SSDs from old computers. I know it's USB3 instead of SATA, and with far less storage capability, but the whole setup cost me $150 (will cost you more if you don't happen to have a bunch of spare drives laying around, or less if a manufacturer sends you stuff for free lol) and is very neat and orderly and was kind of a breeze, what with the huge amount of community support and the fact that this is a pretty darn popular project to build meaning the steps were all laid out for me already.

[@JeffGeerling]

The Pi does make a great 'found parts' storage device, as long as you have modest needs and don't expect it to do everything under the sun. Nice job keeping some older parts in operation and useful!

[@Twitch_Moderator]

Yah!! My man Jeff uses Seagate as well. 👍 I've been using them for decades. The RMA on Seagate is no worse than Western Digital. I used to work in RMA and I saw a lot of Kingston SSD, Intel SSD, Western Digital HDD but rarely did I ever see any Seagate HDDs or Samsung SSDs. I'm rocking 2x 4TB Seagate HDDs that are 7 years old and run everyday. They are used for massive data transfer and storage often. Anyways. I just wanted to show my enthusiasm. Not sound like the Seagate poster Child. Have a great one Jeff and thanks for all the videos. You have an incredible tech channel.

[@SergiuTopan]

Raspberry pi is a good nas if you use only 1G network and usb hard drives (I know that are not nas grade). I have a setup with PI 4 2GB model and 2 TB western digital usb hdd. It works great for plex file storage torrent box and I also edit 1080p videos from it.

[@mrmotofy]

Some of the external actually contain a white label NAS drive

[@skug978]

Potentially you could use a microcontroller like an ESP32 to power-up the Raspberry Pi setup from a wakeonlan call. Like I mentioned on your first video, I believe you could have reduced the cost of the Pi setup by just using a cheap PC case instead of the Noctua parts, 700W PSU, hard drive brackets, etc. For a regular person wanting a cheap NAS, they could forego the 2.5Gbps network card in the Pi build and the PCIe switch, and just use the Pi's own 1Gbps network adapter (limiting max throughput to 125MBps instead of the measured max you found of 200MBps). I believe the Pi setup (without 2.5Gbps network) could be achieved for $191 from your numbers (and using a $25 'PC case with 500W PSU' to hold everything).

[@dusterthefirst]

The apply changes banner is a double edged sword. A lot of the time, when a second apply bar like that exists it allows you to batch settings changes, allowing you to set them all before waiting for them to complete in case they took a long amount of time. It can help by moving the waiting till the end, not interrupting your flow as you change settings, but can also be a hassle if you are just changing the one setting, especially when it takes so long to show up.

[@JeffGeerling]

True. One risk is you might forget to even apply the changes 😅

[@jameshinds2510]

I recently built an Argon EON Pi NAS, which apparently released just barely after this video. My experience with it has been an interesting middle of the road NAS; Argon Forty put most of the effort together in making it. There are two weird downsides. The first is that the drives are connected via USB, and OMV doesn't let you set RAID up via USB, anymore, so you either have to hardware config RAID or set up a backup. The second is that it has 4 bays, but doesn't fit 4 3.5" drives. 2 of them are 2.5" drives at most. I don't think that's bad, but it is odd. I can't actually comment on the speed because I optimized it for capacity, but I strongly suspect that the EON will get bandwidth throttled by that single gigabit connection.

[@DannehBoi90]

No ZFS?! How could you! All seriousness though, this was very informative!

[@reedbj06]

Outstanding content, thank you for sharing. Your insights are much appreciated and it was fun to watch!

[@camofelix]

R/DataHorders reporting in! Y U NO USE ZFS REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE (but for reals, use what you're comfortable with

[@puerlatinophilus3037]

I was almost worried that using FAT32 for all of my drives is a problem.

[@shapelessed]

I've designed my own file server for a raspberry pi, it took 2 months to get it done but it was worth it...

[@kingmasterlord]

sounds like good how to KZbin content to me

[@shapelessed]

@@kingmasterlord Not really, I had to deal with tons of security stuff like directory traversal, injections and XSS and 99.9% of people watching don't know anything about this stuff. If they were to expose some ports on their home routers with badly secured web app, then some hackers, or most likely bots wold easily get access to their home networks... There's always a risk they'll forget to patch stuff that might enable remote code execution... In short, unless you really know what you're doing, don't do it... Building complex APIs needed for login and permission systems isn't easy, and securing it is a nightmare...

[@khairulihsan8417]

Any idea where to start (maybe topics to read) and futher to have similar built like you? Thanks..

[@shapelessed]

@@khairulihsan8417 I'd honestly first start by building a simple API for reading files from the server, some routes like API/file/get/pathToFile, reading the target file and then thinking of securing it, so things like dir traversal protection and possibly locking the server to a certain directory, that would be its root

[@michaelstaps5526]

reminds me of that guy in my neighborhood, that told me, he doesnt need a truck for moving to his new location because his Mini Clubman can handel ANY cargo... just by doing a few little workarounds...

[@Nevakonaza.]

Really impressive that Asustor,Nice channel too Jeff Subbed!

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

Praise is always appreciated!

[@PraveenMak]

You are a genius sir. Thanks for this!

[@madfury3179]

You need to test the Odroid HC4. It's an SMB with SATA slots.

[@applesushi]

I’m a Linux sysadmin so I probably would feel fairly comfortable building a PiNAS. But at home I use a Synology 4-disk one because it just works for what I need. Sometimes it’s OK to go the easy route.

[@RedMageGaming]

Still waiting on canakit to ship my CM4 and such. When I ordered it, it was supposed to ship out march 15th. Then they started saying orders would be shipped out May, now they're saying June....

[@JeffGeerling]

Same here with an order from the Pi Hut. But miraculously, I was at Micro Center today in St. Louis, and they had 4 4GB models in stock, both lite and 8 GB eMMC!

[@1glitchedbot995]

Disabling drive cache may help with the mixed SSD performance issue.

[@smoloms]

I learn so much fro your videos. I love it.

[@Levent_Ergun]

I actually found setting everything up manually without OMV resulted in better results for me. OMV uses too much CPU power and can be troublesome on non Raspberry SBCs, I for example had much better throughput (around 25%) with manual samba and mdadm raid0 setup on a OrangePi Zero.

[@MiniLuv-1984]

Thanks Jeff. Loved the comparison of speed and ease of setting up. I must point out though that it occurred to me like you conflated storage technology with backups and then, you added insult to injury by suggesting a catch-all 3,2,1 plan to a reasonably technical and analytical audience. The storage technology RAID, ZFS etc. etc. determines the reliability of a storage appliance, The number of such appliances determine the redundancy. External risks; fire, power, data comms etc. will determine mitigation strategies such as location of backups, UPS's etc.. A recovery procedure and time-to-restore are also part of the equation and has to be factored into a backup strategy. Finally a testing strategy is required. A backup strategy is worked out by considering risk factors, consequences and mitigation. It's not a particularly technical process and I'd venture to say, most, if not all of your audience can reasonably analyse their own situation, environment and analyse it to come up with a plan that works for them. Cheers, and thanks for your wonderful videos!

[@JeffGeerling]

You have a lot more faith in my audience's analytical abilities than I do ;) Not a knock on the audience, but I just have to acknowledge a lot of people watching these videos are just at the very beginning edge of learning about the topics I cover.

[@MiniLuv-1984]

@@JeffGeerling I'm sure there is a distribution of experience and knowledge and some will be coming in from the cold - to learn. Perhaps a video on risk in relation to backups. Might be dry, but I'm sure red shirt Jeff can help with that :) Regardless, whatever you provide Jeff, I'm always grateful for your videos. You are one of a select few content creators that provides exacting information and not regurgitated opinion, and I for one value that greatly.

[@JeffGeerling]

@@MiniLuv-1984 Definitely considering doing at least one (maybe series) on backup and data retention (targeted at home/small business use case). And thanks for the compliment-I figure there are about 1000 people on youtube reviewing products and listing specs. If I don't learn something, and by extension, teach something new, in each of my videos, I count it as a failure. There are enough 'LTT clone' channels here :)

[@herik63]

I paid 83 euros for a J4125 mini ITX mobo, for running Proxmox for Home Assistant and a Debian server for my network, the NAS is still on the old i5 with Xigmanas, but almost powered off. The board was expanded with a 32GB of RAM and a NVME (Samsung 981) but since the lack of lanes the speed is limited around 800 MB/sec, not bad at all for a 12W server.

[@yorickmeulenbelt4all]

I kept hearing these bonks, took me until the end of the video to realize it was in the video, not in my house :'D You've got a great microphone :)

[@JeffGeerling]

Those pesky kids running around :)

I would love to see a video about that AWS S3 Glacier backup method you are using. Especially interested in how does it works for you price wise (both storing and getting data back). I was puzzling with that idea for a while, but price calculation with AWS services are clearly not made with individuals in mind and always got scared away. (or use Google Drive or something more simpler instead)

[@KaliszAd]

Actually, try DigitalOcean Spaces. They have a $5/250GB/Month + 1 TB traffic plan and it is S3 compatible. Restic, rclone and others can talk to it. I stuffed about 2 TB of deduplicated backups in there using both backup and the SFTP translator built into rclone.

[@JeffGeerling]

Definitely an option. I did the calculations and found that the S3 Glacier option ended up being about 1/4 the cost of any other standard S3-compatible storage plan, plus I put a lot of faith in Glacier's data storage reliability. I have had to restore a few times (usually for some giant project I accidentally deleted locally and didn't realize it until much later), and the costs aren't bad if you're okay waiting a day or two for the download to start, and at a kind of slow rate.

[@KaliszAd]

@@JeffGeerling really depends on how fast the recovery should be and how much data you will download in such a situation. Traffic from any of the big clouds is very expensive. If you mostly just send data in and want to keep them for a long time, S3 Glacier is really good and likely the most reliable option and quite cost effective.

​@@JeffGeerling Thanks! Probably they store it on tape and the wait time is for the queueing. By the way, interfacing an LTO drive with the Raspberry would be an interesting video. Technically not a challenge now that you have a SCSI card attached :) But I wonder if the Pi can cope with the transfer speeds this requires - as some kind of periodic backup agent.

[@Dygear]

Wow! The Shouting at the Disks thing is a throw back. Shout-out to Bryan Cantrill (Some pun intended.)

[@World_Theory]

Is the reason that the Pi locked up during the RAID 0 test, because it was thermal throttling? You did say that you increased the clock speed, but I didn't see you improve its cooling solution, and the faster RAID 0 would mean more data being moved, and therefore a bigger workload for the CPU.

[@JeffGeerling]

In this case, no. It hard locked up (required power reset), and there was no indication the temperature was ever above about 55C

[@Clobercow1]

Jeff. Great video! Here is what I thought 3-2-1 is: 3 copies 2 different types of media 1 copy off site 2 different types of media is important because it can help prevent issues with crypto, and other issues with media / server death. Tapes, for example, are common for the second media in enterprise environments.

[@JeffGeerling]

Tape drives are underrated. Having offline storage that's decently fast to write, easy to transport and store, and high capacity... is nice.

[@luziferius3687]

About 2 types of media: Never use SSDs for long-term backup storage :) Optical disks, HDDs and tapes are ok, SSDs are not. These lose the cell charge over time, so when you want to access your office document archive of 2020 in 2024, you’ll find that the SSD is completely empty…

[@KameraShy]

@@luziferius3687 That is what I have heard also. SSDs would be tempting to use because of their size.

[@KameraShy]

@@JeffGeerling BUT ... keep in mind that tapes have more stringent environmental storage requirements than other types of media.

[@mikek1187]

I noticed that you didn't install any heatsink on the pi. While I doubt that would have had much impact, I would be curious to see how more efficient the pi would be (especially when overclocked) if it could shed its heat better.

[@stephenhargreaves9011]

For installing stuff, although apt wasn't available, how about dpkg? If it was, you could use dpkg to install apt.

[@321gpower]

3 2 1 = plan is a good thing. grt work bro

[@Demodude123]

And he didn't even do zfs as the root partition on the pi! Unacceptable :D. Great vid as always Jeff.

[@DIY_Donkey]

I'm running a Pi 4b 8GB with a seagate ironwolf 4TB in an external USB 3 enclosure, I've not done any proper testing on it but using dlna I can watch 4K video on 2 TVs as well as copy files to it from my laptop via smb at about 20MB/s all at the same time. I know its no where near the same speeds as Jeff's setup but for an average household and about £200 its more than adequate for the job

[@EnricAragorn]

I build my own utlrabudget home NAS one month ago. a Refurbished 2012 HP i5 Tower (70 bucks), plus a 8 Sata disk marvell controler (50 buks on amazon), some ram to reach 16Gb, and a small SSD drive. Is not as fast as yours, but works pretty good with 7200rpm discs. My home network is based on a Gigabit switch. The limit is the network. Every for less than 150 buks

[@mrmotofy]

If you have an extra expansion slot. Get a used Intel based NIC 10GB 2 port like X520-2. Then get one in your main System And directly connect a cable between them then using a static IP. You can also add a line in your host file so that data to the NAS always uses the 10Gb link. With a 2port NIC on NAS one can connect 2 clients and have a direct 10Gb for just the price of the 2 NIC. Then add a 10Gb switch later as need/budget allows. A standard HDD these days can hit around 200MB so the bottle neck really is the network.

[@EnricAragorn]

@@mrmotofy true friend!

[@bufanda]

While I like the Pi's as experimental platform, they are just that in my opinion when it comes to my data I go for stability and thus get out-of-the box solutions.

[@rogierdikkes]

I used to have the same idea, but after using a Synology for 8-9 years I now either have to buy an entire new unit or run something that gets no updates. If something breaks I also have to buy an entire new unit. There are no replacement parts for sale that are supported. Besides that suddenly software packages are no longer supported or even worse can no longer be downloaded which really hinders the ability to keep using the NAS. Having an solution run for 9 years is great, but I want to be in control what parts i replace to upgrade or replace to keep access to my data. I also want an system to run for longer than 9 years. Adding waste to garbage piles shouldn't be the goal. Ideally I want to upgrade a solution if my usage changes or if I want added features which isn't likely with a NAS.. I don't see a Pi as a solution because I had too many break on me in short amounts of time, but a self built system is something I'm really considering.

[@JoeMaza]

I saw part one and it got me thinking. I bought an Asustor. It's suited me just fine. Also, I'm amazed at its petite form factor. I would need to find a case and other parts to rival the size. It would need to be twice the size to fit four drive bays. Thanks, Jeff!

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

Thank you! We appreciate the compliment!

[@keithmiller9665]

Thanks for the follow up video Jeff. Very nice, more please :-) I can’t help thinking that SSDs would consume much lower electricity than HDDs. For a start fan(s) would not be required. Of course SSDs remain far too expensive, but this could change in future and large boxes with HDDs in them would look as out of place as CRT monitors do today. A Pi4 and 4xSSDs connected via a USB 3 hub with 4xSata to USB3 cables consumes in total around 10w from memory. Of course USB3 isn’t suitable but the electricty consumption point remains.

[@JeffGeerling]

SSDs still get quite hot, so you'd need a fan, but yes, not as hot as HDDs, at least not high powered ones like these from Seagate. Also, except for the highest end SSDs, most don't require nearly the same maximum power draw as an HDD.

[@keithmiller9665]

Thanks Jeff. I agree with your point in the video about not being easy to power down OMV to save electricty. Also the bulk of either the Asustor or Pi setup isn’t great. Definitely think there is a gap in the market for a small SSD box / setup that is low powered. This would help reduce the power consumption of not being able to put OMV into a low power sleep type mode.

[@JeffGeerling]

@@keithmiller9665 An SSD-based 2.5" array like what Wiretrustee is building seems like it could be an ideal SOHO solution. Silent, only needs a fan at very low speeds, pretty light on power consumption, and fast enough to saturate a 1 Gbps network. I'm considering-once the Wiretrustee is released-building a small 2-drive RAID 1 NAS that I drop at another family member's house and sync to my local NAS via rclone/rsync. Just need to find a willing family member who's okay with me dumping a few gigs every night :)

[@voiceoftreason1760]

The one important notable not mentioned option here is to make something like a custom itx build with some x86 motherboard. I'll explore that option more as I want to keep the freedom to run any open source NAS OS

[@vitordasilva4047]

Nice video series, thanks! I'd be interested to hear more about your backup solution.

[@priyanv]

@jeff: Am I the first one to realize that a Starlink video is in the works?

[@JeffGeerling]

Eagle eye! Coming next week.

[@sixforks6543]

You always look so happy. Love your channel.

[@JeffGeerling]

Life is good! 2020 was super not-fun but at least I could share some fun projects on the channel with all of you!

[@sixforks6543]

@@JeffGeerling Keep it up my dude, you're providing great content and have a very friendly and marketable face. That smile screams you love what you're doing.

[@JeffGeerling]

@@sixforks6543 I'm having the time of my life :) Glad it comes through in the videos.

[@maokue2639]

Hello Jeff, Thanks for the valuable information and the time your put n it. Great video. I would like to ask you for training on understanding storage, NAS, what's caching and why to use it, and many more.

[@dc9808]

I have been running the synology ds416+(upgraded to 8gb mem vs the original 1gb) for about 3 years and have come to the same conclusion! It's performance and usability vs a bake my own solution is hard to beat. The asastor looks to be competitive with it while including more performance. My buddy has a different take... he bought a dell r720 server off ebay for $300 with 8 open sas slots and stuffed them full of drives. His solution is definitely the bang for the buck winner.

[@mrmotofy]

Can even get like a dell 610 etc for $100-$200 also

[@claireh2667]

Lmao, when you powered those drives in the last video, I heard the dead drive and had to do a double-take: surely that noise was coming from the all-too-familiar GreenPower! But i also can't pretend to be surprised by Doa seagate, just thought they mighta tested the ones they sent you.

[@sunsun221]

A Synology 1819 user here, never considered Asustor before watching your 2.5Gbps NAS build series. Was going to follow your 2.5Gbps Pi NAS build when you finish, but now 6604 is higher on my list. Thanks Jeff. BTW, where to get your green pi tshirt?

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

Hey there! If you have any questions at all. Let me know!

[@sunsun221]

@@ASUSTOR_YT Marco, appreciate you reaching out to Jeff to make this happen. Cheers.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

@@sunsun221 No problem! We continue to learn lots from these collaborations and the feedback you guys give us. Keep 'em coming!

My take on the "NAS story" was: - HP MicroServer Gen 8 - 150 EUR (new, with some Celeron and 4GB RAM inside) - XEON CPU 1260L 4c/8t - 40 EUR on ebay - 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 ECC RAM - 50 EUR on ebay - Sabrent USB3.0 2.5Gbps LAN adapter - 40 EUR (the server has 2 x 1Gbps and a iLO but i wanted 2.5Gbps) Total: 280 EUR (~ $330) - disks, cache SSD and boot SSD not included Advantages: - I can run a fully fledged distro on it with whatever I want / need - It has expansion: 1 PCIe 16x 2.0, some USBs and an extra SATA - It can be fixed / modded to your necesity Disadvantages: - power consumption (~ 70-80W) - kind of loud at startup - it is a server afterall and we all know how server grade equipment sounds like - you have to manage everything yourself, replace CPU, install it, add everything you need etc (this is a disadvantage for those that what something Plug And Play as the Asustor, for me it was fun)

[@leexgx]

I guess if you use actual hardware raid controller (that has a BBU and a UPS) and Linux with btrfs as the filesystem for bitrot detection only so you know when you got corrupted data (single data, dup metadata) , with the hardware raid you can use the automatic raid rebuild (drop clean disk in and off it goes) and monitoring functions of the server instead on relying on mdadm raid This is why I like netgear readynas (simple automatic raid and btrfs for bitrot and auto correction) , as long as the hdd is clean you can just drop it in and it auto rebuilds (same as dell server) , only nas Company I know does it this way, others you have to trigger the rebuild via the ui or have a hotspare configured, only use hotspare in RAID6, never use hotspare in RAID5, use RAID6 before you start to use hotspares

[@fmlazar]

As I understand not even Apple recommends using AFP any more and suggests you keep to samba. Assuming your Macs are using modern version of OSX.

[@johnr8856]

Nice presentation and great information.

[@greyresort9339]

Did you compare the Asustor nas with two nvme cache drives to the raspberry pi setup without cache ? If this is the case you did not compare apples with apples...

[@mcloller5017]

Very well done, as always. Thank you.

[@Luke-Barrett]

Would there be any benefit to a cluster pi nas?

[@willfancher9775]

FYI copying large files isn't a very good test for dm-cache. It purposefully subverts the cache for sequential IO because HDDs tend to be fast enough for sequential loads, and because it drastically improves the longevity of the cache drives.

[@JeffGeerling]

All writes go through the NVMe SSDs even when using dm-cache though-I was monitoring the individual drive activity and confirmed it would write through from the network to the SSDs, then after a brief pause, I'd see the SSDs go to read and the HDDs start writing. The best thing about physically-spinning hard drives is you can also hear them quite easily when they start writing :D

[@willfancher9775]

@@JeffGeerling hm. I must be reading outdated information then.

[@MrREALball]

So, Lockerstor is the NAS for people who do not care about their privacy? Since we have no idea what they did to the gnu/linux repo they installed, we can't be sure that any measures, besides a complete disconnect from network, which will defeat the purpose of the NAS, are going to stop them from sending all of your data to their servers? Am I missing something?

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

Hey there! If we were doing something as dodgy and unethical as that, the last person we'd be sending a NAS to would be someone as smart as Jeff. We use open source components in our NAS. We do not store user data. We couldn't even if we tried, we don't have any servers and if we did have the capability to do so, we'd just simply set up a cloud service and charge people a few dollars a month to store their data on it. The NAS only phones an update server. ADM is transparent about the running processes and we allow people to go into the OS via SSH. We basically give people the tools to have all the control over their data and those tools can be used to find wrongdoing.

[@MrREALball]

@@ASUSTOR_YT you do not need to store it, just feeding it to a neural network would be enough. You are using open source components, okay, but even windows has open source components on it, doesn't mean microsoft doesn't spy on its users (quite the opposite actually). "We basically give people the tools to have all the control over their data and those tools can be used to find wrongdoing." If I give you an apple, doesn't mean it is not poisoned, or if it is even a real apple. But yeah, I didn't think of the fact that I could just never actually allow it access to the internet, which would somewhat prevent it from leaking my personal data to your servers.

[@DarrylAdams]

Looking forward for you to form the Gearling Media Group and having a dedicated Redshirt Jeff channel....

[@TurboPotato]

your videos are AMAZING

[@TheHangman300]

Very useful video, thanks. I'm in a similar situation right now: Upgrading the Pi4 with USB Adapters or buying a NAS (leaning more and more to the off-the-shelf solution). Will you keep Raid5 or go to Raid10 with 4 drives? I'm a bit anxious with Raid5... Imagine 1 drive fails and the rebuild takes 16 hours (or more with data on the drives? does it matter?) with full read utilization on the remaining drives... (but right - that's were the backups are relevant)

[@klausstock8020]

RAID10 *can* experience a complete data loss if two drives fail at the same time (RAID10 is kind of a compromise between RAID1 reliability and RAID0 performance) . RAID6/RAIDZ2 will protect against that scenario. Let's do the math. Assuming an AFR (annual failure rate) of 3%, the chances that any one of the 4 drives fail is 12% pa (per annum=per year). How long will it take for you to fix the drive? Do you have a spare at hand, or do you need to buy it first? Will the NAS alarm you at 2 o'clock in the morning while you are on a party, and how fast can you return to the NAS whilst heavily intoxicated 😉? Let's assume that it will take 3 days for you to fix the issue (a few hours to react, wait until the shops reopen after weekend, plus the rebuild/resilver). The chances that 1 specific drive fails within these 3 days is ~1:4000, the chances that any one of the 3 remaining drives fails is ~1:1300. In a RAID10 scenario, there is 1 in 3 chance that the 2nd failing drive is the wrong one and complete data loss occurs (total chance 1:4000). With RAID6/RAIDZ2, this chance is reduced to 0. Considering the time it takes to resilver: when the NAS is under heavy load, it needs to decide whether resilvering or regular use gets prioritized (bother resilvering and regular use read off the three (or two) remaining disks). If the NAS prioritizes resilvering, it might become unusable for regular work, if it prioritized normal use, resilvering might take much longer - ultimately, it depends on how much faster the disks are than the network interface. However, the performance impact of resilvering must be addresses when planning the NAS, as the NAS will have to perform periodic scrubs, which have a similar performance impact. The math above dealt only with complete drive failures, nut localized surface defects. The scrubbing reads all the disks to find corrupted data, which is then corrected (ideally also alarming the admin that it had to fix some data because of some surface defects; the issue may be benign, but if a lot of "weak blocks" begin to appear, it might hint to wards an imminent drive failure). Resilvering (and scrubbing) under ZFS only considers the actual data stored on the disks. On hardware RAIDs (and some software RAIDs), resilvering goes through the whole disks, regardless whether there is any data or not. Scrubbing can be done on a OS level (since the OS where data sits)...or it's done via the "whole disk" approach, or (quite popular, but dumb) not at all. Likewise, initializing a new RAID array finishes immediately under ZFS, while other solutions require hours for that trivial task. I prefer ZFS for these reasons. TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) is available for free and runs on x86 platforms (so no Raspberry Pi support). Another downside if the "ZFS tax" - a ZFS RAID drive should be filled only up to 80% (to run at optimum performance). Of course, when it's just used as a data archive where writes are infrequent, and some additional seek times (in the case of spinning disks) are tolerable, you can go up to nearly 100%. A ZFS NAS is not as simple as one of the ready-for-use things intended for the home user. It allows the user to specify priorities and timing of scrubs and resilver operations vs. normal use, which is nice for me, but too technical for the average home user. My own NAS uses some cheap "old junk" mainboard, a few SATA controller cards and a few SATA enclosures with port multiplier built-in. The 32 spinning disks are organized in various volumes, some consisting of 4 disks (RAIDZ1, for less important data) and others consisting of 8 drives (RAID2, for data which I consider a bit more important). I use ZFS snapshots (taking a snapshot of a volume finishes immediately) to protect against accidental file deletion; with a cron job taking the snapshots at regular intervals (interval depends on how much the data changes and its importance). And, yes, on one of my 8 disk RAIDZ2 volumes, I once had 2 drives fail within a few hours. I had one spare at hand and needed to order another one. So, no data loss, but maybe I should have gone for RAIDZ3... And, like you mentioned: offline backups for the real important data. Apart from disk failures, fires and burglary are also real life threats.

[@jamesrodemeyer7544]

What do you do to support all these toys, I admire your knowledge, I'm 75 and I love this stuff. Thank you.

[@DigitEgal]

1 Question: What Issues you ran into by using the Mikrotik SFP+ Switch? (since i have the same in my environment) 2 Question: You know anything about issues with Ironwolf NAS drives when using raid (especially zfs) - according to some reddit posts "Ironwolf Drives are not suitable for ZFS"

[@naturalmadness6623]

my pi 4b has h.265 video that just simply can not stream to my devices. I believe it does not support direct stream and require extra transcoding

[@sandrorocha790]

Test both with Plex and Emby transcode. OMV supports SSD caching?

[@wolfgangmeincke]

A stock NAS is great, if you want to have an out-of-the-box solution. It will work fine for many years and you have many additional features. When it becomes too old, you have to buy a new one. The Pi solution needs much more manual effort but you get a full computer and you can easily upgrade a view years later to the next gen Pi. If you really just need a NAS for data storage, buy an external hdd storage for 200 bugs and you have everything you need.

[@meh.7539]

"In my day, you weren't a real sysadmin unless you compiled your own kernel!" But seriously, I remember compiling linux kernels to be a bit trickier way back in like '02 when I was first starting out. It feels much easier now than it did back then.

[@bornlibra23]

Were you able to or did you try moving the raid array directly from the asustor to the raspberry pi? If not May I request you to try that. QNAP doesnt allow that easily.