On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 4:27 AM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>
>
> I looked into the Raspberry and the newest version, about $150 now,
doesn't even have SATA ports.  I can add a thing called a "hat" I think
that adds a couple but thing is, that costs more and still isn't enough.  I
really don't like USB and hard drive mixing.  Every time I do that, the
hard drive turns into a door stop.  Currently, I have three Rosewill
external enclosures and they have USB and eSATA ports.  I use the eSATA
connections and no problems.  It's also really fast.  So, I plan to stick
with SATA connections.

You do NOT want  the Rasp Pi for this. You would have to compile and
maintain the OS yourself just adding work and the disk interfaces aren't
high performance enough.

Obviously you can do what you are most comfortable with but to me a NAS
machine with a bunch of external drives does not sound very reliable.

>
> I have a old computer that I might could use.  It is 4 core something and
I think it has 4GBs of memory, maxed out.  I think it will perform well
enough but wish it had a little more horses in it.

That's more than enough horsepower for TrueNAS Core. If the box will hold 3
drives then you have 1 system drive and 2 data drives for a ZFS RAID1.
That's how both of my NAS boxes are set up.

You can buy more memory at lots of places inexpensively but you don't need
it to start. 4GB will work with TrueNAS Core. My machines have 8 & 12GB. I
never use it all.

https://www.truenas.com/truenas-core/

Even if your old box has only 2 drives, download TrueNAS and just set it up
on one systemdrive. It's not Gentoo difficult. It's a fully formed install
system which will probably be running in an hour. You can use 1 drive in
your data tank and add additional drives later.

The speed of a NAS is _mostly_ a balance between network speed and disk
speed. Processor usage for me is generally about 20%. If your network is
GigaBit then you can sustain somewhere about 850Mb/S on the cables which
translates nicely to about 100 MegaByte/S on your disk drives. There isn't
that much CPU usage as it's mostly compression when backing up.

Unless you use the box as a file server getting data back off is a once in
a while event where you don't care too much about speed, or at least I
don't.

Just do it. Download the install disc and give it a try. Nothing much to
lose.

Good luck.
Mark