Hey Guys,
I am looking to get a NAS for my Dad for Christmas. he currently has a WD EX2 NAS.
Now I would like to get one under 200usd and is a good secure NAS, easy use would be a plus…
I have the HDD so it should be a diskless kind as I will just reuse the old HDD…
I fear there aren’t many good ones for that price.
I built one myself, a samba server made of a RasPi5 and two SSDs in a raid.
Yeah, for that price I’d second the idea of DIY 
And since you have disks already, and the Pi is pretty inexpensive, that gives you some cash to find a decent enclosure.
ok any good Nas’ under 300usd?
What is their network backbone?
The reason I ask is some brands (synology, in my experience) really only play well in their own ecosystem…
Hey Torc, it a Home Network 1GB Connection.
Hmm, I’m probably not in position to make you a useful recommendation sorry! (Edit: because it sounds like you need a NAS with some really good and easy to use security tools, which is not really how I’ve ever done it).
Hopefully someone else can provide some helpful advice?
ZimaBlade DIY NAS Kit, I seen this it looks pretty good will it be secure and be easy to use?
I know Hardware Haven did an early review on it, he’s usually pretty good (though I have the impression he’s one of the “check out this inexpensive NAS solution I’m using with $10,000 worth of disks I was given as a sponsored deal” crowd 
):
ok after watching that maybe not for me. I will look around for some NAS @300usd and see where I can go from there.
but if anybody has a reccomendation for under 300usd let me know
I have discovered TrueNAS. So I may use the old PC I have for the NAS. I may buy 2 new drives so I can set it all up and once you get the OS installed you can access it through another PC via webpage…
This was I will have an really better NAS then I can buy…
I was wondering tho it stated to use ECC Memory and that is mainly in like Xeon board some celerons worked too.
Would it be possible to build a mini ITX with a Celeron CPU with ECC Memory and be priced under 200usd?? I have a case and can scavenge the PSU from my 2nd PC… just to help keep the price down.
So I would only need the CPU, Mobo and RAM… I have the case, HDD and PSU… thnx
I could be wrong, but I don’t believe TrueNAS requires ECC memory - it’s just highly recommended for servers and storage devices in a commercial environment.
Honestly, I haven’t bothered for my home server - photos and MP3s and video files are pretty tolerant of flipped bits in any case
yes I was just thinking maybe the ECC was needed but I tried it on the PC and I got it working…
TrueNAS is cool but I tried to get it working with just one drive it did not like that idea. so I think I am going to get two 4tb drives from amazon and give it a go and see if I can get this setup before Christmas…
Now sure what my dad will think but he might go for it… it is hell of alot better then the NAS or at least so much cheaper DIY…
Yeah, this is similar to the way I’ve been doing it, and you can tie in cool things like a program that automatically syncs photos out of their phones when they connect to the wifi and all those sorts of things (photoprism and/or immich would allow you to do this).
Basically, since it’s another PC, it can do PC things that you don’t want to have to bother turning the main PC on to do
Do you use True NAS? if so this will probally be the best route sice I am halfway there and I can buy some 6tb HDD and use them and just gift the entire thing and have it plugn’play by christmas…
is photoprism and app for the phone?
I don’t use TrueNAS sorry. I basically brewed my own from Debian. Currently thinking about redoing it in Arch, but that might be too much even for me 
Anything that can get the photos off the phone onto the server will need an app on the phone and also an application running on the server. Which is what Apple is doing with iCloud anyway…
I believe there are app installs for immich at least that you can access from inside TrueNAS - I haven’t done it myself but it sounds easier than setting it up by hand
Yeah but a Samba server and Total Commander (or even the default file manager) on Android does it for me, and I am fairly sure that iPhone file manager can use samba shares as well, maybe even natively.
If you can do that automatically on the device connecting to the wifi, then that’s awesome! It’s been almost a decade since I’ve had an android phone…
No, not automatically. I guess. Never tried tbh, I am old school and prefer the manual way.
Totally fair though … I have to manage my wife and kids phones as well