Anybody have hosted NAS on AWS or Raspberry Pi? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CYCLONOUS_69 · 2023-10-10 09:05 Hi all! This is my first question in this subreddit. I new to selfhosting things and I'm on low budget as an Indian. Does anybody have hosted NAS on AWS or Raspberry Pi? I'm literally fed-up with storage getting hogged up on my current SSDs and HDDs. I'm looking to for Raspberry Pi 4 to host FileCloud as NAS but I don't know if it is good option or not. Also, I have looked into Google One 2TB plan but it's way to expensive for me and I don't trust Google or Microsoft much either. If anyone have hosted on either of these platform or anywhere else, I'm happy to know about your experiance and use-cases. Any advice would be appriciated. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- paanthastha · 2023-10-10 09:29 I hosted Nextcloud and Syncthing on a RPi 4 1 GB. It would struggle at times. So I moved the setup to an old desktop computer that I had. And things are fine now. I have also hosted Nextcloud on AWS EC2. It gives you 30 GB in the free tier I think. You can weigh in your options. But I am with you on staying away from Google. Amazon is no different, but by hosting on a correctly configured and/or encrypted EC2 instance one can keep the data out of Amazon's reach. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thekrautboy · 2023-10-10 09:33 Look for a used MiniPC/Thinclient instead, you can usually catch 6th Gen Intel models with 8GB RAM very very cheap. And for the price of a Raspi you can probably find 8th Gen Intel with 16GB RAM. Search for brands like Lenovo, Dell and HP. Also look at used Intel NUCs or NUC- likes from other brands, you can get them brand new with much better hardware than a Raspi4 would be. The days were a Raspi was the go-to device for cheap and efficient selfhosting are sadly long over, and even with supply now getting better, the prices for a decent Pi are just too high for what it delivers. Also you are possibly running into limitations of the ARM chipset at some point when your favorite project doesnt provide a compatible Docker image. This sub is about selfhosting **software services**, not about any hardware purchase or upgrade advice. Consider subs like /r/Homelab /r/HomelabSales /r/HomeServer etc instead. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CYCLONOUS_69 · 2023-10-10 10:25 Thank you for your help. I'll go around the market for MiniPC as it makes more sense and easy to use for me too. Yes, as you said pricing is very different from region to region. I'll consider those subs more too. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ScandinavianWays · 2023-10-10 11:01 I host a NAS on a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB with OpenMediaVault. Since I'm the only one using it, it works for me. For storage I just use a portable HDD connected to the USB Port. I only use it for Plex. I have been looking to switching it out for a Synology NAS. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dazchad · 2023-10-10 11:04 If you intend to host on a cloud provider, keep in mind the bandwidth cost is high. They usually include a few GB for free, though, but not nearly enough if you want to host movies, personal or otherwise. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ramank775 · 2023-10-10 11:11 Instead of raspberry pi, you can use mini-pc . One with i5 7 gen with 8 gb of Ram will cost you around 7K-8K in Delhi Nehru place ( but if you known someone there price can go down to 5K-6K) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ItsPwn · 2023-10-10 11:22 you can self host g with Synology using open source boot loader /r/xpenology https://github.com/AuxXxilium/arc/releases most pc/laptops work ,even old Celeron garbage ---------------------------------------------------------------------- umataro · 2023-10-10 11:29 I have a rpi4 with two 18TB disks in a USB dock. Raspbian OS + ZFS. My one recommendation is that you don't upgrade firmware or kernel beyond normal `apt-get upgrade`. If you diverge from standard OS, be prepared for dkms to fail to compile zfs module. (kernel-headers seem to lag behind new kernels by a few days) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- StabbingHobo · 2023-10-10 12:07 I have a similar setup. I use a compute module with an I/O card for SATA connections and four HDD drives in a 3D printed cage. It’s a bit janky looking but the setup is sound and has been rock solid. I only use it for Plex and local backups, however I’ve been considering setting up a backup solution for phone photos via Photoprism. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- imx3110 · 2023-10-10 12:32 Yes, I have done those exact same things in the past. I hosted 3 hard disk drives for myself, friends and family to use as NAS. Here is my advice: \- Don't use AWS. AWS has a free tier bandwidth cap of 100 GB. Which you can easily blow through and then get stuck with a huge bill. You can use Oracle Free which gives a 10 TB cap, but Oracle can and does shut down your account for trivial and vague reasons. And it feels impossible to create a OCI account from India. Their Address Verification Service does not like Indian Bank Cards due to stricter card regulations in India. \- Raspberry PI is not able to support external HDDs all that well due to the power draw. Either use SATA SSDs (They draw the least power) or invest in a powered USB Hub. ​ \- Raspberry PI 3 when I used it gave me around 40-60 Mbps throughput via ethernet, while Raspberry PI 4 can saturate my 100 Mbps connection. ​ \- Powercuts are a major issue in India and can corrupt your hard disk if Raspberry Pi is currently writing to it. Either invest in a power bank that supports passthrough charging & power the Raspberry Pi through it, or add UPS in the setup. (My setup: I added a [powered USB Hub](https://www.amazon.in/TP-Link-TL-UH700-7-Port-USB- Black/dp/B00LI4O9EA/) which took 12v input. Then I added a [RouterUPS](https://www.amazon.in/Cuzor-Router-Switching-Moisture- Resistant/dp/B07ZKD8T1Q) to power it. Then I used the Hub to power my Raspberry Pi, and my Hard Disks. ) ​ \- For access outside of your network, you can use [tailscale](https:/ /tailscale.com/)/[zerotier](https://www.zerotier.com/).- Make liberal use of Docker & Docker Compose, it's the easiest to take backups of and redeploy in case anything crashes. Just zip up the docker-compose folder housing the yml & config files, upload it and you're done. This is important as the SD cards do fail in Raspberry Pi. ​ \- Try to setup separate backups for your NAS Hard disks for sensitive data. The [3-2-1 backup strategy](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/) is the one that is recommended. ​ \- If you want pure NAS, you can use OpenMediaVault, If you need interface similar to Google Drive, use either Owncloud Infinite Scale, Owncloud or Nextcloud. Owncloud has less features but generally felt more stable across updates compared to Nextcloud. ​ \- If you want to expose UI, you can use Cloudflare tunnels inside docker as well. It has the added benefit of not needing any port forwarding. Disable Cloudflare caching if serving large files (Movies etc) so as to not run afoul of their T&C. \- Setup swap space and monitor memory usage if using RPi. The No.1 reason for Raspberry Pi hangups in my experience has been Out of Memory errors. RPi does not setup any swap space by default and just freezes if it's out of memory. Swap space does not solve this problem but does mitigate it a tiny bit. (Server still responds to ping and you can gracefully restart it after seeing the logs) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- angerofmars · 2023-10-10 13:47 I built my own NAS with an Intel J1900 SoC board, added 8gb of memory and a 32Gb ssd boot drive with Synology DSM7 on it. Costed me less than $80. The pricey part is the storage, depends on how big you want to go. I decided to add 4x Seagate Constellation 16Tb for mine since I got a good deal on them, but you'll do just fine with cheap 1-2tb drives. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lorax-06 · 2023-10-10 20:17 I have a NAS setup with 4, 4TB WD Red drives running in a TerraMaster D4-300 connected to a raspberry pi 4 with 8G. It has lots of extra resources so it's running a few dockers too. I will probably migrate my nextcloud installation to it, but I havent done it yet. I started trying to use openmediavault, but wound up configuring via cli. There are a lot of tutorials for mdadm. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CYCLONOUS_69 · 2023-10-10 22:50 Yeah, I found out by using AWS calculator. Also cheapest option is Cold HDD (sc1) option for $1.18 for 125GB/month only. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CYCLONOUS_69 · 2023-10-10 22:52 That's the goal. Having control over your data is priority for me. I opened a new AWS account with new credit card details and address but still it didn't give me free tier at all whereas my friend got one with his new and old account too, idk why and how. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CYCLONOUS_69 · 2023-10-10 23:27 1. I tried opening new and second acc on AWS for free tier but I didn't get one for some reason even with new credit card info, address. My friend used the same address, different credit card and he got new account with free tier. So for trying and testing purposes, AWS is out of question as I'm on thin budget. I know how Oracle operates in terms of "free" options so that door is already closed by me. 2. I will look into powered USB hub setup as SSDs are still fairly expensive for me. Also, thinking about using Surveillance HDDs are those are somewhat cheaper than NAS HDDs and I don't need much throughput either. 3. Currently looking into Raspberry Pi 4 Model-B with 4GB RAM varient. I have 100 Mbps connection on both links so that is covered. 4. I have inverter backup which is fairly suffient for all my appliences and it can run my current RTX 3080 build without any issues for an hour or so. So considering without using PC, the backup runs for 12 hr pretty easily. Also, it has low switching latency similer to an UPS. 5. I used to use ZeroTier on daily basis. I'll look into it more and into tailscale too. Also, using Docker on RPi looks interesting. Will have to take a look into it. 6. 3-2-1 backup strategy looks good. Never knew untill now. It'll be pretty handy as I do have sensitive docs and files, storing those away from old PC with old hardware will ease burden on me. 7. Still researching on overall good NAS for my usecase. The UI and setup should be easy to use for my family which is my main target. 8. Immich looks good. 9. Thanks for the swap storage tip. Overall thank you for the thorough insight!