Here’s Why I Built My Own NAS With Unraid and an eBay Server Instead of Buying a Synology

I needed a lot of storage for home media, photos, videos, documents, and more. Instead of buying an extremely expensive Synology server, I went an entirely different route and built my own storage server for a fraction of the cost.

Buying a Large Capacity NAS Isn’t Cheap

While there are some budget-friendly NAS setups out there, those wanting a larger capacity or number of drives are left spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on hardware alone. Consider this 12-bay Synology server with just 16GB of RAM and an Xeon processor. It costs $3,000 at the time of writing.

Sure, it has two 10Gbps Ethernet ports and is pre-built and ready to go. But it’s still $3,000. That doesn’t even include any storage, either!

Purchasing a pre-built, brand-new NAS that can handle lots of drives can become very expensive very quickly. But what if I told you it didn’t have to be that way?

A few years ago, and again just recently, I needed a large-capacity storage server. While my old 4-bay Synology server was doing the job just fine on a smaller scale, I needed more. That’s when I decided to ditch the pre-built systems and go an entirely different route.

Used Server Hardware Is Relatively Affordable on eBay

Instead of buying a crazy-expensive pre-built NAS like the above Synology, I took to eBay to find an older, enterprise-grade rack-mount server. These units are typically pulled out of data centers when a company upgrades to a new server, and sold on the second-hand market.

For instance, at the time of writing, you can get a Dell R730xd server with 12 3.5-inch hard drive bays, 64GB DDR4 ECC RAM, two 6-core Xeon processors, dual 10Gbps Ethernet, and a host of upgradability for $470 shipped on eBay.

Already, the Dell server is meeting or exceeding the specs of the Synology at 1/6th the cost.

The crazy part is that the Dell server will only use slightly more power than the Synology. The Synology ships with a 550W power adapter, and the Dell has a 750W power supply. However, the Dell will be quite a bit louder and take up a lot more space than the Synology. These are things that should be taken into consideration when looking at enterprise-grade hardware. However, the noise level and size are not always the drawbacks that they seem.

While enterprise-grade hardware may use more electricity than smaller, desktop-based NAS systems, you have to consider how much more power the rack-mounted server has to offer. While I already mentioned fan noise, if you have a separate room or basement that houses your networking stack already, that might also not be as big of a deal.

It’s a good thing to keep in mind, though, that a server like the Dell R730xd costs $2,500 less than the Synology DS3622xs+. With this in savings, even if the Dell server costs $20 more per month to run (which it likely wouldn’t), it would take you 125 months before the cost difference is made up there. That’s over 10 years.

In reality, the Dell R730xd and the Synology DS3622xs+ will use about the same amount of power to run a similar number of drives. The only time that the Dell would likely draw more power is if you had lots of RAM in it and were doing lots of processor-intensive tasks — tasks that the Synology simply wouldn’t be capable of doing anyway.

Personally, I have a few enterprise-grade servers in my server rack, all of which are filthy and really need to be cleaned. But, that’s a project for another day.

My first server was the Lenovo RD440 70AF, which is a 12-bay 3.5-inch server that functions as my primary storage server. Then, I added three Dell servers to the stack. A Dell R710 (which sits powered off right now), an R720 (which I use as my application server), and the R720xd (which is my second storage server).

Overall, between my primary and secondary storage servers, I have 97TB of available storage after parity. This allows me to keep all of my photos and videos backed up, all of my other media locally stored, and a lot more. Plus, with the application server, which has 192GB of RAM, 20 cores, and 40 threads, I can run as many virtual machines and services as I want.

Enterprise-Grade Servers Offers a Ton of Benefits Over a Desktop NAS

If we were to look at the comparison of the processors between the two servers I’m talking about here, the Dell server comes with two Xeon E5-2620 V3 CPUs, each having six cores and 12 threads. The Synology comes with a single 6-core, 12-thread Xeon D-1531. While Synology’s processor is a few years newer, a single processor in the Dell server has more power. But, you don’t just get one processor in the Dell, you get two.

In addition to more powerful processors, instead of a measly 16GB of RAM that comes stock in the Synology, you’ll get 64GB in the Dell, with the ability to put up to 768GB of RAM in it if you ever need to upgrade. The Synology might come with 16GB but maxes out at 48GB. So, even fully kitted out, the Synology can’t touch the power that the Dell delivers.

You’ll also get six full-size and half-height PCIe slots with the Dell, while the Synology only comes with a single PCIe slot to use. Both servers already have 10Gbps networking so that you can use a PCIe slot for any number of things. Faster networking is one, PCIe storage is another or even a GPU for transcoding media. Plus, the Dell has two 2.5-inch HDD/SSD bays in the back for two additional storage drives.

It’s also possible to expand the 12 bays of the R730xd (or any other enterprise-grade server) with something called a disk shelf. For instance, this NetApp DS4246 24-bay disk shelf adds 24 3.5-inch drives to your server over a few SAS cables. For $440 shipped, an option like this is a fraction of the cost of buying Synology’s first-party expansion system. However, keep in mind you’ll need an HBA (host bus adapter) card to plug the SAS cables between the disk shelf and the server.

The Synology DX1222, which adds 12 additional bays to a compatible server, costs $1,100. By going with a pre-built Synology, you’d be spending $4,100 to get 24 total bays of storage, 16GB of RAM, and a single 6-core 12-thread processor with one PCIe slot. All-in with the Dell, you’d be under $1,000 for 36 3.5-inch bays, two 2.5-inch bays, 64GB of RAM, dual 6-core 12-thread processors, and six PCIe slots.

The capabilities (and price) of a rack-mounted server are simply unbeatable when it comes to using enterprise-grade hardware instead of pre-built desktop systems as NAS.

This singular fact is why I ditched the pre-built NAS I had and decided to grab a rack-mount server off eBay instead. I wouldn’t change my decision one bit, either.

Unraid Turns Your Server Into a User-Friendly DIY NAS

One benefit of buying a Synology (or any pre-built NAS, for that matter) is that it comes with the operating system preloaded and ready to go out of the box. An enterprise-grade server requires you to install your own operating system.

That’s where Unraid comes in. Personally, before running my own rack-mount servers, I was a huge Synology fan. I love DSM, and I also love SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID). With SHR, you can mix and match hard drive sizes and get a combined total of storage from all the drives but one. Unraid does a very similar thing, and that’s why I choose to run it on both of my storage systems.

With Unraid, the largest drive in your array becomes the parity drive, and the rest of your storage is made up of the combined total of drives under parity. You can mix and match the storage drives here, making for easy expansion as your server grows.

My primary 70TB storage server has a 12TB drive as the parity, then a mixture of 8TB, 6TB, and 4TB drives to make up the 70TB. My 27TB storage server is 10 3TB drives, as that’s how I purchased it. But, in the future, I plan to pick up a 12TB or larger drive to swap in as my parity so that way I can start to upgrade the drives one by one to a larger capacity.

Unraid also makes setting up shares super simple. You can create one master share for all of your files or break it down into multiple shares. There’s also full Docker support, as well as the ability to run virtual machines. I personally used my Lenovo RD440 system for about three years as my exclusive server for all of my services and files.

Related

The 8 Easiest Ways to Share Files Between Linux and Windows

From SFTP to Samba to HTTP servers, you have plenty of options.

It only got retired to files only when I picked up the additional servers. Unraid is an extremely capable, simple-to-use NAS operating system, and I highly recommend you check it out for your network-attached storage server.

At the end of the day, for me, it just made sense to go with a rack-mount server instead of a pre-built NAS. It’s far more affordable, easier to expand, and a lot more capable than the alternative. I don’t see myself ever purchasing a pre-built NAS again. It’ll be retired enterprise-grade hardware for me from here on out.