The thing that you will struggle with, doing a roll your own NAS is that rolling your own is only going to be as reliable as you are.

I had a seadrive Linux server set up and I had a bunch of issues with accessibility and software upgrades because it stretched the bounds of what I was capable of. If I went back to that solution now, I would not struggle nearly as much and I would probably run two concurrent instances and transfer files between them instead of trying to upgrade the one live instance.

But I need something consistent for my wife and friends, so I did pick up a Synology 4 bay and loaded it with 4x 8tb drives.

With this thing, extra services beyond the Synology apps are much more simple to configure. Authentication is more consistent, even though I am not using the Synology sign in service.

The server hardware that was hosting Seadrive still has containers and VMs for a web proxy, pihole, my security camera server, qbittorrent-nox. I have a mikrotik router that feeds traffic back and forth.

If none of those things make sense to you even if you look them up, you should use a prebuilt. If you can make a guess how I’m using the things, you might be able to roll your own.

For roll your own, FreeBSD and ZFS on any old desktop with 4 SATA ports is pretty nice and cheap. Built in encryption, NFS, SMB services. Navidrome has install directions for serving music. Pretty secure by default.

If you get a Synology or the like, it’ll work fine as a NAS but be limited as a home server. These things are pretty limited in terms of processing power and they’re ARM based, so that limits what you can run on them. So either you’d have to get a separate server in addition to the NAS or build a server that’ll also work as a NAS.

I use syncthing to sync folders between phone, tablet, desktop and my home server (a NUC).

Then rsync on a schedule from the server to a second off-site server (also a NUC) as backup, connected through zerotier.

I know of truenas, which is a more NAS like solution, but haven’t personally used that.

If you want to do the learning and the work then unraid is a pretty sweet solution. It will be as good as your hardware and has lots of apps and decent forums.

Get a used asustor or synology box on ebay and get the certified refurbished drives that Seagate sells directly. While you can build your own using zfs like others have mentioned to me the cost savings wasn’t worth it. I use mine for backups I don’t want the most important part of my chain to get fucked up because of something I did or didn’t do properly. I went with asustor which has a ton of one click install apps and brain dead easy backup to another asustor I have set up across country at a family members house.

Synology 2-bay gets you everything you want. You shouldn’t need a 4-bay unless you’re sure about your I/O or storage needs.

For your other services, just get them a little minipc. Keep the NAS and compute separate. For the amount of money you’d spend on a 4-bay solution, you can have the above and still have money left over.

IMHO, separate duties… have a NAS for storage and a separate device for “stuff”

And again, IMHO, don’t buy proprietary.

I built my own (Arch linux based) NAS based on an ASRockRack mobo so it has IPMI for remote management and I can power it on /off from Home Assistant.

I’ve setup my NAS to power up in the morning and off later in the day if it’s not in use (based on CPU, I/O, network, etc). It has multiple syncthing daemons running for each person to sync their files from phones and laptops and also has SMB (v3) shares. All on btrfs.

I have a completely separate, low power passively cooled device for Home Assistant, UptimeKuma, Smokeping, Ansible, etc - currently as Proxmox VMs, but I’m considering moving away from that.

Yes, definitely you will get a better deal going with a home made solution here.

Buuuut, there is an important point to highlight: The probability of synology fucking your data up is much lower than the average selfhoster. Unless you already know almost perfectly pros, cons, and how to solve problems without a data loss, you are not better than the average.

As an example, I went with a synology box even if I consider myself better than the average because the data in my nas is extremely (but really extremely) important to me and my wife. And the price was a reasonable fine in order to keep that data safe.

So, evaluate yourself : if. The data is really important and you are not a really good sysadmin then go with a professional solution. If not then go in DIY solution and learn in the process.

Just my two cents

NAS are essentially small computers made for connecting a lot of storage and with a fancy OS that can be configured with a browser.

So the real question between the NAS or a custom build is how much time do you want to spend being a sysadmin. NAS mostly work out of the box, you can configure them to autoupdate and get notification only when something important happens. While with a custom build everything is completely on your own. Are you already familiar with some linux distribution? How much do you want to learn?

Once you answer the previous question, the next is about the power. To store files on the network you don’t need any big CPU, on the contrary, you may want something small that doesn’t cost too much in electricity. But you mentioned you want to stream video. If you need transcoding (because you have a chromcast that wants only video in a specific format for example) you need something more powerful. If you stream only to computer there is no need for transcoding because they can digest any format, so anything will work.

After this you need to decide how much space you need, and what type. NMVE are faster, but spinning HD were still more reliable (and cheaper per TB) last time I checked. Also, do you want some kind of raid? RAID1 is the bare minimum to protect you from a disk failure, but you need twice as much disks to store the same amount of data. RAID5 is more efficient but you need at least 3 disks. Said so, remember that RAID is not backup. You still need a backup for important stuff.

My honest suggestion is to start experimenting with your raspberry and see what you need. Likely it will fit already most of your needs, just attach an external HD and configure samba shares. I don’t do any automated backup, but I know that syncthing and Syncthing-Fork are very widely used tools. On linux you can very easily use rsync in a crontab.

If you want an operating system that offers you an out of the box experience more similar to a commercial NAS you can check FreeNAS. I personally started with a QNAP and have been happy for years, but after starting self hosting some stuff I wanted more flexibility so I decided to change to a TerraMaster where I installed a plain Debian and I’m happy with it, but it definitely requires more knowledge and patience to configure and administrate it.

I bought myself the asrock N100 itx mainboard with ram and drives. Thought that it’s super simple.

I’m now fighting with issues since June. The machine is always freezing after 2 days runtime. Just recently found out that it’s probably the ram stick even though I explicitly bought a stick on the mb compatibility list. Will take probably two more weeks until I get a replacement. I couldn’t use it as NAS in the meantime since I couldn’t be sure that my data is safe.

In my case that’s ok since I’m not dependent on it. You should consider if this level of jank is ok for you.

Otherwise go for the „expensive“ 2/4 bay nas where you can just return the whole thing in case something breaks and you don’t need to find out which component is faulty. Have it running reliably otherwise, with software etc set up for you. I underestimated the time investment.

I wouldn’t go with an N100 machine, they’re old and only just barely good enough for NAS/media serving, and if you want more out of it, you’ll have to replace it.

If you have an old PC laying around, use that. That way you’re not out much if you hate DIY, but it’ll probably be a lot more powerful than any NAS you would buy. I used my old gaming PC (1st gen Ryzen) and it’s working great! If you hate it, you can move the drives into whatever other device you buy.

If you don’t have anything you can reuse, buy something used. Look for a local surplus sale or something, you can probably get a machine for $50-100 with enough space to put your drives in.