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Yes, a small Synology NAS (DS220j) with 2 4tb drives.
Accessible from PC and Mac at home.
Worth it ? depends on your usage.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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Franc Morales wrote: Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN?
One of my company's servers (our only remaining physical server) resides here in my home office. The current h/w (excluding SSDs) is around 13 years old and still works great.
Roles:
0: File Server - All development projects/files/documents are kept here.
1: Web/FTP Server - This server hosts one of the main company web sites as well as a half-dozen web company use web apps, a few customer web apps, and a dozen or so demonstration web apps.
2: Database Server - SQL Server/MySQL including SSRS
3: Mail Server
Franc Morales wrote: If so, is it worth it?
In recent years, we have moved most of the customer web apps to an Azure VM. At this point, I'm weighing the options of replacing the aging on-premise server or moving it all to the cloud.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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Small Synology NAS (DS213j) configured with mirrored (RAID 1?) 4TB WD drives.
Worth it for me - for now. It's setup as a Plex server for media plus storage of quite a bit of data.
The data is slowly being migrated to cloud storage where possible.
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I might add that one might want to be aware of SMR (slower write times) versus CMR drives when it comes to NAS or server drives, if you are going to be writing large amounts of data. Some vendors are using SMR which is slower. I use the plus drives from one of the manufacturers, supposed to be CMR. I think most, if not all, drives 6TB+ are CMR. There was much ado about this on truenas, it seems the zfs file system does not get along well with SMR drives. Don't know what file system Synology uses, never looked. We have a large one at a clients site, been running for 4 or 5 years without problems. I get an email from it every month, telling me it is happy.
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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Synology also does not like SMR drives, slows down writing a lot.
It doesn't help that some vendors were selling SMR drives as 'For use in NAS'.
I found all this out when trying to repopulate a donated Synology NAS with drives from my spares, and finding most of them were SMR.
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SMR never should have been marketed to consumers at all. For datacenter scale write once archival storage it's limitations don't matter. Anywhere else they can be crippling at times.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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Throwing a different hat into the ring, I have a custom built mini-ITX with 2x 8TB hard-drives installed. It runs on Ubuntu and uses mergerfs to create a custom mount point which Ubuntu reads as one drive. Planning on buying 2 more at some point, creating a second merged mount and use rsync to keep everything backed up!
Love the little thing, running Docker containers and has a GTX 1050 Ti for transcoding my media files 
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Yes. we have a windows 7 desktop that sit there at a static lan ip and is the central store for many things.
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Yes. we have a windows 7 desktop that sit there at a static lan ip and is the central store for many things. Including hosing a Home Automation stack that bridges some old x10 devices I have into the "alexa" pool of IOT devices scattered about.
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Ron Anders wrote: Including hosing a Home Automation stack that bridges...
Sorry to hear.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Yes. I have an old Windows 10 box loaded with several drives and using "storage spaces" to provide data duplication. I use it as a file server and backup device for several laptops and the wife's desktop. One advantage storage spaces has over RAID is that the drives don't have to be the same size. I think that Synology have a similar system on their latest 4 drive NAS's.
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Me too - Win10 box with Storage Spaces. Around 3TB total with main folders for "official files" (an "office drive"), music, videos, software, sw dev projects. Been working just fine for years. The server gets backed up to an external drive daily. I do periodic ZIPs of the folders and copy them to DropBox for an offsite backup but I will probably look for a more automated solution soon.
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My router got 2 USB3 ports and an SMB server so setting up a file server wasn't an expensive ordeal.
I am pretty sure something more dedicated would yield more performance, but that doesn't matter for my use case.
That use case being first and foremost backups. Regular, background backup jobs. My second use case is using this heap of backup as a UPnP server (which the router also provides) so my media collection is readily available while the main PC is not running.
But backups alone are IMHO worth it.
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Several, all Linux based.
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
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I had a cheap NAS to store family files, especially photos and videos. But, in the process of getting everybody their own laptops, I neglected to store copies for a while and regularly back it up, the NAS crashed, and we lost about 4 years of photos. So now, I simply keep such things in a backup USB drive and chips. No more NAS for me.
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I have an old headless system with front hot-swappable drive bays, running Windows 7 and a bunch of file shares. I keep referring to it as my home NAS--which is undoubtedly a misnomer, but that's exactly how it's used.
Whether it's "worth it" depends on how you use it. I mostly use it to host files that would otherwise be spread across the Downloads and Documents folders of a bunch of individual machines. I try to avoid that and dump everything onto the system with the file share.
It's also my installer archive. New machine needs an app or an ISO of a CD/DVD? With proper organization, that I've worked out over decades, I can find just about anything within 10 seconds just browsing the file system. Windows Search is slower than that.
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I have my own server in my home-office.
Its a great assist in testing development for client-server or web applications...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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I assume you've gone over the arguments for why you might even need a server. There are many ways to add storage and to share storage over the network that don't involve a dedicated server. I'd like to toss in that having a dedicated server in some sort of RAID configuration that can recover from the catastrophic failure of a single drive does NOT mean you don't need to do backups. You can lose all the data on any kind of server either from some sort of physical catastrophe (fire, flood, earthquake) or from external attack (ransom ware). The only way to recover from those things is to have offline, preferably offsite, backups.
I had a WDC MyCloud EX2 for many years. Two 4GB HDDs, mirrored, for 4GB of usable storage. It was adequate for holding bulk data that was not used a lot (videos, etc.), data that I wanted to share on the network independent of any of the computers, and daily online backups of all my computers. It was slow and only had room for two hard drives. But it was inexpensive. I ultimately out-grew that device and recently upgraded to a Synology DS920+ with four 4GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration for 12GB of usable storage. The Synology is much faster and more capable (lots more optional and add-on features). But it was expensive and had a steeper learning curve for taking full advantage of it.
You can get a MyCloud for under $400 with disks included. If you want something more capable with slots for more disks, I'd recommend one of the Synology servers. In that case, you're looking at somewhere around $1200 and up. If you feel so inclined and think it's within your abilities, building your own server from an older computer you have lying around is probably the cheapest way to go. You don't need a lot of processing power or memory for a server. But pulling all the components together to make it work is time consuming.
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