My DIY NAS Adventure

I&#x27;d be curious to know what the actual NAS performance is like (IOPS, latency, etc).<p>Looked into building a DIY NAS a few years ago, but decided to buy (a Synology DS1618+) instead. I&#x27;m sure I could&#x27;ve saved a few hundred rolling my own, but having purpose build hardware + commercially supported software is worth the cost if it&#x27;s data that you care about (versus something like storage for &#x27;linux iso files&#x27;).<p>I actually had an issue a few months back where my storage pool suddenly degraded and went read only. Was able to send a full diagnostics&#x2F;log dump to Synology, and their support engineers took over to diagnose the issue. If I rolled my own, I&#x27;d be the one spending hours either figuring it out myself while stressing about losing data, and&#x2F;or rebuilding entirely from my offsite backup.

I&#x27;ve looked into using SBCs for a DIY a lot, if you&#x27;re fine with no hotswap and 4 disk then it&#x27;s doable on the cheap. Since I wanted more than 4 drives and hotswap I gave up and ended up looking for a dedicated NAS. The issues with SBCs are usually the adapters you end up using have SATA controllers limited to 4 (or 6 for ASM1166) drives or use SATA port multiplers which reduces performance. For home uses, I don&#x27;t think this matters that much tbh. Adding hotswap is costly due to backplanes and when you have more than 4 disks you run into annoying things like needing more power so you need a real PSU for your SBC. The best solution I though of for this was PicoPSU to keep the size down or FlexATX but the latter adds up in cost. After seeing the size and all these costs add up I just gave up.

I put together a DIY solution, but I like my synology better.