Why and how I set up a home NAS server
I’m not a photographer or YouTuber, I don’t need to store excessive amounts of multimedia files on fast local storage.
I don’t have a DVD collection that I want to back up.
I’m not really afraid of data loss (yes, I know it does happen, even from cloud services, but I only know two people who’ve lost valuable data in their lifetime).
In spite of all this, I still decided to set up a home NAS server. Bear me for the reasons and technical details!
Why I chose to set up a NAS
My data was all over the place
Over the years, I used different cloud services — Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox and different computers. I had a few files here, a few files there.. I also had a bunch of old photos on my hard drive, some photos on Google Photos, and some of them in iCloud. I needed an impulse to clean that up organize.
I’m slightly worried about disasters
What if cloud provider X goes bankrupt? What if you loose access to your account because Google suddenly says you’re violating their terms of service? These things do happen (example). What if my house gets flooded/burns down? Maybe this is being paranoid, but I just sleep better if I know I have a copy of all my significant data on reliable local storage and some form of cloud backup.
I want a home lab but I’m kind of lazy
Every now and then, I want to run a VM or Docker container to try something out. Sometimes I want to expose it externally, sometimes I don’t. I usually don’t have the right environment on my personal laptop or I don’t have enough free space. I know, I should just pick my favorite cloud of choice. But what if I want to use local hardware? Maybe I’m old school but I think it’s just better to have the capability to run a development environment at home.
How I picked a device
Given the reasons above, I put down the following requirements:
- Cloud integration — the device should have bidirectional cloud sync. And preferably a mobile app to access my data at home.
- Reliability — the device should have disk redundancy (we’ll get back to this in a minute) and come from a reputable vendor.
- Home lab — the device should be able to run VMs/containers.
- I’m lazy — I want to buy a box, connect it to my network, copy data and leave it like that.
Brand choice
Some quick Web searching revealed that if I wanted the features above, I’m basically down to either Synology or QNAP. Some additional Web searching revealed Synology vendor locks their devices to their own drives (although as far as I could tell, their own drives don’t really cost more than NAS grade drives from other manufacturers — a 4TB Synology HAT3300 and a 4TB WD Red Plus cost around 100 USD). UPDATE: at the time of writing this in October 2025, the policy seems to have been reversed). Although some of the reviews I’ve seen seem to favor Synology, I decided to go for QNAP as my vote against vendor lock in.
Device choice
My software engineering education initially backfired on me but eventually saved me. I just thoughtlessly assumed RAID5 is the optimal solution — you only waste 25% of space and you get the performance benefit of disk striping (i.e. data is read/written from multiple drives in parallel). RAID5 requires a minimum of 4 drives. So naturally I started looking at 4 drive models. And I was immediately put off by the prices. A QNAP-464–8G at the time would run me about 750 USD. Adding 4 NAS-grade HDDs (either WD Red Plus or Seagate IronWolf, according to QNAP recommendations) would add an extra 500 USD on top. Do I really want to spend that much? Is my data really that valuable?
How much storage and speed do I really need
I did a quick estimate by looking at the backup folder on my PC, my iCloud and Google Photo usage and multiplied that by 2 for future growth. I totalled around 300 GB. A laughable amount given that in 2025 the sweet spot for HDDs begins around 4 TB (1–2 TB drives go for under 100 USD, 120 USD will give you 4TB, above that the price increases proportionally to size). I then went back to my technology choice. I have a 1 Gigabit network at home. That’s 125 MB/s. The hard drives I considered achieve around 160 MB/s of read and write speed. Do I really need RAID5 to increase this speed? 4K video with HEVC encoding won’t go over 100 Megabits of bitrate. We’re aiming at a total of 1–2 users. The primary use case of this NAS is archiving data. As long as I can smoothly play back videos from it, I don’t care about performance. To that end, RAID1 seems perfectly sufficient. This lets me downscale to a two drive enclosure. QNAP offers an easy way to upgrade the capacity by swapping the drives one by one so even if I do need more storage I should still be good with a two bay device.
What I ended up getting
Eventually, I got a QNAP TS-264–8G and two WD Red Plus 4TB drives, for a total of about 700 USD. I decided to go with the x64 line because:
1. It can be upgraded to QNAP’s newer QutS Hero operating system which uses ZFS instead of Ext4. ZFS checksums and periodically validates your data so hopefully nothing goes bad from just sitting idly on hard drives.
2. It comes with 8 GB RAM and can be expanded to 16 GB with regular DDR4 SODIMM memory modules. I actually did this on the spot because I had an 8GB module lying around from an old laptop.
Setup
Hardware
The hardware installation was as easy as it gets. I slid out the two disk carriages, put in my drives and extra RAM, connected power and Ethernet and turned it on.
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I spent some time thinking where to place the NAS unit. I initially thought about placing it in a Kallax shelf in my office. It occupies about 1/3 of it and I wasn’t really happy with cable management. My second idea was to put it in my TV cabinet (Ikea Besta) and this one worked well. I was slightly concerned it would get too hot with the doors closed but the difference isn’t that huge. The device was 36C out in the room and it’s 43C in the cabinet.
Software
Upgrading to QutS Hero was a bit confusing. The device originally comes with QNAP’s legacy operating system, QTS. It allows you to specify a newer firmware image during setup. It did not accept the QutS Hero image I downloaded from QNAP’s website. Thankfully, QNAP released an official video explaining how to do this. Long story short, you need to initialize the device using QTS, upgrade to the latest firmware version and only then can you reinitialize the device and select QutS Hero. Not the most intuitive but it worked.
QNAP’s setup wizard guides you through basic setup, including setting up MFA, alerts, securing your device and configuring a cloud link (myQNAPcloud). This service currently comes free and allows for accessing volumes (or just individual files) from the NAS remotely. Could be useful the next time I want to share some vacation videos.
Data migration and connecting services
I began by creating a single ZFS storage pool. I don’t really have multiple applications with different performance requirements so this is enough. I then decided to create 3 separate shared folders — one for my personal data, one for photos and one for stuff I might want to share with people externally.
I created an unprivileged user to mount these folders onto my laptop.
First, I copied the “backup” folder from my laptop. This took about 40 minutes during which the NAS delivered a solid 110 MB/s of transfer speed. Fair warning, I made sure to avoid backing up small files (I compressed any legacy Git repos into ZIP archives).
Second, I backed up my iCloud photos. QNAP does not have an official connector for iCloud (3rd party Docker container solutions exist). I just installed the Qfile Pro iOS app and had it upload all my photos from my phone. This took a few hours and left my phone pretty hot, but I ended up with the photos in a neat Year/Month/file structure. I opted for keeping my photos in the native HEIC format instead of running a JPEG conversion. To view these files using QNAPs photo app (QuMagie) you need to purchase a 12 USD one off license from QNAP.
Third, I backed up my Google Photos. I had hoped this would be seamless as QNAP used to offer Google Photos integration, unfortunately this is no longer the case. I ended up using http://takeout.google.com/ to generate a multipart archive and uploaded that to the NAS. Unfortunately this messes up file creation dates. I’ll probably just create a script to fix them based on folder names.
Fourth, since I just got a fresh MacBook, I set up daily file backups using Apple’s Time Machine.
Finally, I decided to set up an offsite backup of the whole NAS. QNAP offers their own cloud storage which is reasonably priced (40 USD/year for 500GB at the time of writing this) but since I have a 1TB One Drive subscription anyway, I decided to use that. In the future I’ll write a script to compare checksums on the NAS against the ones in cloud for additional verification.
All in all, I spent about one evening setting this up and this is what it looks like:
Sensitive data
I keep scans of my most important documents backed up, so it’s only natural I’d keep them on the NAS. QNAP offers their Personal Vault solution but I didn’t really have time to familiarize myself with it. OneDrive also offers one and they admit this is just a password prompt on top of regular OneDrive files. So I decided to use the solution I’ve been using for a long time, which is VeraCrypt. I just keep an encrypted file on the NAS and I need to mount it on my PC whenever I need to access it. I do it a few times a year at most (for tax or medical records) so it’s not that much of an issue.
Final thoughts
So far, everything’s gone to plan.
Qfile Pro backs up photos from my phone whenever I come back home. I can access all of my photos from the last 20 years using the QuMagie phone app, Web app or by just accessing the network drive.
I did manage to push all my personal files to the NAS (although I’m still far from keeping them ordered).
I’m planning to migrate Home Assistant (which I use for smart lights and temperature sensors around the house) from a standalone Raspberry Pi to a Docker container on QNAP. I’ll probably write a follow up regarding the home lab aspect of this device because I didn’t really have time to explore it, outside of just running some containers from the UI.
The only downside of having a NAS at home is that I can sometimes hear it. It’s not annoying. It’s more like a gentle knock on the door from time to time that reminds you of two HDDs in a pretty thin enclosure running 24/7.
What are your thoughts? Do you have a NAS? Are you planning to get one? Or maybe you got rid of yours? Let me know in the comments.
