I currently have a 10-year old off-the-shelf NAS (Synology) that needs replacing soon. I haven’t done much with it other than the simple things I mention later, so I still consider myself a novice when it comes to NAS, servers, and networking in general, but I’ve been reading a bit lately (which lead my to this sub). For a replacement I’m wondering whether to get another Synology, use an open source NAS/server OS, or just use a Windows PC. Windows is by far the OS I’m most comfortable with so I’m drawn to the final option. However, I regularly see articles and forum posts which frown upon the use Windows for NAS/server purposes even for simple home-use needs, although I can’t remember reading a good explanation of why. I’d be grateful for some explanations as to why Windows (desktop version) is a poor choice as an OS for a simple home NAS/server.
Some observations from me (please critique if any issues in my thinking):
- I initially assumed it was because Windows likely causes a high idle power consumption as its a large OS. But I recently measured the idle power consumption of a celeron-based mini PC running Windows and found it to be only 5W, which is lower than my Synology NAS when idle. It seems to me that any further power consumption savings that might be achieved by a smaller OS, or a more modern Synology, would be pretty negligible in terms of running costs.
- I can see a significant downside of Windows for DIY builds is the cost of Windows license. I wonder is this accounts for most of the critique of Windows? If I went the Windows route I wouldn’t do a DIY build. I would start with a PC which had a Windows OEM licence.
- My needs are very simple (although I think probably represent a majority of home user needs). I need device which is accessible 24/7 on my home network and 1) can provide SMB files shares, 2) act as a target for backing up other devices on home network, 3) run cloud backup software (to back itself up to an off-site backup location) and, 4) run a media server (such as Plex), 5) provide 1-drive redundancy via RAID or a RAID-like solution (such as Windows Storage Spaces). It seems to me Windows is fine for this and people who frown upon Windows for NAS/server usage probably have more advanced needs.
For me, #1 is license costs. I’ve taken home some servers which would require me to buy 4+ windows server licenses because 16 physical cores is a number for entry-level servers at this point. For the cost of those licenses, I could almost buy a new server with a similar amount of cores every single year.
Second, the brand new filesystem, ReFS, (which needs licenses), has just about caught up to what ZFS had in 2005. The biggest omission is that 2005 ZFS could be your root filesystem. This is less important on *nix systems where your root can be tiny, but windows insists on storing tons of stuff on C, which still needs to be NTFS. ZFS also has 22 years of production testing and still has lots of development.
Third, I want to use containers, and windows uses a Linux VM to do that, so why not skip the middle man?
For server:
docker is linux in a jailed namespace (network, filesystem, process tree, etc jail)
Docker hosted on linux is efficient.
Docket hosted on anything else less so.Never been a better time to try Linux. Ubuntu is pretty easy to get started with (download and setup a bootable USB, stick it and go) and ChatGPT is extremely good about walking you through any questions. You don’t even need to ask highly technical questions, just tell it your goal and your system.
“I just installed Ubuntu 22.04 on my computer and want to SSH into it from a Windows computer on my network, how do I do that?”
“I want to download a file from my Ubuntu command line, how do I do that?”
“I want to setup a share that both Windows and Linux computers can access over my network, how do I do that?”
“I have a github action runner provided by github that includes a run.sh file that needs to run constantly. I want to setup as a background service on my Ubuntu Linux computer so it will always be running as long as the computer is on, how can I do that?”
It will spit out every command line you need in what order, contents of a .service file, tell you how to monitor it, and so on. You can ask it what each line does, what the parameters mean, etc. It’s like having a mid-level sys admin at your fingertips. It will interpret any errors you get, and tell you how to fix them.
Perfect? Maybe not, but its close for a remarkable variety of tasks. It may be, and I’m not joking, 20 times more productive and time efficient than Google searches, reading stackoverflow posts, reading documentations/man pages and trying to decipher what you really need out of any of those sources.
I’m sure some are too paranoid to ask ChatGPT certain things for privacy reasons, and I would anonymize anything you paste in, probably just be a bit mindful of anything involving permissions (you can also ask what security risks exist doing something). Just normal ChatGP3.5 (free) is extremely knowledgeable about Linux CLI and administration along with common packages and apps you’d want to use.
Windows 10 starts to behave weirdly after like 60 days of uptime. USB devices are not detected, drivers randomly restart, …
Linux just runs…
Also Win 10 installs updates more or less randomly…
End User Windows has a shit history with forcing updates on you and reboots just because you waited to long.
End User Windows is also not great at managing large numbers of storage drives.
They also aren’t great to manage remotely.
Because when you start trying to run actual services, the home-user side of it is going to kick in and make is unreasonably difficult to do simple things such as creating a fileshare, managing permissions, getting your services to work through a firewall, etc. All things which are typically just simple text file configs in Linux, or just a few simple commands.
However if you do persevere and get everything working, it’s not going to last. Windows is going to decide what’s best for you and you will be left trying to figure out what settings were wiped or reverted to default when Windows updated itself without asking.
And then if youre running a server where you want performance, stability, and security, you don’t want extra crap running because all those other services that you absolutely don’t need will start interfering with the services that you do need. Linux VMs or containers on a hypervisor are very popular because you can spin up multiple lightweight instances of the OS to perform a single or limited set of functions. So if something breaks, that breakage doesn’t spill over to the other instances. With Windows, you’d have to spin up a 10GB+ instance each time for this approach because you’d have so much extra stuff you do not need.
SMB only (There is/was a way to make Windows do NFS, but it sucked.)
License cost. The desktop versions of windows (used to?) have a limit on concurrent SMB sessions in order to force users to buy the server version and pay for CALs. No idea how any of that works now.
NTFS is kind of a shitty filesystem.
Limited (native) backup options. No tape support, for example.
Management effectively requires GUI access.
No native way to mirror the OS drive in software. You need either a hardware RAID card (LSI, etc.) or that stupid Intel BIOS RAID thing.
These may or may not be issues for OP, but they are issues for many.
Lots of great responses here, I won’t reiterate what everyone has already explained. The big benefits imo are redundancy using better file systems like ZFS (Truenas) or BTRFS (Synology, unraid), and in general better management of the drives, and data stored on them. These appliances support more robust raid configs as well, so you have a lot less risk losing data. The other big one is simplicity for what you need it to do. Creating an SMB share on a PC using windows isn’t hard, but it’s not nearly as simple as the 3 clicks it takes on the purpose built OS. These OSs also usually have built in solutions for hosting any other apps you may also want to play with. That’s just my two cents.
I sit in r/datahoarder a lot and the general consensus is that BTRFS is unstable and should not be used, and instead people should use EXT4 or ideally ZFS. I know ZFS is the gold standard and expected to be more resource intensive and RAM hungry. Can you shed some light on why you’d use BTRFS?
I am by no means an expert, mostly a home tinkerer with a Plex server. I use BTRFS because my Synology supports it and I use ZFS on my Truenas box. I also use SHR with my Synology so BTRFS makes adding and upgrading drives really flexible as my media library grows. BTRFS and ZFS are very feature rich, as you mentioned ZFS is very RAM hungry which can be a limitation for people just looking to get into the server space on a budget. I think the instability of BTRFS comes from the way it stores data, it can get very fragmented. EXT4 in comparison is pretty boring but it works well and if you’re just writing data to store it you might not need the features and overhead of the other file systems. Personally I have no real preference, I like my Synology and I like my Truenas machine and as a hobbyist they both serve me well, and I would take either over NTFS for a storage appliance.
Simple, the SMB connection limit in Windows Pro editions (7,8,10,11) is 20. In previous editions it was 10, and I can’t find a reliable number for the non-pro editions.
That may sound like a lot, but if you have lots of devices reading/writing to it, you’ll quickly run out. It’s also kind of a resource hog when there are lightweight and easy to setup dedicated NAS operating systems with no user limitations for free like TrueNAS (fka FreeNAS) and others.
Given that you’re “most comfortable” with windows is probably the number one reason why you should go with something other than Windows. I think you should always get out of your comfort zone and expand your knowledge. Sure you can keep using windows but why but branch out! Hell if you really want to take a leap of faith load up TrueNAS core 🤣
You could run desktop Windows but if you get the Pro version then you can RDP into from your desktop/laptop. It makes administering it very easy, like working on it locally. .
Personally, I run Ubuntu Server (took a little learning) which I choose to run on Proxmox. You can just run on bare metal. I then just install the media-related packages I use : plex, Sonarr, radarr, SAbnzbd etc
Not that I encourage it, but home users seldom pay MSRP for Windows licenses or at all. Getting around the licensing while ridiculously unlikely to get you busted is a hassle.
The answer is there’s just better options you can install on top of Linux or BSD that are easier to manage, a better experience (nice web panels and not an RDP GUI or clunky thick client) and they have 0 licensing concerns to pay or work around.
I wouldn’t host a share directly from the Linux CLI for some reason I always found this to be kind of a pain but it works, there’s easy solutions like TrueNAS or OpenMediaVault, container based options and you can take the cowards way out with Portainer (that’s what I do) to run tons of really lightweight services.
Windows is fine just not the best unless you’re doing something that works better or needs it
It’s not frowned upon, it’s just not made for it. It’s made for desktop use. It’s also more unreliable/unstable, just ran into some problems yesterday after updates. You DO NOT have to pay for a license however. The only features of windows you lack (afaik) on an unlicensed install is desktop customization and some kind of remote access that I have never used myself. Docker and VMs will work equally well on windows.
Don’t be discouraged from using a dedicated NAS operating system though, there are a lot of videotutorials and documentation. Worst case scenario you wipe it and start over with windows.
If you run only system resources, or task manager, or whatever windows is calling their resource manager these days to monitor CPU, right next to a headless debian server running only htop you will straight up see the answer to your question.
That, is overhead.
Short answer: desktop versions are tuned for application performance, especially foreground vs. background, while server versions are tuned for, well, being used as a server, multitasking being less performance-penalizing for background applications (like server daemons/servelets) and of course greater uptime.
There’s also much more bloat on the desktop side, as it’s targeting consumers and not IT.