First NAS draft.

Author: lostluck

content/posts/2025-01-04-nas.md

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+---
+title: "I'm Considering a NAS"
+date: 2025-01-04T15:39:40-08:00
+tags: [photography, nas, jococruise]
+categories: [Photography]
+slug: considering-a-nas
+---
+
+I'm thinking of building a [NAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage).
+
+<!--more-->
+
+Primarily for photo backup purposes.
+
+Over the last few years, I got into photography, but ultimately I've been
+stalled in improving.
+
+The root issue, is while I like taking pictures, composing, framing them, I don't seem
+to enjoy editing them as much.
+
+It's ultimately a problem of organization. I don't have space.
+
+Once I get going on culling them, it's not so bad, but I'm not quick about it.
+So the problem recurs.
+
+In effect, I need to be more ruthless in that regard, in getting the pictures 
+off of the SD cards and onto one of my computers' harddrives. But ultimately, I
+don't delete the bad photos quickly enough, which makes them accumulate on the 
+active hard drives.
+
+This sort of came to a head on the 2024 JoCoCruise. I once again too too many
+photos, and then they fill up the harddrive, which means I can't take pictures
+off the cards anymore.
+
+And then I become concerned with not losing pictures, both those I've culled and
+edited, and those I haven't looked at yet.
+
+Then I ultimately lose track of what I've processed and not.
+
+So I need a better way.
+
+But I can't do that without space.
+
+Hence, a NAS.
+
+I could get an off the shelf unit, but I didn't love the price profiles for them
+despite the advanced organization features they provide. I've never been amazing
+at adhering to someone else's organizational principals, and it requires a bunch
+of additional research to get going.
+
+So I'm building one myself, and probably throwing TrueNAS or HexOS onto it.
+
+I just want something that can expand if I need to, and not have to work on
+the cloud primarily. Ultimately, anything truly worth keeping would also be
+archived in the cloud, but I hope to keep that set of data to be minimal.
+
+I'd be more tempted to buy something pre-made but I've heard tales that they
+don't put good CPUs in there, and I have a 3700X just laying around since I
+upgraded my gaming PC.
+
+Overall, I'm looking at some refurbished 20TB drives, and the
+[JONSBO N4](https://www.jonsbo.com/en/products/N4Black.html) as a case.
+That'll plenty of space for additional drives upgrades, but still compact.
+It won't be too tough a build, since without a GPU, the power and
+airflow needs should be minimal. I'll need a different low profile CPU cooler,
+but everything is dwarfed by the drive costs anyway so that's fine.
+
+I'm looking at using a double parity set up for the drives, and with 4 drives,
+that'll mostly be swallowed by overhead. But each additional drive should let
+me get nearly the full capacity. I don't anticipate needing it that soon at
+least.
+
+But with ~120MB for each raw + Fine JPGs, it'll take a long age for me to hit
+that capacity, so I'm feeling pretty safe with rebuild risks.
+
+And with that, I should be able to unblock myself from clearing out my existing
+cards, and set up a proper workflow to process my dang photos.