R.I.P. Unlimited Storage

Well it’s been a fantastic couple of years but what was arguably the best online storage deals/hacks is no more! I’ve had an enterprise Google Workspace account that until now had genuinely unlimited storage for just $30AUD a month. It’s no surprise really, as such a service will no doubt be abused by some (like myself) and I’m sure there are plenty of people that actually used up way more than I did!

The main purpose of the Google Drive for me was for my Plex server to store all my TV shows and movies. In total I had about 20TB worth stored on there and I’m not going to lie.. my heart sunk a little when I got the email from Google saying I now have a 5TB limit and I have two months to get bring my account in line. As unfortunate as it is, it was bound to happen sooner or later and honestly I’m just grateful that i have a couple of months to get something sorted. I could of course just delete a lot of this stuff, there’s a lot on there that I’m sure I’ll never watch again - but the data hoarder in me would really much rather keep it if I can!

Because of all this, I’ve figured that now will be a great time to finally get myself some kind of NAS. It’s actually kind of crazy that I’ve never had one considering how long I’ve been into this stuff and how many external USB hard drives I’ve acquired over the years. The timing is a little unfortunate - my wallet just took a bit of a beating after having to get my car repaired - but I think I have a rather cost effective solution that will tide me over for a little while and also allow me to build on it over time.

Proposed Build

I initially really wanted to do a proper build with an N5105 motherboard in a Jonsbo case - something I’ve seen a few YouTubers do and it looks like a great solution! It would be more than enough for my needs and it would look good to boot. This plan however would cost a little more than what I can spare right now so I’ve come up with a quick and not so nice stop gap measure to start us off.

So here’s a breakdown of what I have planned:

• Dell Optiplex 9020 SFF PC: Another mini PC like the one I’ve got running as a server in my closet. If I can get one with 16GB of RAM it will be more than enough to serve as a NAS and also run my Plex media server.
• Unraid: From my research Unraid looks to be the most suitable OS for me to use. It does cost a little bit but it seems to be the only option that will let me add drives as I go, that don’t need to be the same size which will be important for me as it’ll be quite a bit of strain to replace all my drives with bigger ones every time I want to upgrade my NAS. 
• Seagate EXOS hard drives:  I can get some high capacity drives off Kogan for a good price so this seems to be my best bet. I’ve read that these are very noisy enterprise grade drives so I’m thinking this NAS will go in the garage which will also be good as that means it will plug straight into the router.

Depending on how much storage I end up going with, I should be able to get this done for just over $1000AUD which is not too shabby at all. Buying an off the shelf NAS like a Synology would cost me more than that before I even get to the drives!

I hope to get cracking on this over the next couple of weeks, and I’ll be sure to do a write up on the process and the overall experience.