I mostly just cobbled my setup together, but the main parts are a mini PC to act as a server and a USB 3 multi-bay hard drive enclosure. I bought one brand new NAS grade hard drive to store the things I can’t afford to lose, and repurposed any decently sized old hard drives I had lying around for storing stuff that already exist on the internet and that I don’t really mind losing if the hard drive dies. I also have an M.2 SSD for fast storage of files I’m actively using.

The specs of the server doesn’t matter that much for a NAS, but my server is pretty beefy by mini PC standards because it handles all my home server related needs, not just as a NAS. If you’re only using it as a NAS with maybe a PiHole (ad blocking DNS server) instance or similar in the future, you can can either get a lower end (or refurbished) mini PC or a higher end single board computer like a Raspberry Pi 5, depending on what’s cheaper at the moment.

I’m running Fedora Server on it with LUKS encrypted Btrfs volumes on each drive. After each bootup I have to SSH into the server and run a bash script I wrote, where I’ll enter my password and let it unlock and mount each drive. It’s clunky but I trust it more than the TPM which is proprietary. If you don’t care about encryption, you can just put a regular filesystem on your choice on the drives, and configure Linux to mount each drive on bootup by adding them to /etc/fstab.

For accessing the NAS, I can currently only do so from the local network which suits my needs, but in the future I could also set up a VPN server that I can tunnel into from the internet to access. I use Linux for all my personal computers so this probably won’t be applicable to most people, but I mount the NAS as an SSHFS volume and simlink folders I want to offload to the server. I chose SSHFS mainly because it’s an easy way to have an encrypted link to a network share that’s already supported by default. I wanted an encrypted protocol since it would defeat the purpose of encrypting the drives if the data just goes over the network with no encryption, but again, if you don’t care about encryption you can just use NFS or SMB (more likely SMB if you use Windows, since that’s what it supports natively). This also means that my work computer, which runs Windows, can’t even see the network share because it has no SSH access to my server and even if it did, Windows doesn’t support SSHFS anyway.

Last but definitely not least, I have one consumer grade hard drive with enough space to backup my main server hard drive and some extra, in a basic USB C enclosure. Every month I plug it in and sync the server drives over to it. This means if the server’s main hard drive dies, I accidentally rm -rf the server, I get one of the super rare Linux ransomwares, or my dog knocks the drive enclosure down, I don’t lose all my data.

This is probably way overkill in some ways and desperately deficient in others. For anyone else I’d definitely recommend picking a ready made open source NAS OS, which will usually have excellent and beginner friendly community made documentation, and support for Windows clients through SMB. I can’t recommend one myself because I don’t use them, but I’m sure others can.