NAS/Data Storage Options

Hello lainons, I've been considering NAS and Data storage options for awhile now but have always been recommended commercial products like WD and Synology options. Alternatively, there is FreeNAS which is supposedly easy to deal with. Are these options secure? If not, what cheap options are out there for network attached storage?

What do you mean by secure? In general: Don't make it accessible over the internet and turn on drive encryption. You can do that with all of them.

A commercial solution isn't a horrible idea but personally I'd set it up with my own hardware + OS. It's more fun that way and plus I wouldn't have to worry about 'bloat' feautures I never use or vendor support. Basically it comes down to: how much work you want to do and how much cusomizability you want.

I mean, if you really want to worry about security, it would probably be smart to keep it off of any device connected to the internet, encryption and password security methods are also good if you want to keep them secure.

Get a cheap Dell Optiplex, shove a couple of cheapo terabyte HDDs, load some sort of server type linux distro onto it, dynamic IP.jpg and encrypt everything you store on it, then hook it up to a router or something. Then just post it for the data and decrypt it client side...

A secure computer machine is a turned off one. No decide is safe when it's network attached (especially if we're talking about Internet, as people already pointed out) FreeNAS is alright from what I hear, my friends use it. Commercial solutions are easy to set up and generally not too bad, but I've always found them overpriced and difficult to mod/upgrade/personalise

FreeNAS is good. Otherwise, you can do just as well using SMB if you want to do anything else on your server. Use full disk encryption, and if you want to access your file storage server over the Internet, set up a VPN using OpenVPN or Wireguard. Consider using NextCloud if you want a cloud solution for storage.