10 ms·
DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
- vbezhenar 10mo agoNo ECC, no remote KVM. HP Microserver remains the only viable option.
- conorcleary 10mo agofor thousands of dollars, plus what if you don't want remote-in?
- avhception 10mo agoCame here to remark about ECC as well. The remote KVM options from HP and Dell and whatnot are usually so useless they might as well not exist except from remote power up / down, so I don't really care about that.
- ciupicri 10mo agoI wanted to say the same thing. Having to walk to the closet to turn it on/off or having to move it to the living room in order to debug it is an inconvenience, but data corruption caused by lack of ECC is a catastrophe.
- pi-rat 10mo agoBuilt in KVM is not that important any longer, with all the new options for adding an external one. gl-inet comet kvm, nanokvm pro, jetkvm, etc.
- ls612 10mo agoI just bought a consumer AMD B850 board that supports ECC when I built my NAS in early October. I also got 32GB of ECC memory for $180 which is a distant memory today lol.
- speff 10mo agoQ - assuming the NAS was strictly used as NAS and not as a server with VMs, is there a point in having a large amount of RAM? (large as in >8GB) I'm not sure what the benefit would be since all it's doing is moving information from the drives over to the network.
- PikachuEXE 10mo agoIf you use ZFS you might need more RAM for performance?
- loloquwowndueo 10mo agoCaching files in ram means they can be moved to the network faster - right?
- speff 10mo agoMakes sense. I didn't know if the FS used RAM for this purpose without some specialized software. PikachuEXE and Mewse mentioned ZFS. Looks like it has native support for caching frequent reads [0]. Good to know [0]: https://www.truenas.com/docs/references/l2arc/ https://www.truenas.com/docs/references/l2arc/
- ac29 10mo agoDepends on the network speed. At 1Gbps a single HDD can easily saturate the network with sequential reads. A pair of HDD could do the same at 2.5Gbps. At 10Gbps or more, you would definitely see the benefits of caching in memory.
- butvacuum 10mo agoNot as much as expected. I have several toy ZFS pools out of ancient 3tb wd reds, and anything remotely home-grade (stripped mirrors, 4,6,8 wide raidz1/2) saturates the disks before 10gig networking. As long as it's sequential, 8gb or 128gb doesn't matter.
- mewse-hn 10mo agoZFS uses a large amount of ram, i think the old rule of thumb was 1GB ram per 1TB of storage
- WarOnPrivacy 10mo agoI have built 2 NAS that borrow ideas from his blogs. One uses the Silverstone CS382 case (6x 6TB SAS) and the other uses a Topton N5105 Mini-ITX board (6x 10TB SATA). I'm quite happy with both. ref: https://blog.briancmoses.com/2024/07/migrating-my-diy-nas-into-the-silverstone-cs382-with-help-from-the-icy-dock-expresscage-mb038sp.html https://blog.briancmoses.com/2024/07/migrating-my-diy-nas-in...
- dllu 10mo agoVery sad that HDDs, SSDs, and RAM are all increasing in price now, but I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool with Seagate Barracudas on sale at $10 / TB [1]. This seems like a pretty decent price even though the Barracudas are rated for 2400 hours per year [2] but this is the same spec that the refurbished Exos drives are rated for. By the way, interesting to see that OP has no qualms about buying cheap Chinese motherboards, but splurged for an expensive Noctua fan when the cheaper Thermalright TL-B12 perform just as well for a lot cheaper (although the Thermalright could be slightly louder and perhaps be a slightly more annoying spectrum). Also, it is mildly sad that there aren't many cheap low power (< 500 W) power supplies for SFX form factor. The SilverStone Technology SX500-G 500W SFX that was mentioned retails for the same price as 750 W and 850 W SFX PSUs on Amazon! I heard good things about getting Delta flex 400 W PSUs from Chinese websites --- some companies (e.g. YTC) mod them to be fully modular, and they are supposedly quite efficient (80 Plus Gold/Platinum) and quiet, but I haven't tested them out yet. On Taobao, those are like $30. [1] https://www.newegg.com/seagate-barracuda-st24000dm001-24tb-for-daily-computing-7200-rpm/p/N82E16822185109 https://www.newegg.com/seagate-barracuda-st24000dm001-24tb-f... [2] https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/en/content-fragments/products/datasheets/barracuda-3-5-hdd/barracuda-3-5-hddDS2131-3-US2411-en_US.pdf https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/en/content-fragm...
- ghthor 10mo agoNot surprised by the fan, once I went noctua I didn’t go back.
- WarOnPrivacy 10mo ago> $10 / TB That's a remarkably good price. If I had $1.5k handy I'd be sorely tempted (even tho it's Seagate).
- rubatuga 10mo agoI've recently shucked some Seagate HAMR 26Tb drives hopefully they last
- 10mo ago
- dbalatero 10mo agoI researched a bunch of cases recently and the Jonsbo, while it looked good, came up as having a ton of issues with airflow to cool the drives. Because of this, I ended up buying the Fractal Node 804 case, which seemed to have a better overall quality level and didn't require digging around AliExpress for a vendor.
- no_time 10mo agolol same. All my parts arrived except the 804. The supply chain for these cases appears to be imploding where I live (Hungary). The day after I ordered it either went out of stock or went up by +50% in all webshops that are reputable here. I’m still a bit torn on whether I made the good call of getting 804 or the 304 wouldve been a enough for a significantly smaller footprint and -2 bays. Hard to tell without seeing them in person lol. Are you satisfied with it? Any issues that came up since building?
- nicolaslem 10mo agoI have been running my NAS on the 304 for 5 years. It fits natively 6 HDDs but I think it is possible to cram two more with a bit of ingenuity. It is tucked away in an Ikea cabinet that I have drilled the back of for airflow.
- dbalatero 10mo agoAh I haven't built yet, I am still waiting on some parts to arrive.
- VTimofeenko 10mo agoBuilt a NAS last winter using the same case. Temps for HDDs used to be in mid-50s C with no fan and about 40 with the stock fan. The case-native backplane thingamajig does not provide any sort of pwm control if the fan is plugged in, so it's either full blast or nothing. I swapped the fan for a Thermalright TL-B12 and the HDDs are now happily chugging along at about 37 with the fan barely perceptible. Hddfancontrol ramps it up based on the output of smartctl. Case can actually fit a low-profile discrete GPU, there's about half height worth of space.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago> any sort of pwm control if the fan is plugged in, so it's either full blast or nothing Got a new network switch that runs somewhat hot (TP-Link) and it's behaving the same way, built-in fan runs either not at all, or at 100% (and noisy at that). Installed OpenWRT on it briefly, before discovering 10Gbe NIC didn't work with OpenWRT, and it had much better fan control. Why is it so hard to just place a basic curve on the fan control based on the hardware temperature? All the sensors and controllers are there apparently, just a software thing...
- citrin_ru 10mo agoI have an impression that both noise level and power consumption are not a priority for home network equipment manufactures. After moving to a new house and connecting to another ISP I've got an ISP modem-router which: 1. has a fan and while it's quiet it's not silent 2. consumes around 20 Wt, not much but working 24x7 it would cost around £45/year at current electricity rates. I think it's technically possible to make a modem which will consume less power and use passive coiling but I don't think they (ISP and device manufacturer) care.
- exmadscientist 10mo agoAre there any NAS solutions for 3.5" drives, homebrew or purchased, that are slim enough to stash away in a wall enclosure? (This sort of thing: https://www.legrand.us/audio-visual/racks-and-enclosures/in-wall-storage/17-inch-dual-purpose-in-wall-enclosure/p/enp1700na https://www.legrand.us/audio-visual/racks-and-enclosures/in-... , though not that particular model or height.) I'd like to really stash something away and forget about it. Height is the major constraint, you can only be ~3.5" tall. And before anyone says anything about 19" rack stuff, don't bother. It's close but just doesn't go, especially if it's not the only thing in the enclosure.
- butvacuum 10mo ago1 liter PC's (tiny/mini/micro), or some N100 type build + external bay is likely your best bet. If it's really that small, you might have heat issues.
- jmb99 10mo ago> And before anyone says anything about 19" rack stuff, don't bother. It's close but just doesn't go, especially if it's not the only thing in the enclosure. Do you have to use that particular wall enclosure thing? A 1U chassis at 1.7” of height fits 4 drives (and a 2U at ~3.45” fits 12), and something like a QNAP is low-enough power to not need to worry about cooling too much. If you’re willing to DIY it would not be hard at all to rig up a mounting mechanism to a stud, and then it’s just a matter of designing some kind of nice-looking cover panel (wood? glass in a laser-cut metal door? lots of possibilities). I guess my main question is, what/who is this for? I can’t picture any environment that you have literally 0 available space to put a NAS other than inside a wall. A 2-bay synology/qnap/etc is small enough to sit underneath a router/AP combo for instance.
- exmadscientist 10mo ago> Do you have to use that particular wall enclosure thing? It's already there in the wall. All the Cat5e cabling in the house terminates there, so all the network equipment lives in there, which makes me kind of want to also put the NAS in there.
- disambiguation 10mo agoI too was in the market recently for a NAS, downgrading from a 12 bay server because of yagni - it's far too big, too loud, runs hot, and uses way too much energy. I was also tempted by the jonsbo (it's a very nice case) but prices being what they are it was actually better to get a premade 4 bay model for under $500 (batteries included, hdds are not). It's small, quiet, power efficient, and didnt break the bank in the process. Historically DIY has always been cheaper, but that's no longer the case (no pun intended)
- zdw 10mo agoThe Jonsbo N3 case which is 8x 3.5" drives has a smaller footprint than this, which might be better for most folks. Needs a SFX PSU though, which is kind of annoying. If you get an enterprise grade ITX board that has a 16x PCIe slot which can be bifurcated into 4 M.2 form factor PCIx4 connections, it really opens up options for storage: * A 6x SATA card in M.2 form factor from Asmedia or others will let you fill all the drive slots even if the logic board only has 2/4/6 ports on it. * The other ports can be used for conventional M.2 nVME drives.
- ehnto 10mo agoThat's what I built! It's a great case, the only components I didn't already have lying around were the motherboard and PSU. It's very well made, not as tight on space as I expected either. The only issue is as you noted, you have to be really careful with your motherboard choice if you want to use all 8 bays for a storage array. Another gotchas was making sure to get a CPU with integrated graphics, otherwise you will have to waste your pcie slot on a graphics card and have no space for the extra SATA ports.
- p1mrx 10mo agoI recently got a used QNAP TS-131P for cheap, that holds one 3.5" drive for offsite backup at a friend's house. It's compact and runs off a common 12V 3A power supply. There is no third-party firmware available, but at least it runs Linux, so I wrote an autorun.sh script that kills 99% of the processes and phones home using ssh+rsync instead of depending on QNAP's cloud: https://github.com/pmarks-net/qnap-minlin https://github.com/pmarks-net/qnap-minlin
- jaimex2 10mo agoWhat's the plan if your house burns down?
- ekropotin 10mo agoThe loss of your vacation photos will be less of your worries
- scblock 10mo agoHonestly for many people that is probably not true as long as everyone is safe. Most things are replaceable, but those photographs probably are not.
- a96 10mo agoYes. Photos are often the most irreplaceable non-living thing that many people accumulate. How valuable they are does vary, but for many there will be at least some that are priceless.
- aurea 10mo agoIdeally: off-site backup and archive-tier object storage in the cloud.
- DeathArrow 10mo agoI wonder how many consumer level HDDs in RAID5 will take to saturate a 10Gbps connection. My napkin math says that from 1,250 MB/s we can achieve around 1,150 MB/s due to network overhead so it means about 5 Red Pro/ Ironwolf Pro (reading at about 250–260 MB/s each) in RAID5 to saturate the connection.
- ekropotin 10mo agoI though raid5 is highly discouraged
- Mashimo 10mo agoI can't remember the details, but was that not specifically for hardware raid controllers? 2000s style. I think for home use with MDADM or raid z2 on zfs it's just gucci. It's cost effective.
- Maakuth 10mo agoZ2 means you'll have two parity disks, like in RAID-6. That should be okay. The trouble with RAID-5 are the rebuild times that rise to multiple days with modern disk sizes. The duration of time you run effectively without redundancy grows uncomfortably large. Especially if you don't have a hot or even cold spare around.
- Mashimo 10mo agoAh yes, I mixed up raid5 and 6. I think it's still fine for casual home setups. Depending on data and backup strategy.
- cm2187 10mo agoOnly if you need high availability, which is probably not the case for home use. If one of your drives fails under RAID5, before you even order a new disk, you should do an incremental backup, so that your backup is up to date. Then it doesn't really matter that the rebuild times take long. And if you have more data coming in, just do more incremental backups during the rebuild time.
- mvkel 10mo agoWait. You build a new one every -year-?! How does one establish the reliability of the hardware (particularly the aliexpress motherboard), not to mention data retention, if its maximum life expectancy is 365 days?
- p1necone 10mo agoLooks like they built a new NAS, but kept using the same drives. Which given the number of drive bays in the NAS probably make up a large majority of the overall cost in something like this. Edit: reading comprehension fail - they bought drives earlier, at an unspecified price, but they weren't from the old NAS - I agree, when lifetimes of drives are measures in decades and huge amounts of tbw it seems pretty silly to buy new ones every time.
- adastra22 10mo agoMB and other elements are more concerning than the drives.
- zdragnar 10mo agoFor system failure, yes, but not if data retention and recovery is your primary concern. When building a device primarily used for storing personal things, I'd much prefer to save money on the motherboard and risk that failing than skimping on the drives themselves
- embedding-shape 10mo agoEh, cheap motherboards aren't a panacea that can't hurt the rest of the hardware, I personally don't skimp on motherboards, and would much rather skimp on the drives themselves as I have redundancy and 1-2 drives failing wouldn't hurt too much. And data retention is my top priority. Motherboards have fried connected hardware before, poor grounding/ESD protections, firmware bugs together with aggressive power management, wiring weirdness and power related faults have broken people's drives before. What I've never heard about is a drive breaking something else in a system, but broken motherboards have taken friends with them more than once.
- mzhaase 10mo agoI would like to point people to the Odroid H4 series of boards. N97 or N355, 2*2.5GbE, 4*SATA, 2 W in idle. Also has extension boards to turn it into a router for example. The developer hardkernel also publishes all relevant info such as board schematics.
- kajika91 10mo agoI also have an older Odroid HC4, it's been years it is running smoothly and not only I cannot use 1000$ for a NAS as the current post implied but the power consumption seems crazy to me for a mere disk-over-network usage (using a 500W power supply). I like the extensive benchmark from hardkernel, the only issue is that any ARM-based product is very tricky to boot and the only savior is armbian.
- Aurornis 10mo ago> the power consumption seems crazy to me for a mere disk-over-network usage (using a 500W power supply). The rated power supply spec is the maximum it can provide, not the actual consumption of the device.
- antonkochubey 10mo agoAnd the best feature is they have in-band ECC, which can correct one-bit and detect two-bit errors. No other Alder Lake-N or Twin Lake SBC exposes this feature in UEFI.
- ceving 10mo agoCan you give a reference for ECC? I can not find anything about ECC support on the Odroid site.
- adrian_b 10mo agoThe version using the 4-core CPU Intel N97, which is specified by Intel as an embedded CPU, certainly has in-band ECC, which was tested by some reviewers of this SBC. I do not know whether the 8-core version (H4 Ultra) also enables in-band ECC, as for that CPU Intel does not specify embedded uses, so they may disable the ECC support in the factory. See e.g.: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-review-intel-n97-nas-kit-fanless-sbc-ubuntu-24-04/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-revie... However, looking right now at: https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=171&t=48377 https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=171&t=48377 I see that someone has enabled successfully in-band ECC on the 8-core ODROID H4 Ultra and has run benchmarks with ECC disabled/enabled. Therefore it appears that in-band ECC support exists on all models. The results of benchmarks with in-band ECC disabled/enabled may be not representative for real workloads. In-band ECC relies on caching the ECC bits in a dedicated ECC cache, in order to avoid excessive memory accesses. The effectiveness of the ECC cache can be very different for the benchmark and for the real workload, leading to misleading results. Usually for the real workload it is likely that the cache hit-rate will be higher, so the performance drop with in-band ECC enabled will be less conspicuous.
- aetherspawn 10mo agoObligatory comment every time one of these threads comes up that Synology, sure, the hardware is a bit dated but… as far as set and forget goes: I’ve run multiple Synology NAS at home, business, etc. and you can literally forget that it’s not someone else’s cloud. It auto updates on Sundays, always comes online again, and you can go for years (in one case, nearly a decade) without even logging into the admin and it just hums along and works.
- PeterStuer 10mo agoUntil you get the blue flashing light of dead. Luckily I was able to source an identical old model of eBay to transfer the disks to.
- imiric 10mo agoWhat makes you think that Synology hardware is special in that sense? Most quality hardware will easily last decades. I have servers in my homelab from 2012 that are still humming along just fine. Some might need a change of fans, but every other component is built to last.
- aetherspawn 10mo agoIt’s the software and stability of the software (between updates for example) that’s impressive.
- _rwo 10mo agoI love synology; bought one around 2018, runs nicely until this day; received last DSM 7.3 update so will be supported until 2028 but I will probably keep it running until it dies as I don't expose it to The Evil Internet anyway does everything and more I need it to (backups, photos, storage, jellyfin, various media servers, torrents etc.)
- archagon 10mo agoSynology also has a bit of a software moat with its BTRFS-backed SHR implementation. You can throw in drives of arbitrary size and it'll automatically maximize the available free space. ZFS can't do that, though AnyRaid should make it possible in the future: https://docs.hexos.com/blog/2025-05-22.html https://docs.hexos.com/blog/2025-05-22.html Plus, DSM has a spectacular web interface.
- evanjrowley 10mo agoI would have chosen the i3-n305 version of that motherboard because it has In-Band ECC (IBECC) support - great for ZFS. IBECC is very underrated feature that doesn't get talked about enough. It may be available for the N150/N355, but I have never seen a confirmation.
- Alive-in-2025 10mo agowhat is the impact on performance, does it require special ram? just heard about this here
- gforce_de 10mo agosorry for the german comment - ECC is mandatory! Obligatorische Pastete: "16GB Ram sind Flischt, ohne wenn und aber. ECC ist nicht Flischt aber ZFS ist dafür ausgelegt. Wenn in Strandnähe Daten gelesen werden und es kommt irgendwie was in den Arbeitsspeicher, könnte eine eigentlich intakte Datei auf der Festplatte mit einem Fehler "korrigiert" werden. Also ECC ja. Das Problem bei ECC ist nicht der ECC-Speicher an sich, der nur wenig mehr als konventioneller Speicher kostet, es sind die Mutterbretter, die ECC unterstützen. Aufpassen bei AMD: Oft steht dabei, dass ECC unterstützt wird. Gemeint ist aber, dass ECC-Speicher läuft, aber die ECC-Funktion nicht genutzt wird. LOL. Die meisten MBs mit ECC sind Serverboards. Wer nichts gegen gebrauchte Hardware hat, kann z.B. mit einem alten Sockel 1155-Xeon mit Asus-Brett ein Schnäppchen machen. Ansonsten ist die Asrock Rack-Reihe zu empfehlen. Teuer, aber stromsparend. Generell Nachteil bei Serverboards: Die Bootzeit dauert eine Ewigkeit. Von Consumerboards wird man mit kurzen Bootzeiten verwöhnt, Server brauchen da oft mal 2 Minuten, bis der eigentliche Bootvorgang beginnt. Bernds Server besteht also aus einem alten Xeon, einem Asus Brett, 16GB 1333Mhz ECC-Ram und 6x 2TB-Platten in einem RaidZ2 (Raid6).6TB sind Netto nutzbar. Ich mag alte Hardware irgendwie. Ich reize Hardware gerne bis zum Gehtnichtmehr aus. Die Platten sind auch schon 5 Jahre alt, machen aber keine Mucken. Geschwindigkeit ist super, 80-100MB/s über Samba und FTP. Ich lasse den Server übrigens nicht laufen, sondern schalte ihn aus, wenn ich ihn nicht brauche. Was noch? Komression ist super. Obwohl ich haupsächlich nicht weiter komprimierbare Daten speichere (Musik, Videos), hat mir die interne Kompression 1% Speicherplatz beschert. Bei 4TB sind das ca. 40GB Platz gespart. Der Xeon langweilt sich trotzdem ein bisschen. Testweise habe ich gzip-9-Komprimierung getestet, da kam er dann schon ins Schwitzen."
- starky 10mo agoI think the worry about power consumption is a bit overblown in the article. My NAS has an i5-12600 + Quadro P4000 and uses maybe 50% more power than the one in this article under normal conditions. That works out to maybe $4/month more cost. Given the relatively small delta, I'd encourage picking hardware based on what services you want to run.
- silversmith 10mo agoLess power, less heat. Less heat, less cooling required. At some point that allows you to go fanless, and that's very beneficial if you have to share a room with the device.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoSince this is about NAS, you very likely have a bunch of HDDs connected to it. And if you do, I feel like they'll "out-noise" a lot of cooling solutions as long as the fans are not spinning at max by default.
- dontlaugh 10mo agoIt depends how much electricity costs where you live. I’m quite pleased mine idles at ~15W.
- queenkjuul 10mo agoI'm with you, but my "NAS" is also really just a server, running tons of other services, so that justifies the power consumption (it's my old 2700X gaming rig, sans GPU). But i do have to acknowledge that the US has relatively low power costs, and my state in particular has lower costs than that even, so the equation is necessarily different for other people.
- execution 10mo agoIndeed, I always compare it with what I get if I ran it via cloud services and the electricity cost pales in comparison. My NAS is around 100W (6-year old parts: i3 9100 and C246M) which comes to $25/£18 per month (electricity is expensive), but I can justify it as I use many services on the machine and it has been super reliable (running 24/7 for nearly 6 years). I will try to see if I can build a more performant/efficient NAS from a mix of spare parts and new parts this coming month (still only Zen 3: 5950X and X570), but it is more of a fun project than a replacement.
- fmajid 10mo agoI upgraded my home backup server a couple of months ago to a Minisforum N5 Pro, and am very happy with it. It only has 4 3.5” drive slots, but I only use two with 2x20TB drives mirrored, and two 14TB external drives for offsite backups. The AMD AI 370 CPU is plenty fast so I also run Immich on it, and it has ECC RAM and 10G Ethernet.
- archagon 10mo agoThe N5 Pro is a good machine, but I have to recommend the Aoostar WTR Max over it, having used both. It's a few hundred bucks cheaper ($680 post-tax for a quality SFF case + mobo + CPU + power + fans!!) and has an extra drive bay and a couple of additional NVMe slots (three Gen4 2x and two 1x), despite being only ~13% larger. Also, the drive caddies on the N5 Pro were driving me crazy: the plastic clips holding the disk in place require quite a bit of force to dislodge and feel like they could snap at any moment. (And once they inevitably do, there's no screwholes to use as a backup.) Either way, it's a great time for home NAS.
- pSYoniK 10mo agoTL;DR - please stop wasting tons of resources putting together new servers every year and turning this into yet another outlet for "I have more money than sense and hopefully I can buy myself into happiness". Just get old random hardware and play around with it and you'll learn so much that you will be able to truly appreciate the difference between consumer and enterprise hardware. This seems awfully wasteful. One of the main reasons for which I've built my own homeserver was to reduce resource usage - one could probably argue that the carbon footprint of keeping your photos in the cloud and running services is lower than building your own little datacentre copy locally and where would we be if everyone builds their own server, then what? Well, I think that paying Google/Apple/Oracle/etc whoever money so that they continue their activities has a bigger carbon footprint than me picking up old used parts and running them on a solar/wind only electricity plan. I also think I'm going a bit overboard with this and I'm not suggesting to vote with your wallet because that doesn't work. If you want real change this needs to come from the government. You not buying a motherboard won't stop a corporation from making another 10 million. Anyway, except for the hard drives, all components were picked up used. I like to joke it's my little Frankenstein's monster, pieced together from discarded parts no one wanted or had any use for. I've also gone down the rabbit hole to build the "perfect" machine, but I guess I was thinking too highly of myself and the actual use case. The reason I'm posting this is to help someone who might not build a new machine because they don't have ECC and without ECC ZFS is useless and you need Enterprise drives and you want 128 GB of RAM in the machine and you could also pick up used enterprise hardware and you could etc... If you wish to play around with this, the best way is to just get into it. The same way Google started with consumer level hardware so can you. Pick up a used motherboard, pick up some used ram, a used CPU, throw them into a case and let it rip. Initially you'll learn so much and that alone is worth every penny. When I built my first machine, I wasn't finding any decently used former desktop form hp/lenovo/dell so I found a used i5 8500t for about 20$, 8 gb of ram for about 5$, a used motherboard for 40$, case was 20$ and PSU was $30. All in all the system was 115$ and for storage I used an old 2.5inch ssd for boot drive and 2 new NAS hard drives (which I still have btw!). This was amazing. Not having ECC, not having a server motherboard/system, not worrying about all that stuff allowed me to get started. The entry bar is even lower now, so just get started, don't worry. People talk about flipped bits as if it happens all day every day. If you are THAT worried, then yeah, look for a used server barebone or even a used server with support for ecc and do use ZFS, but I want to ask, how comfortable are you making the switch 100% now over night without having ever spent any time configuring even the most basic server that NEEDS to run for days/weeks/months? Old/used hardware can bridge this gap and when you're ready it's not like you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You now have another node in a proxmox cluster. Congrats! The old machine can run LXCs, VMs, it could be a firewall it could do anything and when it fails, no biggie. Current setup for those interested: i7 9700t 64 GB DDR4 (2x32) 8, 10, 12, 12, 14 TB HDDs (snapraid setup and 14 TB HDD is holding parity info) X550 T2 10Gbps network card Fractal Design Node 804 Seasonic Gold 550watts LSI 9305 16i
- cm2187 10mo agoHDD have to be bought new, as well as anything mechanical (eg fans). But for motherboards, CPU, RAM and SSD, there is great value in buying used enterprise hardware on ebay. It is generally durable hardware that spent a quiet life in a temperature controlled datacentre, server motherboards from 5 years ago are absolute aircraft carriers in term of PCIe lanes and functionalities. Used enterprise SSDs are probably more durable than a new retail SSD, plus power loss protection and better performance. The only downside is slightly higher power consumption. But just bought a 32 core 3rd gen Xeon CPU + motherboard, 128GB RAM, it idles at 75w without disks which isn't terrible. And you can build a more powerful NAS for a third of the price of a high end Synology. Unlikely that the additional 20-30w idle power consumption will cost you more than that.
- Helmut10001 10mo agoI wouldn't say that being new is an absolute requirement. I recently upgraded my ZFS pool from SATA to SAS HDDs. Since SAS HDDs have much better firmware for early error detection and monitoring, I decided to buy 50% refurbished. Even if I lost half of them, I would still be safe. I also have offsite backups. This setup worked really well for me, and I feel completely confident that my data is safe while not wasting unnecessary resources. Whether to use new or used equipment therefore depends on the setup.
- cm2187 10mo agoAgree, but that's taking a risk with your data (whereas if a MB fails, you likely just need to replace it but your data is fine), and HDD kind of have a finite number of hours in them. Where buying them used I think makes sense is for a backup server, that you leave off except the few hours in a week where you do an incremental backup. Then it doesn't really matter that the drives have already been running for 3 or 4 years.
- Helmut10001 10mo agoWith the redundancy in a raidz2 or mirror, the driver can and will fail. I count on this. But it can happen in a controlled manner.
- esskay 10mo ago> HDD have to be bought new In A DC environment sure. In a home NAS not so much. I'm on Unraid and just throw WD recertified drives of varying sizes at it (plus some shucked external drives when I find them on offer), that's one of its strengths and makes it much cheaper to run.
- machomaster 10mo agoOne can also use SnapRAID + mergerfs.
- StrLght 10mo agoI did something similar last year. Market for mITX NAS boards is pretty bad. I went for ASRock N100DC-ITX – it has 2x SATA ports, but there's also PCIe 3 x4. The main benefits of this board were: * it's not from an obscure Chinese company * integrated power supply – just plug in DC jack, and you're good to go * passive cooling Really hope they make an Intel N150 version.
- enchanted-gian 10mo agoQuestion,whats the problem with a motherboard being from an obscure Chinese company?Is it because its harder to find replacements or some other reason. i ask because i recently built my own homelab like 4 months ago and source all my parts from Aliexpress which as way cheaper than any name brand on amazon an they're all relatively obscure. My homelab is running perfectly though so why the apprehension?
- StrLght 10mo agoI am more worried about them in the long-term. Reviews are usually not as detailed as I'd like them to be (shout out to ServeTheHome – they're doing a great job in terms of that), or they're nearly impossible to find. For me personally, there are two things I am concerned about: 1. Issues that can only be resolved via BIOS update. Almost all obscure Chinese SBCs won't get any updates, so you're stuck with whatever issues you encounter. 2. In case of hardware failures, there's a 0% chance for RMA. You are not getting a replacement or your money back.
- gorbachev 10mo agoThe motherboard seems quite expensive.
- kotaKat 10mo agoWhile not DIY, I would like to also call out an interesting discovery lately. https://www.ugreen.com/blogs/news/ugreen-makes-strategic-entry-into-us-market-with-nasync-products-set-for-walmart https://www.ugreen.com/blogs/news/ugreen-makes-strategic-ent... UGREEN has apparently inked deals to drop their DXP2800s into (some) Walmarts, which also included bringing in some 10/12TB Toshiba N300 Pro drives as well to go with them on the shelves. Being a super-rural American, I was a bit surprised to see this on my local shelf as a nearly turnkey solution in an area where there's nothing remotely close to a Best Buy, even. Even more surprisingly: they've been sold by Walmart below minimum advertised prices at UGREEN a few times normally...
- AlanYx 10mo agoOne thing to be aware of is that many (all?) current UGREEN boxes can't support ECC RAM. For anyone looking to use ZFS like the article linked here, that may be an issue, depending on one's view of the debate about whether ECC is necessary with ZFS.
- Xiol32 10mo agoI had one of the DXP4800 Plus NASes for about a month before RMAing it. The CPU would immediately hit 100C with even the slightest whiff of load. The entire thing was also unstable and would regularly just lock up without any kernel panic or other error message available, could even get kdump to gather anything (I'd binned their dodgy NAS OS and installed Debian). It also seemed to amplify the noise of the hard drives within. Every thunk of a drive head moving around would be audible from a different room. Not sure how they managed to do that, but it's an acoustic nightmare.
- kotaKat 10mo agoNot gonna lie I dumped their packed-in OS like shipping foam. Turned the watchdog off, installed TrueNAS, not looking back. I haven't paid attention to temps or noise - it's been suitable in my bedroom corner and it's been running for a month+ now like a trouper.
- mtlynch 10mo agoI appreciate Brian's posts and they've helped me learn to build my own NAS systems, but there's a scammy angle to his articles. All of the merchant links are affiliate links, which he (illegally) does not disclose.[0] He's effectively acting as a sales rep for these brands, but he's presenting himself as an unbiased consumer. The affiliate relationship incentivizes Brian to recommend more expensive equipment and push readers to the vendors that pay Brian the most rather than the vendors that are the best for consumers. I recognize that it's an unfortunate truth that affiliate links are one of the few ways to make money writing non-AI content about computer hardware. I'm fine with affiliate links, but the author should disclose the conflict of interest at the top of the post before getting into the recommendations. In the interest of full disclosure, I also write about NAS builds on my blog, so I somewhat compete with Brian's posts, but I stopped using affiliate links five years ago because of the conflict of interest. If you're not familiar with how affiliate relationships create dangerous incentives, I recommend reading the article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] tl;dr - All the top mattress-in-a-box reviewers were just giving favorable reviews to the company that paid the best affiliate rates, even going so far as to retroactively update old reviews if the payout rates changed. [0] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking#affiliateornetwork https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse... [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
- alias_neo 10mo agoJust skimming over the article, I feel like the blue link coloured word "Topton" has been seared into my retinas. That aside, as someone who has been building computers for nearly 3 decades, and NAS's for a decade plus, I dislike almost everything about this build. Spending a lot on the PSU is a good move, but the motherboard is a bad choice for the price when a much more capable socketed board + CPU could be had for around the same price, and the use of no-name SSD and NVMe is an absolute no-no for me. The impression I got from so many linked mentions of Topton this and Topton that, is that this was mostly done to push that particular brand for a sponsorship or affiliate program. Youtube has already long gone the way of being untrustworthy for advice on this sort of thing due to sponsorships and affiliates etc, perhaps I should blog my advice and experience that no body pays to influence, in a more generic sense for those who actually need guidance on where to focus when building hardware like PCs and NASs. I'm not going to suggest that hardware I chose for my "NAS" as it would be universlly bad advice for most people, but there is some generic knowledge to be shared here. Sometimes it feels just like telling my kids to "learn from my mistakes", does anyone actually want to hear it?
- bhattisatish 10mo agoAre there any tape based solution which can be used at home? I don't care about time retrieval. It's more for home archival purpose. I have two NAS servers (both based on Synalogy). But I need something where I can back it up and forgot about it till I want to restore the stuff. I am looking at a workflow of say, weekly backup to tape. Update the index. Whenever I want to restore a directory or file, I search the index, find the tape and load the same for retrieval. NAS can be used for continuous backup (aka timemachine and timeshift). And archival at a weekly level.
- mm0lqf 10mo agoTape drives are generally SAS so you will need a controller card I've got a HP StorageWorks Ultrium 3000 drive (It's LTO-5 format) connected to one (LSI SAS SAS9300-4i), in my NAS/file server (HP Z420 workstation chassis). Don't go lower than LTO-5 as you will want LTFS support. About £150 all in for the card and drive (including SFF-8643 to SFF-8482 cables etc..) on EBay Tapes are 1.5TB uncompressed, and about £10/each on Ebay, you'll also want to pick up a cleaning cartridge. I use this and RDX (1TB cartridges are 2-4 times the price, but drives are a lot cheaper, and SATA/USB3, and you can use them like a disk) for offline backup of stuff at home.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoNot OP, but similar situation, trying to figure out tape archiving, already using SAS. However, is there no open formats? The whole LTO ecosystem of course reeks of enterprise, and I'd expect by now at least one hardware hacker had picked together some off-the-shelf components to build something that is magnitude cheaper to acquire, maintain and upgrade.
- uniqueuid 10mo agoShort answer: no Tape is really complicated and physically challenging, and there are no incentives for people investing insane amounts of time for something that has almost no fan base. See the blog post about why you don’t want tape from some time ago. Edit: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/lto-tape-backups-for-linux-nerds https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/lto-tape-backups-for-linux-n...
- Keyframe 10mo agoThis is all fine, but price came around same-ish as UGREEN DXP8800, if we're considering price alone.
- Neikius 10mo agoSpecs and price of this are perfect, but I want AMD. Guess too picky? Anyone knows of a similar product with AMD CPU?
- aynyc 10mo agoI did some shopping recently, the market is very weird right now. Given the pricing of hardware recently, pre-built NAS now is actually on par pricing wise for DIY.
- andruby 10mo agoLooking at the Power Consumption section: How can the total average Wattage be lower than any of the lines it consists of? Total average power is 66.49W, yet average _Idle_ power is noted as 66.67W.
- Mashimo 10mo agoI think the Total is not the combination of the above listed items. The listed items are just sub categories. See the "Duration" column. Out of 108h he did a 18h burn in.
- anentropic 10mo agoI used to have big HDDs attached to my Thunderbolt dock. But it was always annoying having to 'eject' them before unplugging the laptop from the dock. Or sometimes overnight they would disconnect themselves and fill up my screen with dozens of "you forgot to eject" notifications. Yes I'm on macOS. Do NAS avoid this issue? Or you still have to mount/unmount? Why does there seem to be much more market for NAS than for direct attached external HDD? Eventually I got a new laptop with bigger SSD, started using BackBlaze for backups, and mostly stopped using the external HDDs. I always assumed NAS would be slower and even more cumbersome to use. Is that not the case?
- yabones 10mo agoA NAS will use a network file protocol (SMB/NFS/AFP/SFTP etc) to access data rather than direct disk access, so the types of failures are different. Generally you don't really have to "eject" but disconnecting during a large transfer can cause incomplete writes. The main risk with directly attached storage is that most kernels will do "buffered writes" where the data is written to memory before it's committed to disk. Yanking the drive before writes are synced properly will obviously cause data loss, so ejecting is always a good idea. Generally, NAS is a bit safer for this type of storage because the protocols are built with the assumption that the network can and will be interrupted. As a result, things are a bit slower since you're dealing with network overhead. So, like everything, there are some trade-offs to be made.
- zuhsetaqi 10mo agoYou can disable this notification with defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.DiskArbitration.diskarbitrationd.plist DADisableEjectNotification -bool YES
- tom_alexander 10mo ago> Why does there seem to be much more market for NAS than for direct attached external HDD? I can access my NAS from anywhere in the world, but you can only access your direct-attached drives when sitting at your desk. I can hide my NAS in a closet, but your direct attach drives are wasting valuable desk space and causing noise in your workspace. My NAS has a software raid (raidz2) so any two of my drives could die without losing a single bit of data. Technically this is possible with direct attached drives too, but usually people aren't attaching multiple external drives to their computer at the same time. Multiple people/computers/phones can access my NAS simultaneously, but your direct attach drives are only usable by a single computer at a time. I can use my NAS from any device/operating system without worrying about filesystem compatibility. With direct attach drives, you need to pick a filesystem that will be supported by the devices you want to plug in to it. The downside is a NAS is running 24/7 which will consume more electricity than drives you only plug in on-demand, and file transfers will be slower over a network than directly plugged in to your computer, but 99% of the time the speed difference does not matter to me. (It really only impacts me when doing full-disk backup/restore since I'd be transferring hundreds of gigabytes.)
- dewey 10mo agoMaybe I'm out of the loop but I've never heard of "Topton". As this brand is being mentioned 16 times in this one blog post I'm just assuming that's a sponsored blog post and not an objective overview.
- jffry 10mo agoEvery time I've looked into doing a DIY NAS in the last few years Topton seems to come up - as far as I can tell it's because they make MiniITX boards with a boatload of SATA ports.
- trevithick 10mo agoTopton makes a lot of those router mini PCs. I have an N100 with 4 2.5Gbe ports. It has a serial port too, which is nice. It's been running great for about a year now. Then again, it's from Aliexpress, so who knows if it's even really a Topton.
- alan-jordan13 10mo ago[dead]
- jrrv 10mo agoWhat makes a motherboard a NAS motherboard, precisely? I've got a decent Mini-ITX sitting around and I've been contemplating setting up/getting a NAS. Would be nice if I could re-use what I already have and save some money.
- nickdothutton 10mo agoFor me, ECC RAM, large enough number of SATA ports, ability to run rest of my software stack well enough (in my case FBSD and ZFS).
- cm2187 10mo agoTechnically any motherboard can become a NAS, but there are desirable features. - low idle power consumption since your NAS will be sitting doing nothing most of the time - pretty much any desktop MB will do - fast networking, 1gbe means ~100MB/s transfers, nicer to have 10gbe. Limited benefits beyond 10gbe in practice. - enough PCIe lanes to connect enough drives. HDD of course but nice to have a separate fast SSD array plus SSD caching. You might also want a SAS HBA if you are looking enterprise drives or SSDs (and even for SATA SSD you will get a better performance via a HBA than through the motherboard). Some people also want a graphic card for video transcoding - ECC memory - IPMI - once you start using it it becomes hard to give up. Allows you to manage the server remotely even when switched off, and access the BIOS via a web interface. Allows you to keep the server headless (i.e. not have to go plug a screen to understand why the server is taking so long to reboot). I'd say a good candidate for a NAS motherboard would be something like a supermicro X11SSH-LN4F, you can find used ones pretty cheap on ebay.
- Aurornis 10mo ago> My only complaint about the motherboards has been that buying them from one of the Chinese e-tail sites like AliExpress is considered problematic by some. I love some AliExpress deals for some of my hobby purchases, but a NAS motherboard is not one of them. The contrast between the fashionable case, boutique Noctua fans, and then an AliExpress motherboard doesn’t inspire confidence in the priorities for this build. When it comes to a NAS I prioritize the core components from well known manufacturers and vendors. With everything from hobby gear to test equipment AliExpress has been a gamble on wherever you’re getting the real deal or a ghost shift knockoff or QA reject for me. It’s the last place I’d be shopping for core NAS components.
- StopDisinfo910 10mo agoThat's a Topton board from the official Topton store on AliExpress. It's strictly equivalent to buying straight from the manufacturer and will be shipped by Topton not AliExpress. The Jonsbo case is probably both cheaper and easier to buy from AliExpress than Amazon too to be fair. It's also a Chinese brand.
- briancmoses 10mo agoI wrote this blog and I completely agree with you both! This listing should be as close to a sure thing as you can get on AliExpress. But even then, dealing with AliExpress when things go sideways isn't always all that great. I have purchased this motherboard from this link, I'd do it again in a heartbeat if I needed to, and I wouldn't fault anyone for avoiding AliExpress either. If somebody wants to buy from a different vendor, it's sometimes possible to find resellers on Amazon or eBay (myself included). The prices might be a bit more expensive, but some folks might think it's worth it. I talk about it in the blog, it's my understanding that there's shortages of the Intel CPUs which I would expect to drive up the pricing.
- m000 10mo agoI've recently gone through building a NAS for home. I read several guides like this, but a lot of them didn't quite match what I had in mind. Following some takeaways from my personal experience: - Finding a low-wattage/high-efficiency ATX/SFX PSU is the hardest part. To achieve the advertised efficiency, your Gold-rated PSU needs at least 20% load. I.e. 100W for a 500W PSU. If you are building for low-power, you will need much lower wattage for the PSU to operate at optimal conditions/efficiency. Good luck finding anything under 450W these days. - Do your math before choosing RAIDX, where X != 1. E.g. the disk cost for 2*16TB RAID1 array is pretty close to the cost of 3*8TB RAID5 array of the same capacity. But future upgrades with RAID1 are much easier and less costly, given that your NAS box will probably have only 4-5 slots. RAIDX make sense if you want to go wild (target NAS capacity >> maximum available single disk capacity). - If you have not jumped into the "homelab" rabbithole and you only want a NAS and some services, NAS operating systems like TrueNAS are a PITA. Your hardware will be "owned" by the NAS OS, and you will need to jump through hoops to get any other software running. Most of them encourage you to not run anything else on them, except from prepackaged apps from their "store". So, you may want to stick with something more prosaic. E.g. vanilla debian. - If you are thinking of ZFS/TrueNAS because of the scrubbing functionality, RAID1 + BTRFS also have scrubbing. - Motherboards from AliExpress save you time. If I could procure a motherboard with 6 SATA ports, at least 2 2.5GbE ports, and an N series CPU from a mainstream vendor, I probably would. But there aren't any such models. If you try to add these features on top of a standard motherboard, you need another round of researching components. Plus, if it is a mini-ITX mobo, you may run out of PCIe slots. - Motherboards from AliExpress are just fine. I'm not sure why people nag about "reliability" without even anecdotal evidence. If your mobo dies, too bad. But mobos are pretty low in the list of components affecting the safety of your data, with PSU, disks and software being more important.
- accidc 10mo agoDo you have a preferred/recommendation for a NAS OS?
- m000 10mo agoNot really. I was not interested in maintaining an extensive homelab (so that I have separate storage and computing nodes), or buying into a new "software ecosystem" (I would consider buying e.g. a Synology/QNAP box if I did), so I ended up with vanilla Debian. Debian 13 (trixie) got released right on time, so I will be on the latest for a couple of years. From what I tried (TrueNAS, OpenMV, Unraid), Unraid seemed to be the most appealing. TrueNAS was very unfriendly towards even the idea of opening a shell [1] and IIRC you couldn't even install debian packages out of the box. OpenMV had problems booting on my hardware, plus it is lagging behind mainline debian (the Debian 12 version of OpenMV got released around 2 months before Debian 13). Unraid also had limitations regarding what you could run, but the community seemed to be the most robust. Also, it is the only one that stores its parity data externally. This gives you the most flexibility with disk configurations. Also, IIRC you can pull out a disk and the data on it would be readable, so migrating your data to something else would be relatively painless. So, if I had to choose a NAS OS, it would probably be Unraid. The downside is that you need to buy a license. But hey! Black Friday to the rescue! [1] https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/scaletutorials/systemsettings/usescaleshell/ https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/scaletutorials/systemsett...
- drjasonharrison 10mo agoOne problem I've had running a NAS at home is dust. My usual installation location is my pantry, which is where the network enters my apartment. Unfortunately, it is also the same room as my heat pump, so dust can accumulate. Integrating a dust filter (not necessarily HEPA, but MERV 11) and the required fan upgrades would be wonderful.
- Hamuko 10mo ago>32GB of DDR5 RAM In this economy?
- QuiEgo 10mo agoI’ve been pretty happy with taking a Terramsater F4-425 Plus and putting Linux on it. I feel like the mini ITX market for motherboards is just too niche. If you want something small, buy an off the shelf NAS. If size is not an issue, buy a case that can hold a full sized motherboard and lots of disks.
- mkinsella 10mo agoI just purchased one of these on BF sale. How hard is it to install Truenas?
- QuiEgo 10mo agoI put straight Debian on it, but it was pretty easy. Go to the bios, turn off secure boot, change default boot device, prosper. It's just an x86 computer that boots a custom Linux distro (TOS), no reason any other Linux distro can't work. They don't lock the boot loader like say... Synology. You need a newish Linux kernel (6.12 maybe? Don't remember exactly) for proper support of the N150 iGPU and the Realtek NICs it uses.
- Havoc 10mo agoI was looking at N class CPU builds and very quickly realized they're not for me. For storage only over LAN, low power prioritized use they're a valid play, but there are some tradeoffs that are not obvious at first glance. See those NVMEs he stuck in there? They're running at 1/8th their rated link speed. Yeah...12.5%. (PCIe 4.0 x4 vs PCIe 3.0 x1). This board is one of the better ones on pcie layouts [0], but 9 gen3 lanes is thin no matter how you look at it so all those boards have to cut corners somewhere on that I decided I'm better off with a ebay AM4 build - way better pcie situation, ECC, way more powerful cpu, more sata, cheaper, 6x nvme all with X4 lanes, standard fan compatibility. Main downsides being no quicksync, power consumption and fast ECC UDIMMS are scarce. That was for a proxmox/nas hybrid build though so more emphasis on performance [0] https://youtu.be/1YJ0s_LxXgU?t=690 https://youtu.be/1YJ0s_LxXgU?t=690
- femiagbabiaka 10mo agoHmm good point. But to make sure I understand you completely, this only really matters for compute-heavy workloads, right?
- greycol 10mo agoYes, mostly. PCIE 3.0 x1 lane gets you 500mb/s [1] not much point to it compared to a regular ssd on sata3 which could do 600mb/s. So if you want very fast storage you would also think about it. Realistically for your DIY stuff you're talking a different beast to these NASs. Bang for your buck you'd be attaching the mass 3.5" storage in an external second hand JBOD enclosure and the main device would be dealing with the faster storage and have an HBA to connect to it. [1] edit: as Havoc pointed out I need my coffee should be 2gb/s which does change the point.
- Havoc 10mo agoNot quite. A gen 3 lane is 1 GB/s link speed Better question is how the article is getting 1.2 on fio tests. That must be a testing artifact
- Havoc 10mo ago
- Gud 10mo agoMy advice, skip the TrueNAS and go straight to FreeBSD. It's a simple operating system to maintain and it requires minimal setup to use as a NAS.
- chrismanning 10mo agoTrueNAS isn't even FreeBSD any more, it's Linux based now sadly
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoThen migrate straight to Linux
- embedding-shape 10mo agoAs someone who tried TrueNAS at first, but prefers declarative reproducible configuration, do give NixOS a try. Best NAS base-OS I've tried so far, and when it was time to migrate to new hardware, I just switched the disks, re-ran the config and was up and running in no-time.
- Gud 10mo agoOk, sounds complicated compared to a basic FreeBSD install.
- quasigod 10mo agoI dont think its much more or less complicated, just depends on which one you're more familiar with.
- madeofpalk 10mo agoWhat do you do for all the NAS-appliance stuff that TrueNAS provides?
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
- michaelhoney 10mo agoI appreciate the use of liters as the unit of bulk
- ACV001 10mo agoraspberry pi + 2 HDDs and a 2 slot bay (~$150).
- 8fingerlouie 10mo agoHoly smokes, the NAS in idle consumes more power than my UNAS Pro with 4x8TB HDD and 2X8TB SSD, as well as a Mac mini M1 with a 2TB Samsung T7 SSD, and my 4 access points and 4 protect cameras combined. For reference, the UNAS Pro comes with 10G networking, and will deliver roughly 500MB/s from a 4 HDD RAID5 array, and close to 1GB/s from the SSDs (which it never gets a chance to do, as I use them for photos/documents). My entire "network stack", including firewall, switch, everything POE, hue bridge, tado bridge, Homey Pro, UPS, and whatever else, consumes 96W in total, and does pretty much all my family and I need, at reasonable speeds. Our main storage is in the cloud though, so YMMV.
- downrightmike 10mo ago"Our main storage is in the cloud though, so YMMV." AKA you externalized the costs
- 8fingerlouie 10mo agoNot really. It's part of the 3-2-1 backup setup, but where other people have their "offsite backup" in the cloud, I keep my working copy there, and have backups at home. I outsourced operations of it though. I have self hosted for decades, and for the first time in 15-20 years, I'm able to take a vacation and not bring my laptop in case something breaks. As for main storage, as was probably evident from my comment, I don't have 30TB of cloud storage. We have our important stuff in the cloud, and "everything else" at home, but nothing at home is accessible from the internet unless you're on a VPN.
- mrb 10mo ago"the NAS in idle consumes more power than my UNAS Pro with 4x8TB HDD and 2X8TB SSD, as well as a Mac mini M1 with a 2TB Samsung T7 SSD, and my 4 access points and 4 protect cameras combined." I know that's not true. I say this as someone who measures the power consumption of individual components, and even individual rails with a clamp meter. The OP measures an idle power of 67W. He has 6 x 8TB HDDs. These typically consume 5W idling (not spun down). So the OP's NAS without drives is probably around 37W. A UNAS Pro without drives reportedly consumes 20W with no drives. Adding 4 x 8TB at 5W per drive, means your UNAS Pro config with drives probably idles at 40W (again, drives not spun down). That means you are 17W under his NAS idle power. So you claim your remaining hardware (Mac mini, 4 APs, 4 cameras) run in under 17W... Yeah that's not possible. 17W is peanuts; it's half the power of a phone's fast charger (~30W). PS: for the OP, an easy way to further reduce power consumption is to replace your 500W PSU with a smaller one, like 250-300W which is still amply over-specced for your build. Because the typical efficiency curve of a PSU drops sharply at very low loads. For example at idle when your NAS pulls 67W from the wall it's very probable it supplies only ~50W to the internal components, so it's running at 10% load and it's only 50/67 = 75% efficient. The smallest load for which the 80 Plus Gold standard requires a minimum efficiency is 20%. If you downgrade to a 250W PSU you are enforcing a minimum 20% load for which the 80 Plus Gold standard requires minimum 87% efficiency. The load at the wall would thus drop to 50/.87 = 57W thereby saving you 10W.
- lateforwork 10mo agoMy NAS is a Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB hub and WD Portable Hard drives plugged into the USB hub. I run Ubuntu 64 and Samba on it. It has been working fine for 5 years now. I am impressed by how reliable Raspberry Pi 4 and Ubuntu are.
- zeroq 10mo agoI wanted to join the NAS club for so long but it was always either bang for buck for prebuilts ($1k for 4 bays, with 4Gb RAM and the CPU is slower than my previous phone?!) or lack of availability for 4+ SATA boards. Last year I had aha moment when I learned about SAS boards. My final build was: - Jonsbo N3 case - ITX PSU - ASRock B550M/ITX - Ryzen 5500GT - LSI 9207-8i - 16GB DDR4 Result - for ~$1k I have 8 bay NAS that's also strong HTPC and console capable of running games like Silksong with no sweat. Before I learned about SAS cards my biggest limiter was number of SATA slots. If not for that card I would be looking at $600+ niche mobos. But the biggest winner was 5500GT. I was looking at N300 for lower power consumption, but Ryzen draws 1W at idle and has APU capable of serious gaming (not 4k Elden Ring, but c'mon).
- SJetKaran 10mo agoWhat is Ryzen adding here towards the NAS part of this system? Or is it only for gaming?
- ffsm8 10mo agoNAS in this context is more about home server then an actual plain network attached storage. I usually call mine NAS too, despite technically using it more for selfhosting - and basically never mounting it's data volumes. I think this applies to almost everyone using them nowadays, which is also the reason why the pre built ones are less and less relevant - because they always have super conservative CPUs (which are more then sufficient for a NAS that's actually used as a plain network attached storage - but severely underperforming if the user wants to run services on it.)
- zeroq 10mo agoMain benefit of Ryzen is that previously I was aiming for something like Atom or N300 for low power consumption - now, with Ryzen I have CPU with 10x computing power, powerful integrated GPU, that idles at 1W, and I can do serious gaming with it.
- amy_petrik 10mo agohello I like terramaster if you're looking for budget. software is a bit potato (it's all there, and you can install apps, just 7-8/10 polished, not 10/10), hardware build quality is solid for 10 bays i like asus lockerstore, also two NVMes, times I've bought those, a bit north of 1000 i do not have affiliations or interests with either company, just a data hoarder that's within the last year so not sure if anything changed in the last few months in light of things
- slashdave 10mo agoNo drive hot swapping?
- bhouston 10mo agoNice design! I recently switched my TrueNAS setup from a bunch of HDDs to a 8 NVMes (with an HHD volume now as only long-term "offline" archiving.) No more trying to optimize the system to get 10G speeds, it just is crazy fast, no matter what type of tasks I do. I haven't yet switched from my massive case yet though - I am not sure there is DYI cases that can handle 8 NVMes yet, but it is the future.
- archagon 10mo agoIt would appear that flash storage loses data when left unpowered for extended periods of time, however. Maybe not an issue if your NAS is powered 24/7, but it makes me nervous for archival storage.
- nullbyte808 10mo agoCould have saved hundreds if you bought a cheaper PSU and used CPU/mobo on ebay. Used DDR4 ram is also cheaper.
- vermaden 10mo agoThere are literally TONS of various NAS cases for 3.5 drives - with amd64 or arm64 CPUs - some Mini-ITX or STX based ... what is lacking on the market are NAS cases for multiple 2.5 drives ONLY.
- a96 10mo agoNo ECC.
- npodbielski 10mo agoLooks nice but now when I have server with IPMI and BMC chip I won't go back. Taking monitor and GPU to the basement when there is boot error or you need change BIOS settings is no fun. Remote management is very helpful this way. And with tailscale you can I.e. reboot your server remotely, even if SSH does not connect.
- StillBored 10mo agoECC! I don't care what BS people say about ZFS/Btrfs/whatever, if a bit flips on your router hopefully the checksum fails and nothing bad happens. If you flip a bit in memory, on the way to the disk, then its corrupt at rest, and future reads will likely propagate the error. Sure, who cares, a glitch here/there in your kids first birthday video. Better hope the glitch is there, rather than in say the bit of code computing the sector offsets/whatever. Stories like this hit the media every couple years, so if it can happen on the big fancy EMC/whatever then it can happen on your little NAS in the closet. So, just pay the little extra for the CPU+MB+RAM that protects your data from the NIC all the way to the HD.