budget DIY NAS

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Hi There,

 

I'm thinking into building a NAS for my home archive (mostly pictures, videos, etc) for around 300-400€ (under 430$) with at least 6TB capacity and single redundancy drive. Pretty tight budget, i know.

OS whise I looked into FreeNAS and OVM, but since I'd like to increase stroage size easily I turned to unRAID, so that I can chuck in one or two additional (maybe high capacity) drives later one.

So for the system I've been thinking about an AM4 Motherboard (B450M or A320M) and some lowend Ryzen 3rd Gen or even AMD Athlon and 8GB RAM. (around 150$ + PSU, case)

 

Questions:

- what HDDs should I use? I thouhgt about 2x4GB in RAID1 or 3X3GB or 4x2GB with single parity drive each. The later two seem more resonable to me though, since I'm only getting 4TB out of the first config.

- Is the systrem spec reasonable or would you suggest somethiong else? Idealy I would like to have room for a OpenVPN Server as well (so can connect from my mobile). RAM should be upgradable.

- any case recommendations with >=4x3,5" Drive Bays? Should be somewhat small

 

Note: Due to the budget I also looked into an RPi4-based NAS, which would be limmeted by USB3 and to a maximum of 4 drives...

 

Thanks in advance!

 

[Bombastinator]

Generally when I see budget scratch built NASes here they’re built off of existing PCs where the cpu/mobo/memory/case is already in hand.  I take it you want to buy everything?  

[lal12]

1 hour ago, ad_sc said:

OS whise I looked into FreeNAS and OVM, but since I'd like to increase stroage size easily I turned to unRAID, so that I can chuck in one or two additional (maybe high capacity) drives later one.

Well I personally think FreeNAS is the best and unRAID is a bit of a mess. Also keep in mind that unRAID will cost money, which probably go against you low budget plan. If you are doing a RAID5 you can still add drives individually instead of in pairs. Yes you have to keep them equal sized, but this restriction also exists in Unraid, since the parity drive has to be >= the size of your largest data drive.

 

1 hour ago, ad_sc said:

So for the system I've been thinking about an AM4 Motherboard (B450M or A320M) and some lowend Ryzen 3rd Gen or even AMD Athlon and 8GB RAM. (around 150$ + PSU, case)

Would by my goto to. I probably would go for a Ryzen 3 3200g and the cheapest sufficient mainboard I could find.

 

1 hour ago, ad_sc said:

- any case recommendations with >=4x3,5" Drive Bays? Should be somewhat small

There are some nice and cheap (40-50€) ones from SilverStone and Sharkoon, however they are Mini-ITX/Mini-DTX for which the Mainboard might be more expensive.

 

1 hour ago, ad_sc said:

Note: Due to the budget I also looked into an RPi4-based NAS, which would be limmeted by USB3 and to a maximum of 4 drives...

I wouldn't recommend going to an ARM NAS it can be done, but there aren't really any good DIY solutions and if there is still some tinkering involved and it is not even really cheap, but if you go ARM do not go RPi4!

 

 

Edit: another possible solution would be something like an Asrock J4005 or Asrock J4105 which would fit into the mentioned cases and cost probably half (70-100€) of a Ryzen combo. Performance wise it is much less capable though, and I would go with OMV since it is the most lightweight compared to unRAID and FreeNAS.

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2 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Generally when I see budget scratch built NASes here they’re built off of existing PCs where the cpu/mobo/memory/case is already in hand.  I take it you want to buy everything?  

Yes, thats right.

 

1 hour ago, lal12 said:

Well I personally think FreeNAS is the best and unRAID is a bit of a mess. Also keep in mind that unRAID will cost money, which probably go against you low budget plan. If you are doing a RAID5 you can still add drives individually instead of in pairs. Yes you have to keep them equal sized, but this restriction also exists in Unraid, since the parity drive has to be >= the size of your largest data drive.

I wonder how you would do that in FreeNAS? I did some googling and either fond that you shouldn't do RAID5 nowadays or that you can only add another, same-sized vdev?

And couldn't I e.g. add a 6TB drive later and then format 2x3TB drives as parity? I'm not sure if that's how it works, but intuitavly I would think so?

 

2 hours ago, lal12 said:

I wouldn't recommend going to an ARM NAS it can be done, but there aren't really any good DIY solutions and if there is still some tinkering involved and it is not even really cheap, but if you go ARM do not go RPi4!

Well there is this HAT, but its pretty expensive (would make the ARM system 120€ + ATX-PSU). So I might as well go for AMD.

https://shop.maker-store.de/single-board-computer/zubehoer/weiteres-zubehoer/2808/rock-pi-4-sata-hat-quad

 

Thanks for the HW recommendations!

[Bombastinator]

As far as arm goes I’m wondering if a pi4 could hack freeNAS.  I’ve heard of it being done.  How well it works is another question though.  There is a difference between can be done and functional

[lal12]

51 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

As far as arm goes I’m wondering if a pi4 could hack freeNAS.  I’ve heard of it being done.  How well it works is another question though.  There is a difference between can be done and functional

Well you would have to implement FreeBSD support for the PI, which might be the biggest hurdle (and it is a big one). Compiling it for ARM afterwards should be not that hard. AFAIK only PI 1 and 2 are supported by FreeBSD, I doubt support for Pi4 will come in the near future. And I don't think the PI has the performance for a smooth FreeNAS experience.

 

The issue with using an RPI is that it hasn't reallly any high performance interface like PCIe to connect the drives to. (There are some hacks to get to PCIe, but this includes removing the USB3 chip and do some heavy soldering...). There are other boards available like the BPI-R2 which at least offer 2 SATA ports and other nice things like 5xLAN, but it is not that cheap (~100€). I considered doing something with my companies proprietary ARM board, which has a one native Sata Port already and a mini PCIe connector, where you can hook up a card with 2-4 sata ports, this would pretty much be an ideal board for a NAS. There are others like rockpro64 (~90€) + an PCIe Sata card (20-50€), but still not much cheaper than an x86 build just slower. Besides you have to still need a power supply and some tinkering too hook it all up and get it in a case. So you will end up having less performance, more work to do on hardware and software, and basically the same price (or just a tiny bit cheaper). So I think it is not worth it. Unless there is a huge saving in power consumption, however an RPi4 uses still 6.5W on idle, and I read a report that a ryzen 3400g (including the power supply inefficency) also only uses 6.5W on idle, so probably there aren't that much possibilities for saving there...

[lal12]

2 hours ago, ad_sc said:

I wonder how you would do that in FreeNAS? I did some googling and either fond that you shouldn't do RAID5 nowadays or that you can only add another, same-sized vdev?

Yeah you right about that. I got something confused there. I personally had a RAID1 and added two HDDs to it which I think was possible. However adding drives to ZFS RAIDZ is not possible. I got it confused with btrfs there. I guess you could go for BTRFS with OMV, but unfortunately BTRFS RAID5/6 is flawed.

[Bombastinator]

4 hours ago, lal12 said:

Well you would have to implement FreeBSD support for the PI, which might be the biggest hurdle (and it is a big one). Compiling it for ARM afterwards should be not that hard. AFAIK only PI 1 and 2 are supported by FreeBSD, I doubt support for Pi4 will come in the near future. And I don't think the PI has the performance for a smooth FreeNAS experience.

 

The issue with using an RPI is that it hasn't reallly any high performance interface like PCIe to connect the drives to. (There are some hacks to get to PCIe, but this includes removing the USB3 chip and do some heavy soldering...). There are other boards available like the BPI-R2 which at least offer 2 SATA ports and other nice things like 5xLAN, but it is not that cheap (~100€). I considered doing something with my companies proprietary ARM board, which has a one native Sata Port already and a mini PCIe connector, where you can hook up a card with 2-4 sata ports, this would pretty much be an ideal board for a NAS. There are others like rockpro64 (~90€) + an PCIe Sata card (20-50€), but still not much cheaper than an x86 build just slower. Besides you have to still need a power supply and some tinkering too hook it all up and get it in a case. So you will end up having less performance, more work to do on hardware and software, and basically the same price (or just a tiny bit cheaper). So I think it is not worth it. Unless there is a huge saving in power consumption, however an RPi4 uses still 6.5W on idle, and I read a report that a ryzen 3400g (including the power supply inefficency) also only uses 6.5W on idle, so probably there aren't that much possibilities for saving there...

It might also be possible to move it to a different BSD.  There are several.  As for smooth?  Yeah.  I would call smooth part of functional rather than “can be done”. Virtualize got an AMD64 system on an iPhone and running windows10 can be done.  “Smooth” is a different question though.  The guy I know messing with it is an old BSD guru so I wouldn’t put it past him to move it to a different BSD or something similar.  Perhaps I’m wrong and he hasn’t done it.  I was only listening with half an ear when he was talking about it.  He’s got like 5 or 6 little arm computers and doesn’t use anything else currently.  Says he’s completely done with x86.  He’s quite fond of beagle bones.

 

UPDATE:  got a bit more data on this one:  freeNAS is basically a distribution of FreeBSD.  You can apparently make the thing out of regular BSD.  You just have to roll your own.  FreeNAS was built on 9 or 10.  Raspberry supports up to 12.  The pi4 will not support FreeBSD till 13, but will do it.  A NAS can be built off freeBSD using a pi3.  The issue is ZFS. The pi3 has only 1 mg of memory.  ZFS CAN be run on only 1 mg but it’s real real right.  You want to build a NAS off FreeBSD using a pi3 it can be done though apparently.