Expandable home NAS 8 - 16 tb

[frokes]

Hi!

 

With the recent situation being what it is I've been looking more and more into doing more freelancing work and with the amount of work I've been doing from home I've also realised how bad my backup and redundancy situation is. To solve this I'm playing with the thought of building a NAS (that can be extended into a plex and/or light render) server. From what I've been able to learn from reading, unRAID is a decent choice in my case as I value the expansion capablilities quite highly and don't have the time to spend more hours than necessary in the terminal.

 

As of right now I have roughly 4tb (including some minor redundancy) on my workstation. With an increase of ~500gb since christmas I have been aiming for ~6tb usable space on the NAS but the 4tb drives appear to have a better value over 3tb drives.

 

Here are the parts I thought of using:

- ASUS Prime B450-A

- Ryzen 3 3200G

- Corsair SF450

- 16gb DDR4-2666 Samsung/Kingston/Crucial ECC

- 3x4tb IronWolf  ( expandable to a max of 6x4tb in the future )

 

When it comes to the case I get a kick out of building custom ones and with access to a workshop comes great power something, something...

 

The main points that I would like feedback on are:

- Is ECC memory worth it?

- Memory requirements?

- Found a deal on SkyHawk discs that are cheaper than IronWolves, worth it?

- Cooling requirements? Would like to go for as much of a sleeper look as possible

 

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, frokes said:

- 3x4tb IronWolf  ( expandable to a max of 6x4tb in the future )

Id probably go 8tb shucked drives, cheaper per tb, less total power used aswell.

 

1 minute ago, frokes said:

- Is ECC memory worth it?

Seeing how it doesn't cost much more, might as well. It won't have any functional difference, but will lower change of data corruption.

 

1 minute ago, frokes said:

 

- Memory requirements?

You really don't need much for a basic nas, unless you want to do more or need high performance, 4 or 8gb should be fine.

 

2 minutes ago, frokes said:

- Found a deal on SkyHawk disc that are cheaper than IronWolves, worth it?

Id still get the 8tb external drives, but any hdd should work here, the nas features aren't really needed.

 

2 minutes ago, frokes said:

- Cooling requirements? Would like to go for as much of a sleeper look as possible

Not much needed, just get some air flowing by the drives, and the cpu won't use much power at all.

[frokes]

12 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id probably go 8tb shucked drives, cheaper per tb, less total power used aswell.

 

Id still get the 8tb external drives, but any hdd should work here, the nas features aren't really needed.

Huh hadn't even looked at that. Surely that would remove any warrently though and the price difference does not appear to be that great to me (~20$ in my country from what I can tell), am I missing something?

[Jisagi]

If you want to go with ECC, keep in mind, that all Ryzen with integrated gpu will NOT support ECC. Also keep the mainboard compatibility for ECC in mind as well. Some manufacturers support it on all/most of their lineup, others don't support it at all.

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 hours ago, frokes said:

Huh hadn't even looked at that. Surely that would remove any warrently though and the price difference does not appear to be that great to me (~20$ in my country from what I can tell), am I missing something?

IDK of your country and prices, but you normally still get warrnty on those drives.

 

What are the prices in your country?

[frokes]

22 hours ago, Jisagi said:

If you want to go with ECC, keep in mind, that all Ryzen with integrated gpu will NOT support ECC. Also keep the mainboard compatibility for ECC in mind as well. Some manufacturers support it on all/most of their lineup, others don't support it at all.

Ahh damn. Did some digging as the spec for ryzen 3 3200G says it supports it but no one appears to have gotten it to work from the forum posts i've read. Thanks for pointing that out!

 

19 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

IDK of your country and prices, but you normally still get warrnty on those drives.

 

What are the prices in your country?

Wait I might not be following you you here. Was your suggestion to just use a bunch of external discs and connect them to the NAS over USB or to buy the external discs, take them apart and use the drives inside them? Surely the latter would void the warranty, right?

 

As for prices :

External 4 tb ~120€

External 8 tb ~190€

 

Internal 4 tb ~140€

Internal 8 tb ~220€

 

So going for external drives is a bit cheaper but not having a minimum of 3 years of warrenty is rather significant in my opinion.

[Mihle]

If you go unRAID and start out with 3x4TB, you don't have to go to 6x4TB later. You could later go to for example 3x4 TB and 3x8TB or whatever, it's just that what disk that is parity would have to change when you get the first 8TB one.

[frokes]

11 minutes ago, Mihle said:

If you go unRAID and start out with 3x4TB, you don't have to go to 6x4TB later. You could later go to for example 3x4 TB and 3x8TB or whatever, it's just that what disk that is parity would have to change when you get the first 8TB one.

Ah right! Thanks for the tip!

[Mihle]

1 minute ago, frokes said:

Ah right! Thanks for the tip!

Parity disk have to be the same or larger size than the largest data disks, other than that you can mix sizes.

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 hours ago, frokes said:

Wait I might not be following you you here. Was your suggestion to just use a bunch of external discs and connect them to the NAS over USB or to buy the external discs, take them apart and use the drives inside them? Surely the latter would void the warranty, right?

Take the usb drives out of their casing. There cheaper per tb and basically the same drives in side.

 

The warranty is normally fine if you take the drive out of the enclosure.