DIY NAS build

[akkudakku]

Budget (including currency):  Not firmly set, ~3k PLN probably

Country:  Poland

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for:  NAS

Other details:  would like to it not crash and burn all my data

 

Came up with a project, so I don't die to boredom due to COVID

 

I was thinking about using:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3200G or AMD Athlon 3000G

Mobo: ASUS PRIME B450M-A (cheapest in the store that I used to check parts with 6xSATA)

RAM: HyperX 8GB (2x4GB) 2666MHz CL16 Fury (cheapest 2666MHz set in the store)

PSU: Thermaltake Smart SE 630W 80 Plus Bronze

Case: Cooler Master K280 (lots of 3.5" bays, cheap)

Boot SSD: WD 120GB M.2 SATA SSD Green

 

Storage HDDs: Seagate BARRACUDA 2TB 7200RPM 256MB x6

 

I might add an 10Gb network card later on.

 

I need help deciding the RAID configuration.

I have 3 ideas:

- RAID10 = 6TB, 2 drive redundancy

- RAID10 with 2 hot spares = 4TB, 2 drive redundancy, fast rebuild with dedicated hot spares

- RAID5 with hot spare = 8TB, 1 drive redundancy, long rebuild with a hot spare (?)

 

Would the board be capable of the arrays specified? Most likely they will need to be software arrays - is this OK for data safety?

 

From what I understand about RAID arrays:

Regular RAID10 is safe and super fast on both writes and reads, somewhat lower TB/$.

RAID10 with hot spares is safest for data, but I get least TB/$.

RAID5 is slow on writes, fast on reads, has some redundancy and is the best for TB/$. How long would the RAID5 rebuild if one of the disks failed?

 

I can sacrifice capacity for redundance if it is advisible, I want to store photos (that I don't want to lose)/etc. on the NAS.

 

Also should I use dedicated NAS drives or 'risk' using regular drives (budget is set for regular drives)?

 

What would be the best OS to setup the NAS? Debian? Some dedicated NAS OS?

Edited May 4, 2020 by akkudakku

[Streetguru]

10 minutes ago, akkudakku said:

 

You'll want FreeNAS, which can just run off a USB drive

Maybe go for 16GBs of RAM if RAM is cheap

How much space do you need exactly?

This covers a lot of things anyways I think.

 

[akkudakku]

How much space do I need? Well the more the better, mass storage always finds a way to get filled up

Another question - can a NAS be used as Steam cache? Because if it can then all the space I can get (reasonably).

But if the general consensus will be that RAID 5 will be OK for me, then I think that 8TB would be fine.