NAS Questions

Arya4 · August 10, 2022

I recently was given an old Asus Prime Z490-A motherboard that had one of its PCIE x16 slots broken. It's fully functional except for that one slot, so I want to do a secondary build for storage/a NAS. However, I don't know anything about NAS' yet.
1. What's a good place to learn about NAS building? Any recommended YouTube channels?
2. Will this motherboard be viable? Will I need all the slots?
3. Do I need a GPU at all?
4. Do CPU or RAM matter? Or can I use a cheap Celeron/Pentium and mix/match ram?
5. For power, should I use a PSU that supplies more than I need? I have a Corsair CX 430 and I don't know if that will be enough. I know for gaming PCs you should always go a bit higher.
6. Can I connect a NAS directly to my PC via ethernet/USB-C?

Thanks for all the help!

Needfuldoer · August 10, 2022

1. Anthony's "Your PC is Your New Server" video is a good start. There are many channels like Craft Computing on YouTube that talk about setting up TrueNAS, and if you really want to get deep in the weeds you can look up ServeTheHome or Level1Techs.

2. Yes, as long as none of the pins on the broken slot are touching each other the board should be viable. You just won't have that slot (or 16 PCIe lanes) to play with. If the pins are damaged and touching, you'll need to use something like flush cutters to rip off the remaining pieces of the plastic guide and snip the busted pins off.

3. If your CPU has onboard graphics, no.

4. CPU matters more than RAM, especially if you're going to host and transcode media.

5. Always over-buy PSU capacity by a reasonable amount. If you get another motherboard or want to add more drives later, you don't want to limit yourself with a wimpy power supply/

6. You could, but the point of a NAS is to have network-accessible storage that all your networked devices can share. If you're just going to connect it to one PC, then you might as well just buy more drives for that PC instead.

Arya4 · August 10, 2022

2 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

1. Anthony's "Your PC is Your New Server" video is a good start. There are many channels like Craft Computing on YouTube that talk about setting up TrueNAS, and if you really want to get deep in the weeds you can look up ServeTheHome or Level1Techs.

2. Yes, as long as none of the pins on the broken slot are touching each other the board should be viable. You just won't have that slot (or 16 PCIe lanes) to play with. If the pins are damaged and touching, you'll need to use something like flush cutters to rip off the remaining pieces of the plastic guide and snip the busted pins off.

3. If your CPU has onboard graphics, no.

4. CPU matters more than RAM, especially if you're going to host and transcode media.

5. Always over-buy PSU capacity by a reasonable amount. If you get another motherboard or want to add more drives later, you don't want to limit yourself with a wimpy power supply/

6. You could, but the point of a NAS is to have network-accessible storage that all your networked devices can share. If you're just going to connect it to one PC, then you might as well just buy more drives for that PC instead.

What would be a good LGA 1200 CPU for a NAS? Would an Intel Pentium Gold G6400 work? I'm trying to keep it quite low cost, as well as reusing some of my older parts, such as reusing my CX 430 and a 2x4gb kit of DDR4 ram. Would using these be feasible, or would I need something more?

What I'd like to use the NAS for is being able to access my files and such from uni while my PC/NAS is at home.

LIGISTX · August 10, 2022

4 hours ago, Arya4 said:

What would be a good LGA 1200 CPU for a NAS? Would an Intel Pentium Gold G6400 work? I'm trying to keep it quite low cost, as well as reusing some of my older parts, such as reusing my CX 430 and a 2x4gb kit of DDR4 ram. Would using these be feasible, or would I need something more?

What I'd like to use the NAS for is being able to access my files and such from uni while my PC/NAS is at home.

Yes, that CPU will be plenty. 8 GB of RAM will also be plenty for this.

I would look into running unraid as the operating system. It has a lot of flexibility and will let you start playing with things like docker containers which are a great way to start dabbling in the hobby of homelab.