NAS Home Server with Linux

bluesummer · August 17, 2022

Budget (including currency): $1200, $1300 max after drives

Country: US

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Storage of family photos and movie/music streaming between multiple people

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):

No parts list yet, but some requirements. For my CPU, anything with around 4-6 cores and an IGPU should work for me, however keep in mind ECC RAM is also a requirement! Speaking of RAM, anything ECC with 16GB works with me, although I'd like it to be expandable as I expand my storage. For my motherboard, maybe an old workstation board could work, lots of SATA connectors would be a huge plus. For transcoding, I have a 2060 lying around, and maybe also the 6750 XT in my current rig I'm looking at replacing, whichever would be best, I'll whichever would be overkill/not enough, hehe, do keep in mind this system will be regularly transcoding 4K to up to 6 streams simultaneously though. I'd rather have more GPU overhead than necessary rather than having to upgrade to fit my needs and wasting time and money. Anyways, for drives, I was just gonna gut some of those external HDDs WD sells and use those for budget reasons, although if I should use something else, tell me. I was planning for 16TB total, 8TB for storage and then 8TB in RAID. Also a 500GB NVMe drive for boot, and maybe one for cache if the mobo supports it, not a requirement though. For the case I was gonna use a Fractal Define R5, lots of HDD sleds, quiet, roomy but not to big. Open to suggestions though. As for the PSU I have some lying around I could use but they're rather loud so I'd rather use a new one, if budget allows. Quiet is the name of the game here, since it's going to be always on and in my bedroom. Anyways, fire away y'all, I'm open to suggestions. Send me your lists!

Needfuldoer · August 17, 2022

Are you planning to run Unraid, TrueNAS, Windows with Storage Spaces, or something else?

43 minutes ago, bluesummer said:

8TB for storage and then 8TB in RAID

How many drives do you want, and why wouldn't you want "storage" on a RAID array?

(But remember, RAID is not a backup!)

46 minutes ago, bluesummer said:

Also a 500GB NVMe drive for boot, and maybe one for cache if the mobo supports it, not a requirement though

A cache SSD might help with Unraid's pseudo-RAID, but it won't necessarily help ZFS as much as you might think it should.

54 minutes ago, bluesummer said:

lots of SATA connectors would be a huge plus

SAS HBAs are cheap and support SATA drives. Don't worry too much about the number of SATA ports on the motherboard.

55 minutes ago, bluesummer said:

this system will be regularly transcoding 4K to up to 6 streams simultaneously

That sounds... optimistic. At a minimum you'll have to patch the drivers to have more than three simultaneous NVENC streams on a GeForce card.

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new

https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding

Considering your budget, and assuming you're not replacing your 10th gen PC soon, I think a used LGA2011-3 workstation like an HP Z440 would work for you. The chassis are cheap, parts for them are even cheaper (you can find registered ECC DDR4 for under $2/gig if you're patient), you'll have plenty of headroom to grow (they'll take anything from a quad core to a 22 core), and it's going to be reasonably quiet and power efficient. (You'll also get a Windows license, so you could run it bare metal or as a management VM.)