Building a NAS within the next 12 month

[Armymen]

Hi,

I have been running Synology DS1517+ since 2017. (Intel Atom C2538 at 2.4 Ghz, 8192 MB Ram)

It is getting old, and it is due for an upgrade within the next 12 months.

My current hard drive setup is: 6 TB, 6 TB, 12 TB, 12 TB,12 TB, for a total of 31.4 TB using SHR with 1-disk fault tolerance.

 

The reason I want to upgrade is because of the limited performance in VM and Transcoding in 4k on the fly.

 

I was thinking of upgrading by building my own server and using the following items.

My budget is less than 1000$ and for my OS, I plan to use UNRAID.

 

What do you guys think of the choice of component?

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 months is a pretty long timeframe, and Id wait for 13th gen intel and 7000 series amd. They might have an av1 encoder on 13th gen and that will be a nice bonus. And a bit faster of a cpu for the same price is nice.

 

Im pretty sure thats a sfx psu. Id get a normal atx psu as its what your case takes, and there are many more options.

 

Id get a hba as I think that board only supports 6-8 sata dries

[FloRolf]

What drive setup are you planning? Because you can't just reuse the old drives without wiping them. 

 

But as our LTT Forums Wizard said, thinking about it now is a little pointless, hardware changes too rapidly to make decisions 12 months prior. 

[Armymen]

14 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

What drive setup are you planning? Because you can't just reuse the old drives without wiping them. 

 

But as our LTT Forums Wizard said, thinking about it now is a little pointless, hardware changes too rapidly to make decisions 12 months prior. 

Good day,

Yeah I know hardware in 12 month does change. I dont need something very powerful. Just enough powerful to run VM more fluid and better for 4k transcoding.

Not a gaming machine here

 

For the HD, I plan to unmount 1 drive at the time, adding them into the new machine and transfer data over to new machines. I know I cannot just move the drive from one machine to the other.

 

[FloRolf]

16 hours ago, Armymen said:

For the HD, I plan to unmount 1 drive at the time, adding them into the new machine and transfer data over to new machines. I know I cannot just move the drive from one machine to the other.

It sounds like you want to actively break your raid and I don't think that will work. Not entirely sure how SHR behaves with situations like that but for any other kind of raid it wouldn't. 

 

Also building up new volumes one by one is not a good idea. 

 

I'd honestly suggest you get a new faster synology, that way your SHR is pretty much plug and play. 

[Needfuldoer]

19 hours ago, FloRolf said:

Not entirely sure how SHR behaves with situations like that but for any other kind of raid it wouldn't. 

SHR is pretty much just Linux software RAID. They provide instructions for mounting an existing SHR volume on a Linux machine, but I don't know if continuing to use it beyond data recovery is a good idea.

 

https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_can_I_recover_data_from_my_DiskStation_using_a_PC

 

When I migrated from a DS415+ to TrueNAS, I copied everything off the Synology (onto a couple new external drives and another TrueNAS server) so I could use its drives in the new array.

[Bersella AI]

For memory, it seems unnecessary taking such "high-spec" 3600MHz kits. Instead, 3200MHz kits w/o shields are recommended.

For mobo, considering the B660 chipset only has 4 SATA ports that are insufficient for your drives, an HBA card may be essential; alternatively, 10th gen Core (even engineering-samples) from Blue Team & B460 boards (with 6 SATA ports) can be considered.

[ShakataGaNai]

On 10/4/2022 at 12:09 PM, Armymen said:

Hi,

I have been running Synology DS1517+ since 2017. (Intel Atom C2538 at 2.4 Ghz, 8192 MB Ram)

It is getting old, and it is due for an upgrade within the next 12 months.

My current hard drive setup is: 6 TB, 6 TB, 12 TB, 12 TB,12 TB, for a total of 31.4 TB using SHR with 1-disk fault tolerance.

 

The reason I want to upgrade is because of the limited performance in VM and Transcoding in 4k on the fly.

 

I was thinking of upgrading by building my own server and using the following items.

My budget is less than 1000$ and for my OS, I plan to use UNRAID.

 

What do you guys think of the choice of component?

 

 

It seems like on a performance per dollar perspective, you could probably do a lot better (if that is USD). Though planning for a year in advance is hard to know how things will look. You can certainly cheap out a lot more on the case and RAM. Probably the motherboard too.

 

You could get a 10G PCI-E card, an NVME riser, a HBA card and/or even a discrete GPU (if you want to transcode a lot). All you need to do is make sure the mobo has the absolute basics, rather than something super fancy.

 

As a comparison, the NAS I'm building right now (which will be TrueNAS, not that it matters) is below. I don't need to transcode on the fly and plan to have a very limited amount of containers running. It's more about the storage. I'm starting simple with a 2 drive mirror, to be expanded later.

 

I skipped 10G for now, because my network isn't 10G. That'll be a PCIE later. The case supports 8 drives, though the mobo only supports 4 SATA (It has 6 ports, but 2 are shared with the 2nd NVME slot). So HBA later when I get that far. RAM? Probably overkill - but it was cheap enough.

 

If you're trying to build a NAS on a budget, don't but the latest generator and find what's the best value for your case. In my hunt, I started with a Ryzen 2200G, but turns out they are old enough to actually be more expensive than something 2 generations later (aka the 5600G). Motherboards similarly. There is a "not too new, not too old" sweet spot for price/performance. PCPartPicker is your friend.