NAS Build requirements

jowest90 · October 6, 2023

I'm going to be upgrading to a whole new pc in a few weeks, I want to try reuse my old parts and make it into a nas/storage system. The purpose of this build is to use hold photos, videos, and important files and I don't want to spend money on cloud servers. I'll be reusing most of all parts with the exception of getting a smaller case that can hold more drives as well as new hdd drives, but i'm not sure what other requirements I would need such as a raid card or if I need a sever OS or not.

My current parts that I'll be reusing are:

CPU: Core i7-3930K

Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth x79 (contains 2 SATA 6.0Gb/s and 4 SATA 3.0Gb/s)

Memory: G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2400 (PC3 19200)

Video Card: Gigabyte GTX 680

Power supply: corsair Gold AX850 850W

Boot Drive: 500GB ssd boot drive

I'm fully aware that some of these might be excessive for a nas, but it's all I've got and I would like to try not to buy parts that I don't need to if at all possible.

I'm switching out my old case to a Fractal Design Define R5.

As for hard drives, would it be more cost effective to get the biggest one or several smaller ones and put them in a raid format?

Budget (including currency): $500

Country: US

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

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): All mentioned above

Electronics Wizardy · October 6, 2023

Hardware looks fine here, might be a bit power hungry though so take that into account if you have high power costs.

How much storage do you want?

Id probably start with soemthing like 3x 12TB drives. Then go with a OS like unraid so its easy to add drives later on for more storage.

jowest90 · October 6, 2023

13 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Hardware looks fine here, might be a bit power hungry though so take that into account if you have high power costs.

How much storage do you want?

Id probably start with soemthing like 3x 12TB drives. Then go with a OS like unraid so its easy to add drives later on for more storage.

As mentioned, I am aware of the power costs, but those are the parts I have at the moment. Unless maybe someone can recommend me a super cheap gpu that I can use to view my storage, I'm willing to do that.

As for how much storage, 36TB would be work for now.