Building a NAS

[Coen Hacking]

Hi everyone,

 

This year I built my first PC. 

Now I'm also trying to build a NAS, but don't want it to be too big. So I thought this case would be a good option:

https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005001370106988.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.100009.2.2c0a72a8A5mDzJ&gps-id=pcDetailLeftTopSell&scm=1007.13482.271138.0&scm_id=1007.13482.271138.0&scm-url=1007.13482.271138.0&pvid=bcfd0b10-5b82-4d63-be7e-95a303c5d662&_t=gps-id%3ApcDetailLeftTopSell%2Cscm-url%3A1007.13482.271138.0%2Cpvid%3Abcfd0b10-5b82-4d63-be7e-95a303c5d662%2Ctpp_buckets%3A668%232846%238109%231935&pdp_npi=4%40dis!EUR!68.66!65.23!!!71.24!!%402103849716992128702215501e3231!12000029396902645!rec!NL!!AB&gatewayAdapt=glo2nld

 

These are the parts I selected, I went a bit overkill with the PSU (500W), but the options are quite limited for 1U Flex / Standard.

https://nl.pcpartpicker.com/user/coen123/saved/#view=vMFzvK

I'm going to put TrueNAS Scale on it with ZRAID1.

 

Does anybody have experience with building NASes?

Do you have any suggestions for better cases? I would like to have accessible drive bays

Any PSU suggestions? I did see the FSP FlexGURU 300W, the only modular one, but I'm not sure if there's better options.

[Dr. Will0hlep]

Putting SSDs in a NAS is overkill unless you have some stupidly good internet connect. Bandwidth is almost always the limiting factor. Unless you have 10Gb/s LAN speeds get HDDs.

 

When I built mine I used a node 804. it's a similar design of case, but It can fit 10 3.5" HDDs and 2 2.5" SSDs.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Since your going ssd only, I'd be darn tempted personally to just get a mini pc and use m.2/2.5in drives. Should be much smaller. And since your only using 8tb of drives, I'd just get a single 8tb drive here if it was me.

 

Don't forget a boot drive for truenas.

 

[jaslion]

Any reason for ssd only? Do you need like something CRAZY fast.

[Coen Hacking]

Thank you for the suggestions!

 

The reasons that I want to do it this way with SSDs:

• Reducing latency, HDDs always have a worse worst case latency
• Form factor, yes, M.2 is smaller and much more performant, but only full ATX boards have 4 or more slots
  • Yes I could get myself a nice PCIe card, but I don't want to open the entire case when one drive fails (I know it's incredibly uncommon)
  • I might want to move the disks over to a rack mount later on in a bigger array (even though I'll probably buy different drives by then)
• Noise, I've got an apartment and the NAS would be in my living room. SSDs are nice and quiet
• Redundancy, an 8TB M.2 is nice, but I want data safety
  • My MacBook just died. Luckily nothing was lost (thanks to various cloud storage providers) and Apple replaced it, but I just want to have better data management
  • I looked at 2TB drives and 4TB drives. 2TB was much more cost-effective.

It's currently not so much about speed, as I already have NVME drives in my PC.

[Electronics Wizardy]

56 minutes ago, Coen Hacking said:

Thank you for the suggestions!

 

The reasons that I want to do it this way with SSDs:

• Reducing latency, HDDs always have a worse worst case latency
• Form factor, yes, M.2 is smaller and much more performant, but only full ATX boards have 4 or more slots
  • Yes I could get myself a nice PCIe card, but I don't want to open the entire case when one drive fails (I know it's incredibly uncommon)
  • I might want to move the disks over to a rack mount later on in a bigger array (even though I'll probably buy different drives by then)
• Noise, I've got an apartment and the NAS would be in my living room. SSDs are nice and quiet
• Redundancy, an 8TB M.2 is nice, but I want data safety
  • My MacBook just died. Luckily nothing was lost (thanks to various cloud storage providers) and Apple replaced it, but I just want to have better data management
  • I looked at 2TB drives and 4TB drives. 2TB was much more cost-effective.

It's currently not so much about speed, as I already have NVME drives in my PC.

With 1gbe networking that different will be pretty small for most uses, I'd really go above 1gbe if you care about latency.

 

I'd just go with a single large m.2 and I'd say the failure isn't that big of a issue. Modern ssds have a pretty low failure rate, and worst case restore backups. Raid doesn't protect from all issues that could take all the at out, so you still want those backups anyways.

 

Should work as planned though

[NikoPCraft]

If you gonna use SSD you better get 10G NIC, with 1G you have no reason to worry about latency because for LAN 1G is going to be painfully slow if you are content producer and want to host your projects on your NAS. Let's just say even with SSDs but 1G connection between your pc and NAS you'r not going to be editing 4k braw footage from that NAS with 1G no matter how fast SSDs you've got, however if you WANT to do just that or something simillar to that work from your PC and have all your projects on NAS, then consider a moderboard that will support 10G or allow you to stick in a 10G network card into it. If you do that, you gonna need a switch that will support 10G and you will need to update your PC to support 10G networking as well. Only then can you relax about redundancy, and if I do not care about any of that and just want NAS to store music, movies and for backup, you do not have to worry about redundancy... Anyways that's my 2 cents and let us know what you end up putting together 

[silentdragon95]

Keep in mind that RAID is not a backup. Ideally you'd either be storing backups of your other computers on the NAS, in which case you don't really need redundancy because the data is already a copy, or you'd be storing important files that aren't necessarily saved anywhere else, in which case you really should have a regular backup to an external drive or cloud storage. In both cases RAID isn't really all that necessary.

 

If speed isn't as much of a concern, also keep in mind that 5200RPM HDDs aren't extremely loud either, and you could always set them to spin down after x amount of time, so they wouldn't be running during the night for example. Also do make sure that the rest of your components are quiet if that is a big concern for you, especially SFF power supplies aren't really known for being super quiet due to the small fan inside.

[Coen Hacking]

2 hours ago, NikoPCraft said:

If you gonna use SSD you better get 10G NIC, with 1G you have no reason to worry about latency because for LAN 1G is going to be painfully slow if you are content producer and want to host your projects on your NAS. Let's just say even with SSDs but 1G connection between your pc and NAS you'r not going to be editing 4k braw footage from that NAS with 1G no matter how fast SSDs you've got, however if you WANT to do just that or something simillar to that work from your PC and have all your projects on NAS, then consider a moderboard that will support 10G or allow you to stick in a 10G network card into it. If you do that, you gonna need a switch that will support 10G and you will need to update your PC to support 10G networking as well. Only then can you relax about redundancy, and if I do not care about any of that and just want NAS to store music, movies and for backup, you do not have to worry about redundancy... Anyways that's my 2 cents and let us know what you end up putting together 

Well, no 10Gb/s yet. but I do have 2.5Gb/s on my PC and switch. It's mostly IT/AI stuff, no 4K raw content.

I'll also have some movies on there with Jellyfin.

1 hour ago, silentdragon95 said:

Keep in mind that RAID is not a backup. Ideally you'd either be storing backups of your other computers on the NAS, in which case you don't really need redundancy because the data is already a copy, or you'd be storing important files that aren't necessarily saved anywhere else, in which case you really should have a regular backup to an external drive or cloud storage. In both cases RAID isn't really all that necessary.

 

If speed isn't as much of a concern, also keep in mind that 5200RPM HDDs aren't extremely loud either, and you could always set them to spin down after x amount of time, so they wouldn't be running during the night for example. Also do make sure that the rest of your components are quiet if that is a big concern for you, especially SFF power supplies aren't really known for being super quiet due to the small fan inside.

It's additional backup to cloud storage. Most of my things are on Google Drive and Github.

Good point about the power supply, but aren't all Flex 1U units quite loud then?

The beQuiet Straight Power 11, isn't audible.

 

This might be an option https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005005905553933.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.main.1.3d4d1bc60cAXW7&algo_pvid=91bb500d-1e66-4f4d-ab31-b83212acea29&algo_exp_id=91bb500d-1e66-4f4d-ab31-b83212acea29-0&pdp_npi=4%40dis!EUR!219.24!135.93!!!1673.58!!%40211b612516992823133286510e1aed!12000034791285507!sea!NL!0!AB&curPageLogUid=1dDuWWDqaySN

It's also easier, because I can get a be quiet! SFX L Power 500W

 

I basically want a Seagate Diskstation that I build myself

[silentdragon95]

17 minutes ago, Coen Hacking said:

Good point about the power supply, but aren't all Flex 1U units quite loud then?

Yeah, pretty much. If you want the system to be quiet I would avoid these power supplies, after all they are usually meant to be used in servers or big workstations where noise is less of a concern.

 

17 minutes ago, Coen Hacking said:

This might be an option https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005005905553933.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.main.1.3d4d1bc60cAXW7&algo_pvid=91bb500d-1e66-4f4d-ab31-b83212acea29&algo_exp_id=91bb500d-1e66-4f4d-ab31-b83212acea29-0&pdp_npi=4%40dis!EUR!219.24!135.93!!!1673.58!!%40211b612516992823133286510e1aed!12000034791285507!sea!NL!0!AB&curPageLogUid=1dDuWWDqaySN

It's also easier, because I can get a be quiet! SFX L Power 500W

That does look like a much better option as far as noise goes.