DIY NAS build

[Mouse-Potato]

Budget (including currency): 1000 euros +/-

Country: France

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Fully dedicated 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): Currrently i have a 2200G on an Asrock A/B 350 mini-itx board with 8gb of Ram

 

Hello all,

I was undecided wether to post in the NAS or new build category. I figured that is does qualify as a new build since i know close to nothing about setting up a NAS hardware wise and i could use all the help that i can get.

 

So basically what i want to accomplish is build a system with redundancy with at least 15Tb of storage that has low power consumption.

 

Hardware wise on hand i currently have:

Mobo: Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac

CPU: AMD 2200G

Ram : 8 gb 3000MHZ

PSU: Corsair SF450 

 

I'm planning on using the Jonsbo N1 or N2 case to build in.

 

What would you guys recommend for storage ? I'm kind of lost on that point

Also regarding ram i've read up that i's best to use ECC and that the CPU i have might not be compatible.

Would it be better to just use an Intel N97 or variant board and start from scratch ? The low power consumption of those boards are very attractive.

 

Any recommendations would be awesome !

[Dr. Will0hlep]

20 minutes ago, Mouse-Potato said:

Budget (including currency): 1000 euros +/-

Country: France

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Fully dedicated 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): Currrently i have a 2200G on an Asrock A/B 350 mini-itx board with 8gb of Ram

 

Hello all,

I was undecided wether to post in the NAS or new build category. I figured that is does qualify as a new build since i know close to nothing about setting up a NAS hardware wise and i could use all the help that i can get.

 

So basically what i want to accomplish is build a system with redundancy with at least 15Tb of storage that has low power consumption.

 

Hardware wise on hand i currently have:

Mobo: Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac

CPU: AMD 2200G

Ram : 8 gb 3000MHZ

PSU: Corsair SF450 

 

I'm planning on using the Jonsbo N1 or N2 case to build in.

 

What would you guys recommend for storage ? I'm kind of lost on that point

Also regarding ram i've read up that i's best to use ECC and that the CPU i have might not be compatible.

Would it be better to just use an Intel N97 or variant board and start from scratch ? The low power consumption of those boards are very attractive.

 

Any recommendations would be awesome !

ECC is a nice to have, but you should be fine without it. It would appear that your CPU and Motherboard both support it seperately (provided they are unbuffered dimms) but together ECC is unsupported. However, as I said, I'd continue on with non-ECC memory.

 

As for cases, I'd suggest a Fractal Design Node 804 cube case, it is a bit larger but it will take up to 10 3.5' drives (8 of those go in easily).

 

For storage you want HDD that are CMR (avoid SMR drives). SSDs are pointless in a nas unless you plan to spend loads on networking, cause networking is almost always the bottleneck.

[Mouse-Potato]

1 hour ago, will0hlep said:

ECC is a nice to have, but you should be fine without it. It would appear that your CPU and Motherboard both support it seperately (provided they are unbuffered dimms) but together ECC is unsupported. However, as I said, I'd continue on with non-ECC memory.

 

As for cases, I'd suggest a Fractal Design Node 804 cube case, it is a bit larger but it will take up to 10 3.5' drives (8 of those go in easily).

 

For storage you want HDD that are CMR (avoid SMR drives). SSDs are pointless in a nas unless you plan to spend loads on networking, cause networking is almost always the bottleneck.

Ok for the non-ECC memory, but i'm not sure i understand why if both bits of hardware support it seperately, why can't they support it together ?

 

Regarding the case, i'm crunched on space at home, but i suppose the 10 drive option is a nice to-have. Will i need 8 to 10 drives though ?

 

I figured I could get away with 3 to 5 3.5" drives and fit it in a more compact case. What brand/model drives would you recommend that are reliable ?

 

Thank you !

[Dr. Will0hlep]

32 minutes ago, Mouse-Potato said:

i'm not sure i understand why if both bits of hardware support it seperately, why can't they support it together?

I didn't understand it either (I had assumed it was the motherboard manufacturers choice) but having looked again, it looks like the 2200G is the issue (the 2200G Pro does support ECC but the 2200G dosn't). If you wanted ECC you'd need a slightly newer CPU (Check motherboard listing for a detailed list of supported RAM by CPU). That said I still don't recommend ECC memory for most use cases.

 

32 minutes ago, Mouse-Potato said:

Regarding the case, i'm crunched on space at home, but i suppose the 10 drive option is a nice to-have. Will i need 8 to 10 drives though?

Well, that depends. How do you plan to use the NAS? Is it for backup or is it to be used like an archive?

 

If it is for Backup (for the storage of a second copy of your data) it really only needs to have as much storage as the systems your backing up (plus a bit more).

 

If it is for Archive (for storage of data that you plan to only have on the NAS), you need to take into account not just how much data you have now, but also how much you want to add in the near future (3-5 years).

 

Do you need/want built in redundancy? If yes, how much?

 

Also, when it comes to adding more space later or replacing the array, it is much easier if you have several empty bays that you can just put new drives into.

 

32 minutes ago, Mouse-Potato said:

What brand/model drives would you recommend that are reliable ?

I typically buy Seagate drives, either Ironwolf Pros or Exos drives, mostly cause they offer very good TByr/£ (Data Stored for Warrenty Duration per Pound spent) in the UK (prices will vary). But the most important thing is to get CMR drives.

[Needfuldoer]

2 hours ago, Mouse-Potato said:

What would you guys recommend for storage ? I'm kind of lost on that point

For the amount of space you want, I'd go with a mirror of two large-capacity hard drives with a third as a cold spare. If you're going to use a media library like Plex or Jellyfin, or a personal photo server, then you'll want to run their databases off an SSD. You won't necessarily need the raw throughput an SSD can offer, but their random read speeds will make the interfaces feel a lot snappier. (It makes a huge difference to loading posters and thumbnails, for example.) 

 

Another option would be to run four drives in either a single parity RAID, but since you're planning to use an ITX board with only four SATA ports, you won't be able to run any additional drives without using up your only PCIe slot. (You may want to install high speed networking or a low power GPU in the future.)

 

Personally I'm running 12 TB HGST/WD Red equivalent white-label drives I shucked out of EasyStore enclosures, and they've been fine.

 

But no matter what, always remember that RAID is not a backup. RAID is insurance against downtime and having to manually restore from your backups.

 

2 hours ago, Mouse-Potato said:

Hardware wise on hand i currently have:

Mobo: Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac

CPU: AMD 2200G

Ram : 8 gb 3000MHZ

PSU: Corsair SF450 

This is a great start for a NAS!

 

I can't find anything that says your M.2 slot shares bandwidth with the SATA ports, so you should be able to use all of them. 

 

If you run TrueNAS, you'll need a dedicated boot drive. You can shove a very affordable 32 gig Optane M10 32GB drive into the bottom M.2 slot and forget it exists.

 

Unraid uses a USB flash drive to boot, so you can put a storage drive in the M.2 slot if you want to. (Some people might recommend using an SSD "as a cache", but it doesn't really work that way to speed things up.)

[Mouse-Potato]

8 hours ago, will0hlep said:

I didn't understand it either (I had assumed it was the motherboard manufacturers choice) but having looked again, it looks like the 2200G is the issue (the 2200G Pro does support ECC but the 2200G dosn't). If you wanted ECC you'd need a slightly newer CPU (Check motherboard listing for a detailed list of supported RAM by CPU). That said I still don't recommend ECC memory for most use cases.

I was thinking of maybe going with a 3400G because of memory limitation issues i've been having with the 2200G, I seem to not be able to go higher than 2666Mhz stable.

 

8 hours ago, will0hlep said:

 

Well, that depends. How do you plan to use the NAS? Is it for backup or is it to be used like an archive?

The sole purpose would be access movies, pictures, files all over the internet as well as local. The same way Qnap or Synology works. Not sure if Unraid or Truenas supports mobile device access the same way though.

 

8 hours ago, will0hlep said:

Do you need/want built in redundancy? If yes, how much?

I was under the impression that with certain RAID setups you could basically rebuild your filesystem without any loss if a HDD fails, at least that is what i'm looking to accomplish.

 

8 hours ago, will0hlep said:

I typically buy Seagate drives, either Ironwolf Pros or Exos drives, mostly cause they offer very good TByr/£ (Data Stored for Warrenty Duration per Pound spent) in the UK (prices will vary). But the most important thing is to get CMR drives.

Those Seagates seem to be the go-to drives for most NAS builds, I know that WD Red's used to be the reference but not sure they are still up their on the charts reliability wise.

I've been referring to backblaze's stats though, not sure that is a good way to pinpoint the drives that seam to be more reliable https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-Q1-2024/

 

Thanks a lot for your help !

[Mouse-Potato]

9 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

For the amount of space you want, I'd go with a mirror of two large-capacity hard drives with a third as a cold spare. If you're going to use a media library like Plex or Jellyfin, or a personal photo server, then you'll want to run their databases off an SSD. You won't necessarily need the raw throughput an SSD can offer, but their random read speeds will make the interfaces feel a lot snappier. (It makes a huge difference to loading posters and thumbnails, for example.) 

This seems very difficult to set up ? So the SSD would basically be a giant cache/reference drive for the main HDD's ?

9 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

 

Another option would be to run four drives in either a single parity RAID, but since you're planning to use an ITX board with only four SATA ports, you won't be able to run any additional drives without using up your only PCIe slot. (You may want to install high speed networking or a low power GPU in the future.)

So i have 4 SATA drives on the Mobo, and an M.2 on the back side but i also have this RADI card that fits into the PCIe slot: https://www.startech.com/en-fr/cards-adapters/pexsat34rh

 

I've had it for a while but not sure how to implement it into the rest of the build and the other SATA drives, it supports HyperDuo which apparently is good. But that's all i know about the device ^^. I have seen M.2 to 4 SATA outputs, which might be a better option, the only problem is that i would need the space behind the case to access it and that could be a problem.

 

9 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

 

Personally I'm running 12 TB HGST/WD Red equivalent white-label drives I shucked out of EasyStore enclosures, and they've been fine.

Would you use refurbished drives? I've found some 12TB HGST's for around 140 euros, but i'm always hesitant to pull the trigger because i'm afraid of errors or premature death of said drives ...

9 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

 

If you run TrueNAS, you'll need a dedicated boot drive. You can shove a very affordable 32 gig Optane M10 32GB drive into the bottom M.2 slot and forget it exists.

You're recommending Optane's over other mainstream brands because of the price ? I could pick up a 128GB patriot M.2 SSD for about 20 euros.

 

9 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

 

Unraid uses a USB flash drive to boot, so you can put a storage drive in the M.2 slot if you want to. (Some people might recommend using an SSD "as a cache", but it doesn't really work that way to speed things up.)

I'm somewhat lots between the dedicated boot drive for TrueNas and the Unraid flash drive. By flash drive you mean like a SD card of a thumb drive ?

 

 

And thank you as well for your help !

[Needfuldoer]

7 minutes ago, Mouse-Potato said:

This seems very difficult to set up ? So the SSD would basically be a giant cache/reference drive for the main HDD's ?

Not really. You'd set the SSD up as its own pool, then install Plex/Jellyfin/Photoprism/etc there instead of the spinning drives. It wouldn't be a cache, but its own separate bucket of data. (SSDs "as a cache" aren't really a thing with ZFS anyway.)

 

9 minutes ago, Mouse-Potato said:

Would you use refurbished drives? I've found some 12TB HGST's for around 140 euros, but i'm always hesitant to pull the trigger because i'm afraid of errors or premature death of said drives ...

That's why you buy spares when you buy used or refurbished drives. If you've got a spare drive on the shelf, ready to go in case of a drive failure, you can at least buy yourself a little time to replace the spare.

 

Usually those drives are well within the bottom of the bathtub curve by the time they're resold; the really bad ones have already failed and been replaced, but they're not completely used up to the point where they're extremely likely to fail in the near future. 

 

The biggest drawback to used drives in my opinion is that they usually only come with a minimal warranty. A new bare drive might have a 5 year warranty, a new shucked drive might be 3 years, but a used refurbished drive may only get 30 to 90 days.

 

12 minutes ago, Mouse-Potato said:

You're recommending Optane's over other mainstream brands because of the price ? I could pick up a 128GB patriot M.2 SSD for about 20 euros.

Price and longevity. TrueNAS doesn't need a lot of space, so the small capacity of a 32 gig Optane is fine. At least in the US you can get one of those shipped to your door for under $20, and there are sellers in China that ship globally for about the same price. Those Optane M10 drives are rated for 365 TBW. The Patriot P300 128 GB is only rated for 60 TBW. Since TrueNAS doesn't really want you to use the boot drive for hosting files, you might as well get a small, cheap one you'll never have to worry about.