NAS build

[Zeeico]

Budget (including currency): Around $600 hopefully, can stretch to $800 if necessary (not including drives)

Country: US

 

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

This is for a NAS build. The main plan is to run Plex and Pi-hole on it, but I'd also like to be able to run game servers (Assetto Corsa, Minecraft...)

 

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): 

I am looking to buy mostly used parts, but am willing to buy new for some parts like the motherboard or the power supply. Also, I already have a Quadro RTX 4000 that a friend gave me, so I don't need a gpu, and don't necessarily need a cpu with Intel Quick Sync. I know you can't give a parts list for used parts, but I'd love some help in figuring out what platform and parts I should be looking for.

 

Thanks for the help!

[manikyath]

i'm just gonna drop this in as a starting point, because $600 without drives is a pretty nice budget for new hardware too.

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i5-14500 2.6 GHz 14-Core Processor  ($239.99 @ Amazon) 
Motherboard: ASRock Z790 Riptide WiFi ATX LGA1700 Motherboard  ($199.99 @ Newegg) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-4800 CL40 Memory  ($87.99 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Kingston NV2 500 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive  ($37.99 @ Amazon) 
Power Supply: Corsair RM750e (2023) 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  ($99.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $665.95
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-09-03 11:22 EDT-0400

 

went with intel i5, something ryzen 5 would probably run just as well.  32GB RAM because getting any less is pretty poopy value.

thossed in a boot drive for completeness sake.

80+ gold power supply of decent quality.

 

i'm leaving case up in the air, because finding decent NAS cases has become a dark art...

[ChrisLoudon]

16 minutes ago, Zeeico said:

Thanks for the help!

Hi buddy,

 

Plex and Pi-Hole don't need much grunt to run and with the help of your RTX4000 GPU, you won't have any issues with hardware GPU transcoding your video streams.

 

Where you will need a few more horses will be the game servers. Unfortunately, I don't have any experience with these so hopefully others on these forums can chime in and give you a better idea what kind of CPU would be best for these.

 

For the 'back-end', Unraid is a great choice if your storage pool is made up of different sized disks. Its not free so maybe look at TrueNas but I think it relies on all drives being the same size.

 

Alternatively, you could look at a more virtualised environment and use something like Proxmox. Again, this is slightly out of my area of expertise but it would allow for greater control at the expense of increased hardware requirements.

 

Depending on how many drives you intend on installing for the storage part of your build, I have a Fractal Node 804 and I love it. Its a neat uATX case with a load of space for up to 8 x HDDs and 3 x SSDs + however many NVMe's your Mobo supports.

 

Food for thought.

 

C

[Zeeico]

Thank you both for the replies!

@manikyath You're right, I'll probably look more into new parts with my budget, and your list is a good starting point, thanks.

 

@ChrisLoudon Thanks for the tips. I had seen the Fractal Node 804 and it seemed like a really good case for a NAS, I was probably going to end up picking it up.

[ChrisLoudon]

Just now, Zeeico said:

Thanks for the tips. I had seen the Fractal Node 804 and it seemed like a really good case for a NAS, I was probably going to end up picking it up.

No worries. If you do decide to get the 804, be careful when installing the drives in the secondary compartment. The official spec shows support for 8 drives but I would advise on only installing 7 as the 8th drive plays havoc with mobo side cable management specifically the roue for the 2 x 4pin CPU power.

 

Additional cable management can get tricky especially if you have a load of drives but overall its a great case.

 

I'm about to start looking at adding a bit of water cooling to it. Just for $hits and giggles!

[OddOod]

Welcome (back) to the forums!
Honestly, if you live near a decently sized metro area (~25k) there are likely some big businesses that do liquidation sales (I like govdeals.com) and you can often find some end of life servers there with backplanes for HDDs. These tend to make great platforms for a NAS (as long as power isn't wicked spendy)

[igormp]

On 9/3/2024 at 11:58 AM, Zeeico said:

The main plan is to run Plex

How many clients are you serving? If not that many, you should be fine with just CPU transcoding.

Also, do you have a plex pass subscription? Otherwise you won't be able to make use of GPU transcoding.

In case you have just a small number of clients or no subscription, I believe the GPU becomes totally useless and you could just not use it at all.