What motherboard and ram do I need for my nas?

[Kryzillo]

Hello.

I’m building my first nas for movies, photos and in the future security cameras. I’m wondering what motherboard would be best for me to get. Preferably under $150 as I’m trying to keep this build pretty cheap otherwise I would’ve just gone with Ugreen. I do not  have my CPU picked out yet because the marketplace listing didn’t work out for me but it’s most likely going to be some ryzen 5 zen4. 

I want to have 6 drives and if needed upgrade to 8 drives, and I have a 64gb ddr4 laying around that i’ll put in. 

 

Other than that I have a question about RAM and hardware acceleration.

1. I’m going to have around 24tb capacity in 6 drives, and I want to be able to access photos and everything quickly so how much ram would I need for that capacity? is my 64gb enough or overkill?

2. I’ve heard something about gpu hardware acceleration for NAS builds in a recent ltt video, is it worth buying a cheap GTX card to use it? how much “responsiveness” would I gain by doing so? Also, I will be using HEXOS as I just bought a lifetime pass so I realize hardware acc isn’t available at the time of LTTs video on the software but I’m still wondering for any future releases of the software.

 

Sorry if any of these questions are dumb, this is my first nas build I’m used to gaming pcs lol. 

[tkitch]

 

you're not building it for 150$, unless you have a lot of hardware laying around.

 

You need a case w 8+ 3.5" Bays

 

Motherboard + CPU + SATA Card (since no boards have 8+ SATA ports anymore)

 

For 24TB in 6 drives, you need 6TB Drives.  4TB would be much smaller.

Also:  64GB RAM is beyond overkill, but if you have it, it's fine. 

 

Adding a GPU is generally for Video Transcoding.  If you're not doing Plex Transcodes (or Jellyfin, or whatever) you don't really need a GPU.  

[GOTSpectrum]

1 minute ago, tkitch said:

you're not building it for 150$, unless you have a lot of hardware laying around.

I'm pretty sure they meant a motherboard for under 150, not the whole build 

[Kryzillo]

4 minutes ago, tkitch said:

 

you're not building it for 150$, unless you have a lot of hardware laying around.

 

You need a case w 8+ 3.5" Bays

 

Motherboard + CPU + SATA Card (since no boards have 8+ SATA ports anymore)

 

For 24TB in 6 drives, you need 6TB Drives.  4TB would be much smaller.

Also:  64GB RAM is beyond overkill, but if you have it, it's fine. 

 

Adding a GPU is generally for Video Transcoding.  If you're not doing Plex Transcodes (or Jellyfin, or whatever) you don't really need a GPU.  

I meant the motherboard for under $150. 

I have a fractal r5 I’m picking up today for $40 

thanks for the info on the ram and gpu

[Kryzillo]

3 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

I'm pretty sure they meant a motherboard for under 150, not the whole build 

correct 

[tkitch]

1 minute ago, Kryzillo said:

I meant the motherboard for under $150. 

I have a fractal r5 I’m picking up today for $40 

thanks for the info on the ram and gpu

then the answer is:  Basically anything.

You'll be adding a SATA card, or HBA, or other add-on to get enough SATA Ports, so basically any motherboard is all you need.

[Needfuldoer]

A B450/B550 Ryzen 3000 or 5000 build would be more than enough. I'd suggest picking up an Arc A310 for Plex transcoding (if you have a Plex Pass account), since their price/performance is pretty tough to beat if you're shopping for older Quadro cards.

 

If you have the 64 GB of RAM sitting on a shelf already, you might as well use it.

 

You could also go older with a Xeon E5-16xx v4 X99 build. That would give you PCIe lanes for days, but at the expense of higher power consumption.

 

9 minutes ago, tkitch said:

Also:  64GB RAM is beyond overkill

My old home server has 256 GB, and the new one has 192 GB. (Quad channel Broadwell to six-channel Cascade Lake.)