NAS build

[venith]

• Budget (including currency): 200-400 euro (without storage)
• Country: Germany
• Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Truenas (or HexOS)
• Other details:
  • I'm giving up on DSM (Synology NAS software) and and would mainly use it for raw photo storage.
  • I would need about 10TB of storage (for the next few years), ideally with option to expand later
  • very unlikely that 2 users will be using the NAS simultaneously
  • I am considering the Jonsbo N2 case for its smaller footprint
  • because of noise/power considerations, I am thinking of an intel N100

 

As I have not built a PC in years (my last build included a soundblaster and voodoo card ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), I am a bit lost...

I was wondering if anyone could give me some pointers how to go about this?

 

I guess my preference for the case and cpu are a starting point for which mobo to go for, as this case supports up to 5 3.5 drives, I would be looking for at least this many sata connectors (or is there another way of attaching drives?)

 

Any suggestions are appreciated

 

 

 

 

 

 

[NadiaMayer]

As I said before, in another thread, go with a second hand office PC, preferably some with some PCIe slots

 

You can get PCIe cards so that the controller is relatively easy. And if you get a machine When we come with M.2 slots, you can get these eight slot SATA controller cards.

 

 

[ChrisLoudon]

57 minutes ago, venith said:

my last build included a soundblaster and voodoo card

Lol, now that's a blast from the past.

 

The N2 (and all the Jonsbo Cases for that matter) are pretty nifty if you don't need the space for beefy dGPU.

 

For NAS stuff, I tend to recommend Intel CPUs over AMD, but that's purely down to more Intel CPUs having iGPUs that can be very useful down the line if you want to run a PLEX or Jellyfin media server and need the GPU horsepower for transcoding.

 

For basic storage stuff (and even a few server side docker containers) you don't need much in terms of horsepower. My NAS runs on a very old 3770k (i think) and does me just fine.

 

Another platform to consider would be Unraid. Unfortunately its not free but its one of the few NAS OSs that support storage arrays with a mish-mash of hard disks AND a level of redundancy. Most other platforms (like RAID) require all HDDs be the same size. This was great for me as I had an attic full of old HDDs that ranged between 1TB and 8TB so being able to strap them together and still have enough redundancy to allow for a drive or 2 to fail was great given the age of some of the drives.

 

The only real downside to the Jonsbo N2 case is its mini-ITX which will limit your SATA ports (probably to 4) without using the PCIe slot to add more.

 

You could look on eBay (or similar) and find an older platform that has a board with a couple of eSATA ports on the back. I think I had a Z170 itx board that had this so allowed me to plumb in 6 drives. Current boards might still have them but I've never bothered looking.

 

My NAS is in a Fractal Node 804 with a dGPU for video transcoding and the other PCIe slot has an add-in SATA controller in it that adds 6 more ports.