Looking for some input on a budget NAS setup.

[WagonDude555]

Long story short my wife is going to go crazy if we don't get a NAS going before Netflix takes Supernatural off of streaming. I have a Windows XP era full tower it has tons drive bays, and decent airflow. For the power supply I have an older 550? gold power supply sitting around. I really like the flexibility of the AMD AM4 platform(I also have an older AM4 V8 cooler for the cpu). For the CPU I was considering the AMD Ryzen™ 5 5600G 6-Core 12-Thread(should this be good? other suggestions?). Not sure what I really need for motherboard. Things I can think of is plenty of SATA ports(I want to run 4-6  20TB drives), and a nvme for a boot drive, do I need a graphics card? How good does it need to be? For Ram I'm thinking some budget friendly 64gb kits(or 2 32gb kits). What else should i consider, case fans are all going to be swapped for Noctua, since it will live in my office. 

 

My plan for this NAS is to store all of our physical media onto it so that my wife and I can easily access it. This includes 200-300 movies. DVD, BluRay, including several shows. Along with a pretty extensive music collection I have 2TB of music, and not all of my CDs are even ripped, my close friend has about 5TB of music that we would like to combine since we both have unique releases, all are at high quality FLAC. I'm sure there are other things, but that the start of it. My goal is to run a Raid setup so I can lose a drive and not lose any data, I plan on getting used certified drives. 

 

 I'm real excited to start building my new to me NAS, so what does everyone think about my component choices before I start buying, what should I change, or keep? I want to keep the cost lower, but I absolutely understand buy once cry once. I have had extremely good luck with used parts, and cheap knock off parts. So if I can find something cheaper used let me know, I just don't know enough about what matters for a NAS. I really appreciate any help. 

[Dutch_Master]

Do you need to do transcoding for streaming that FLAC files? If so, you need a GPU and better (higher rated) PSU.

 

To connect your drives, use a HBA (host-bus-adapter) to connect all your storage drives to, it simplifies upgrading the mainboard in future as all you need to do is taking it out of the PCIe slot and reconnect it when you've swapped out the mainboard. In your case, an LSI 9300-8i or similar card will suffice. However, this does require a breakout cable for each 4 SATA ports, but those are quite affordable.

 

For drives, consider refurbished enterprise drives, currently the 16TB is the sweet-spot in price/capacity. Also, to minimise the risk of data loss, use no more then 2 drives from a single manufacturer.

 

What OS are you using, Win-OS is simply not the best choice. Options include plain Linux, ProxMox (modified Linux) TrueNAS (a BSD variant), Hex-OS (a TrueNAS skin for newbees) and UnRAID (another Linux variant). Some are free, others aren't. Most offer ZFS as file system and that's fine, on plain Linux you can use RAID6 and have a 2-drive redundancy. That is, any 2 drives can fail w/o data loss. On ZFS, it's not that easy but the GUI helps setting stuff up (that's the entire purpose of said GUI )

 

Should you want to go all fancy, consider an Asrock Rack X570 board, it has 2x Gbit (or better) NIC as well as IPMI/BMC (onboard hardware management). If you choose this route, skip the 5600G and use a 5700X instead. It offers 2 extra cores and no burden of the iGPU (but you'd either don't need it if you don't transcode streams or you have a decent dGPU for that task anyway). Do note these IPMI boards are more expensive as their non-IPMI counterparts and harder to find.

 

HTH!

[Dedayog]

46 minutes ago, WagonDude555 said:

Long story short my wife is going to go crazy if we don't get a NAS going before Netflix takes Supernatural off of streaming. I have a Windows XP era full tower it has tons drive bays, and decent airflow. For the power supply I have an older 550? gold power supply sitting around. I really like the flexibility of the AMD AM4 platform(I also have an older AM4 V8 cooler for the cpu). For the CPU I was considering the AMD Ryzen™ 5 5600G 6-Core 12-Thread(should this be good? other suggestions?). Not sure what I really need for motherboard. Things I can think of is plenty of SATA ports(I want to run 4-6  20TB drives), and a nvme for a boot drive, do I need a graphics card? How good does it need to be? For Ram I'm thinking some budget friendly 64gb kits(or 2 32gb kits). What else should i consider, case fans are all going to be swapped for Noctua, since it will live in my office. 

 

My plan for this NAS is to store all of our physical media onto it so that my wife and I can easily access it. This includes 200-300 movies. DVD, BluRay, including several shows. Along with a pretty extensive music collection I have 2TB of music, and not all of my CDs are even ripped, my close friend has about 5TB of music that we would like to combine since we both have unique releases, all are at high quality FLAC. I'm sure there are other things, but that the start of it. My goal is to run a Raid setup so I can lose a drive and not lose any data, I plan on getting used certified drives. 

 

 I'm real excited to start building my new to me NAS, so what does everyone think about my component choices before I start buying, what should I change, or keep? I want to keep the cost lower, but I absolutely understand buy once cry once. I have had extremely good luck with used parts, and cheap knock off parts. So if I can find something cheaper used let me know, I just don't know enough about what matters for a NAS. I really appreciate any help. 

You really don't need much for a good NAS/Plex box.  Mine is...  parts I had from upgrading...

 

Plex: AMD Ryzen 5 5600 - Gigabyte B550M AORUS Elite AX - G. Skill Ripjaws V 16GB 2400Mhz - MSI 1050Ti 4GB - Crucial P3 Plus 500GB + WD Red NAS 4TBx2 - TP-Link AC1200 PCIe Wifi - EVGA SuperNova 650 P2 - ASUS Prime AP201

 

I have 592 movies (720p and 1080p) as well as 2,807 TV Show episodes.  Like every Star Trek episode, from every generation of ST, full seasons of CSI, Burn Notice, Mentalist, etc etc etc.  All saved on a 4TB drive (actually only 2.53TB used so far).  You'll be fine with some 12TB drives or so.

 

Don't go nuts with 4K or BluRay shit, let the TV upscale.  

[Bersella AI]

14 hours ago, WagonDude555 said:

For the CPU I was considering the AMD Ryzen™ 5 5600G 6-Core 12-Thread(should this be good? other suggestions?)

Pretty decent. The integrated GPU may be utilized by Jellyfin, so that a discrete one is no longer required.

Virtually all recent motherboards come with only 4 SATA ports; for more than 4 drives, an M.2 to SATA riser card or HBA would be essential. Grab a B550 board with at least two PCIe x16 slots for future proofing, and make sure it can fit in that full-tower chassis "from the XP era".

RAM does not need to be beefy for just storage + transcoding. 16 GB would be a sweet point to start and to lower costs.

[Ha-Satan]

8 minutes ago, Bersella AI said:

Pretty decent. The integrated GPU may be utilized by Jellyfin, so that a discrete one is no longer required.

Virtually all recent motherboards come with only 4 SATA ports; for more than 4 drives, an M.2 to SATA riser card or HBA would be essential. Grab a B550 board with at least two PCIe x16 slots for future proofing, and make sure it can fit in that full-tower chassis "from the XP era".

RAM does not need to be beefy for just storage + transcoding. 16 GB would be a sweet point to start and to lower costs.

Specifically, if @WagonDude555 is going for an AM4 system, the board to get is the MSI Pro B550-VC, because the connectivity is really good: 8 SATA ports, 2 M.2 slots, and 4 full-length PCIe slots. Granted only the top slot is PCIe 4.0 X16 (the others are PCIe 3.0 X1/X4/X1 respectively) and the third PCIe slot can't be used at the same time as the second M.2 slot, but it should still be more than enough for a typical home server user. You'd easily have the bandwidth to use all 8 SATA ports, a SATA expansion card for even more ports, and a fast PCIe NIC.

 

[WagonDude555]

On 3/16/2025 at 8:54 PM, Dutch_Master said:

Do you need to do transcoding for streaming that FLAC files? If so, you need a GPU and better (higher rated) PSU.

 

To connect your drives, use a HBA (host-bus-adapter) to connect all your storage drives to, it simplifies upgrading the mainboard in future as all you need to do is taking it out of the PCIe slot and reconnect it when you've swapped out the mainboard. In your case, an LSI 9300-8i or similar card will suffice. However, this does require a breakout cable for each 4 SATA ports, but those are quite affordable.

 

For drives, consider refurbished enterprise drives, currently the 16TB is the sweet-spot in price/capacity. Also, to minimise the risk of data loss, use no more then 2 drives from a single manufacturer.

 

What OS are you using, Win-OS is simply not the best choice. Options include plain Linux, ProxMox (modified Linux) TrueNAS (a BSD variant), Hex-OS (a TrueNAS skin for newbees) and UnRAID (another Linux variant). Some are free, others aren't. Most offer ZFS as file system and that's fine, on plain Linux you can use RAID6 and have a 2-drive redundancy. That is, any 2 drives can fail w/o data loss. On ZFS, it's not that easy but the GUI helps setting stuff up (that's the entire purpose of said GUI )

 

Should you want to go all fancy, consider an Asrock Rack X570 board, it has 2x Gbit (or better) NIC as well as IPMI/BMC (onboard hardware management). If you choose this route, skip the 5600G and use a 5700X instead. It offers 2 extra cores and no burden of the iGPU (but you'd either don't need it if you don't transcode streams or you have a decent dGPU for that task anyway). Do note these IPMI boards are more expensive as their non-IPMI counterparts and harder to find.

 

HTH!

I don't think I'll need transcoding for FLAC files. But I was going to possibly throw my old 1660 super in there, I'll be upgrading this year, so my wife can have my 3070. Refurbished drives was what I was thinking to use, nothing on my NAS will be super important, I'll be keeping all physical media. I did forget to mention I have no idea what OS I was going to use, I was thinking at least use Linux, but I've souly have been a Window user my entire life, so I may have some issues. Thank you for the board recommendations, seems that there are many suggestions, so I'm going to compare and see what I like best. 

On 3/17/2025 at 11:23 AM, Ha-Satan said:

Specifically, if @WagonDude555 is going for an AM4 system, the board to get is the MSI Pro B550-VC, because the connectivity is really good: 8 SATA ports, 2 M.2 slots, and 4 full-length PCIe slots. Granted only the top slot is PCIe 4.0 X16 (the others are PCIe 3.0 X1/X4/X1 respectively) and the third PCIe slot can't be used at the same time as the second M.2 slot, but it should still be more than enough for a typical home server user. You'd easily have the bandwidth to use all 8 SATA ports, a SATA expansion card for even more ports, and a fast PCIe NIC.

 

I really like this board, I'm thinking a PCIe NIC would be much cheaper than spending more on a board with better NIC. I appreciate the input. 

 

 

Ultimately I think I will go with the MSI PRO B550-VC Board, I'll buy only 16GB of ram, keep the AMD Ryzen™ 5 5600G 6-Core 12-Thread, I did forget that the PSU I had was a really cheap no name unit, so I'll be buying a new one. I'm thinking 650 watts should be more than enough(gold rated good?). CPU cooler will be fine, I'll be getting some refurbished drives from Server Part Deals. I'll add the 1660 Super whenever I decide to upgrade my card, and that should be it. I'll keep an eye out for any more replies or suggestions, but I think that should be a pretty decent NAS build.