I am looking to build a NAS for personal use with a Raspberry Pi 5 but I am dumb and need help

[BroganLive]

Budget (including currency): $250 USD (This is going to be flexible because I know by the time I build the computer itself I'm only leaving room for one smaller drive to start with)

Country: United States

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: I think I want to use Jellyfin but I am starting from 0 knowledge so I am open to suggestions. I want to be able to stream Movies, TV shows, and music, I would love to be able to do so in home AND out of home. I would also love to be able to run game servers (Minecraft specifically) but I don't know if that is something this hardware would be capable of.

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 know I need a Pi 5, I am also fairly certain my best bet in terms of maximum number of drive bays is the Radxa "Penta SATA Hat". With my current projected budget I hope to get it up and running as a proof of concept with one 500gb-1tb drive initially, adding more as needed or as I have the money for it. What I really would love is a complete component list and someone who could teach a 5 year old how to install all the software and get the thing up and running. Again I am starting with 0 knowledge on NAS building so I am open to any and all suggestions and critiques. I am struggling mostly because a lot of the videos I have seen are assuming I have some base level of knowledge on what any of these things are, how they work together, and a decent amount of command line comfortability, which I do not have. I do not have a timeline for this but the goal is to have something that is good enough that I no longer need to be spending 15 dollars a month on this and 20 dollars a month on that and another 8 dollars a month on some third thing. I am tired of subscriptions, I have a vast collection of physical media and there is no reason I should not be getting the most use out of what I have before spending MORE money on services that seem to actively hate me. I will also say, if someone is aware of something that is within or near my budget range that ISN'T a Pi NAS but would give me what I am looking for I am all ears.

 

[Ha-Satan]

So to be honest, a Pi 5 may not be the easiest or cheapest way to get started with selfhosting. My recommendation instead would be to get a used office PC or workstation. These will of course be considerably larger than the Pi and will draw more power, so take that into consideration, but what you get in return will be worth it for most people.

 

A used office PC will have an X86-based processor, which will give you more options for software than you would get on the Pi's ARM-based chip. Also, a tower PC will give you lots of internal expansion options for both drives and PCIe cards. Finally, especially if you get a relatively modern Intel CPU, you'll get a really good iGPU for transcoding, which is important for a good Jellyfin experience. (IIRC, the hardware encoding on the Pi 5 still isn't as good as modern Intel iGPUs, though I could be mis-remembering).

 

Something like this or this would be great (especially the second one since it's full-width, which will give you even more options for internal expansion). My file and media server is basically identical to the second one. I'm still relatively new to the world of selfhosting (only been doing it about 18 months) and I can attest that this was a great machine for me to start with.

 

As a general rule, getting an Intel CPU that's at least 7th gen or newer is a good idea because the iGPUs from the 7th gen is when Intel started to support most of the modern video codecs that you might want to use for transcoding. Obviously even newer than that will be better, but stuff from the 7th gen era is a good balance when it comes to price vs. encoding capabilities. I think that a lot of business are also offloading 7th gen machines for cheap right now since they don't officially support Windows 11.

[SorryBella]

8 hours ago, BroganLive said:

Again I am starting with 0 knowledge on NAS building

Then i would recommend starting off with x86, on Raspberry Pi your best bet is going to be OpenMediaVault, not TrueNAS. You could recompile a TrueNAS image to run on Raspberry Pi but not without a lot of fight.

 

7 hours ago, Ha-Satan said:

because the iGPUs from the 7th gen is when Intel started to support most of the modern video codecs that you might want to use for transcoding.

6th also support all the way to HEVC. The more important feature of 7th gen is that thats when Nvme boot is a commonplace on most of these system without a BIOS hack, which means you can free up every single of your SATA port to your storage drives. Nevertheless +1.