NAS Spec Review

[Materies Coil]

I'm a software developer and small content creator who currently uses a Raspberry Pi 4 and some external hard drives as a NAS, which is getting full (and isn't ideal for a number of reasons). I'm looking to build a new NAS and have done some research to figure out a plan of attack. However, before I pull the trigger and buy the hardware, I was hoping to get some reviews of my hardware choices from more experienced folks to make sure I'm getting the most for my money.

Link: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/bb6tBq

 

 

Budget is £1'000, I can have some play in that if required but would rather not go over unless it gives notable value. Would be planning on install TrueNAS for the software and would be planning to run the hard drives in Vdevs of 3 in Raid1. Means I'd have 24TB of storage (currently have 6TB which is nearly full) with space for another 3 drives to double that storage later.

 

NOTES:

• The OS would be on the SATA SSD (using the second M.2 slot disables 2 of the sata ports for some reason) but means I'd need SATA expansion if I was to add more drives, the M.2 shown would be a caching drive
• I'd want to be able to upgrade the CPU at a later date so I can run a few docker containers, these would mainly be light applications like a custom Discord bot and a webhook server
• Along with this build, I'll be looking to upgrade my home network to 2.5GB (hence a mobo with 2.5GB connection). In the future I'd like to go to 10GB if I can but thats a future upgrade
• I do edit videos from my NAS, so ideally want a good speed from it
• I'm the only person in my house and the only user of my NAS

Any thoughts or comments are appreciated, I'm mainly looking to see if the choices I've made are sensible or if there's space for some improvement. Any advice is welcome!

[Needfuldoer]

2 hours ago, Materies Coil said:

I'd want to be able to upgrade the CPU at a later date so I can run a few docker containers, these would mainly be light applications like a custom Discord bot and a webhook server

If you've been using a Raspberry Pi as a NAS, then you're going to be over the moon with the performance that just about any real, full-size PC will give you.

 

That's plenty of power for a file server.

 

2 hours ago, Materies Coil said:

I do edit videos from my NAS, so ideally want a good speed from it

You're limited to about 100 MB/sec over Gigabit Ethernet. If you want a faster connection than that, you'll need an Ethernet card for the NAS and for your desktop.

[Materies Coil]

Appreciate the feedback, I did suspect that pretty much any full size PC would be a significant upgrade. Was mainly checking for any daft mistakes I may have been making. 

 

Aye, know gigabit is going to be the limiting factor. That's why I went for a mobo that had 2.5GB built in, my PC also has 2.5GB. I just need to get a switch for the higher speed as well. Sounds like I've made good choices so will look at buying it all later.

[porina]

3 hours ago, Materies Coil said:

Would be planning on install TrueNAS for the software and would be planning to run the hard drives in Vdevs of 3 in Raid1. Means I'd have 24TB of storage (currently have 6TB which is nearly full) with space for another 3 drives to double that storage later.

RaidZ1, not Raid1, but that's fine. It just confused me for a second.

 

3 hours ago, Materies Coil said:

the M.2 shown would be a caching drive

I'm not an expert in ZFS but L2 cache is complicated. It's not as simple as just add it and perf universally goes up. Interactions with use case and how much ram you have. Someone else may be able to provide better guidance here.

 

3 hours ago, Materies Coil said:

• I do edit videos from my NAS, so ideally want a good speed from it

Sequential speeds haven't been a problem as far as my attempts were concerned. Even 4k video bitrate isn't that high and you'll more likely be limited by the processing speed of the editing system itself.

 

However, I did find an edge case which put me off using HD storage for video editing and I'm back to local SSD. I'm using Resolve and sometimes some operations block the UI until it is complete. It seems to be when it is trying to read all the audio from a video file. This is more random-like in that it is lots of small separated reads so hard disks suffer badly here and it takes much longer than on SSD. This may or may not be a problem depending on the software, the video files, and how you use them. I usually have long clips (tens of minutes or longer) so it takes a while to go through them.

[Materies Coil]

2 hours ago, porina said:

I'm not an expert in ZFS but L2 cache is complicated. It's not as simple as just add it and perf universally goes up. Interactions with use case and how much ram you have. Someone else may be able to provide better guidance here.

I'm not an expert either, but looking up TrueNAS setup guides you can specify a caching drive for the Vdevs. Most the guides I saw had a similiar setup to mine above with setting a M.2 SSD/NVME as the cache, how this works behind the scenes with ZFS I couldn't say

2 hours ago, porina said:

Sequential speeds haven't been a problem as far as my attempts were concerned. Even 4k video bitrate isn't that high and you'll more likely be limited by the processing speed of the editing system itself.

 

However, I did find an edge case which put me off using HD storage for video editing and I'm back to local SSD. I'm using Resolve and sometimes some operations block the UI until it is complete. It seems to be when it is trying to read all the audio from a video file. This is more random-like in that it is lots of small separated reads so hard disks suffer badly here and it takes much longer than on SSD. This may or may not be a problem depending on the software, the video files, and how you use them. I usually have long clips (tens of minutes or longer) so it takes a while to go through them.

This is good to know thanks, I also use Davinci Resolve. I'll bear this in mind thanks, thankfully most the clips I work with are usually smaller/shorter but may be worth me looking into alternative architectures/work flows for this in future.

[porina]

33 minutes ago, Materies Coil said:

This is good to know thanks, I also use Davinci Resolve. I'll bear this in mind thanks, thankfully most the clips I work with are usually smaller/shorter but may be worth me looking into alternative architectures/work flows for this in future.

If it helps, I haven't had a problem with UI blocking in Cut or Edit, although if you want to see the waveform in Cut it can take much longer to appear. It can happen in Fairlight although I don't know the exact trigger.

[LIGISTX]

On 6/3/2025 at 4:35 AM, Materies Coil said:

I'm not an expert either, but looking up TrueNAS setup guides you can specify a caching drive for the Vdevs. Most the guides I saw had a similiar setup to mine above with setting a M.2 SSD/NVME as the cache, how this works behind the scenes with ZFS I couldn't say

You don’t need L2arc. 
 

ZFS already caches into arc (which is RAM), L2 would then be an SSD. But this is strictly a read cache, which is not at all needed especially for a home use case unless you literally are always reading the exact same data over and over. But even then… harddrives in a few drive wide vdev can likely get pretty close to saturating 2.5 gigabit by themselves especially sequentially.

 

To do video editing, don’t do it over the network. Put that NVMe SSD in your local machine, and use that to store current projects on (while backing up to the NAS). The performance will be an order of magnitude better. 

[Materies Coil]

On 6/3/2025 at 7:56 AM, Materies Coil said:

Link: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/bb6tBq

 

 

Coming back here just for anyone looking at this forum to potentially follow my spec list, the motherboard on the specs does not support the Ryzen 3 3200G or Ryzen 5 3400G. Only the Ryzen 4000 G-Series.

 

I of course find this out AFTER buying and building the thing, clearly I wasn't thorough enough when checking compatabilities... 

 

Edit: Motherboard manual confirms support for 4000 G-Series processors, so likely going to change the CPU for a Ryzen 3 4300G I think.

[_hitman_]

Hmm it should work, depends of the CPU revision, check the link - https://pg.asrock.com/mb/AMD/B550 PG Riptide/index.asp#CPU

 

 

AM4	Ryzen 5	PRO 3400G(YD340BC5M4MFI)	45-65W	Picasso	3.7GHz	2MB		All
AM4	Ryzen 5	PRO 3400G (YD340BC5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.7GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 5	PRO 3400GE (YD340BC6M4MFH)	35W	Picasso	3.3GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 5	3400G(YD340GC5M4MFI)	45~65W	Picasso	3.7GHz	2MB		All
AM4	Ryzen 5	3400G (YD340GC5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.7GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 5	3400G (YD3400C5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.7GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 5	3400GE (YD3400C6M4MFH)	35W	Picasso	3.3GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 5	3350G(YD3350C5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.6GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 3	PRO 3200G(YD320BC5M4MFI)	45-65W	Picasso	3.6GHz	2MB		All
AM4	Ryzen 3	PRO 3200G (YD320BC5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.6GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 3	PRO 3200GE (YD320BC6M4MFH)	35W	Picasso	3.3GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 3	3200G(YD320GC5M4MFI)	45~65W	Picasso	3.6GHz	2MB		All
AM4	Ryzen 3	3200G (YD320GC5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.6GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 3	3200G (YD3200C5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.6GHz	2MB	B1	All

[Materies Coil]

On 6/6/2025 at 5:23 PM, _hitman_ said:

Hmm it should work, depends of the CPU revision, check the link - https://pg.asrock.com/mb/AMD/B550 PG Riptide/index.asp#CPU

 

 

AM4	Ryzen 5	PRO 3400G(YD340BC5M4MFI)	45-65W	Picasso	3.7GHz	2MB		All
AM4	Ryzen 5	PRO 3400G (YD340BC5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.7GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 5	PRO 3400GE (YD340BC6M4MFH)	35W	Picasso	3.3GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 5	3400G(YD340GC5M4MFI)	45~65W	Picasso	3.7GHz	2MB		All
AM4	Ryzen 5	3400G (YD340GC5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.7GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 5	3400G (YD3400C5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.7GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 5	3400GE (YD3400C6M4MFH)	35W	Picasso	3.3GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 5	3350G(YD3350C5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.6GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 3	PRO 3200G(YD320BC5M4MFI)	45-65W	Picasso	3.6GHz	2MB		All
AM4	Ryzen 3	PRO 3200G (YD320BC5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.6GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 3	PRO 3200GE (YD320BC6M4MFH)	35W	Picasso	3.3GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 3	3200G(YD320GC5M4MFI)	45~65W	Picasso	3.6GHz	2MB		All
AM4	Ryzen 3	3200G (YD320GC5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.6GHz	2MB	B1	All
AM4	Ryzen 3	3200G (YD3200C5M4MFH)	65W	Picasso	3.6GHz	2MB	B1	All

Sorry, been away for a few weeks so necroing this a little. Annoyingly, the motherboard manual is the only place that specifically calls out the 3200G and 3400G as not compatible.

 

Currently trying again with a 4300G but not posting so far. Only just seated the new CPU though so could be as simple as reseating the RAM or similiar

[_hitman_]

Dunno maybe some middle revision board or CPU revision. Some CPU are supported only if they are B1 revision, for example. In the attached file are all CPU support list for that MB. Good luck!

AM4

Ryzen 3

3200G (YD3200C5M4MFH)

65W

Picasso

3.6GHz

2MB Revision-

B1

All

Bios_cpu_list.docx

[Materies Coil]

6 minutes ago, _hitman_ said:

Dunno maybe some middle revision board or CPU revision. Some CPU are supported only if they are B1 revision, for example. In the attached file are all CPU support list for that MB. Good luck!

AM4

Ryzen 3

3200G (YD3200C5M4MFH)

65W

Picasso

3.6GHz

2MB Revision-

B1

All

Bios_cpu_list.docx 31.58 kB · 1 download

Appreciated! I may need this and to contact support after all. Even with the new CPU, the motherboard won't post and has its CPU and DRAM LED's lit. I've tried reseating both the CPU and the RAM and tried a different set of RAM both in 1 stick and 2 stick configurations. Starting to look a little like the motherboard may be dead which is not something I wanted to be dealing with

[_hitman_]

Give it some time, maybe it trains the memory. Also it is worth trying to reset cmos.

[Materies Coil]

Gave it 45 minutes and no dice, haven't tried reseting CMOS though. Will try that on Sunday when I next get chance, also have a Ryzen 1600X in another system I can put in to check if the BIOS needs updating though I doubt it given how long its been since this hardware was released