nas Building first NAS

[Denisu]

Budget (including currency): £400-500~ (can go slightly over)

Country: United Kingdom

workloads that it will be used for: archive storage for photography and other media, not to be used as "live", if that makes sense.

 

This is my first time looking to build a NAS, and while I have built a PC before and tinkered a lot, I am really at a loss for what I should do to make a NAS. I do have some requirements, though:

1. I want it to be expandable, so I'd prob start with 2x 8TB hard drives and then expand from there as needed

2. I want a boot SSD
3. It can't be too big or loud, as it needs to sit inside a living room
4. I'm not sure how RAID works entirely, but I would like redundancy; some advice on this would be great!

5. I want to be able to run specific NAS software instead of Windows on this device. I've heard of trueNAS, but I'm not sure if it's applicable to me.

6. I don't want the access to my NAS to be slow, my parents own a Synology at home, and if it's between their weird network setup and just Synology being Synology, it runs at 2-4mb/s lol

I know it's a lot to consider but i hope someone could be able to help me out 

[Indian pc builder]

1 hour ago, Denisu said:

Budget (including currency): £400-500~ (can go slightly over)

Country: United Kingdom

workloads that it will be used for: archive storage for photography and other media, not to be used as "live", if that makes sense.

 

This is my first time looking to build a NAS, and while I have built a PC before and tinkered a lot, I am really at a loss for what I should do to make a NAS. I do have some requirements, though:

1. I want it to be expandable, so I'd prob start with 2x 8TB hard drives and then expand from there as needed

2. I want a boot SSD
3. It can't be too big or loud, as it needs to sit inside a living room
4. I'm not sure how RAID works entirely, but I would like redundancy; some advice on this would be great!

5. I want to be able to run specific NAS software instead of Windows on this device. I've heard of trueNAS, but I'm not sure if it's applicable to me.

6. I don't want the access to my NAS to be slow, my parents own a Synology at home, and if it's between their weird network setup and just Synology being Synology, it runs at 2-4mb/s lol

I know it's a lot to consider but i hope someone could be able to help me out 

• have you looked at the ugreen nases? they are quite good.

• If u want to build one yourself, it really depends more on good cases, if u want easy replaceability and easy expansion.

• Something like the silverstone cs380 gives you 8 drives, but something like from jonsbo, if you can get your hands on it may be in order as it is smaller, though you are then limited to an itx size motherboard most likely, which limits how much stuff u can do.

• Boot ssd is fine, just throw in a cheap low capacity nvme ssd, or even something like a transcend 32 gb m.2 mlc ssd which is what i put in my server, just keep in mind that your motherboard needs sata m.2 slots, which isn;t always a given.

• For access not tp be slow when using hard drives, you want a lot of striping data and a lot of throughput to the nas.

• Truenas scale is the best for this as they are dedicated to being a very good nas plus with the docker integrations and vms, sky's the limit on what you can do, plus zfs ss rock solid for data protection.

• How fast is your internet connection? do you have the ability to run an ethernet cable? BUY A UPS.

• truenas definitelt applies to you

• for not too big or loud, one option for something pre made is ugreen nasync

• or if you are diying it, something like the jonsbo n1 or n2.
  
  
  
  https://pcpartpicker.com/

 

 

use pcpartpicker to try and make a sense of what you may want to do for a nas build, it helps you by giving you a framework. 

 

( i am automatically assuming you are a first time builder)

[FilipposTechGR]

1 hour ago, Denisu said:

Budget (including currency): £400-500~ (can go slightly over)

Country: United Kingdom

workloads that it will be used for: archive storage for photography and other media, not to be used as "live", if that makes sense.

 

This is my first time looking to build a NAS, and while I have built a PC before and tinkered a lot, I am really at a loss for what I should do to make a NAS. I do have some requirements, though:

1. I want it to be expandable, so I'd prob start with 2x 8TB hard drives and then expand from there as needed

2. I want a boot SSD
3. It can't be too big or loud, as it needs to sit inside a living room
4. I'm not sure how RAID works entirely, but I would like redundancy; some advice on this would be great!

5. I want to be able to run specific NAS software instead of Windows on this device. I've heard of trueNAS, but I'm not sure if it's applicable to me.

6. I don't want the access to my NAS to be slow, my parents own a Synology at home, and if it's between their weird network setup and just Synology being Synology, it runs at 2-4mb/s lol

I know it's a lot to consider but i hope someone could be able to help me out 

I’d suggest, 
Case/board: A small tower or NAS-style case that takes 4–6 drives, with a B550/B660 ITX or mATX board. That way you can start with 2×8TB and still have space to add more later.
CPU/RAM: Any modern low-power CPU with iGPU Ryzen 5600G, Intel i3-12100. TrueNAS likes ECC RAM, but for home use 16–32GB non-ECC is fine.
Boot drive: A cheap 120–240GB SATA SSD is perfect for TrueNAS. Don’t waste an NVMe slot here.
Drives/RAID: With 2×8TB, your options are RAID1 mirror, 8TB usable but redundancy or just striped 16TB usable, no redundancy. Later, with 3+ drives, you can move to RAIDZ1/2.
Noise: Pick a case with 120/140mm fans and a decent PSU Corsair RMx, Seasonic Focus. Large fans spin slower = much quieter.
Software: TrueNAS SCALE for a first build it’s a good balance between power and usability.
Network speed: Don’t repeat the Synology issue, make sure you have gigabit wired LAN minimum. Ideally your router + switch + cables are all Cat5e/Cat6. That way you’ll actually see 100+ MB/s transfers instead of 2–4 MB/s.
So in short: budget £400–500 can easily get you a quiet 2×8TB mirrored setup with SSD boot, TrueNAS, and room to grow. That’s a solid first NAS.
Hope this helps

[porina]

4 hours ago, Denisu said:

workloads that it will be used for: archive storage for photography and other media, not to be used as "live", if that makes sense.

Do you mean you will turn it off when not required?

 

4 hours ago, Denisu said:

1. I want it to be expandable, so I'd prob start with 2x 8TB hard drives and then expand from there as needed

ZFS based solutions are kinda expandable but with constraints. Unraid scales better but is not free.

 

4 hours ago, Denisu said:

2. I want a boot SSD

Required for TrueNAS, but not for Unraid which instead requires a USB stick with serial number as they tie the licence to it.

 

4 hours ago, Denisu said:

3. It can't be too big or loud, as it needs to sit inside a living room

This could be tricky. Older HP microservers might work here. I forget the names, but the older black cubes, not the newer silver fronted ones (gen 8?). The older ones can be really cheap used, and have 4 of 3.5" disk bays. There is a separate SATA port but you might need power adapter cable to use it.

 

You might consider slower HDs (5400rpm) if noise is a concern.

 

4 hours ago, Denisu said:

4. I'm not sure how RAID works entirely, but I would like redundancy; some advice on this would be great!

If you use TrueNAS then you'd probably want to go RaidZ1 for expansion possibility later. In Unraid it would be one parity disk + 1 data disk. You can add additional data disks. In both of these examples, one disk can fail and you can still recover all data.

 

4 hours ago, Denisu said:

6. I don't want the access to my NAS to be slow, my parents own a Synology at home, and if it's between their weird network setup and just Synology being Synology, it runs at 2-4mb/s lol

If you're writing small files, they'll all be pretty slow since HDs are inherently slow at doing that. For sequential transfers then RaidZ1 can go faster once you go past 2 drives. Unraid in default mode has a write speed about half that of a disk, with read speeds of the disk. If you put it in turbo write mode, then writes will be same as a native disk. 2 disks might be a special case so that only applies once you get to 3+ data drives in array. Unraid allows you to set a write cache (SSD or HD, optionally mirrored) if you need faster write performance, but this only really works if you leave the unit on 24/7 as by default it empties the cache to array once a day.

 

Consider also if you need/have a separate backup, or if this is the backup?