Building a cheap NAS

Hiest · November 2, 2025

Budget (including currency): as cheap as possible but around 200Euros for initial setup + 100Euros for ssds in the future

Country: Germany

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: As a Nas

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 already have a case, and a boot ssd.

I thought something like a reasonably cheap Am4 motherboard paired with the Ryzen3 3200g and 8-16Gb of cheap DDr4 ram and a cheap 450W PSU.

I don’t have more than Gbit networking anyway so I don’t believe I would befit from a ethernet nic.

Why ssds in the future? Well I don’t have that many files like at most 500Gb so it wouldn’t break the bank and I think the reduced idle power, increased reliability and speed would be worth it.

Is this a good idea?

Edit: Here is my existing parts list

Dutch_Master · November 2, 2025

It's fine (your list) except you have a single stick of RAM. Change that to a dual stick set so your system runs more efficiently with dual channel memory.

Also, data recovery on HDD's is easier (=> cheaper!) b/c the platters can be read by another controller. Good luck on that one when an SSD is involved :old-eyeroll: Meaning performance-wise, adding an SSD as cache makes sense if fast access (read+write) is what you're after, but after that it should be stored long term on HDD's, IMO.

porina · November 2, 2025

Given the small amount of data, is a NAS even needed? Does the data need to be always accessible from multiple systems? Personally I think it is a bit overkill just to run two SSDs.

7 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

It's fine (your list) except you have a single stick of RAM. Change that to a dual stick set so your system runs more efficiently with dual channel memory.

For a NAS that really doesn't matter.

7 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

Also, data recovery on HDD's is easier

Presumably they listed two SSDs to do a mirror. This might be a scenario where two different models might be advantageous so if either has a design problem, it isn't all or nothing.