Building First NAS

[GeorgeDouj88]

Purpose/Intro

Hey guys, this is my first post here after a while so it feels good to be back on the forums (In the meantime I built and water cooled my first PC, check it down in my signature although I don't have a good build log for it). Anyways, I'm writing this post because, as you can see in the title, I'm building my first NAS/Home Media Server which will be used to store all kinds of stuff, movies, pictures, screen captured game play, and other random files. I've always wanted to build a Home Media Server (or more accurately, I've wanted to have a private cloud storage) and something came up that made it a good time to build one. My Dad got a few cameras for around the outside of the house and told me you can look at its feed online and it stores videos for a week and then wipes it, or something like that, and it was all that we needed. I told him getting these cameras might be a good time to make a home media server so that we could possibly store the videos (although I'm not sure at all how so if we find out we can't we're still gonna use the NAS for other stuff) on the NAS and then use it for so many other things. I'm still not 100% sure we're gonna build it yet but I would still like some help.

 

Requests

What I'm asking you guys is if you can give me a part list with a cheap M.2 SSD for the OS drive and then all the other parts for the NAS. The budget would be as cheap as possible for all the other parts other than the main storage drives, recommend me the best drives for each type of raid you recommend or just recommend drives in general, and please tell me what raid array to use and what accessories for the raid. All I know about raid is that some of them are raid 1, raid 0, and raid 10. Raid 10 is raid 1 and raid 0 together. Raid 1 (or 0, I'm not sure which) the data is mirrored to another drive, and in raid 0 (or 1, I'm not sure which) the data is split across two drives. I saw this CPU, Mobo, and RAM combo on Newegg that looked really good and am hoping to use this. (https://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.3514464)

 

Please tell me anything I need to know, any questions you have, what parts I should use, etc. As I would realllllly prefer to build a NAS then buy one.

 

Thanks in advance

[komar]

Out of curiosity, with that main rig you have there, why don't you do something similar to this?

For just a Home media server you could use even the build in W10 network sharing and save yourself a bunch of headache...

[Razor Blade]

With 2 hard drives your choices for RAID are 0 or 1. My suggestion would be to use RAID 1 to give you some redundancy.

 

If you're just looking for a NAS box to store files, consider an off the shelf solution. They're much more power efficient, will be a lot easier to use and manage. You can also get a 4 bay if you're maybe thinking of expanding your storage in the future.

 

If you're wanting to build something, consider getting a used workstation. They can be had at the price point of just that motherboard, CPU, and RAM combo. You'll get pretty much everything though. PSU, case, etc.

[beyonddc]

I concur what @Razor Blade said.  If you are not tech savvy, you might be better off to buy off the self solution for your NAS. Synology and QNAP would be the brand that I consider.  You get free tech support, warranty and community forum to ask for questions.

 

Buying a new hardware to build a NAS server is overkill, at least if I were in your situation.  I probably would go on Craigslist to look for a 2nd hand computer or buy a refurbish computer from Newegg.  If you are planning to setup your own NAS then FreeNAS is probably the operating system of choice.

 

As far as RAID concern, that depends on how many hard drives you have.  If you have 2 hard drives then you can setup RAID1 which is just mirroring.  If you have 3 hard drives or more then you can setup RAID5 so if one hard drive failed in the RAID, your whole RAID would still function in a degraded mode until you replace the failed hard drive.  RAID1 and RAID5 are the typical RAID configurations that most people use (at least for home NAS).

[GeorgeDouj88]

1 hour ago, komar said:

Out of curiosity, with that main rig you have there, why don't you do something similar to this?

For just a Home media server you could use even the build in W10 network sharing and save yourself a bunch of headache...

I was thinking of that briefly and saw that video but I dont have ANYY space for anymore drives in my PC cause of all the watercooling and also I was hoping to upgrade the NAS a lot more in the future once more space is needed and I understand more about servers and stuff and making it a much more advanced NAS

[GeorgeDouj88]

52 minutes ago, beyonddc said:

I concur what @Razor Blade said.  If you are not tech savvy, you might be better off to buy off the self solution for your NAS. Synology and QNAP would be the brand that I consider.  You get free tech support, warranty and community forum to ask for questions.

 

Buying a new hardware to build a NAS server is overkill, at least if I were in your situation.  I probably would go on Craigslist to look for a 2nd hand computer or buy a refurbish computer from Newegg.  If you are planning to setup your own NAS then FreeNAS is probably the operating system of choice.

 

As far as RAID concern, that depends on how many hard drives you have.  If you have 2 hard drives then you can setup RAID1 which is just mirroring.  If you have 3 hard drives or more then you can setup RAID5 so if one hard drive failed in the RAID, your whole RAID would still function in a degraded mode until you replace the failed hard drive.  RAID1 and RAID5 are the typical RAID configurations that most people use (at least for home NAS).

To reply to the first thing you said: I am very tech savvy as I know quite a lot about PC building, pc parts, water cooling, peripherals, other little things like pixels, bytes, etc. (you can also see my signature for the PC I built for my first PC). Also, I was thinking about a simple NAS from a good storage company with a few bays and I know that a hotswap NAS would be a better fit for me but I was really hoping to build one, a big reason is that I really wanna build more PCs, but also since I was hoping to upgrade the NAS a lot more in the future once more space is needed and once I understand more about servers and stuff and I want to make it much more advance in the future. Can you pls recommend me parts.

[beyonddc]

36 minutes ago, G3ORG3Douj88 said:

To reply to the first thing you said: I am very tech savvy as I know quite a lot about PC building, pc parts, water cooling, peripherals, other little things like pixels, bytes, etc. (you can also see my signature for the PC I built for my first PC). Also, I was thinking about a simple NAS from a good storage company with a few bays and I know that a hotswap NAS would be a better fit for me but I was really hoping to build one, a big reason is that I really wanna build more PCs, but also since I was hoping to upgrade the NAS a lot more in the future once more space is needed and once I understand more about servers and stuff and I want to make it much more advance in the future. Can you pls recommend me parts.

The bundle that you selected looks pretty good.  I probably would go with Ryzen 3 2200G if I was in your situation in case I need to host Plex server or host some virtual machines but you didn't really specify your budget in your OP.

 

The motherboard that comes with the bundle doesn't have RAID support at the hardware level so you will be relying on the software level RAID provided by FreeNAS if you are using that as your OS.

 

For storage, just make sure you are getting hard drive that is specifically designed for NAS.  WD Red, Seagate IronWolf and Toshiba N are your best bet.  I have been using WD Red and Seagate IronWolf for years and have no issue with it but mechanical failure is unpredictable anyway.  I might just have good luck.

 

It is recommended to get the same drive and model for your RAID configuration, don't mix and match.  3TB NAS drive usually goes between $90 to $100 when it is on sales and 4TB NAS drive goes between $100 to $120 when it is on sales.  If you are on Newegg promotional email list.  The 4TB Seagate IronWolf drive is on sales for $104.99 today.

 

For RAID1, say you have 2x4TB hard drives, you will end up with 4TB of storage.

For RAID5, say you have 4x4TB hard drives, you will end up with 12TB of storage 

 

Good luck

[GeorgeDouj88]

9 minutes ago, beyonddc said:

The bundle that you selected looks pretty good.  I probably would go with Ryzen 3 2200G if I was in your situation in case I need to host Plex server or host some virtual machines but you didn't really specify your budget in your OP.

 

The motherboard that comes with the bundle doesn't have RAID support at the hardware level so you will be relying on the software level RAID provided by FreeNAS if you are using that as your OS.

 

For storage, just make sure you are getting hard drive that is specifically designed for NAS.  WD Red, Seagate IronWolf and Toshiba N are your best bet.  I have been using WD Red and Seagate IronWolf for years and have no issue with it but mechanical failure is unpredictable anyway.  I might just have good luck.

 

It is recommended to get the same drive and model for your RAID configuration, don't mix and match.  3TB NAS drive usually goes between $90 to $100 when it is on sales and 4TB NAS drive goes between $100 to $120 when it is on sales.  If you are on Newegg promotional email list.  The 4TB Seagate IronWolf drive is on sales for $104.99 today.

 

For RAID1, say you have 2x4TB hard drives, you will end up with 4TB of storage.

For RAID5, say you have 4x4TB hard drives, you will end up with 12TB of storage 

 

Good luck

Thanks so much for the help. I really wanted to build a NAS but because my Dad doesn't really agree with doing something like this since we don't really need it that much so I'm just gonna stick with a NAS from SeaGate, synology, etc. that I will add SeaGate drives to. Do you have any recommendations for something like that? also, what is their actual names, how do I specify I'm talking about a NAS that I can just quickly swap bays through simple drives rather than a big NAS that you build.

[beyonddc]

14 minutes ago, G3ORG3Douj88 said:

Thanks so much for the help. I really wanted to build a NAS but because my Dad doesn't really agree with doing something like this since we don't really need it that much so I'm just gonna stick with a NAS from SeaGate, synology, etc. that I will add SeaGate drives to. Do you have any recommendations for something like that? also, what is their actual names, how do I specify I'm talking about a NAS that I can just quickly swap drives through simple drives rather than a big NAS that you build.

 

Seagate IronWolf, WD Red and Toshiba Nxx are just the name of their model lineup for their NAS drives.

 

For Synlogy bayless NAS, you can go to Newegg -> Networking -> Network Attached Storage (NAS) and then do a filter by brand and you should see it but they are expensive.  What you get is support and warranty.  I have a RAID5 with 4 hard drives and I had 2 drives failed on me at the same time.  The process of RAID recovery is not fun but luckily I bought an off-the-self NAS versus building my own so I had help from the manufacturer but that still requiring me buying 2 new hard drives, attempt to clone the bad hard drives onto the new one and enabling SSH on my NAS and be accessible over the Internet so that the technician can log into my NAS to perform the recovery.

 

NAS is an expensive investment.  The money where you want to spend the most on is the hard drives itself.  As I stated in my post previously, if budget is limited, I probably will get a 2nd hand desktop from Craigslist or a refurbish desktop from Newegg and then spend rest of the budget on brand new hard drives.  It sounds like you are a DIY'er, the learning experience here is RAID configuration and NAS configuration.

 

I think you are looking at about $600 to $700 for a DIY 4x4TB NAS and about $800+ for an off-the-self 4x4TB NAS

 

My NAS is an off-the-self 4x3TB NAS.  The hard drive is $90 each and the NAS is $200 as well so my initial investment is $560.  The NAS I got is Thecus N4100EVO.  I wouldn't recommend that brand now that I used it for 5 years although I did used their support but I have heard nothing but praise for Synology NAS so I rather recommend them.

[GeorgeDouj88]

12 minutes ago, beyonddc said:

 

Seagate IronWolf, WD Red and Toshiba Nxx are just the name of their model lineup for their NAS drives.

 

For Synlogy bayless NAS, you can go to Newegg -> Networking -> Network Attached Storage (NAS) and then do a filter by brand and you should see it but they are expensive.  What you get is support and warranty.  I have a RAID5 with 4 hard drives and I had 2 drives failed on me at the same time.  The process of RAID recovery is not fun but luckily I bought an off-the-self NAS versus building my own so I had help from the manufacturer but that still requiring me buying 2 new hard drives, attempt to clone the bad hard drives onto the new one and enabling SSH on my NAS and be accessible over the Internet so that the technician can log into my NAS to perform the recovery.

 

NAS is an expensive investment.  The money where you want to spend the most on is the hard drives itself.  As I stated in my post previously, if budget is limited, I probably will get a 2nd hand desktop from Craigslist or a refurbish desktop from Newegg and then spend rest of the budget on brand new hard drives.  It sounds like you are a DIY'er, the learning experience here is RAID configuration and NAS configuration.

 

I think you are looking at about $600 to $700 for a DIY 4x4TB NAS and about $800+ for an off-the-self 4x4TB NAS

 

My NAS is an off-the-self 4x3TB NAS.  The hard drive is $90 each and the NAS is $200 as well so my initial investment is $560.  The NAS I got is Thecus N4100EVO.  I wouldn't recommend that brand now that I used it for 5 years although I did used their support but I have heard nothing but praise for Synology NAS so I rather recommend them.

Ok, thanks for all the great help.