Hi! I’ve never built a NAS before and only one custom gaming PC, so I’d love if any of you more experienced folks could take a look at my parts selection and possibly suggest better options.
Of course first my use cases:
- Nextcloud
- Immich
- Jellyfin
- Possibly more, similar to the above
Planning on using Truenas with a Raidz (1? - 1 disk failure tolerance) and running most of my stuff in Docker containers. The amount of users will likely stay at or below 3, certainly at or below 5, so it doesn’t need to handle that much.
Here’s my parts list:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 4650G
- iGPU, power efficient, AM4 so cheaper, performant enough (I think)
- Case: Jonsbo N3
- This is the component I started with, since I really like the form factor. It did limit my choice on motherboards heavily though.
- Motherboard: Gigabyte A520I AC
- I was trying to go for one with ECC memory support, but at least on pcpartpicker I struggled to find ones at this form factor supporting it. However from reading through Forum threads ECC isn’t critically important for a more “casual” build like mine, just a nice-to-have.
- Memory: Found about 16GB of DDR4 in my old pc, they worked before so I didn’t bother looking at them in detail
- Cheap
- Storage:
- OS: Western Digital Black SN770 1 TB M.2-2280
- Where I live the 500GB version is actually more expensive
- Cache: Samsung 870 Evo 500 GB
- Cheap enough, although if I can combine this with the OS drive, then even better
- Primary Storage: 4x Seagate IronWolf Pro 8TB (ST8000NT001)
- I have to admit, I can’t recall why I settled on these. 8TB seemed good for price-to-size and I didn’t want the server ones despite them actually being cheaper because they’re extremely loud apparently, but why Pro and not non-pro and why this exact model… I can’t recall, I just remember having a headache that afternoon TwT
- OS: Western Digital Black SN770 1 TB M.2-2280
I realize I left out the cooler and psu as I don’t think they’re particularly relevant here, I can deal with those myself. Price-wise, I am going by German prices and parts availability. On any of the parts listed, or if I forgot anything else though, I would love advice on the quality of my decision and how to improve it, thanks <3
I assume the cache drive is for your ZFS pool. You probably don’t need that.
How come? I’ve seen those recommended quite often.
When you read files from the ZFS filesystem it will automatically keep the files in RAM. This is called the ARC and it is why people frequently recommend having a lot of RAM with ZFS. The ARC is very effective, automatic, and has no risk because it only caches reads. A cache drive is a secondary ARC generally using a fast SSD. The problem is that it generally only helps performance when you are reading lots of small files multiple times. This is because ZFS does so well reading large files from HDD that it doesn’t make much of a difference.
In short: If you already have the drive and want to play with the feature, go for it. But if your going to spend money on the drive, you will probably be better served spending it on more RAM.
Got it, thank you
You’re not using a CPU that most distributions support for hardware transcoding. You either need to use an Intel CPU with QuickSync or stick a discrete nvidia card in the box. The Intel route is often easiest here, and I say this as a die hard AMD fan.
Are you intent on building your own box?
I’m only asking because TerraMaster does the F6-424 (or F4-424) series which has 6 bays (or 4), a decent CPU (1235U) with hardware transcoding support, space for two 4x4 NVME m.2 SSDs, which runs silently and will just work as an appliance, even though it is a full PC. You can then install unraid or truenas on it, or heck bareback Linux and do it yourself. There are decent alternatives to putting something together yourself.
Regarding disks Seagate EXOS are often cheaper than IronWolfs and have higher MTBF than even the Pro. Don’t ask me why they’re lower cost, for more bang.
You’re not using a CPU that most distributions support for hardware transcoding. You either need to use an Intel CPU with QuickSync or stick a discrete nvidia card in the box.
I see, I chose that one based on a recommendation from I believe the channel was called “Wolfgang’s Channel”. They make a lot of home lab content and showed the iGPU working fine for Plex, so I assumed it wasn’t an issue.
Are you intent on building your own box?
Yeah pretty much, I think it sounds fun
Regarding disks Seagate EXOS are often cheaper than IronWolfs and have higher MTBF than even the Pro. Don’t ask me why they’re lower cost, for more bang.
As I mentioned in my post, apparently they’re way louder since they’re made for datacenters where noise is crazy anyways, and since I am planning to have the NAS in my hallway I’d like to avoid the datacenter vibe, even if a handful of drives won’t cause quite that level of cacophony
I run EXOS drives in the under-stair cupboard. They’re noisy but they’re not that bad.
There’s definitely a chance my knowledge is no longer current but I would 100% verify that for your operating system of choice (which I presume is Linux), your AMD CPU can deliver hardware transcoding under Plex. I’ve not heard of AMD CPUs handling this under Linux at least. Ready to be corrected.
I run EXOS drives in the under-stair cupboard. They’re noisy but they’re not that bad.
I think anything described as “noisy” would be too much, especially considering the savings are decent but not huge.
I’ve not heard of AMD CPUs handling this under Linux at least.
I’ll double check that then, just to be sure. Although I have noticed that, between me writing it down and now, the CPU is no longer available where I live, so I have to find a replacement either way.
You’re fine with this setup, and in many respects it’s overkill.
I run 33 containers including jellyfin, frigate, and immich as the hardest working ones across 2 HP elitedesk g4 with 48 GB ram, and a 3rd low power system hosting 8gb NFS for storage on simple gigabit lan. Even that is overkill for these tasks.
The apps most commonly run in a self-hosted env are really quite lightweight and spend most of their time at idle.
Ah, sorry, I should’ve specified this further. Whether this can run what I need it to isn’t the primary concern, I believe it can do so, I primarily attached my decision making basis just in case it changes anything.
I’m more concerned about things like picking the correct drives, or if limiting my motherboard selection through an ITX case was a bad idea, or if my choice of not going with ECC was a poor one, those kinds of things.
I think you’re still OK.
There are lots of great itx boards out there, so basically take your pick. And there will be ppl who say you don’t need ecc, but it certainly won’t hurt, it will just cost a bunch more.
I run a supermicro mini itx with ecc, for my zfs backup, but my non ecc machines have also been fine.
Its fine.
Best advice I can give you is start where you are with what you have.
What you need will become apparent as you do.
When I built my first server, TrueNAS, ZFS, and Raid z1 made perfect sense. And I loved it for the first couple months. Then an update and unexpected shutdown rendered my storage pools unrecoverable. Had backups for most but not all of the files, and spent almost a year of bits of free time here wading in way over my head on highly technical support forum threads & there trying to bring the pools back online. Nothing worked, the array was toast.
I don’t know how tech savvy you are, but here’s the advice I’d give my past self - Take a few weeks to read documentation and play with TrueNAS before filling up your drives with stuff. Peek around in troubleshooting forums, see if the troubleshooting you may have to do is in line with your experience level.
After wiping my drives and starting over, I built around Open Media Vault. It’s less pretty and less feature rich than TrueNas, but it’s also much less fragile in a raid z1 setup and I never worry about it.
TrueNAS should be way safer than OpenMediaVault. I’ve used TrueNAS for some large work deployments and it is solid as long as you understand ZFS basics.
I’m not saying TrueNAS and ZFS aren’t good. For large enterprise systems, arrays with sufficient redundancy, servers with reliable power management, I can see its advantages, esp. w/ snapshots, etc. I acknowledge that Open Media Vault is mickey mouse in comparison.
I just feel compelled to share my experience when I see people considering TrueNAS for their first foray into building a small home media server, running a z1 array, with no mention of battery backup or power management. ZFS isn’t inherently safer. It’s safer when paired with sufficient redundancy and power management.
Here you need to decide if you want to run Plex/Jellyfin on the same server or not. And how important power consumption is for you.
You should also consider if you are planning to run only the NAS or some other VMs/containers on that machine. In that case you might consider 32 Gb of RAM to be more future proof.
I would price it out vs an aoostar wtr max (699 with 6 drive case and decent amd mobile cpu plus a lot of expandability options) https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-wtr-max-amd-r7-pro-8845hs-11-bays-mini-pc?variant=50067345932586 I bought one of those for an NVR setup (it runs proxmox on my cluster running a single vm that uses most of the system resources and has a hailo 8 passed to it plus an intel gpu passed to it through occuplink and writes to 6 drives in a raidz. I also have the nvme slots all filled for various things unrelated to this project directly like being another node in my ceph cluster). it runs surprisingly cool and very stable so far, leaving me very impressed, especially since I have it totally loaded in all nvme slots and hard drive slots (exos drives). I’m not sure how loud it is because it’s in a server rack on a shelf with lots of other noisy gear in my basement.
The reasons not to go this route: your priced option is way cheaper or you are uncomfortable with the eratic nature of cheap chinese manufacturer bios updates.
A few questions:
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How much data are you going to store?
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What performance are you targeting? (Power draw and application performance)
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What do you project for future growth? Are you sticking to containers or are you wanting to use VMs?
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What are you targeting for cost? You can buy a used workstation for not that much money which might be a better deal depending on what the end goal is.
I would highly recommend that you do lots of research on ZFS before doing anything. You will benefit from ram way more than you will from a cache. Also cache drives wear out fast do to high number of writes.
I also would go for Intel if you are thinking about Jellyfin since Intel has better encoding. (At least on hardware more than 1-2 years old)
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skip the Cache Drive and use 2 Drives for the main OS, if you can get ECC as 20TB’s is a lot of data if something goes wrong, and like other file systems ZFS will destroy your data with bad RAM.
ZFS is designed to not destroy data in the case of a hardware failure. It checksums everything it does and will go read only if it starts having errors.
