Another 'I'll build my first DIY NAS' Topic 😂

TrueNAS General
1

Hi everyone,

my name is Davide, you can call me Dave, and yes this is another ‘ask for help without asking for help’ :joy:

2025 will see my first DIY NAS take life but before I wish to have a precise idea bout hw and services that I’ll need to setup everything properly.

Before talk about hardware, why I’ need a NAS? First of all for backup (RAID Its not a backup :P) and consistency of all my data, all my work and sensible documents will stored there (and already have the idea to build a NAS’s NAS later for double backup :joy:) and for personal cloud, the times I’ll need data when I’ll be around, even in thers country, I have to upload and download data from my personal cloud.

What about space? I want to start with 30TB in RAID6/ZTF2 (right? :sweat_smile:), so far I have 10TB data but I imagine to take more space to do not have the necessity to enlarge space soon.

The machine itself doesn’t need to be powerful, for this kind of service.

I think Truenas scale with NextCloud and Tailscale could cover the most importants needed I described so far but I’m here to learn first of all.

I’m not sure if Its better start with new hardware or start with a cheaper old Xeon based system or a Epyc 4004 platform, considering I’m aiming for is solidity and reliability.

Step by step I would like to shape my project to arrive on a setup that can give me what I’m looking for, and about the expense, I’m don’t want spend less find myself with something doesn’t work properly or too much to waste resources on a overgrowth machine that make what it meant to do but its uselessly big.

I hope to explain everything clearly and I want to say thank you in advance to everyone want answer me!

2

You’ve explained fairly clearly. I’d say the few missing pieces of info that can help point you into specific recommendations are:

  • What is your budget
  • What country are you in (generally helps are some items are cheaper in US/EU & some folks have a better knowledge of deals in their area)
  • Is size or noise a consideration?

I’d argue Gigabyte MC12-LE0 is possibly the most cost effective starter motherboard, especially if you are in Europe. Supports ecc (kinda mostly, since it is AM4 it’ll support OS level reporting on UDIMMs - better than no ecc at all), supports IPMI (yey, you’ll never need a display connected to your server unless something has critically gone wrong), has a pcie4x16 slot for an HBA, and a pcie4x4 slot for a NIC, supports AM4 (not hard to find a used ryzen 5600). Folks regularly link this thing for sub 100 Euro.

Try not to cheap out too much on the PSU would be my other recommendation.

Now if you turn around & tell me that money is no object, then my recommendations will quickly change :smiley:

3

Thanks Fleshmauler!

  • What is your budget
    I think I have a good margin, for this specific project I can even get up to €5k - Let me explain better, I’m keeping it broad to contemplate a range of possibilities, this doesn’t mean that this amount of money literally has to be spent.

  • What country are you in (generally helps are some items are cheaper in US/EU & some folks have a better knowledge of deals in their area)
    Italy

  • Is size or noise a consideration?
    Size in the specific no (no rack solution please :sweat_smile: - I’m on a Define 7XL for flessibility), on the other hand noise yes, It will be in my studio with the others systems, I don’t have a dedicated space or room for it.

PSU - usually I use Seasonic

MC12-LE0 - This could be perfect for a Redundance NAS Backup machine

For this I would go for a 10Gb connection or onboard or on pci-ex
If I understand correctly about TNS I took into consideration 2 ssd sata3 for OS redundancy, 3 (1+2 for ZF2) nvme for mtadata (I presume on pci-ex id mb can have enough slot on board work as intended too) + mechanical HDD ≈30TB ZFS2 for raw storage, no cache ssd. I used my imagination for a solid machine or how ‘it should be’, I hope to imagined it correctly :rofl: