I published a blog that I figured I’d share with the community, the DIY NAS: 2025 Edition. Especially for anybody who’s looking for inspiration on a capable and budget-friendly NAS that doesn’t take up a ton of room or consume a bunch of power in your home.
This NAS features:
TrueNAS SCALE
Intel N100 CPU
32GB DDR5 RAM
1x10GbE (Marvell AQC113C) and 2x2.5GbE (Intel i226-V) network interfaces
2x Teamgroup MP44 1TB NVMe SSDs (for Apps, VMs, and other “fast” storage)
1x Silicon Power 128GB A55 SATA SSD (for TrueNAS SCALE)
With drives, my out of pocket cost was a little over $1,750 and without drives the price comes in at right around $617. I’ve been building machines a lot like this one for quite some time and I was surprised at how inexpensively I was able to build a DIY NAS that includes 10GbE among its features. But given how long I’ve been doing this, I probably also shouldn’t be surprised that 10GbE is starting to approach what I’d consider affordable.
I don’t think think this is the penultimate DIY NAS build, but it’d be a very intriguing option for me if I was starting over from scratch. I hope folks searching for idea find this and what other people have shared, to create their own idea of the perfect DIY NAS build.
Maybe I should add the one I just finished to this thread, I’m pretty close to the same price because I was able to recycle some things. Using the n18 board I bought from you.
Mine definitely would have been easier if I bought a new case! (but I got 6 drives in the array) What I have for my build is on Serve the Home forums in their DIY section, same user name.
No performance data from mine yet, just finished the build this morning and I still need to create shares and move VMs to this new server. And I really want to add SSD to mine, but not spending the extra $250+ to get there just yet. Mine only needs to be 3-4TB useable for my lab.
