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
- JONSBO N2 case (5x 3.5" drive bays)
- 5x Recertified Seagate Exos X20 18TB HDDs (for bulk storage)
- 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.
