DIY NAS: 2025 Edition -- SFF, 5 drive bays, 10GbE, and more for around $600

TrueNAS General
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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.

diynas2025-assembly-10
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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.

[edit] link to the post here DIY small build

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I wish there was an N100 class type solution which supported ECC :frowning:

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I wish there was an N100 class type solution which supported ECC :frowning:

I wish that, too. That would be magical, wouldn’t it?! :sunglasses:

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I followed your guide (swapping the HDD for SSD drives).

Thanks to your excellent blog, I now have an excellent NAS annoying my children with it’s fan. :grin:

I only had one bump along the road, but that was newbie me not realizing how to properly power the boot ssd.

Ordered everything from AliExpress btw.

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Nice! I’m glad that you like how your own DIY NAS turned out!