After seeing the prices of a prebuild nas I decided to build my own instead but within the budget of buying a starting prebuild nas ± 300 euro.
I also want to use it in the future for playing 4k videos with some 7.1 home cinema. Untill I have a proper firewall I wont expose it to the WAN.
Then I looked into HBA LSI cards and that would already cut my budget 1/3 I dont know how to troubleshoot such cards or recoginize a fake one. (idle power also not the best)
So I ordered some intel boards with 8 sata ports https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=1127 and https://pg.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z690%20PG%20Riptide/index.asp
But now I changed my mind once again and went with AsRock B550M Pro4 ASRock > B550M Pro4
Now I am with a AM4 socket that should support ECC memory with the pro AMD CPU series. All this motherboards are around 100 euro. Server boards are to expensive for me.
This board had 6 sata ports but M2_2 and SATA3_5_6 share lanes. If either one of them is in use, the other one will be disabled.
I plan to use EZDIY-FAB Quad M.2 PCIe 4.0/3.0 X16 Expansion Card to avoid using the M2_2 ( EZDIY-FAB Quad M.2 PCIe 4.0/3.0 X16 Expansion Card with Heatsink, Supports 4 x PCIe NVME M.2 SSD, RAID on CPU on Intel Platform and 4.0 RAID on AMD Platform: Amazon.de: Computer & Accessories ) - 37 euro
I can find online the board support Bifurcation but to sure I opened a ticket with asrock to confirm this and also the ECC memory support.
So I plan to use 2 500gb nvme as mirror boot in this card, so I dont use the M2_2 slot. I could add 2 M.2 later in this card for jellyfin or plex.
I noticed that sata ssd as boot drives are more expensive and have more idle power usage, not worth to sacrifice my sata port for I guess.
this leave me 6 sata ports, I will start with a single miror pair and will expand later to 3 pairs. I ordered 2 8TB MG series enterprice from Toshiba.
Now I also not decide which CPU I would like,
AMD Ryzen 3 Pro 4350G - 107 euro or
AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G second hand from ebay (pins look fine in the pic) - 135 euro
I can see my motherboard has more lanes than my CPU has, not sure if its a good match? The gen 3.0 only does not matter I guess.
start build:
Case: used case that has a old optical drive and space for 2 HDD, maybe 4 hdd if I can secure them. - 0 euro
MB: AsRock B550M Pro4 -98 euro
PSU: ASRock Steel Legend SL-650G 650W ATX ( had a good score on cybernetics for low power ) -99 euro
Memory: I upgraded my gaming pc so I have 2*8gb kingston DDR4 laying around -0 euro.
CPU: 4350G or 4650G - 130 euro
Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 90 SE Dual Tower - 23 euro
build: 350 euro
NVME expansion card - 37 (wanted to test it before I proceed, else a HBA might be needed instead)
2 nvme boot Kingston NV3 NVMe PCIe 4.0 drive: 74 euro
2 times 8TB Toshiba enterprise MG series (cheaper than nas drives?) - 360 euro.
End buid:
case: fractal node 804
MB: AsRock B550M Pro4
PSU: ASRock Steel Legend SL-650G 650W ATX
Memory: maximum of 64 GB of ecc memory with the 4350G and 128 gb ecc with 4650G
CPU: hopefully I dont need to upgrade
NIC: maybe 10gbe or 2.5 gbe
6 HDD in pairs maybe more if I buy HBA
Thank you the concerns about the ECC, I dont really need it but it seems recommended. I saw some other post where the ECC was working with asrock consumer board. To be sure I have now ordered the ECC memory from their QVL. I can still return the AMD MOBO if it does not work and go instead for the intel MOBO with 8 sata ports and better video transcoding instead. (I have the i3 12100 until I need to return it)
I plan to start with just 2 HHD drives in mirror and add another pair once its full. Once that is full I would add another pair.
For me its very hard to post my requirements/expectations as I never had a NAS and I test out some options with it and decide which ones I like.
Thinks that I would like to try:
Media server for movies
torrenting on my nas ( once I have a firewall)
I would like to try out some light VM, however a proxmox project I could do later if I like it. Maybe I like to play some arkos games on the go. Up to playstation 2.
Regarding the case, I want to have a ATX power supply and maybe up to 6/8 drives. With a optical drive I could rid of old cds laying around. That is not a requirements however.
So I would say the basic requirement is to backup the pictures/clips from our phone and computer. If I could do more in the future that would be great.
Yeah, some reasonably cheap consumer boards for AMD supports ECC. But that’s not my cup of tea, perhaps somebody else can help with those.
While mirrors have better IOPS and are definitely advised for the VMs and block storage, they are not really needed for the media storage. With raidz, you would have more usable space. You would need more drives from the start, though, or deal with raidz expansion and add them one by one. You can read about the (performance) benefits of each pool layout here.
Well, I think many cases would meet these requirements. Especially if you don’t mind using non-NAS standard tower case.
And they can be dirt cheap if buying used. For example, I bought a used Inwin PE689 for, like, 30 euros on the local market.
Use the x4 slot for the nic, x8 for hba (or opposite).
Use the x16 slot (x8 electrical) for a gpu in the future.
Get a cheap intel dc ssd for booting (120GB is more than enough) and you are set. Not sure about 4k playback with 5.1 surround though but i assume the gpu will handle that.
Even my 1 VDEV Z3 pool manages playing 4k just fine over a 1GbE network connection.
I agree that buying used hardware, especially quality cases, is the way to go. There are many good mini-itx motherboards out there, and as long as you know how to spot potentially problematic ones (ie c2xxx series embedded processors with the potential avr54 bug) it’s the older motherboards that offer the best bang for the buck AND adequate # of SATA ports.
There is a reason that Supermicro still makes x10-era motherboards today and that’s all the customers who still want boards with plenty of SATA ports. More modern iterations of their motherboards simply eschew them in favor of NVME (which may be the future but also wicked expensive $/TB ATM).
If the OP goes the AMD route, I suggest looking into the Ryzen Pro CPUs with the G and GE ending which are available used and offer much lower power consumption at idle than regular Ryzen CPUs. This is particularly interesting in the context of SOHO use where long times at idle with little power consumption is pretty welcome in places with high power prices like mine.
Thanks for the input, I was looking into raidZ2 first until I was trying to figure out what to do if I run out of space. You need more than 4 HDD to make it more storage efficient than 2-way mirrors. Migrating to a bigger raidZ2 would need another 4 HDD. If I had for example 10 sata ports It would be easier. unless I misunderstood something.
This are the 2 cases that I have laying around.
Both have just slots for 2 HDD.
One has a optical drive and the other had beter ventilation.
I just have to move over the old pc to the other case if I want to use that.
You can add single drives to a Raid-Z(1,2,3) VDEV using RAID-Zx-expansion . For example a 4x Raid-Z2 VDEV could become a 5x Raid-Z2 VDEV. You can search for the advantages and disadvantages of using that feature.
I don’t remember what version of Scale that feature first appeared in. Older pools would need their ZFS Features upgraded to use it.
Hi MSameer,
Thanks, I have looked into it but sadly it does not have PCIe Bifurcation.
I wanted to perserve the sata ports for actual bulk storage and have a mirror boot and a mirror fast drive for media server, VM and what else.
This would just leave 2 sata ports for storage.
I wanted to go with integrated graphics to preserve energy, although I saw on the forum that the Sparkle Intel Arc A310 ECO is not that bad.
If you have other suggestions with more sata ports or Bifurcation or M.2 slots then it is of course welcome.
Since I only could use 3x M2 SSD I was thinking to use my x1 slot for the mirror boot pool. (one in the expansion slot and one this card)
This will only operate on 1 gb/s, is that a problem? I guess the boot is not used so much?
I actually used these (well, the same) for my proxmox boot pool and ditched them. Because they’re bad I wanna my pcie1 for additional NIC.
You don’t need much bandwidth for a boot pool. I connect my boot drives via internal mobo usb headers (it works with USB2 just ok as well) for both my proxmox and truenas. So far, so good. Agh, I use cheap enclosures/adapters, so there is no SMART data – I don’t really care. Don’t do this for your data drives.
