I would like to replace my old sinology NAS by a self made NAS / home server.
However, I’ve no experiences on building NAS and it would be much appreciated if some of you could check my config and give me some advices.
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7600
Motherboard: ASUS Prime B650-PLUS
RAM: 2x Kingston Fury 32Go ECC
System disk: 2x Samsung 980 250Go (Raid 1)
Storage: 4x WD Red 8To (Raid 6)
Power Supply: Be Quiet Pure Power 11 700w
Cpu fan: Be Quiet Dark Rock 5
Box: Fractal Design Core 2500
Of course this CPU is overkill for just a NAS but I’m planning to host:
Plex Server
Personnal Cloud
Open VPN
Vitrual machine for game server
Maybe PiHole to block ads on my whole network
Web server
Do you think it should work? Do you have any remarks about my setup?
Thank you in advance for your replies and sorry for my English, I did my best.
It should work, but a last generation CPU is massive overkill for a little NAS with 16 TB of actual storage. Mirrorred boot is not really useful, while you’d rather need a SSD pool for your apps.
Please mind ZFS terminology. No RAID1, but mirrors, no RAID6, but raidz2.
Generally something to avoid unless you’re certain that you need it. It brings complexity, points of failure, and isn’t an ‘insert ssd to make slow hdds go fast!’ that most folks initially assume.
Everything you listed should work fine - considerations for the future:
Consider getting an LSI HBA so you can have your HDDs run on that & save the sata slots on the motherboard for a sata ssd for boot. This’ll let you use the two nvme slots on the motherboard for a mirrored pool for your apps & vms.
Better: Get a motherboard with more SATA ports and do without a HBA.
Previous generation B550 has 6 SATA ports (MC12-LE0…).
Ryzen CPUs can run 4 NVMe from a x16 slot.
It’s a shame that board doesn’t have a 3rd NVMe port, otherwise it might be ideal to have 1 of them as boot, and the other two as a mirrored pool for your Apps/VM’s. Something that comes in handy with a board, is one that has extra SATA ports. If you have a failure or wish to replace a drive, you don’t then need a PCI expansion card to give you extra SATA ports.
For PSU I’ve found the 450W Be Quiet’s more than capable, though the 700W might be handy if you later use a dedicated GPU.
It’s only a thought but if funds permit, TrueNAS has powerful features for backing up the NAS to a secondary machine. This could be a very low powered 2-4 Core machine, I’ve had success with Topton boards.
Whatever you choose, do thoroughly test it with disposable data before committing to use it with real data.
If you really want to be safe, I’d also recommend to burn in the HDDs prior to deployment. There should be a guide or two somewhere on the forums on how to run badblocks which will test every sector with writes and reads - this will take a few days with 8TB drives however, but is good practice before you put irreplaceable data on your NAS.
At the very least a Smart long test. Also many people forget to setup automagic smart tests, scrubs, and snapshots.
In short, what you proposed should work fine, but maybe a motherboard with more SATA ports, and a less powerful CPU could save money & give more options.
Edit: though a cpu with less cores will possibly give you less options to play with VMs if you want to in the future.
If you want to use these as a container from TrueNAS, its OK.
Plex Server
Personnal Cloud
Open VPN
Maybe PiHole to block ads on my whole network
Web server
If you want to use multiple VMs, the memory can be a bottleneck.
The previous release of TrueNAS had a bug in the Hypervisor and thus memory ballooning was not working, what meant that you had to assign necesssary memory to a VM BEFORE creating it.
(I dont know, whether or not this was fixed in the new release, but I actually had a lot of problems with it.)
Also, if you did not buy your HDD yet, better use 6 drives in a RAIDZ2 config. (this means 4 data disks and 2 parity disks)
Another important thing is not to buy SMR disks for the storage.
Finally, if you want to use plex to transcode videos on the fly on server side, you might need to buy an nvidia or intel VGA for HW acceleration.
In that case the PSU might be a bottleneck.
(My TrueNAS box has an old, low power Xeon CPU in it which can serve happily up to 7 streams until you dont need transcoding. I guess the AMD CPU is quite powerful, and also, if you only want to watch 1-2 parallel streams, it might be enough for that.)
I would pick a MoBo with at least 6 sATA ports. It is OK for even the 6 drives RAIDZ2 setup.
A HBA is great, but it is overkill for 6 drives and a 6 sATA port MoBo is less expensive then a HBA. And, if it is not delivered in IT mode, you need to reflash it yourself, and that can be something not everybody OK to do.
Otherwise others have already did perfect recommendations.
That’s a lot of very useful informations,
I will take in consideration all your advices before buying the hardware and I will probably modify a little bit my basket.
In conclusion I’ll try to:
choose a motherboard with 3 nvme slots and 6 sata ports (or LSI HBA if really no choice)
keep my overpowered CPU for software transcoding (until I add a capable graphics card), running VM or running game server in the future.
Maybe increase RAM
DO NOT buy SMR HDD! (thank you @Gyula_Masa I didn’t knew the difference between smr and cmr until my google search after reading your reply)
Burn in HDD before deployment (SMART tests were already planned) thank’s @Fleshmauler
Use 1 nvme as boot, 2 as mirrored pool for Apps/VM and avoid ssd cache (I don’t think I really need it)
I will think about that and place my order end of the week. Thank you all, your replies helped me a lot!
