First let me say “Helo” - old fart, systems engineer here deciding to delve into the the DYI NAS community.
I’ve decided to replace my 13 year old Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 6 w/ (6) WD Red 2tb drives in RAID5 Because:
A) it’s getting very long in tooth (13 yrs old) such that its web based protocol is no longer supported by modern browsers.
B) While I’d added internal cooling to its CPU and chipset … I suspect it’s only a matter of time before something decides to not stay operational.
So I took a spare case, a 3 drive expansion bay with hot swap drawers and the first 64bit Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHz and landed on TrueNAS and threw together a test/trial run system, and copied my current data footprint to it.
The PoC test for me was convincing and now I want to DYI it.
After some brief research I’ve landed on the following hardware loadout. Some for feature, some for price, some based on past experience. Looking for opinions. positive or negative, but respectful.
Jonsbo N3 Mini-ITX NAS case (I like the aesthetics)
CWWK AMD 8845HS Octa-core NAS motherboard
SFX Power Supply
Noctua NH-L9i-1700 LP HSF
(2) G.SKILL Ripjaws DDR5 SO-DIMM
(2) WD_BLACK 1TB SN850X NVMe Gen4 PCIe, M.2 2280
(8) 4TB WD Red Plus NAS 5400RPM I don’t need the hot dog performance and I do want the cooler temps and longevity.
And IIRC in my research the 2nd NVMe can be used for data caching ops on that board with TrueNAS cfg.
I can’t argue against aesthetics, but I question the cooling model of Jonsbo N cases.
The motherboard looks overpowered, unless you’re planning for substantial apps/VMs.
Non-ECC SO-DIMM
And overall curious choice of drives: Too big for boot (100 GB or less would do), no obvious use for the other 1 TB, and too many small drives for storage.
Not quite. Certainly not for writes, and for reads you should rather bump RAM.
I was thinking the same thing about the 1tb drives (a bit over kill) but I’m used to just using 1tb or larger for everything. But I did adjust down to 500gb and saved >50% $$
Motherboard, I’ not sure what all aside from media server I’ll be doing with this NAS but I tend to buy the latest top tier w/i a $$/feature class “just in case” I need or wanted moar wattage in the cottage…
My HDD selection was one of previous experience and budget. I’d planning on a two drive redundancy (raid Z2 ?) and would sill like to double my current space … again I don’t know what all will end up on it.
If “media server” involves transcoding, you might be happier with an Intel CPU and iGPU—unless you plan to add an Arc A310 anyway, or a satisfied to do occasional transcodingon the CPU.
“Latest top tier” is often regarded as too new, and too expensive, to recommend. NAS duty does not require that much computing power.
There’s no arguing against Z2 for security. But you’re planning for “only” 24 TB of raw space (ca. 20 TB usable); eight drives is a lot of drives for relatively little space. Bigger drives, in 4- to 6-wide, could provide as much space, or more, at a likely better $/TB ratio.
Less drives means less noise, less power, less SATA ports/drive bays and thus more possible cases and possible motherboards.
Media sever … sry, misleading term, data storage only. I have other devices at locations in my home that do localized video processing.
I could look at the cost/tb analysis going with fewer, larger drives. My current NAS is a tad under 10tb and is only 40% capacity. This one will be 2.5 times larger … so not necessary, at this time.
I’ve gotten over VMs and collections of OSs i simply want to enjoy my tech without having to constantly tweak and futz with it.
