After looking at the cost of a diskless 4 bay NAS I decided to build my own from my old parts inventory. I purchased a Jonsbo N5 case and a Lsi 9300 16i to go with an i3-6100 mobo. I have populated it with a few drives I had on hand for learning and testing.
Initially, I would like about 8TB of storage that I can expand as needed (I know the N5/HBA is overkill). Should I mirror 2 8tb drives or use 4 4tb drives in a raidz2 configuration? The drive cost is reasonably similar. The raidz2 option seems more expandable but I’m on the steep part of the learning curve:)
I found these new 4tb drives which seem like a good value.
(Western Digital/Dell DC HC310 HUS726T4TALA6L0 4TB SATA 3.5" HDD — ServerPartDeals.com)
Current configuration:
Gigabyte GA-H170M-DS3H mobo
i3-6100 CPU
120GB M2 NVME boot drive
16GB memory soon to be 32GB
Ebay used Lsi 9300 16i
Jonsbo N5 case
3 120GB SATA ssd in a raidz1 pool (have 2 more, may use for common files for multiple PCs)
3 1.5tb WD green hdd in a raidz1 pool (just for testing and learning)
1GB network (TP-Link Omada >100 devices ~75% wireless)
Mostly a single user plus a bit for my wife
A couple Windows PCs, ~12 Linux PC/Rpi and 4 Android devices
50+ IoT devices