On an initial cost of acquisition and ongoing power consumption cost basis, is there anything to beat Intel N100/N150 based systems?

TrueNAS General
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I’m looking at building a home NAS (for backing up photos and streaming video to my PS3 primarily) around the likes of this motherboard. Power consumption is something I’ve been trying to keep in mind through it all, as electric can be up to 34 eurocents a kwh here (peak time in evening), and after digging through as much information as I can get and having some chats with an AI, Intel N100/N150 setups seem to be the winners.

The plan is to pair it with 4 x 4TB HDDs (my calculations don’t show the lower power consumption of SSDs paying for the difference in initial purchase price for a very long time, and the expected low usage renders the speed unnecessary) in RAIDZ1, and 8GB of DDR5.

I have a big old gaming PC case to build it in, and an old TFX PSU that will do till there’s a sale on more efficient PSUs. I looked into building with AM4 motherboards, but it didn’t seem to be worthwhile when the power consumption was examined, and AM5 stuff is still a bit too expensive. Are there other options which I should consider?

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While it’s not directly related to your question, I think you better just go with 16GB.

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Just to warn you, there Is a review where a guy complain about costant reboots using this mainboard with Truenas, and the lack of documentation make troubleshooting hard. I also remember to have read there threads about similar platform that land to same behaviour, due to RAM overheating-frequency/not well supported.
Honestly, despite all the specs mentioned are really good/appetible, i think that the overall quality does not live up to expectations.

I take as comparison my system, that despite his age, the 6 spinning disks + 3 Nvme, apps running, the bronze PSU… idle at exactly 40w, i would not be to much worried about idle consumption , and choice another platform (well supported), but Is just IMHO

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Well that is reassuring :astonished:

Do not trust the AI when doing research. Make sure you follow up anything it states. You did right to come here and ask this question.

At face value this sounds good. I’d likely even want to build it. Download the User Manual and read it. You have two M.2 slots, one NVMe and one NGFF. These are not the same and I suspect you can use either one but maybe not both. But I have not read the User Manual.

For streaming video content, so long as you are not needing Transcoding, you should be fine.

If all you are doing is a Basic NAS, absolutely no Apps/VMs/Jails/Containers… You get the point, then I do not see why this would not work in a well ventilated case.

I too would buy at least 16GB RAM (make sure it is on the QVL) or if you can afford it, the 32GB RAM, to go with it and pair that with a 64GB to 128GB SSD boot drive, whatever is the least expensive. A boot drive does not need to be very large in capacity nor speed. You could use M.2 or a traditional 2.5" SSD.

As for the storage drives 4TB SSDs, if you buy cheap here, you may have problems like others with a lot of failures. The company may honor the warranty but it could be a real pain in the butt in the long run. So factor that in as well. My SCALE NAS is all NVMe. Power consumption is low and I’m happy, but I purchased 4TB NVMe drives when they were at a great price and from a trusted manufacturer.

I’d like to see those calculations. You should only factor in the warranty for the length of time a drive will last. SSDs have a finite amount of erase cycles, whereas a spinner does not. Most of us have spinners well beyond the warranty period. I have 3 drives out of 4 which are about to cross over 60,000 hours (6.8 years) and that fourth one from the original purchase failed last year, still 4 years after the warranty. And power consumption is less with SSD however the cost difference is difficult to see it saving more money in the long run, but I do not know how expensive power is where you live.

I’m not trying to shoot you in the foot for building a complete SSD machine, it could be nice and small, power consumption could be low, but the purchase price could be high. I’m really asking you to think about SSD or HDD.

I left out that a SSD system would be very light whereas a HDD system would have some weight to it.

If you build this, love to see a complete parts list and photos of the system, and an evaluation on how it works.

Look into a Pico Power Supply if power consumption is a real factor.

I laughed when I read this, considering the 4TB SSDs you would purchase are not cheap at all.

One thing you should remember and I say this a lot: Drives and Fans are consumable items, they will fail. The rest of the system should last at least 10+ years. Put your money where it counts, buy quality components.

If you really are shooting for low power, and can wait a while, an ARM processor would sip power. TrueNAS can run on ARM now, basic functionality has been talked about. Watch the recent TrueNAS Tech Talk video on YouTube. I’d consider it myself if I had an ARM computer available, but I do not want to purchase one just to play with TrueNAS.

Good luck on your adventure.

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Thank you, I’ll examine a bit closer about the hardware stability

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Thank you, I have no intention of using SSDs other than for the boot drive (because using an M.2 for that makes it all look neater, and the cost), I think perhaps I didn’t write about the difference between the low purchase price of HDDs paying off better clearly enough.

For me, electric ranges from 30ish cent/kwh at peak down to 15 cent/kwh at night, 25 cent through the day, if it weren’t for that, I’d be converting my occasional use Dell T3610 to a NAS.
I will be sure to examine a bit closer about stability and hardware capabilities (and will be doing testing out of the box to double check).

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Never forget to do some serious Burn In tests. MemTest86+ and Prime95. We see stability problems all the time and these tests can find a problem before you slap data on the drives. You can also perform some drive tests, and it depends on how deep you want to go. At a minimum, a SMART Long test.

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FWIW, I’ve heard (perhaps at servethehome) that N100 can have issues with 32GB. The official spec states 16GB as max.

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Thanks for that very important bit of information. That is too bad 16GB is the limit. While it would be fine for this use case, you know some of us like to think about more RAM = Larger ARC.

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Thanks, I think I’m going to examine an AM4 based system a bit closer now, that might be best for the long term

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Too bad you do not live a bit closer to me, I have a nice Intel motherboard just for things like this. It is just collecting dust right now. I may make it a backup system again when I take my CORE NAS offline, then I will have that system to sell and I know I can get a fast sale of that one. I just need to be willing to part with it vice it too collecting dust.

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