Dear Members,
I would like to make a minimalistic NAS for redundant file storage only, without any media features. The goal is to be cheap, silent and low power consumption. A motherboard with integrated CPU would be good, for example J3455. I want to use 2 HDDs with capacity of 12 TB, mirrored.
Do you think that kind of CPU can do it for me?
IMHO, absolutely yes.
But if you want something more recent, Intel N100 Is quite cheap choice
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My NAS is based on a 2-core Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU J3355 @ 2.00GHz - and performance is great. It can fully support 1Gb transfers.
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Intel N100 is a very good idea. I didn’t know that. Thank you for you suggestion!
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It’s nice to read that these low performant CPUs can deal with home NAS tasks. Thanks for letting me know that! I think I will go with N100.
Have a look at the ASROCK N100DC ITX. There are a few NAS tutorial/build videos with it on the internet.
I can totally see it having the system on a cheapo M.2 drive and your 2 HDDS connected to the onboard SATA ports.
A few things I would be wary about:
Does the integrated HDD power supply have enough juice to spin up your particular drives?
Do you expect to want more drives in the future?
People tend to match that board with a chinesium M.2 to SATA (x6, x8 port) adapters, which are heavily frowned upon around here. I have one such adapter on order, to check it out, but unless you find credible reports of it being 100% reliable, I would not trust any critical data to it. Bear in mind, you will probably need a separate power supply for extra HDDs, besides the laptop brick you would need for the system itself.
Yes, power supply is also a question for me… I think I will go with an standard ATX model. I am not planning to extend this with more drives, so m.2 and 2xSATA will be enough for me. Let’s see if it will work as expected. 
Bear in mind, the ASROCK board I mentioned takes 19V DC, not the standard ATX 24pin. It is designed to run off a laptop brick PSU. It is said to be capable of running on 12V from an ATX PSU, but you have to double check the specs if you decide to go that way.
Be aware that most off the shelf ATX PSUs don’t have good efficiency with light loads. My Truenas system is desperately old and inefficient and still hovers at about 40W when idling with the HDDs in standby (spun down). With the N100, I would expect most ATX PSUs won’t even notice a load, let alone be efficient with it. On the other hand, laptop brick PSUs are meant to work with a lighter load and you can choose one that will be in its most efficient power level with your specific setup.
EDIT: Asrock does have a similar board for ATX PSU - N100M. Although a better option if you need more than 1xNVMe + 2xSATA, the point of ATX PSUs being inefficient at low power holds true. A quick look around, found a user reporting 7W idle (4 HDDs spun down) and 55W with them up and busy with a resilver. Mind you, that system runs off a Pico PSU, which is much more efficient than a multi hundred watt ATX PSU.
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I can second that. When my Titanium-rated Seasonic 700W PSU died, I switched to a Corsair 500W Platinum and power consumption went up 10% even though theoretically the PSU output of the Corsair more closely matched the actual needs (110W plug load) of the NAS than the Seasonic did.
But the big difference between Titanium and Platinum-rated PSUs is in the low end, and that is where most NAS’ usually operate since no PSU OEM makes a Ti-rated ATX-form factor PSU under 600W
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Thank you this is a useful information. I thought it is enough if I just plug in an older 300W ATX PSU. So I hope, a good quality 19V laptop PSU can do the job. I will try to do tests.
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It really depends on the PSU. @jgreco made a good guide re: sizing PSUs that some argued was too conservative, but which was based on his lived experience of running a lot of systems.
Basically, the biggest issue is how “smart” the motherboard is in conjunction with the attached drives re: spin-up of HDDs. If the HDDs are reliably “staggered” re: spin-up then the potential PSU needs can be reduced tremendously since it’s spin-up that draws a spike of power (for a short duration).
If the HDDs in your pool can all come on at once, the PSU has to be much bigger to handle this momentary load.
Most motherboards, backplanes, whatever at consumer scale lack spin-up staggering smarts, hence the guide suggests generous wattages for every HDD vs. what you’d expect looking over idle or active power requirements in the spec sheets.
IIRC, the MiniXL I got from iXsystems in 2016 or whatever had a 300W non-ATX PSU for a 8HDD, 2SSD array. I don’t recall if it staggered spin-up, but I really doubt it.
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