Show off your homebrew TrueNAS builds (August, 2026 edition)

TrueNAS General
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Since I had to do some cleaning and had to pull out my TrueNAS server, I thought I would snap a photo of my homebrew TrueNAS Build which I rebuild last year

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  • Case: GAMEMAX Master 2 - Because it has eight hard drive bays and was cheap.
  • Motherboard: Supermicro MBD-X13SAE-F-O ATX Server Motherboard. It has three NVMe slots and eight SATA slots, plus support for IPMI which is extremely handy.
  • Processor: i7-14700K . It is overkill for a NAS, but the price is right.
  • CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U9S - Two fans in case of failure.
  • Memory: 64GB of ECC DDR5 memory. I was lucky to get it at a low price.
  • Video Card: Nvidia 5060 video card for transcoding. I had originally purchased a refurbished 4060 Ti through Woot, but it was too long. The performance between the 4060Ti and 5060 is roughly the same.
  • Storage drives: Eight 8 TB drives running in a RAIDZ2 configuration.
  • Boot Drive: SAMSUNG MZVPV128HDGM-00000 . It’s a 128GB drive that is about ten years old now.
  • Docker drives: Two SABRENT Rocket 4 1TB NVMe running in a mirror configuration. Once I moved my Docker pool from the hard drives to the NVMes, I noticed a significant speedup with Audiobookshelf.
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24x 3.5 hdd, 40x 2.5 hdd/ssd open airframe case $90 USD at the time with 120x360 aio water cooling with 120mm, 140mm cooling fans. It’s really easy to dust off :rofl:

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When I was a kid listening to Texas Rangers baseball games on radio, Mark Holtz was the play-by-play broadcaster. I’ll get a Truenas DIY pic soon.

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With the prices of storage going up like crazy, I though I’d try using just electrons. I tried to build a Quantum TrueNAS machine but every time I rebooted it, the qubits lost all the data so not a good TrueNAS machine. I should have paid for the SSD, then I’d have my approximately 3 million home photos still, because that is what we store on a home NAS, right? :nerd_face:

@MarkHoltz nice looking computer, very clean, cables routed nicely, professional looking. I can tell that you take pride in your work. If those 8TB drives were fairly new, hopefully in 5 years the cost for storage will go back down before the drives start failing. Of course, you might get 7+ years out of them, assuming your storage requirements do not increase.