I’m building a NAS for the first time on my own, so I wanted to share the story so far here.
I’m not a stranger to custom builds, in fact I don’t think I ever bought an assembled PC (not counting second hand 386 box a million years ago). But this is my first small, low power build, so it’s not perfect, I already ran into a wall (more later).
I base the build on an AsRock mini-ITX board, the CPU is included, it’s passively cooled, low power consumption but still powerful for a NAS. I’m sticking it into a Node 304 Fractal Design case. Here’s the full list of parts I got:
- AsRock J4125-ITX board with a Celeron 4125 (4-core CPU)
- 8GB DDR4 RAM (a Crucial kit)
- a 500GB NVMe SSD (which I can’t use)
- a couple of Seagate IronWolf 4TB drives
- 90W PicoPSU and some no-name power brick
- Fractal Design Node 304 mini-ITX case.
I planned to have an SSD for OS, these two disks for my photography and media, and then later on expand with more storage (preferably SSD, when I can afford it).
As mentioned, I messed up: the M2 slot on the motherboard is a “Key E” slot. I never bothered with these keys before, so I didn’t know that a Key E slot does not have a SATA protocol, it won’t take my SSD.
Another thing, the PicoPSU is a 20-pin power supply, and the board has a 24-pin slot. It should still be fine, the specs say that this is still okay, but I’ll have to see. According to my back-of-the-napkin calculations, 90 Watts should be enough power for the mobo and CPU, the SSD and the two spinning disks.
Anyway I’ll get a regular SATA SSD tomorrow and see how it’s shaping up. Let me know if you want me to post more on my progress/end result or if you have any questions.
To people negging about the CPU being under powered:
File sharing, media management, a couple of services for a handful of clients… It’s perfectly fine.
At 10W in with a tiny footprint it’s great when you don’t need any more computing power and next winter electricity bill drops.
Not everybody needs a full racks of decommissioned Xeons and arrays on arrays of RAIDs that draw juice like an industrial fruit press regardless it’s in use or not.
Yep, that was my intention. First, it’s low power, so it can be always-on with only a small impact on the power bill. Second, it’s only gonna serve a few things - my photography hobby and media library, and maybe a service or two will come with time. If I need other services, I put them on a Hetzner box and they’re much better taken care of.
I’ve done my share of sysadmin work and even a bit of server-room maintenance, I don’t want a full-time, or even a part time job. This is mostly gonna sit in the corner, and be quiet. If the prices matched, I would have probably just gone with QNap or Synology, but this way I get the NAS and the disks for the same price.
Ha. I thought that piece of red was some sort of meat in a vacuumpack
Yes, it didn’t inspire confidence when it arrived so, but it’s actually a tiny PSU, it’s essentially all bolted onto the power connector :)
Yeah that makes more sense. But with power, better a bigger block than just enough power. I read somewhere that a powerunit works better if it has more left then just enough
Well, yes, kind of. More power means the PSU or the power adapter is heating up, generating more losses. Closer to their top power, it’s also a bit spikier. You have a bigger reserve for spikes.
The downside is a slightly higher power draw (in absolute values, it’s negligible, but in comparison, it can be a double-digit percentage difference).
I’ve been reading a bit, and I believe that my setup won’t exceed 50 Watts, maybe a bit more if I add two more spinning disks. It should be quite a good match, I think.
Can you let us know your price when its all said and done? I just bought and set up a QNAS and am interested in a comparison.
Sure, here’s the breakdown:
AsRock J4125-ITX -> 120,62€ Crucial 8GB RAM kit -> 19,90€ 2 x Seagate IronWolf 4TB -> 2 x 114,99€ Samsung 870 EVO SSD 500GB -> 31,41€ (I originally ordered an NVMe one that cost 29€). Fractal Design Node 304 -> 91,89€ PicoPSU -> 35,95€ No-name Power Adapter (220V to 12V) -> 12,99€ Molex-2x Sata -> 9,99€ (there is a ~1€ option, but I wanted a nicer cable for some cable management.
A few cables that I had. Total: 552,73€
I wanted to get a 4-bay NAS, and QNAP, Synology or Asustor would be a bit less, but without the disks. Also, I wanted an x86 CPU, for potential future use. This way I turned out a little cheaper, and it is a bit more flexible.
What OS do you plan on using?
I’d like to do a really basic NAS build which is just a PC with 2 drives in RAID 1, and some room to run a few services in the future.
- dedicated game servers
- Home Automation service
- far future - old GPU to run a local AI
I’m assuming some kind of Linux-Based OS, but I’m not sure which one to go with that would be easy for a Linux Novice.
I plan to try the OpenMediaVault first. For my use - a lot less for services and dynamic changes and a lot more for sitting in the closet quietly - it’s good enough. And I can still dig into the internals if I wanted to.
And with OMV I can also teach my non-techy wife and kids how to add themselves more disk space :)
That’s the same exact case I chose for my nas
