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.
Good luck with those Celeron CPUs. I owned a bunch of PCs running those and they are essentially space heaters that can do math.
That is why I bought a few Ryzen powered Mini PCs. They have plenty of computational power and they are also power efficient.
I also wanted some Ryzens, but my requirements were different. I did not want so much computational power, as much as I wanted low power. Combined with the price and availability, this works good enough for mne. We’ll see in the long run.
Oh, I don’t want this to be a PC. I have plenty of CPU power for what I do, this has a different purpose.
I’m not planning to run anything much on those Celerons - it’s mostly just a file server. People do that with a RasPi - a 4-core CPU is going to blow it out of the water I think.
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.
i use the same case for my own wifi ap/internet router & firewall/nas; it doesn’t work will with pata drives if you have too many sata like me.
Any reason you chose that cpu?
Yes, in fact! Two main reasons.
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I wanted low-power, this is mostly gonna sit in the closet and serve files around. Even ARM CPUs like the RasPi can do that. But I didn’t want it to be too weak, in case I wanted a simple service or two, this still has extra oomph. This isn’t too powerful, but it is a 64-bit x86 CPU.
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I also wanted some ports. This has 4 SATA ports. It’s supposed to be a NAS. It has a Gbit ethernet - I don’t have a Gbit network at home so this is good enough for now, and I can expand it somewhat. It has USBs, expansion slots etc.
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those two combined resulted in a few selections, AsRock’s mini-ITX boards with integrated CPUs are quite good choices in this space.
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I wanted low power consumption. I could have gone with a slightly stronger J5040-ITX perhaps, but it’s also using just slightly more power.
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it’s also cheaper, the mobo with the CPU cost me 120€. The j5040 I mentioned would be a bit more - not a lot but still noticable.
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I wanted silent, and this board and CPU is passively cooled. If I had money, I would get SSDs for storage as well (less power, less noise) but it’s a LOT more expensive.
I know there are other CPUs in this space but in the end you have to pick one so I did.
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.
