After buliding several NASs and home servers in my time, here's a few additional points to consider. 1. Reduce power draw as much as possible, especially if you're planning to leave it on 24/7. Get a low power motherboard/CPU, preferably a mobile chip if you can. 38w power at idle is low for a desktop but pretty high for a NAS or laptop. With the current energy prices in the UK right now 38W 24/7 would cost me £113 to run a 38W NAS for a whole year. With a mobile chip, especially a modern ones, you could easily half and in my case 1/4 this. The alternative is to tweak TrueNAS to use Wake on LAN. You'll need to make sure your motherboard/NIC has that capability. That way it's shut down until you needs it. Get bigger, fewer drives. Again for power usage reasons. The less hardware used, the less power it takes up. Go for 5400rpm drive if performance isn't an issue as they use less power too. Fewer sticks of RAM. One 16GB stick is better than 2x8GB if power reduction is the aim. 2. It's actually harder than you think to source the perfect case for a home built NAS. Home built NASs are nearly always too big. You've got two choices. Get a hulking 10y old+ old tower for pennies or spend several hundreds on a dedicated NAS case. Cheap cases suitable for NASs are practically non-existant. 3. A homebuilt NAS is WAAAYYY easier to fix than a bought NAS if it goes wrong. Busted Synology or QNAP and you're looking at weeks to get it fixed/replaced and there's the chance, if it's and older model they don't have the parts any more. Personal experience of having several TB of data held hostage by a NAS company because their repair/replace policy was so inadequate/expensive. Use bog standard parts/disks and things can usually be put back together quckly and with less chance of a part literally not being avaliable anymore. 4. Decide early if what you want is just disk storage or something more flexible. It might just easier to just set a machine as a general purpose server. If the hardware available to you can cope with being used as a render station or for video format conversion or something, then why limit it to just serving files? 5. Avoid 'Green' drives. Get NAS specific ones if you can. I've never had much longevity with 'Green' drives. These types are not meant to be run 24/7 and wear out/fail a lot faster than drives designed for NASs. 'Black' drives or those for meant for desktops are generally okay but they're the same price as NAS drives and don't have the cache/power features of NAS drives. Of course any drive will do on a budget, but if you have the option, always pick a NAS drive first (or try to at least avoid the green ones).
The CPU/motherboard is usually negligible in power consumption compared to the drives (with the exception of some older, pre-2015, power-hungry chips.) Spinning rust drives are usually 8-10W each, and most Intel chips that support power modes are probably around 10-15W idle. For comparison, I have a Proxmox box I built out of an old Dell Optiplex 7050 with an i5-6500 chip, which isn't exactly a low-power chip at max 65W TDP. However, it only pulls 15W at near-idle including 24G RAM, a NVMe boot disk, and a SATA SSD. I've never seen it consume more than 40W, and for a NAS, the processor utilization should be very low even with big transfers. Using low power mobile/laptop chips or the Celerons would probably only save a Watt or two at best. Those tend to shine when you're actually bogging down the processor, but of course, they're also slower for that lower power draw.
I built a NAS back in 2014 - it had an i3 4170 CPU, 16GB RAM and a HighPoint DataCentre 7280 PCIe HBAwith 8 MiniSAS ports (max 32 SATA drives) - I loaded it up with 24 x 1.5 TB 2.5" Seagate hard drives and the whole thing under load used about 150W (These days of course I'd just use a couple of 3.5" 12-18TB drives instead) - performance was outstanding for the time, saturating a full gigabit NIC easily and doing local transfers between the drives around 160-180 MB/s. Thanks for the video and the memories!
As someone who bought a "off the shelf NAS", having it fail HURTS. You can restore the data, but you have to use the exact same hardware. Some newer products allow for drive pools to be transfered to other systems, but TrueNAS doesn't seem to care about the hardware, and you seem to be able to import your data forward, no matter how old your setup was.
@@Felix-ve9hs I actually imported my zfs pool from FreeNAS 9 to TrueNAS 11 (I think that's the version), this was with different hardware (though I had backups). My lost data was in an old synology system, that had the motherboard die. It wasn't able to import the data on the drives to a newer synology system. (From my understanding, synology doesn't have that problem anymore)
I recently did a hardware upgrade on my truenas scale system. new mobo/cpu/ram/boot drive. lost my vm, created users, and app settings. all of which took very little time to re create. mind you I missed the step where I was supposed to download the config file(its current location doesn't really match the written descriptions) the pool itself imported without a hitch. considering I botched my upgrade and was able to get everything back up in running, id say that +1 for upgrades/hardware failures
May have changed over time for some brands, but I know people who got stung by their proprietary NAS boxes dying and having to resort to extreme efforts to find a 'compatible' NAS from ebay/amazon/etc. I also know others who bought their NAS unit in pairs, so if one unit failed they can at least try to recover their data using the remaining device (and then buy two new units to restart the cycle), crazy stuff. TrueNas (and similar) do better to separate the data from the hardware and OS itself (hence why you cannot boot off your data storage drives). I suspect it is due to the boxed NAS units storing the OS and data on the same physical drives in a way that limits the ability to support hardware changes (protected or encrypted partitions, or whatever).
Most off the shelf NAS use Linux with software RAID. Surely for the cheaper models they are built like that, just an ARM processor running a Linux distribution with standard filesystems and software RAID (Linux md array or LVM volumes with ext4 filesystem or for the more fancy one BTRFS). That is to recover the data you just connect the drives to any PC running any Linux distribution (even an Ubuntu live USB would be fine) and it should mount the array without any issues. Linux software RAID is made in a way that the configuration is stored on the drives itself, that is you can connect the drives in any sort of order and the OS should mount the array automatically. I had to do even one time to fix a Synology drive where more than 2 drives had bad sectors in a RAID 5 and the NAS itself was not able to mount the array, while with a Linux distribution I was able to recover (most of) the data by mounting the array read-only mode. I don't know NAS manufacturers that use hardware RAID that needs proprietary controllers, at least consumer ones. Probably the more enterprise grade stuff will do, but it's more likely something standard that in case of data recovery can be mounted with software implementations.
@@alerighi That could be the case if encryption is not enabled and containers were not being used. It also depends on the OEM using standard packages and not TRYING to lock customers into their ecosystem. Off the shelf NAS devices are okay, but they come with their own unique limitations. Enjoy 2023 everyone.🙂
It's completely fair to exclude the cost of storage when comparing a DIY NAS to an off-the-shelf one. The off-the-shelf models don't come with drives, after all.
@@kvltntr00 in this case, the objective is to reduce the price as much as possible while maintaining a decent level of performance, personal choices don’t occur here.. drives on the other hand, where cost and features will vary depending on usage, are personal choices
Exactly and that's how they rape you. The hardware in those off-the-shelf models is WAY worse than this and I would never recommend one to a home user when this is an option.
the big problem with using old hardware for this purpose is power consumption. older cpu architectures consume a lot more energy to do something trivial. but I'm a fan of the idea of repurposing old hardware instead of discarding and buying new
True. I have a Sandybridge machine lying around in a giant tower case with 6 drive slots, but am still hesitant to turn it into a NAS because of power consumption.
@@Machinationstudio While it'll be different for everyone, when I calculated my NAS build over buying newer and more power efficient hardware, it would be nearly 4 years before they would equal in value.
I set up a NAS using this same case. It is big, but it holds a lot of hard drives. I removed the DVD drive and filled every bay with hard drives. I use an SSD as the boot drive. I use a motherboard with plenty of SSD connectors, running with an old Intel Xeon processor. I decided to use OpenMediaVault as the OS, as I found it easy to set up and it works well for using the NAS as storage and a media server. And for anyone wondering about backups, this is my second NAS. My first one is an actual NAS unit, and both contain the same data.
The main advantage of separating the hardware from the OS is you don’t need to worry about the manufacturer losing interest in providing patches and updates for a ready made version (that uses their own proprietary software) A classic is a couple of WD my-cloud models I had with perfectly good drives but WD decided to drop support. Ubuntu Server setup with a Samba config also makes a good NAS (although not as feature rich as true nas)
@@chrisSandersASX I have just replaced mine with a software raid (2 drives mirrored) ubuntu server setup. You could also think about a TrueNAS device replacement 👍🏻
I too have a wd mycloud, when WD dropped support for My cloud OS 3 i found out that my model was compatible with Mycloud OS 5 i upgraded, but im still looking for options to run my HASS and Plex servers from(currently running plex from my main desktop pc and HASS from a RasPi 3b+)
The benefit of this over RAID is that RAID controllers can be proprietary and the encoding change not only between board versions, also firmware versions - which can make it a big problem getting access to the data. With iSCSI you would want some UPS protection. iSCSI risks data corruption on abrupt power loss.
More importantly, it's cheaper. I'm doing my part about the e-waste though, I pay for old used PCBs from local schools, companies, etc and reclaim the gold at home. You can still make a good pofit even paying for the boards because you can grab up the customers who would've otherwise given them up for free for recycling.
This video popped up in my suggested list and I'm so glad it did. I'm building a NAS out of unused computer gear I already own plus some new drives. The idea of adding a high-speed network card for a dedicated connection to an editing machine is golden. I'm borrowing that for sure. Cheers! 👍
Inspired. Just wrapped up building a TrueNAS system using an Intel Core i5-3570S 3.10GHz in an old ASUS MOBO, 16GB DD3, a new 128GB SSD for the OS, a single 6TB HDD, and twin Seagate 3TB drives in RAID. I am new to TrueNAS, but have had commercial NAS units for a decade. I had a LOT of old data to transfer. I am keeping anything I cannot replace (like home movies and photos) in RAID, and anything I can download again in the 6TB single drive. I am running a GB network, with CAT6 cable and 10/100/1000 Ethernet connections at all points. It runs zippy and has no problem streaming 4K video to multiple smart TV's / PCs. I have four users in my house, and we can all draw off the NAS at once no problem. Great use of a bunch of old stuff. Besides the 128GB SSD, I didn't buy anything else new.
Great video and thanks for including power consumption. It depends on where you live of course but unfortunately here in the UK using old hardware like this has become quite expensive. A year of running this on idle would cost about 150 USD in the UK.
There was an old video called "Turn an old laptop into a NAS - Synology". It actually utilized sinology's OS. I did this and utilized the usb 3.0's with multi drive docks. Gives me lots of storage, expandability and portability. Plus being a laptop really low power consumption.
Really nice to see this video, as I recently started a similar build with TrueNAS SCALE. Of course, I managed to pull it off with almost no cost by using stuff that I've scrounged over the years. I also like the fact that you're pointing out other TH-cam videos, like the one Craft Computing did on iSCSI.
I have two of that exact case. They're great for a generic file server. Good air flow, lots of 3.5 inch drive bays. Overall, a good little box you can stick in a corner.
It would be cool to see the iSCSI for videos on a SSD in the server, with your 2.5Gbps network. The speeds you were getting look to be limited by the speed of the HDDs. I see just a little lower than that over SMB with a 1Gbps network. Cool video, and nice find on the case! I've been looking for something local, but so far have not.
I have done similar. Have an i5 3470 machine, 16gb ram, similar sata card etc and 7 drives. Works great and pulls around 36w idle. Far far cheaper than dedicated. I opted Win 10 Pro, have a linux VM on it with pi-hole and also Jellyfin. So allows it to run various roles :) Yep, might pull more than a dedicated at idle but 36w not going to break the bank :)
Interesting because I have a haswell (micro ATX board) with 4670k with all extras disabled in the BIOS and using only onboard VGA and no HDDs or PCIE cards connected, just a single SATA SSD and the CPU set to power save profile etc I couldn't get it to use less than 60w at idle. It does have 32G RAM though. If I recall correctly dropping XMP it uses 50W at idle.
@@joshuamaserow This could just be down to motherboard. Mine is not a feature packed one at all, real stripped down. No XMP set on mine and didn't really tweak the power management at all. I did consider limiting the CPU to 50% clocks to reduce load power draw but then I installed VM on it so left to allow full clocks. Yours is also K skew which could effect it
@@joshuamaserow Same. I converted my old i5 4670k and msi z87 gd65 mobo into a 'budget' nas and its working great. Not worried about the power draw though as its stuffed with 8 2tb hdd and 3 pcie x4 nvme riser cards with a samsung 970 evo+ 2tb on each one. Yeah its a ton of storage but I have a ton of bluray rips and other large size goodies. I'm a digital packrat.. 🤪
@@joshuamaserow Was thinking through this some more. My other "server box" is an old HP Z440 work station. E5 1620 V4, 32gb ram, ssd + 2 spinny rust and an old GT 750. This pulls 60W idle. In theory the idle on the E5 xeon should be similar to the i5 3470. So the key differences between being X99 mobo, double ram and the GT 750. Result double the power draw.
Love the concept of this video, great selection of budget parts make for a really interesting build. I just really wish every budget server build video didn't immediate devolve into "Thanks to sponsor for sending all the hard drives free of charge." Great deal for the channel, but really doesn't help anyone else.
Just built a NAS with redundancy a few weeks ago out of some old PC parts! Super awesome and fun project, Feels nice to have a NAS now also. FreeNAS is pretty awesome and cool to play around with, especially if you are studying IT, I'd recommend a project like this 🔥
Great video - the motherboard is your most limiting factor here, but I completely get why you’re using it. Something more modern, capable of handling more RAM and providing higher bandwidth PCI-E would be huge helps. A board that supports NVMe would be really nice in this situation. Another thing to consider, if you’re going to use this case long term, is using the 5.25” bays. There are manufacturers out there that have kits to allow use of up to 4x 2.5” drives in a 5.25” bay. Unless you plan on using the optical drive, it looks like you could put up to 12x 2.5” drives in there. Using SSDs would really be a nice option for your video editing use case and could help reduce some of the noise/heat generated by mechanical drives.
Thanks, and yeah I completely agree. I actually have two follow up videos to this; one where I upgrade the motherboard, and the second where I upgrade the drives. Still no SSDs, but that's just because I haven't really hit a bottleneck in terms of seq reads on my 2.5Gb network. Maybe if I move to 10Gb ethernet or start using higher bitrate footage I'll make a switch! Appreciate the comment!
Nice video! I did about the same thing with a 12-drive 4U rack mounted case, and run it through ProxMox. I can virtualize my NAS along with a lot of other services and then have a backup configuration to a completely separate machine in case my hardware fails. Not just a drive. Drives are surprisingly resiliant, it's the motherboard and RAM I'm always wary of. But, the best NAS is one that can save data when you need it, the best backup is the data you can access after your NAS fails. So no matter what you do for storage, ALWAYS have a backup, and RAID is NOT a backup!!!! Cheers!
On a seperate note, you don't need I/O past your initial setup. You only need network. So for your use-case, that 2/5GB card makes it so you could set this anywhere as long as you have direct connection and not even hear it whirring away with those rinky-dink fans and cooling. I have mine 2 stories below me directly connected from my basement. You don't need anything but that ethernet to get to everything you need.
Regarding backups, you’re spot on. I don’t follow the 321 principle (at least not yet), but I do have everything backed up to the cloud and run daily snapshots. And I’m fully aware that I don’t need access to anything other than network. It’s just on my desk in case I needed to tinker with it while making the video. I also just have to move a bunch of other machines around to make room for where it will eventually live 24/7
This is actually a good case, I bought the newer Antec p10c case thinking that it can accommodate 6 drives and a dvd drive, but found out that the psu cable expect drives to align in close proximity. The p10c case put drive racks in unconventional fashion behind the board and next to the psu, making it impossible to connect them even with two sata power cables. The only solution is to connect all the drives first than stash them somewhere inside the chassis without the mounting/racks.
The algorithm sent this my way, I guess past searches of NAS hardware. Glad it did. I have a more powerful tower than you featured here sitting idle that I was considering selling. So the only thing I would need to buy to test this solution would be a SATA card if I needed more ports than on the mobo. Worse case, I lose
I'd advise getting a motherboard with ECC memory support since ZFS on Truenas is memory dependent for the checksuming aka bit rot protection of data. More than 8GB of ram would be good too since Truenas uses ram for a read and write cache.
I would’t say that’s entirely true. There are other benefits to ZFS and TrueNAS outside of just checksumming. But I get what you’re saying. The upgrades to this a bit down the road will have ECC
@@HardwareHavenFrom my understanding, the problem here is that if you don't have ECC memory, you place the whole VDEV @ risk. I like the hardware concept here but this hardware configuration, while excellent as a NAS, and for your use case, doesn't pair well with TrueNas because of the necessary protection ECC provides for ZFS and the High Memory requirements of ZFS. I would recommend instead using Ubuntu, or Fedora with Cockpit as a front end and mirroring but not pooling drives, unless you want a high speed scratch volume where the data isn't particularly valuable. Even Windows 10 might make a good OS for a NAS using this hardware provided you debloat it appropriately and configure update channels accordingly. Placing valuable data on a trunas system, that doesn't meet the recommended sys requirements is risky. Love the concept of your video though and great presentation. Will sub.
My dad bought an Antec 302 and an Antec NSK4482. I've been considering 'upgrading' to some cool new case and getting rid of the other one PC. But now I'm on a home server journey. I'm grateful for the explanation that new towers don't come with lots of drive bays because I'm in Drive Bay Heaven right now and I don't think I knew how good I had it 😅
Nice video. They have recently come out with some NAS chassis so that people can build their own NAS (with a mini-ITX and SFX power supply). They are really compact.
On the network side, you could create a network bridge in TrueNAS. That essentially acts like a software switch, meaning that both interfaces will have the same IP address. Then your editing PC can access the NAS through the 2.5G port, but also still be able to access the rest of the network as the NAS will forward it. Then you don't have two IP addresses to worry about!
I have to look at a budget NAS for my work storage. I did see a video on a Pi recently but I feel that a ‘proper’ mobo might serve me better. Also, sticking 16GB of RAM in it should improve things considerably. Thank you.
Wow. thanks for this video. It answered two questions concerned me so long. One is how connect directly between pc and nas without router and the second is how to use iscis controller!
Hi man just wanted to let you know I just found your channel and I'm a huge fan just a few videos in. Your content is extremely interesting and helpful. Your voice and articulation make your videos some of the most easily digestible and pleasant watches of any tech youtuber. Quickest sub of my life. Keep up the great work and P.S. Good luck with the kid!
The Antec 300 is such a solid little case. I’m putting my old 300 back together to migrate my NAS off its current Skylake-SP platform, and it’s a nice no-frills chassis. Relatively compact, solidly built, with a decent capacity of both fans and drives.
Does it have lower requirements? I would only be running a few terabytes and buying a system that needs at least 8GB defeats the whole budget approach.
Nice find on the Antec case. Still a great base design from the old 900 from 20 years ago 2 issues here are the mainboard and sata controller. Would have been better to get an older HBA for the same (or less) money - HBA's are very well covered and discussed in the TrueNAS community forums - and then shopped a mainboard to suite rather than accepting multiple bottlenecks
Completely agree! In a follow up, I replaced the motherboard with a super micro board and 4th gen Xeon. I also abandoned the SATA adapters. I’m using an HBA on an upcoming video with a TrueNAS VM. Thanks for the comment!
I have that same antek case from a pc build I did 2011, I found this video because I’m looking to build a NAS as well. Will definitely use this case. Cool video, greatly appreciate it.
Great work! How are you liking TrueNAS SCALE? :) We've been watching the growth of your channel and we're very impressed, can't wait to see you grow further!
Me gusto el video, muy claro y detallado en cuanto al hardware, yo tenia pensado usar un motherboard con 2 puertos sata y comprar un adaptador igual PCIEx1 a 4 sata pero termine comprando comprando una mother con 4 puertos sata. No habia pensado el puerto ethernet, asi que ahora voy a evaluar ese punto. Excelente!!!!! Muchas gracias!
I did a similar build back in 2017 using FreeNas. At that time Tiger was hawking a low end HP server with a 4 core 3.2Ghz i3 and 4GB of ram, the MB had 6ea sat ports and a 250w power supply and is a mini tower, I installed 16GB additional ram, ZFS needs RAM. I used 2ea 16GB usb thumb drives for a mirrored boot disk and bought 6ea 3GB WD drives into it and connecting everything. I installed Freenas onto the thumb drives and set up the drives with ZFS. It's been running for over 5 years and it has been trouble free over that time. I'm not using this for anything other than storage so I went with 5400 drives because they are more reliable. I measured the input power and is under 100w so although the power supply seems small it's worked fine, the exhaust air is only warm so it's pretty efficient. The only time the server is ever down is if we have a power outage, All I have to do is turn the machine fack on and it comes back fine. I check the server log every month or two to make sure all is well. It's like the Eveready bunny - it just keeps running and running
If you're just running a NAS you don't need much power. You can even run a NAS on something like a Raspberry Pi. The hardware starts to matter when you're trying to use it as an actual server. Or run containers, VM's etc. But just for storage anything will do really. Especially if you don't care for the speed, you can even use an old 2 core 4 GB system and it's gonna be fine. A bit on the slower side, but it's gonna do it's job.
Excellent video, specially the power consumption. I assembled an offsite backup server with an old i5, and it consumes a LOT of energy, even idle. I would very much like for the system storage to be a mirror (even USB, maybe internal?!). Congrats.
I've been running TrueNAS Core on a 1U SuperMicro box for over a year, booting the OS off a USB stick. No issues at all. It runs 24/7 as my backup repository.
Wow your channel is really growing. Good job 👍. Kinda curious how many times has this motherboard, or any of the others, been put into and removed from builds for videos. I think I've only seen three mother boards on this channel 🤔. Any way, potential ideas... Custom home surveillance system, DVD/CD ripper/burner system with possible multiple bays, weather station reporting to a smart mirror, smart home hub/controller. Um you've already done a nas, steam library, Plex server, did you do pi hole? Custom router, although that takes a bit more research to prep for. Well there are some things I can think of. As always keep up the great work and don't stress yourself.
Just found your channel tonight. Glad to see more content like this on TH-cam. Subbing right off the batt. I need to build a new NAS because my old one is failing or failed.
Great video man, also understood the usage of the mobo for the video although a slightly better one would have helped a lot even though you mention it in the video a board with 4/6 sata 3 ports would have been very useful.
Used to run a FreeNAS server back in the day, was OK, was a frankenstein like yours, taught me a bunch but for the reliability \ support of Docker etc I ended up going Synology.
So it cost $600+ dollars total, its always the drives the cost the money. For a extra $150, you could of got a 4 bay synology NAS which is faster and smaller, just my 2 cents.
I didn’t include the cost of drives to allow easier comparison to other NAS options, which typically don’t include drives. And a $370 disk station would definitely be smaller, which I mentioned, but I don’t see how it would be faster, at least in terms of transferring files. I also don’t need a small form factor, and being able to easily add more drives down the road is a plus to me. I appreciate your 2 cents though, so thanks for the comment 👍🏻
The problem with most prebuild nas is if your nas have a problem and broke you need an identical nas or the one in the same lineup to import it. And they like to drop support for older hardware. Ur out of luck if theres no replacement from the same lineup. Truenas dont care. Actually zfs in general dont care what u use. Use any os any distro. Just install latest zfs version and you prob could just import it.
How would it be faster thou. Theres no 300 buck nas with 2.5gb. And most of the time the bottleneck is on the drive if not network. The other components will not get bottleneck not even if he added 10 gbit nic.
years ago I used to think having a hard drive with a few hundred MB was more then enough data storage capacity, as I don't store photos, music or video. But I looked up my external hard drive where I store mostly documents, pdf's webpages from various tech and business related topics. It's 180 GB and growing. If you backing up data locally I recommend you have at least 2 storage devices (in case of failure), I have seen more then my share of failed drives (including NAS, USB external drives and other storage media). Also research different backup/restore software (one that you can schedule to do backups on a regular basis. In addition to backing up data, I recommend cloning the hard drive on your computer (so if it fails, you do a restore of the entire operating system, programs, configurations, data).
This is also a great idea if you need to also use the server for something else. I'm running plex, qbittorrent, adguard home and a full web server on mine. I've had a real NAS before, but it seemed like wasted space for just storage, si I've converted my old PC into one.
FreeNAS (before it became TrueNAS) used to recommend just using a USB Drive to install the OS. Over succeeding iterations, they rescinded that and now recommend using a hard drive or SSD. Unaware of this change, my setup formerly used 2x Samsung Fit USB drives (mirrored) for boot and both failed! I swapped it with a Sandisk Ultra Fit and it also failed after a couple of months. I now use a spare WD Red to run TrueNAS.
Back in the Freenas 9 days running off a USB drive was recommended as they ran most of the OS in ram and very little was written to the drive. Now from Freenas10 up to Truenas13 it uses a lot more writes with the usb so it will chew through that USB in a few months. Even with your redundancy set up there will still die and you WILL be replacing drives on the regular
Great video, you said you could use 2 USB sticks mirrored but I can't find any info on how to do that unless using a mac... could you tell us how to do this or better yet please make a video on it
I'm thinking about building my own NAS. Internal drivebays is a problem obv so I think I might get a small form factor case and mobo, nice and inexpensive, and building an bay to physically attach to the main case for 5 or more drives, and then just passing cables through.
Hey great DIY Im now been researching nas and came across this video, makes sense! I have several of these parts already an already built pc thats been sitting on the bench old but very viable for an inexpensive nas.. Thanks for opening my eyes!!
I like it! I chose Unraid for my build because I couldn't afford all the disks I needed up front and would need to add them to the pool one at a time, and I'm quite happy. I'm quite impressed at the low wattage your machine uses, mine was built to replace a couple of desktops so it as a i9 in it haha.
I built a NAS with a Raspberry Pi, a 1TB HDD microcenter was giving away for free, and a enclosure I got for cheap…reminded me of this project here, NASs are very useful, they punch high above their perceived weight
What are some things to look for when buying cheap used drives with large capacity? I just want a ton of space for a plex media server build but the read/write speeds dont need to be anything crazy. I just dont want to buy a really crappy hard drive
My experience says that electric bill is the main cost of own nas. I've got PowerEdge from scraps with 2 CPUs but now, i migrated to rack mount sinology with additional few rack mount diy servers that i launch only if I need it. Electrical bill did not go down with $$$ because of higher $$$ per kWh but did go down with usage of kWh - go a lot down.
Always worth marking the drive bays with the last 5 letters/digits of the corresponding drive serial number. This can save you time when replacing a failed drive.
LOL, I have this same case from a build I did back in 2009 (i5 4590) and was thinking about turning it into a NAS. Its been sitting in the garage for a while and I don't want to toss it. Thanks for the info!
We've had a pair of HP Z420 workstations for the past 4 years. They were from a local recycler and I think they cost us about $220 each. Anyway, this year we built brand new sparkly PCs. What to do with the old Z420s? Turn them into e-waste? Well, they make amazing TrueNAS servers. The only extra purchase was the 2.5GB NIC and a 60GB SSD. They have a 600W PSU stock, Space for at least 6 drives including the wiring, a 6core XEON (E5-1650V2), 32GB of ECC memory and 10 SATA connectors on the motherboard! They are enterprise grade machines and they loaded TrueNAS Scale perfectly. We only use one and the other one is for parts unless we need a second server. Old enterprise hardware is the way to go. I've been looking at a Dell PowerEdge 2900 server for $160 just to play around with it.
For enterprise drives, Toshiba can provide the best quality and reliability at the cost of having a rattly noise so choose that if you don't mind the noise
I want to build my own NAS using an old PC. Would it be better for me to just take all the parts out of it and strip it down to what you have and start fresh? I just want a NAS/Server (not sure what to call it) I just want video and photo storage and I would like to use it to rip bluerays and make my own home movie stream for myself and maybe be able to watch movies from my phone when I’m away. Just confused on how to accomplish this because there is so many videos out there that makes no sense to me lol!
There are definitely a lot of options and it can get overwhelming, lol. I would highly recommend you checking out UnRAID. You do you have to pay for it and it isn’t necessarily cheap, but it’s a one time payment for life. It will do all the things you mentioned and is IMO way simpler than most other options out there, plus there are tons of guides/forums and since you pay for it, you get support. I also have a video on it where I converted an old budget gaming PC to a NAS. I also made a video about ripping blu-rays and streaming them with something called Jellyfin, which was also in UnRAID
UnRAID Video (A bit old but still makes sense) th-cam.com/video/7h0JVS0en3U/w-d-xo.html Ripping Blu-Rays & Streaming with Jellyfin th-cam.com/video/jZRQh-ngoO4/w-d-xo.html
PCI-E 2.0 x1 = 500MB/s bandwidth, so probably not hampered much if driving 4x HDD. Also while using Truenas (BSD) as primary router is not recommended, you might be able to configure routing to pass traffic from the 2.5GBE connected PC to the rest of the LAN - though an extra GBE LAN port on the 2.5GBE PC is probably simpler ... be careful to set the route metric to guide NAS traffic to the 2.5GBE link
After buliding several NASs and home servers in my time, here's a few additional points to consider.
1. Reduce power draw as much as possible, especially if you're planning to leave it on 24/7.
Get a low power motherboard/CPU, preferably a mobile chip if you can. 38w power at idle is low for a desktop but pretty high for a NAS or laptop. With the current energy prices in the UK right now 38W 24/7 would cost me £113 to run a 38W NAS for a whole year. With a mobile chip, especially a modern ones, you could easily half and in my case 1/4 this.
The alternative is to tweak TrueNAS to use Wake on LAN. You'll need to make sure your motherboard/NIC has that capability. That way it's shut down until you needs it.
Get bigger, fewer drives. Again for power usage reasons. The less hardware used, the less power it takes up. Go for 5400rpm drive if performance isn't an issue as they use less power too.
Fewer sticks of RAM. One 16GB stick is better than 2x8GB if power reduction is the aim.
2. It's actually harder than you think to source the perfect case for a home built NAS.
Home built NASs are nearly always too big. You've got two choices. Get a hulking 10y old+ old tower for pennies or spend several hundreds on a dedicated NAS case. Cheap cases suitable for NASs are practically non-existant.
3. A homebuilt NAS is WAAAYYY easier to fix than a bought NAS if it goes wrong. Busted Synology or QNAP and you're looking at weeks to get it fixed/replaced and there's the chance, if it's and older model they don't have the parts any more. Personal experience of having several TB of data held hostage by a NAS company because their repair/replace policy was so inadequate/expensive. Use bog standard parts/disks and things can usually be put back together quckly and with less chance of a part literally not being avaliable anymore.
4. Decide early if what you want is just disk storage or something more flexible. It might just easier to just set a machine as a general purpose server. If the hardware available to you can cope with being used as a render station or for video format conversion or something, then why limit it to just serving files?
5. Avoid 'Green' drives. Get NAS specific ones if you can. I've never had much longevity with 'Green' drives. These types are not meant to be run 24/7 and wear out/fail a lot faster than drives designed for NASs. 'Black' drives or those for meant for desktops are generally okay but they're the same price as NAS drives and don't have the cache/power features of NAS drives. Of course any drive will do on a budget, but if you have the option, always pick a NAS drive first (or try to at least avoid the green ones).
solid advice, thank you
Fractal Node 304/804.
They are still sold 10 years later new, and for a damned good reason.
The CPU/motherboard is usually negligible in power consumption compared to the drives (with the exception of some older, pre-2015, power-hungry chips.) Spinning rust drives are usually 8-10W each, and most Intel chips that support power modes are probably around 10-15W idle. For comparison, I have a Proxmox box I built out of an old Dell Optiplex 7050 with an i5-6500 chip, which isn't exactly a low-power chip at max 65W TDP. However, it only pulls 15W at near-idle including 24G RAM, a NVMe boot disk, and a SATA SSD. I've never seen it consume more than 40W, and for a NAS, the processor utilization should be very low even with big transfers.
Using low power mobile/laptop chips or the Celerons would probably only save a Watt or two at best. Those tend to shine when you're actually bogging down the processor, but of course, they're also slower for that lower power draw.
With this in mind, how does using something like a laptop with some external drives compare for power use?
Zima blades are looking solid and cover almost all these excellent tips! Btw thanks great tips!
I built a NAS back in 2014 - it had an i3 4170 CPU, 16GB RAM and a HighPoint DataCentre 7280 PCIe HBAwith 8 MiniSAS ports (max 32 SATA drives) - I loaded it up with 24 x 1.5 TB 2.5" Seagate hard drives and the whole thing under load used about 150W (These days of course I'd just use a couple of 3.5" 12-18TB drives instead) - performance was outstanding for the time, saturating a full gigabit NIC easily and doing local transfers between the drives around 160-180 MB/s. Thanks for the video and the memories!
As someone who bought a "off the shelf NAS", having it fail HURTS. You can restore the data, but you have to use the exact same hardware. Some newer products allow for drive pools to be transfered to other systems, but TrueNAS doesn't seem to care about the hardware, and you seem to be able to import your data forward, no matter how old your setup was.
@@Felix-ve9hs I actually imported my zfs pool from FreeNAS 9 to TrueNAS 11 (I think that's the version), this was with different hardware (though I had backups).
My lost data was in an old synology system, that had the motherboard die. It wasn't able to import the data on the drives to a newer synology system. (From my understanding, synology doesn't have that problem anymore)
I recently did a hardware upgrade on my truenas scale system. new mobo/cpu/ram/boot drive. lost my vm, created users, and app settings. all of which took very little time to re create.
mind you I missed the step where I was supposed to download the config file(its current location doesn't really match the written descriptions)
the pool itself imported without a hitch.
considering I botched my upgrade and was able to get everything back up in running, id say that +1 for upgrades/hardware failures
May have changed over time for some brands, but I know people who got stung by their proprietary NAS boxes dying and having to resort to extreme efforts to find a 'compatible' NAS from ebay/amazon/etc. I also know others who bought their NAS unit in pairs, so if one unit failed they can at least try to recover their data using the remaining device (and then buy two new units to restart the cycle), crazy stuff. TrueNas (and similar) do better to separate the data from the hardware and OS itself (hence why you cannot boot off your data storage drives). I suspect it is due to the boxed NAS units storing the OS and data on the same physical drives in a way that limits the ability to support hardware changes (protected or encrypted partitions, or whatever).
Most off the shelf NAS use Linux with software RAID. Surely for the cheaper models they are built like that, just an ARM processor running a Linux distribution with standard filesystems and software RAID (Linux md array or LVM volumes with ext4 filesystem or for the more fancy one BTRFS).
That is to recover the data you just connect the drives to any PC running any Linux distribution (even an Ubuntu live USB would be fine) and it should mount the array without any issues. Linux software RAID is made in a way that the configuration is stored on the drives itself, that is you can connect the drives in any sort of order and the OS should mount the array automatically.
I had to do even one time to fix a Synology drive where more than 2 drives had bad sectors in a RAID 5 and the NAS itself was not able to mount the array, while with a Linux distribution I was able to recover (most of) the data by mounting the array read-only mode.
I don't know NAS manufacturers that use hardware RAID that needs proprietary controllers, at least consumer ones. Probably the more enterprise grade stuff will do, but it's more likely something standard that in case of data recovery can be mounted with software implementations.
@@alerighi That could be the case if encryption is not enabled and containers were not being used. It also depends on the OEM using standard packages and not TRYING to lock customers into their ecosystem.
Off the shelf NAS devices are okay, but they come with their own unique limitations.
Enjoy 2023 everyone.🙂
It's completely fair to exclude the cost of storage when comparing a DIY NAS to an off-the-shelf one. The off-the-shelf models don't come with drives, after all.
Yes, also depending on how you set it up, it's possible to expand later.
@@manitoba-op4jx you can make the same argument about every single component in a DIY NAS build...
@@kvltntr00 in this case, the objective is to reduce the price as much as possible while maintaining a decent level of performance, personal choices don’t occur here.. drives on the other hand, where cost and features will vary depending on usage, are personal choices
Exactly and that's how they rape you. The hardware in those off-the-shelf models is WAY worse than this and I would never recommend one to a home user when this is an option.
Yeah, I was going to say that getting free multi-terabyte drives for free certainly helps with staying under budget.
the big problem with using old hardware for this purpose is power consumption. older cpu architectures consume a lot more energy to do something trivial. but I'm a fan of the idea of repurposing old hardware instead of discarding and buying new
True. I have a Sandybridge machine lying around in a giant tower case with 6 drive slots, but am still hesitant to turn it into a NAS because of power consumption.
@@Machinationstudio While it'll be different for everyone, when I calculated my NAS build over buying newer and more power efficient hardware, it would be nearly 4 years before they would equal in value.
You just need to look at the right solutions. An i7-3770k, for example, is a very poor choice.
@@oldtwinsna8347if you can disable two cores, undervolt and underclock it, why not?
Anything including Skylake or Zen 1 would work fine enough i guess, the older intel chips still work fine and dont really consume a lot of power
I set up a NAS using this same case. It is big, but it holds a lot of hard drives. I removed the DVD drive and filled every bay with hard drives. I use an SSD as the boot drive. I use a motherboard with plenty of SSD connectors, running with an old Intel Xeon processor. I decided to use OpenMediaVault as the OS, as I found it easy to set up and it works well for using the NAS as storage and a media server. And for anyone wondering about backups, this is my second NAS. My first one is an actual NAS unit, and both contain the same data.
Do you happen to have a a post somewhere explaining it how to? If not do you have the name of the case?
Honestly once explained it's fairly intuitive. Thank you for breaking it down so nicely for us newbies! Can't wait to play with the full version
Honestly online muhuahhahahahaha.......
your first sentence is an oxymoron
The main advantage of separating the hardware from the OS is you don’t need to worry about the manufacturer losing interest in providing patches and updates for a ready made version (that uses their own proprietary software) A classic is a couple of WD my-cloud models I had with perfectly good drives but WD decided to drop support. Ubuntu Server setup with a Samba config also makes a good NAS (although not as feature rich as true nas)
That's what happened to my NAS. Why I'm looking for new options.
@@chrisSandersASX I have just replaced mine with a software raid (2 drives mirrored) ubuntu server setup. You could also think about a TrueNAS device replacement 👍🏻
A server not being as full featured as a NAS… lol.
I too have a wd mycloud, when WD dropped support for My cloud OS 3 i found out that my model was compatible with Mycloud OS 5 i upgraded, but im still looking for options to run my HASS and Plex servers from(currently running plex from my main desktop pc and HASS from a RasPi 3b+)
I also got burned by WD on my EX2 getting deprecated.
The benefit of this over RAID is that RAID controllers can be proprietary and the encoding change not only between board versions, also firmware versions - which can make it a big problem getting access to the data.
With iSCSI you would want some UPS protection. iSCSI risks data corruption on abrupt power loss.
You can use software RAID and not have that issue.
I love how you sourced old hardware to do this. Kudos for helping to reduce eWaste!
More importantly, it's cheaper. I'm doing my part about the e-waste though, I pay for old used PCBs from local schools, companies, etc and reclaim the gold at home. You can still make a good pofit even paying for the boards because you can grab up the customers who would've otherwise given them up for free for recycling.
Old hardware is great for a NAS or server.
eventually every computer will end up in landfill, it's just a matter of time
This video popped up in my suggested list and I'm so glad it did.
I'm building a NAS out of unused computer gear I already own plus some new drives.
The idea of adding a high-speed network card for a dedicated connection to an editing machine is golden.
I'm borrowing that for sure. Cheers! 👍
Inspired. Just wrapped up building a TrueNAS system using an Intel Core i5-3570S 3.10GHz in an old ASUS MOBO, 16GB DD3, a new 128GB SSD for the OS, a single 6TB HDD, and twin Seagate 3TB drives in RAID. I am new to TrueNAS, but have had commercial NAS units for a decade. I had a LOT of old data to transfer. I am keeping anything I cannot replace (like home movies and photos) in RAID, and anything I can download again in the 6TB single drive. I am running a GB network, with CAT6 cable and 10/100/1000 Ethernet connections at all points. It runs zippy and has no problem streaming 4K video to multiple smart TV's / PCs. I have four users in my house, and we can all draw off the NAS at once no problem. Great use of a bunch of old stuff. Besides the 128GB SSD, I didn't buy anything else new.
Great video and thanks for including power consumption. It depends on where you live of course but unfortunately here in the UK using old hardware like this has become quite expensive. A year of running this on idle would cost about 150 USD in the UK.
Не обязательно что бы оно работало постоянно
There was an old video called "Turn an old laptop into a NAS - Synology". It actually utilized sinology's OS. I did this and utilized the usb 3.0's with multi drive docks. Gives me lots of storage, expandability and portability. Plus being a laptop really low power consumption.
Really nice to see this video, as I recently started a similar build with TrueNAS SCALE. Of course, I managed to pull it off with almost no cost by using stuff that I've scrounged over the years. I also like the fact that you're pointing out other TH-cam videos, like the one Craft Computing did on iSCSI.
Very cool! And thanks!
@@HardwareHaven You're welcome.
I have two of that exact case. They're great for a generic file server. Good air flow, lots of 3.5 inch drive bays. Overall, a good little box you can stick in a corner.
This can't be real... The video recommendation came the exact day i needed. Thank you!
It would be cool to see the iSCSI for videos on a SSD in the server, with your 2.5Gbps network. The speeds you were getting look to be limited by the speed of the HDDs. I see just a little lower than that over SMB with a 1Gbps network. Cool video, and nice find on the case! I've been looking for something local, but so far have not.
Sata 2 speeds would limit the ssd to 300mb/s too
@@max_uaminecraft1827 SATA 2.0 is rated at 3.0 Gbps, so yes around 300MB/s.
@@ntgm20 it's actually exactly 300MB/s due to 8b/10b encoding
Thanks for the hint!
I have done similar. Have an i5 3470 machine, 16gb ram, similar sata card etc and 7 drives. Works great and pulls around 36w idle. Far far cheaper than dedicated.
I opted Win 10 Pro, have a linux VM on it with pi-hole and also Jellyfin. So allows it to run various roles :)
Yep, might pull more than a dedicated at idle but 36w not going to break the bank :)
Interesting because I have a haswell (micro ATX board) with 4670k with all extras disabled in the BIOS and using only onboard VGA and no HDDs or PCIE cards connected, just a single SATA SSD and the CPU set to power save profile etc I couldn't get it to use less than 60w at idle. It does have 32G RAM though. If I recall correctly dropping XMP it uses 50W at idle.
@@joshuamaserow This could just be down to motherboard. Mine is not a feature packed one at all, real stripped down. No XMP set on mine and didn't really tweak the power management at all. I did consider limiting the CPU to 50% clocks to reduce load power draw but then I installed VM on it so left to allow full clocks. Yours is also K skew which could effect it
@@joshuamaserow Same. I converted my old i5 4670k and msi z87 gd65 mobo into a 'budget' nas and its working great. Not worried about the power draw though as its stuffed with 8 2tb hdd and 3 pcie x4 nvme riser cards with a samsung 970 evo+ 2tb on each one. Yeah its a ton of storage but I have a ton of bluray rips and other large size goodies. I'm a digital packrat.. 🤪
@@joshuamaserow Was thinking through this some more. My other "server box" is an old HP Z440 work station. E5 1620 V4, 32gb ram, ssd + 2 spinny rust and an old GT 750. This pulls 60W idle.
In theory the idle on the E5 xeon should be similar to the i5 3470. So the key differences between being X99 mobo, double ram and the GT 750. Result double the power draw.
why did you put windows on it in the first place ?
Love the concept of this video, great selection of budget parts make for a really interesting build. I just really wish every budget server build video didn't immediate devolve into "Thanks to sponsor for sending all the hard drives free of charge." Great deal for the channel, but really doesn't help anyone else.
This is the video I've been waiting for, I love that u used truenas scale, thanks man this video helped a lot
Just built a NAS with redundancy a few weeks ago out of some old PC parts! Super awesome and fun project, Feels nice to have a NAS now also. FreeNAS is pretty awesome and cool to play around with, especially if you are studying IT, I'd recommend a project like this 🔥
Heck yeah, that’s awesome
totally agree, but i prefer using openmediavault. Please have a look at this NAS-OS!
Great video - the motherboard is your most limiting factor here, but I completely get why you’re using it. Something more modern, capable of handling more RAM and providing higher bandwidth PCI-E would be huge helps. A board that supports NVMe would be really nice in this situation.
Another thing to consider, if you’re going to use this case long term, is using the 5.25” bays. There are manufacturers out there that have kits to allow use of up to 4x 2.5” drives in a 5.25” bay. Unless you plan on using the optical drive, it looks like you could put up to 12x 2.5” drives in there. Using SSDs would really be a nice option for your video editing use case and could help reduce some of the noise/heat generated by mechanical drives.
Thanks, and yeah I completely agree. I actually have two follow up videos to this; one where I upgrade the motherboard, and the second where I upgrade the drives. Still no SSDs, but that's just because I haven't really hit a bottleneck in terms of seq reads on my 2.5Gb network. Maybe if I move to 10Gb ethernet or start using higher bitrate footage I'll make a switch!
Appreciate the comment!
Nice video! I did about the same thing with a 12-drive 4U rack mounted case, and run it through ProxMox. I can virtualize my NAS along with a lot of other services and then have a backup configuration to a completely separate machine in case my hardware fails. Not just a drive. Drives are surprisingly resiliant, it's the motherboard and RAM I'm always wary of. But, the best NAS is one that can save data when you need it, the best backup is the data you can access after your NAS fails. So no matter what you do for storage, ALWAYS have a backup, and RAID is NOT a backup!!!! Cheers!
On a seperate note, you don't need I/O past your initial setup. You only need network. So for your use-case, that 2/5GB card makes it so you could set this anywhere as long as you have direct connection and not even hear it whirring away with those rinky-dink fans and cooling. I have mine 2 stories below me directly connected from my basement. You don't need anything but that ethernet to get to everything you need.
Regarding backups, you’re spot on. I don’t follow the 321 principle (at least not yet), but I do have everything backed up to the cloud and run daily snapshots.
And I’m fully aware that I don’t need access to anything other than network. It’s just on my desk in case I needed to tinker with it while making the video. I also just have to move a bunch of other machines around to make room for where it will eventually live 24/7
This is actually a good case, I bought the newer Antec p10c case thinking that it can accommodate 6 drives and a dvd drive, but found out that the psu cable expect drives to align in close proximity. The p10c case put drive racks in unconventional fashion behind the board and next to the psu, making it impossible to connect them even with two sata power cables. The only solution is to connect all the drives first than stash them somewhere inside the chassis without the mounting/racks.
The algorithm sent this my way, I guess past searches of NAS hardware. Glad it did. I have a more powerful tower than you featured here sitting idle that I was considering selling. So the only thing I would need to buy to test this solution would be a SATA card if I needed more ports than on the mobo. Worse case, I lose
I'd advise getting a motherboard with ECC memory support since ZFS on Truenas is memory dependent for the checksuming aka bit rot protection of data. More than 8GB of ram would be good too since Truenas uses ram for a read and write cache.
Yepp, never use ZFS without ECC. It totally defeats the purpose of using it.
I would’t say that’s entirely true. There are other benefits to ZFS and TrueNAS outside of just checksumming. But I get what you’re saying. The upgrades to this a bit down the road will have ECC
@@HardwareHavenFrom my understanding, the problem here is that if you don't have ECC memory, you place the whole VDEV @ risk. I like the hardware concept here but this hardware configuration, while excellent as a NAS, and for your use case, doesn't pair well with TrueNas because of the necessary protection ECC provides for ZFS and the High Memory requirements of ZFS. I would recommend instead using Ubuntu, or Fedora with Cockpit as a front end and mirroring but not pooling drives, unless you want a high speed scratch volume where the data isn't particularly valuable. Even Windows 10 might make a good OS for a NAS using this hardware provided you debloat it appropriately and configure update channels accordingly. Placing valuable data on a trunas system, that doesn't meet the recommended sys requirements is risky. Love the concept of your video though and great presentation. Will sub.
My dad bought an Antec 302 and an Antec NSK4482. I've been considering 'upgrading' to some cool new case and getting rid of the other one PC. But now I'm on a home server journey. I'm grateful for the explanation that new towers don't come with lots of drive bays because I'm in Drive Bay Heaven right now and I don't think I knew how good I had it 😅
Nice video. They have recently come out with some NAS chassis so that people can build their own NAS (with a mini-ITX and SFX power supply). They are really compact.
THANK YOU MY BROTHER FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY AND ANOTHER FAMILY!!!
I really appreciate the real world performance tests, a lot of similar videos leave that out!
Nice details on the iSCSI setup, very informative, thanks.
4:25 _USB sticks are no longer recommended.._
Good to know.
On the network side, you could create a network bridge in TrueNAS. That essentially acts like a software switch, meaning that both interfaces will have the same IP address. Then your editing PC can access the NAS through the 2.5G port, but also still be able to access the rest of the network as the NAS will forward it. Then you don't have two IP addresses to worry about!
I have to look at a budget NAS for my work storage. I did see a video on a Pi recently but I feel that a ‘proper’ mobo might serve me better. Also, sticking 16GB of RAM in it should improve things considerably.
Thank you.
Wow. thanks for this video. It answered two questions concerned me so long. One is how connect directly between pc and nas without router and the second is how to use iscis controller!
Hi man just wanted to let you know I just found your channel and I'm a huge fan just a few videos in.
Your content is extremely interesting and helpful. Your voice and articulation make your videos some of the most easily digestible and pleasant watches of any tech youtuber. Quickest sub of my life.
Keep up the great work and P.S. Good luck with the kid!
Thanks Joseph!
The Antec 300 is such a solid little case. I’m putting my old 300 back together to migrate my NAS off its current Skylake-SP platform, and it’s a nice no-frills chassis. Relatively compact, solidly built, with a decent capacity of both fans and drives.
Personally I'd go with truenas core over scale due to its maturity, but that preference aside this is a nice practical home build.
Does it have lower requirements? I would only be running a few terabytes and buying a system that needs at least 8GB defeats the whole budget approach.
The most detailed guide for building DIY NAS yet i could find
Nice find on the Antec case. Still a great base design from the old 900 from 20 years ago
2 issues here are the mainboard and sata controller. Would have been better to get an older HBA for the same (or less) money - HBA's are very well covered and discussed in the TrueNAS community forums - and then shopped a mainboard to suite rather than accepting multiple bottlenecks
Completely agree! In a follow up, I replaced the motherboard with a super micro board and 4th gen Xeon.
I also abandoned the SATA adapters. I’m using an HBA on an upcoming video with a TrueNAS VM.
Thanks for the comment!
same thoughts, and an HBA with external link opens up tons of options for DAS so you are not PC case limited on drives.
I have that same antek case from a pc build I did 2011, I found this video because I’m looking to build a NAS as well. Will definitely use this case. Cool video, greatly appreciate it.
Great work! How are you liking TrueNAS SCALE? :)
We've been watching the growth of your channel and we're very impressed, can't wait to see you grow further!
Thanks! So far I’ve enjoyed it.
@@HardwareHaven Glad to hear it!
Congrats on your new baby!! I totally enjoy seeing what you can put tougher and use on a budget. Well Done :)
Me gusto el video, muy claro y detallado en cuanto al hardware, yo tenia pensado usar un motherboard con 2 puertos sata y comprar un adaptador igual PCIEx1 a 4 sata pero termine comprando comprando una mother con 4 puertos sata. No habia pensado el puerto ethernet, asi que ahora voy a evaluar ese punto. Excelente!!!!! Muchas gracias!
I did a similar build back in 2017 using FreeNas. At that time Tiger was hawking a low end HP server with a 4 core 3.2Ghz i3 and 4GB of ram, the MB had 6ea sat ports and a 250w power supply and is a mini tower, I installed 16GB additional ram, ZFS needs RAM. I used 2ea 16GB usb thumb drives for a mirrored boot disk and bought 6ea 3GB WD drives into it and connecting everything. I installed Freenas onto the thumb drives and set up the drives with ZFS. It's been running for over 5 years and it has been trouble free over that time.
I'm not using this for anything other than storage so I went with 5400 drives because they are more reliable. I measured the input power and is under 100w so although the power supply seems small it's worked fine, the exhaust air is only warm so it's pretty efficient. The only time the server is ever down is if we have a power outage, All I have to do is turn the machine fack on and it comes back fine. I check the server log every month or two to make sure all is well.
It's like the Eveready bunny - it just keeps running and running
This is very efficient even though it's not that good of a server, but you still got a working server!
If you're just running a NAS you don't need much power. You can even run a NAS on something like a Raspberry Pi. The hardware starts to matter when you're trying to use it as an actual server. Or run containers, VM's etc. But just for storage anything will do really. Especially if you don't care for the speed, you can even use an old 2 core 4 GB system and it's gonna be fine. A bit on the slower side, but it's gonna do it's job.
I knew to buy used, but you reminded me how used you can get :)
This was the video i needed to complete my build
Thanks!!!
Excellent video, specially the power consumption. I assembled an offsite backup server with an old i5, and it consumes a LOT of energy, even idle. I would very much like for the system storage to be a mirror (even USB, maybe internal?!). Congrats.
I've been running TrueNAS Core on a 1U SuperMicro box for over a year, booting the OS off a USB stick. No issues at all. It runs 24/7 as my backup repository.
Wow your channel is really growing. Good job 👍.
Kinda curious how many times has this motherboard, or any of the others, been put into and removed from builds for videos. I think I've only seen three mother boards on this channel 🤔.
Any way, potential ideas... Custom home surveillance system, DVD/CD ripper/burner system with possible multiple bays, weather station reporting to a smart mirror, smart home hub/controller. Um you've already done a nas, steam library, Plex server, did you do pi hole? Custom router, although that takes a bit more research to prep for. Well there are some things I can think of. As always keep up the great work and don't stress yourself.
Yeah I have some plans to have some semi-permanent homes for some of them haha
And thanks for the ideas. Very likely to use them
Bro I love your channel, your content just keeps on getting better and better. Good Luck!
Excellent video. I guess that you can improve the iSCSI performance if you disable flow control and increase the MTU size.
Just found your channel tonight. Glad to see more content like this on TH-cam. Subbing right off the batt. I need to build a new NAS because my old one is failing or failed.
Great video man, also understood the usage of the mobo for the video although a slightly better one would have helped a lot even though you mention it in the video a board with 4/6 sata 3 ports would have been very useful.
Omg finally TH-cam recommended to me some golden quality channel. I'm glad to meet you sir :D
Glad you enjoy it! Thanks!
I never have seen someone screwing a motherboard like that 0:14
Trying to get everything on camera can be a challenge haha
@@HardwareHaven I know its for the montage and everything dont worry :) but it was funny to see xD
Used to run a FreeNAS server back in the day, was OK, was a frankenstein like yours, taught me a bunch but for the reliability \ support of Docker etc I ended up going Synology.
So it cost $600+ dollars total, its always the drives the cost the money. For a extra $150, you could of got a 4 bay synology NAS which is faster and smaller, just my 2 cents.
I didn’t include the cost of drives to allow easier comparison to other NAS options, which typically don’t include drives. And a $370 disk station would definitely be smaller, which I mentioned, but I don’t see how it would be faster, at least in terms of transferring files. I also don’t need a small form factor, and being able to easily add more drives down the road is a plus to me. I appreciate your 2 cents though, so thanks for the comment 👍🏻
The problem with most prebuild nas is if your nas have a problem and broke you need an identical nas or the one in the same lineup to import it. And they like to drop support for older hardware. Ur out of luck if theres no replacement from the same lineup. Truenas dont care. Actually zfs in general dont care what u use. Use any os any distro. Just install latest zfs version and you prob could just import it.
How would it be faster thou. Theres no 300 buck nas with 2.5gb. And most of the time the bottleneck is on the drive if not network. The other components will not get bottleneck not even if he added 10 gbit nic.
years ago I used to think having a hard drive with a few hundred MB was more then enough data storage capacity, as I don't store photos, music or video. But I looked up my external hard drive where I store mostly documents, pdf's webpages from various tech and business related topics. It's 180 GB and growing. If you backing up data locally I recommend you have at least 2 storage devices (in case of failure), I have seen more then my share of failed drives (including NAS, USB external drives and other storage media). Also research different backup/restore software (one that you can schedule to do backups on a regular basis. In addition to backing up data, I recommend cloning the hard drive on your computer (so if it fails, you do a restore of the entire operating system, programs, configurations, data).
Wait! HDDs take 4 screws?
I thought it was illegal to use more than the 2 facing you.
Also, I learned some stuff as always.
Thanks for making this.
Hahahaha
Thanks Vedant
Old school tech here. I cringed at 4 drive screws and even 3 psu screws. Two is all ya need. Been doing that way for more than 30 years now.
@@davidinark…. Might want to add a /s otherwise that’s pretty cringe.
no way bro! i actually needed this video cuz i had a useless laptop that has a broken screen now i can finally make my own NAS
This is only "on a budget" for him being that a sponsor gave him 4 4tb drives.
lesgoo another vid from Hardware!!
Congrats on the baby man!
Thanks!!
your videos always brighten my day! ☀️
That Antec 300 case was my first back in 2009(ish).
This is also a great idea if you need to also use the server for something else. I'm running plex, qbittorrent, adguard home and a full web server on mine. I've had a real NAS before, but it seemed like wasted space for just storage, si I've converted my old PC into one.
FreeNAS (before it became TrueNAS) used to recommend just using a USB Drive to install the OS. Over succeeding iterations, they rescinded that and now recommend using a hard drive or SSD. Unaware of this change, my setup formerly used 2x Samsung Fit USB drives (mirrored) for boot and both failed! I swapped it with a Sandisk Ultra Fit and it also failed after a couple of months. I now use a spare WD Red to run TrueNAS.
Few things still boot off usb and run in RAM anymore :(
All the logging and data transactions melt small flash storage unfortunately
Congrats on the new baby!
No lie, that Antek 300 case is my all ti.e favorite, and it's where my NAS lives too!
She's a beauty for sure!
Back in the Freenas 9 days running off a USB drive was recommended as they ran most of the OS in ram and very little was written to the drive. Now from Freenas10 up to Truenas13 it uses a lot more writes with the usb so it will chew through that USB in a few months. Even with your redundancy set up there will still die and you WILL be replacing drives on the regular
Great video, you said you could use 2 USB sticks mirrored but I can't find any info on how to do that unless using a mac... could you tell us how to do this or better yet please make a video on it
I'm thinking about building my own NAS. Internal drivebays is a problem obv so I think I might get a small form factor case and mobo, nice and inexpensive, and building an bay to physically attach to the main case for 5 or more drives, and then just passing cables through.
I have that same antec 300 case. Still running my primary pc on it! Solid old workhorse.
Hey great DIY Im now been researching nas and came across this video, makes sense! I have several of these parts already an already built pc thats been sitting on the bench old but very viable for an inexpensive nas.. Thanks for opening my eyes!!
NAS, seems interesting but I have the old CM Storm Enforcer case. Holds six 3.5" drives and two 2.5" drives plus I have NVME M.2 slot on my MB.
I like it! I chose Unraid for my build because I couldn't afford all the disks I needed up front and would need to add them to the pool one at a time, and I'm quite happy. I'm quite impressed at the low wattage your machine uses, mine was built to replace a couple of desktops so it as a i9 in it haha.
Recommend looking at a cheap UPS as well connected via USB can shutdown truenas if power outage when battery level gets low
Yeah, I'd love to do a video on that at some point!
@@HardwareHaven Look forward to seeing the video :)
Great video, very captivating storytelling!
I built a NAS with a Raspberry Pi, a 1TB HDD microcenter was giving away for free, and a enclosure I got for cheap…reminded me of this project here, NASs are very useful, they punch high above their perceived weight
the sequel to the budget nas video
One word sets the standard for NAS power: "Plex". For multiple-4K hardware-accelerated video transcoding, you are going to want an Nvidia GPU.
What are some things to look for when buying cheap used drives with large capacity? I just want a ton of space for a plex media server build but the read/write speeds dont need to be anything crazy. I just dont want to buy a really crappy hard drive
Haha! I also have that same case! I stripped it and installed some more modern components in it.
My experience says that electric bill is the main cost of own nas. I've got PowerEdge from scraps with 2 CPUs but now, i migrated to rack mount sinology with additional few rack mount diy servers that i launch only if I need it. Electrical bill did not go down with $$$ because of higher $$$ per kWh but did go down with usage of kWh - go a lot down.
Make sure to check out the follow up video where I make some upgrades!
► th-cam.com/video/i7ZPw-IuYG4/w-d-xo.html
mmmm this linked video is the same video.
2 dimms
shoulda 2X4GB...
dual channel like a baws
@@MyersJ2Original OOPS! Good catch haha
Having 2 extra SATA ports... NASA refers to "room to grow" as "Baby Fat". You made me giggle and had to share! Thanks for the awesome content!
Always worth marking the drive bays with the last 5 letters/digits of the corresponding drive serial number. This can save you time when replacing a failed drive.
Yeah, that's a great point!
Lovely cable management.
LOL, I have this same case from a build I did back in 2009 (i5 4590) and was thinking about turning it into a NAS. Its been sitting in the garage for a while and I don't want to toss it. Thanks for the info!
We've had a pair of HP Z420 workstations for the past 4 years. They were from a local recycler and I think they cost us about $220 each. Anyway, this year we built brand new sparkly PCs. What to do with the old Z420s? Turn them into e-waste? Well, they make amazing TrueNAS servers. The only extra purchase was the 2.5GB NIC and a 60GB SSD. They have a 600W PSU stock, Space for at least 6 drives including the wiring, a 6core XEON (E5-1650V2), 32GB of ECC memory and 10 SATA connectors on the motherboard! They are enterprise grade machines and they loaded TrueNAS Scale perfectly. We only use one and the other one is for parts unless we need a second server. Old enterprise hardware is the way to go. I've been looking at a Dell PowerEdge 2900 server for $160 just to play around with it.
Nice! Yeah those are great machines to convert into storage servers
For enterprise drives, Toshiba can provide the best quality and reliability at the cost of having a rattly noise so choose that if you don't mind the noise
Thanks for the info 👍🏻
I think open media vault fits better for this use case instead of truenas. It doesn’t use ZFS out of the box so 4 gigs of ram are more than enough.
I haven't used it much, but plan to look more into it at some point
Dude love the intro graphic and great build
Thanks! Appreciate the kind words
Sounds like a perfect use case for my old PC.
I want to build my own NAS using an old PC. Would it be better for me to just take all the parts out of it and strip it down to what you have and start fresh?
I just want a NAS/Server (not sure what to call it) I just want video and photo storage and I would like to use it to rip bluerays and make my own home movie stream for myself and maybe be able to watch movies from my phone when I’m away. Just confused on how to accomplish this because there is so many videos out there that makes no sense to me lol!
There are definitely a lot of options and it can get overwhelming, lol. I would highly recommend you checking out UnRAID. You do you have to pay for it and it isn’t necessarily cheap, but it’s a one time payment for life. It will do all the things you mentioned and is IMO way simpler than most other options out there, plus there are tons of guides/forums and since you pay for it, you get support.
I also have a video on it where I converted an old budget gaming PC to a NAS. I also made a video about ripping blu-rays and streaming them with something called Jellyfin, which was also in UnRAID
UnRAID Video (A bit old but still makes sense)
th-cam.com/video/7h0JVS0en3U/w-d-xo.html
Ripping Blu-Rays & Streaming with Jellyfin
th-cam.com/video/jZRQh-ngoO4/w-d-xo.html
Thanks man!! I’ll watch those! I appreciate it!
@@csxtrainman95 No problem!
Sonds like you want to build a Plex/Kody server.
Great video! This video made me to build my own NAS
PCI-E 2.0 x1 = 500MB/s bandwidth, so probably not hampered much if driving 4x HDD.
Also while using Truenas (BSD) as primary router is not recommended, you might be able to configure routing to pass traffic from the 2.5GBE connected PC to the rest of the LAN - though an extra GBE LAN port on the 2.5GBE PC is probably simpler ... be careful to set the route metric to guide NAS traffic to the 2.5GBE link
Good thoughts!
TrueNAS Core is BSD, TrueNAS SCALE is Debian Linux.
Nice video. It’s nice to see such beginner friendly videos.
Thanks!