Wait. You build a new one every -year-?! How does one establish the reliability of the hardware (particularly the aliexpress motherboard), not to mention data retention, if its maximum life expectancy is 365 days?

I think the worry about power consumption is a bit overblown in the article. My NAS has an i5-12600 + Quadro P4000 and uses maybe 50% more power than the one in this article under normal conditions. That works out to maybe $4/month more cost. Given the relatively small delta, I'd encourage picking hardware based on what services you want to run.

Built a NAS last winter using the same case. Temps for HDDs used to be in mid-50s C with no fan and about 40 with the stock fan. The case-native backplane thingamajig does not provide any sort of pwm control if the fan is plugged in, so it's either full blast or nothing. I swapped the fan for a Thermalright TL-B12 and the HDDs are now happily chugging along at about 37 with the fan barely perceptible. Hddfancontrol ramps it up based on the output of smartctl.

Case can actually fit a low-profile discrete GPU, there's about half height worth of space.

I would like to point people to the Odroid H4 series of boards. N97 or N355, 2*2.5GbE, 4*SATA, 2 W in idle. Also has extension boards to turn it into a router for example.

The developer hardkernel also publishes all relevant info such as board schematics.

I would have chosen the i3-n305 version of that motherboard because it has In-Band ECC (IBECC) support - great for ZFS. IBECC is very underrated feature that doesn't get talked about enough. It may be available for the N150/N355, but I have never seen a confirmation.

Q - assuming the NAS was strictly used as NAS and not as a server with VMs, is there a point in having a large amount of RAM? (large as in >8GB)

I'm not sure what the benefit would be since all it's doing is moving information from the drives over to the network.

I upgraded my home backup server a couple of months ago to a Minisforum N5 Pro, and am very happy with it. It only has 4 3.5” drive slots, but I only use two with 2x20TB drives mirrored, and two 14TB external drives for offsite backups. The AMD AI 370 CPU is plenty fast so I also run Immich on it, and it has ECC RAM and 10G Ethernet.

The Jonsbo N3 case which is 8x 3.5" drives has a smaller footprint than this, which might be better for most folks. Needs a SFX PSU though, which is kind of annoying.

If you get an enterprise grade ITX board that has a 16x PCIe slot which can be bifurcated into 4 M.2 form factor PCIx4 connections, it really opens up options for storage:

* A 6x SATA card in M.2 form factor from Asmedia or others will let you fill all the drive slots even if the logic board only has 2/4/6 ports on it.

* The other ports can be used for conventional M.2 nVME drives.

Very sad that HDDs, SSDs, and RAM are all increasing in price now, but I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool with Seagate Barracudas on sale at $10 / TB [1]. This seems like a pretty decent price even though the Barracudas are rated for 2400 hours per year [2] but this is the same spec that the refurbished Exos drives are rated for.

By the way, interesting to see that OP has no qualms about buying cheap Chinese motherboards, but splurged for an expensive Noctua fan when the cheaper Thermalright TL-B12 perform just as well for a lot cheaper (although the Thermalright could be slightly louder and perhaps be a slightly more annoying spectrum).

Also, it is mildly sad that there aren't many cheap low power (< 500 W) power supplies for SFX form factor. The SilverStone Technology SX500-G 500W SFX that was mentioned retails for the same price as 750 W and 850 W SFX PSUs on Amazon! I heard good things about getting Delta flex 400 W PSUs from Chinese websites --- some companies (e.g. YTC) mod them to be fully modular, and they are supposedly quite efficient (80 Plus Gold/Platinum) and quiet, but I haven't tested them out yet. On Taobao, those are like $30.

[1] https://www.newegg.com/seagate-barracuda-st24000dm001-24tb-f...

[2] https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/en/content-fragm...

Are there any NAS solutions for 3.5" drives, homebrew or purchased, that are slim enough to stash away in a wall enclosure? (This sort of thing: https://www.legrand.us/audio-visual/racks-and-enclosures/in-... , though not that particular model or height.) I'd like to really stash something away and forget about it. Height is the major constraint, you can only be ~3.5" tall. And before anyone says anything about 19" rack stuff, don't bother. It's close but just doesn't go, especially if it's not the only thing in the enclosure.

I researched a bunch of cases recently and the Jonsbo, while it looked good, came up as having a ton of issues with airflow to cool the drives. Because of this, I ended up buying the Fractal Node 804 case, which seemed to have a better overall quality level and didn't require digging around AliExpress for a vendor.

I recently got a used QNAP TS-131P for cheap, that holds one 3.5" drive for offsite backup at a friend's house. It's compact and runs off a common 12V 3A power supply.

There is no third-party firmware available, but at least it runs Linux, so I wrote an autorun.sh script that kills 99% of the processes and phones home using ssh+rsync instead of depending on QNAP's cloud: https://github.com/pmarks-net/qnap-minlin

I too was in the market recently for a NAS, downgrading from a 12 bay server because of yagni - it's far too big, too loud, runs hot, and uses way too much energy. I was also tempted by the jonsbo (it's a very nice case) but prices being what they are it was actually better to get a premade 4 bay model for under $500 (batteries included, hdds are not). It's small, quiet, power efficient, and didnt break the bank in the process. Historically DIY has always been cheaper, but that's no longer the case (no pun intended)

I have built 2 NAS that borrow ideas from his blogs. One uses the Silverstone CS382 case (6x 6TB SAS) and the other uses a Topton N5105 Mini-ITX board (6x 10TB SATA). I'm quite happy with both.

ref: https://blog.briancmoses.com/2024/07/migrating-my-diy-nas-in...

Obligatory comment every time one of these threads comes up that Synology, sure, the hardware is a bit dated but… as far as set and forget goes:

I’ve run multiple Synology NAS at home, business, etc. and you can literally forget that it’s not someone else’s cloud. It auto updates on Sundays, always comes online again, and you can go for years (in one case, nearly a decade) without even logging into the admin and it just hums along and works.

What's the plan if your house burns down?

I wonder how many consumer level HDDs in RAID5 will take to saturate a 10Gbps connection. My napkin math says that from 1,250 MB/s we can achieve around 1,150 MB/s due to network overhead so it means about 5 Red Pro/ Ironwolf Pro (reading at about 250–260 MB/s each) in RAID5 to saturate the connection.

TL;DR - please stop wasting tons of resources putting together new servers every year and turning this into yet another outlet for "I have more money than sense and hopefully I can buy myself into happiness". Just get old random hardware and play around with it and you'll learn so much that you will be able to truly appreciate the difference between consumer and enterprise hardware.

This seems awfully wasteful. One of the main reasons for which I've built my own homeserver was to reduce resource usage - one could probably argue that the carbon footprint of keeping your photos in the cloud and running services is lower than building your own little datacentre copy locally and where would we be if everyone builds their own server, then what? Well, I think that paying Google/Apple/Oracle/etc whoever money so that they continue their activities has a bigger carbon footprint than me picking up old used parts and running them on a solar/wind only electricity plan. I also think I'm going a bit overboard with this and I'm not suggesting to vote with your wallet because that doesn't work. If you want real change this needs to come from the government. You not buying a motherboard won't stop a corporation from making another 10 million.

Anyway, except for the hard drives, all components were picked up used. I like to joke it's my little Frankenstein's monster, pieced together from discarded parts no one wanted or had any use for. I've also gone down the rabbit hole to build the "perfect" machine, but I guess I was thinking too highly of myself and the actual use case. The reason I'm posting this is to help someone who might not build a new machine because they don't have ECC and without ECC ZFS is useless and you need Enterprise drives and you want 128 GB of RAM in the machine and you could also pick up used enterprise hardware and you could etc...

If you wish to play around with this, the best way is to just get into it. The same way Google started with consumer level hardware so can you. Pick up a used motherboard, pick up some used ram, a used CPU, throw them into a case and let it rip. Initially you'll learn so much and that alone is worth every penny. When I built my first machine, I wasn't finding any decently used former desktop form hp/lenovo/dell so I found a used i5 8500t for about 20$, 8 gb of ram for about 5$, a used motherboard for 40$, case was 20$ and PSU was $30. All in all the system was 115$ and for storage I used an old 2.5inch ssd for boot drive and 2 new NAS hard drives (which I still have btw!). This was amazing. Not having ECC, not having a server motherboard/system, not worrying about all that stuff allowed me to get started. The entry bar is even lower now, so just get started, don't worry. People talk about flipped bits as if it happens all day every day. If you are THAT worried, then yeah, look for a used server barebone or even a used server with support for ecc and do use ZFS, but I want to ask, how comfortable are you making the switch 100% now over night without having ever spent any time configuring even the most basic server that NEEDS to run for days/weeks/months? Old/used hardware can bridge this gap and when you're ready it's not like you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You now have another node in a proxmox cluster. Congrats! The old machine can run LXCs, VMs, it could be a firewall it could do anything and when it fails, no biggie.

Current setup for those interested:

i7 9700t

64 GB DDR4 (2x32)

8, 10, 12, 12, 14 TB HDDs (snapraid setup and 14 TB HDD is holding parity info)

X550 T2 10Gbps network card

Fractal Design Node 804

Seasonic Gold 550watts

LSI 9305 16i