Building A DIY NAS On A Budget - TrueNAS Scale

Comments · 1.1K

• MR

  @MrBearyMcBearface · 3 years ago

  Hey. Person reading this. Remember that pc you replaced with the new gaming pc you built? Use that.

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• XT

  @xtremecoding4005 · 1 year ago

  "Build a NAS on a budget", but the most expensive parts were given to me😂😂😂😂

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• DA

  @daelra · 3 years ago

  After buliding several NASs and home servers in my time, here&apos;s a few additional points to consider.<br>1. Reduce power draw as much as possible, especially if you&apos;re planning to leave it on 24/7.<br>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. <br>The alternative is to tweak TrueNAS to use Wake on LAN. You&apos;ll need to make sure your motherboard/NIC has that capability. That way it&apos;s shut down until you needs it. <br>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&apos;t an issue as they use less power too.<br>Fewer sticks of RAM. One 16GB stick is better than 2x8GB if power reduction is the aim.<br><br>2. It&apos;s actually harder than you think to source the perfect case for a home built NAS. <br>Home built NASs are nearly always too big. You&apos;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. <br><br><br>3. A homebuilt NAS is WAAAYYY easier to fix than a bought NAS if it goes wrong. Busted Synology or QNAP and you&apos;re looking at weeks to get it fixed/replaced and there&apos;s the chance, if it&apos;s and older model they don&apos;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. <br><br>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?<br><br>5. Avoid &apos;Green&apos; drives. Get NAS specific ones if you can. &nbsp;I&apos;ve never had much longevity with &apos;Green&apos; drives. These types are not meant to be run 24/7 and wear out/fail a lot faster than drives designed for NASs. &apos;Black&apos; drives or those for meant for desktops are generally okay but they&apos;re the same price as NAS drives and don&apos;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).

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• EL

  @eldibs · 4 years ago

  It&apos;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&apos;t come with drives, after all.

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• ET

  @ethi8128 · 3 years ago

  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&apos;m a fan of the idea of repurposing old hardware instead of discarding and buying new

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• CO

  @corvusaflame713 · 4 years ago

  As someone who bought a &quot;off the shelf NAS&quot;, 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&apos;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.

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• UT

  @utubeuser1024 · 4 years ago

  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&quot; Seagate hard drives and the whole thing under load used about 150W (These days of course I&apos;d just use a couple of 3.5&quot; 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!

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• AN

  @Anomz · 4 years ago (edited)

  I never have seen someone screwing a motherboard like that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf_5FaVFnrU&amp;t=14">0:14</a>

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• YG

  @ygrittesnow1701 · 4 years ago

  There was an old video called &quot;Turn an old laptop into a NAS - Synology&quot;. It actually utilized sinology&apos;s OS. I did this and utilized the usb 3.0&apos;s with multi drive docks. Gives me lots of storage, expandability and portability. Plus being a laptop really low power consumption.

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• PE

  @PeteSpaker · 3 years ago

  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&apos;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&apos;t buy anything else new.

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• AU

  @ausfoodgarden · 3 years ago

  This video popped up in my suggested list and I&apos;m so glad it did.<br>I&apos;m building a NAS out of unused computer gear I already own plus some new drives.<br>The idea of adding a high-speed network card for a dedicated connection to an editing machine is golden.<br>I&apos;m borrowing that for sure. &nbsp;Cheers! 👍

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• SI

  @Siemenneste · 4 years ago

  Honestly once explained it&apos;s fairly intuitive. Thank you for breaking it down so nicely for us newbies! Can&apos;t wait to play with the full version

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