Hi! I’ve never built a NAS before and only one custom gaming PC, so I’d love if any of you more experienced folks could take a look at my parts selection and possibly suggest better options.
Of course first my use cases:
- Nextcloud
- Immich
- Jellyfin
- Possibly more, similar to the above
Planning on using Truenas with a Raidz (1? - 1 disk failure tolerance) and running most of my stuff in Docker containers. The amount of users will likely stay at or below 3, certainly at or below 5, so it doesn’t need to handle that much.
Here’s my parts list:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 4650G
- iGPU, power efficient, AM4 so cheaper, performant enough (I think)
- Case: Jonsbo N3
- This is the component I started with, since I really like the form factor. It did limit my choice on motherboards heavily though.
- Motherboard: Gigabyte A520I AC
- I was trying to go for one with ECC memory support, but at least on pcpartpicker I struggled to find ones at this form factor supporting it. However from reading through Forum threads ECC isn’t critically important for a more “casual” build like mine, just a nice-to-have.
- Memory: Found about 16GB of DDR4 in my old pc, they worked before so I didn’t bother looking at them in detail
- Cheap
- Storage:
- OS: Western Digital Black SN770 1 TB M.2-2280
- Where I live the 500GB version is actually more expensive
- Cache: Samsung 870 Evo 500 GB
- Cheap enough, although if I can combine this with the OS drive, then even better
- Primary Storage: 4x Seagate IronWolf Pro 8TB (ST8000NT001)
- I have to admit, I can’t recall why I settled on these. 8TB seemed good for price-to-size and I didn’t want the server ones despite them actually being cheaper because they’re extremely loud apparently, but why Pro and not non-pro and why this exact model… I can’t recall, I just remember having a headache that afternoon TwT
- OS: Western Digital Black SN770 1 TB M.2-2280
I realize I left out the cooler and psu as I don’t think they’re particularly relevant here, I can deal with those myself. Price-wise, I am going by German prices and parts availability. On any of the parts listed, or if I forgot anything else though, I would love advice on the quality of my decision and how to improve it, thanks <3
I’ll make the obligatory unRAID suggestion. It fits a lot of less intensive scenarios like what you’re describing. It does carry a cost, and the licensing model is “interesting”, but it has top-tier ease of use, especially around container apps. It would also allow you to use that 1tb ssd as a cache drive since the OS would run from usb (well, in-memory but stored on usb). You can also trial it for free for 30 days and if you don’t like it, there’s plenty of good suggestions in the thread already
A friend of mine had an unRAID NAS and moved that over to TrueNAS later after being bothered by the licensing costs, that’s why I was looking into the latter more. I do know how to RTFM, so I think I should be fine on that? But maybe there’s gonna be a huge negative surprise, I suppose I don’t know that yet
Yeah, they did something goofy with it, but they’re at least trying to not be nakedly evil. I got in when it was just a perpetual license, but the new model isn’t as bad as a lot of people think. TrueNAS is good too - I use the enterprise version at work and it’s done well. The biggest differences are that the Ent. version doesn’t expose containers or lxc so i don’t know how that works, and TrueNAS/ZFS requires same-size disks where unRAID allows mixing sizes while retaining up to 2 parity disks. At work, I buy specific drives, so zfs is great - at home I buy what’s affordable, so zfs isn’t so good. I also saw one of your other comments, and unRAID supports hardware pass-through to containers, so exposing your AMD iGPU to jellyfin should be pretty simple. I can’t speak to how TNas would handle that
Oh I didn’t even consider the fact that I might need to pass through the iGPU. Thanks for pointing that out, will double check. Although it’d be very odd if TrueNAS struggled to do that, considering how many people use it and how many of those have some kind of self-hosted streaming service. But of course, always best to check anyways!