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
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!
Truenas uses KVM for virtual machines. So that will allow GPU passthrough, but may require command line and config files to do it. For docker this seems relevant: https://forums.truenas.com/t/electric-eel-nvidia-gpu-passthrough-support/11797
I’m comfortable enough with those, that shouldn’t be an issue then. Thanks for the info!
Be aware if you have the iGPU as the only video output device and passthrough to a VM it will no longer show what the host system is doing. This would be referred to as a headless server. I would suggest making sure you can SSH into the host before doing that. LearnLinuxTV has guides for how to do that with best security practices.
Docker works differently, so it may not be an issue with that.