Hardware @lemmy.ml zlatko @programming.dev 1y ago

DIY NAS build in progress

I'm building a NAS for the first time on my own, so I wanted to share the story so far here.

I'm not a stranger to custom builds, in fact I don't think I ever bought an assembled PC (not counting second hand 386 box a million years ago). But this is my first small, low power build, so it's not perfect, I already ran into a wall (more later).

I base the build on an AsRock mini-ITX board, the CPU is included, it's passively cooled, low power consumption but still powerful for a NAS. I'm sticking it into a Node 304 Fractal Design case. Here's the full list of parts I got:

AsRock J4125-ITX board with a Celeron 4125 (4-core CPU)
8GB DDR4 RAM (a Crucial kit)
a 500GB NVMe SSD (which I can't use)
a couple of Seagate IronWolf 4TB drives
90W PicoPSU and some no-name power brick
Fractal Design Node 304 mini-ITX case.

I planned to have an SSD for OS, these two disks for my photography and media, and then later on expand with more storage (preferably SSD, when I can afford it).

As mentioned, I messed up: the M2 slot on the motherboard is a "Key E" slot. I never bothered with these keys before, so I didn't know that a Key E slot does not have a SATA protocol, it won't take my SSD.

Another thing, the PicoPSU is a 20-pin power supply, and the board has a 24-pin slot. It should still be fine, the specs say that this is still okay, but I'll have to see. According to my back-of-the-napkin calculations, 90 Watts should be enough power for the mobo and CPU, the SSD and the two spinning disks.

Anyway I'll get a regular SATA SSD tomorrow and see how it's shaping up. Let me know if you want me to post more on my progress/end result or if you have any questions.

40 comments

To people negging about the CPU being under powered:

File sharing, media management, a couple of services for a handful of clients... It's perfectly fine.

At 10W in with a tiny footprint it's great when you don't need any more computing power and next winter electricity bill drops.

Not everybody needs a full racks of decommissioned Xeons and arrays on arrays of RAIDs that draw juice like an industrial fruit press regardless it's in use or not.
- Yep, that was my intention. First, it's low power, so it can be always-on with only a small impact on the power bill. Second, it's only gonna serve a few things - my photography hobby and media library, and maybe a service or two will come with time. If I need other services, I put them on a Hetzner box and they're much better taken care of.
  
  I've done my share of sysadmin work and even a bit of server-room maintenance, I don't want a full-time, or even a part time job. This is mostly gonna sit in the corner, and be quiet. If the prices matched, I would have probably just gone with QNap or Synology, but this way I get the NAS and the disks for the same price.
Ha. I thought that piece of red was some sort of meat in a vacuumpack
- Yes, it didn't inspire confidence when it arrived so, but it's actually a tiny PSU, it's essentially all bolted onto the power connector :)
  
  Yeah that makes more sense. But with power, better a bigger block than just enough power. I read somewhere that a powerunit works better if it has more left then just enough
Can you let us know your price when its all said and done? I just bought and set up a QNAS and am interested in a comparison.
- Sure, here's the breakdown:
  
  AsRock J4125-ITX -> 120,62€ Crucial 8GB RAM kit -> 19,90€ 2 x Seagate IronWolf 4TB -> 2 x 114,99€ Samsung 870 EVO SSD 500GB -> 31,41€ (I originally ordered an NVMe one that cost 29€). Fractal Design Node 304 -> 91,89€ PicoPSU -> 35,95€ No-name Power Adapter (220V to 12V) -> 12,99€ Molex-2x Sata -> 9,99€ (there is a ~1€ option, but I wanted a nicer cable for some cable management.
  
  A few cables that I had. Total: 552,73€
  
  I wanted to get a 4-bay NAS, and QNAP, Synology or Asustor would be a bit less, but without the disks. Also, I wanted an x86 CPU, for potential future use. This way I turned out a little cheaper, and it is a bit more flexible.
What OS do you plan on using?

I'd like to do a really basic NAS build which is just a PC with 2 drives in RAID 1, and some room to run a few services in the future.

dedicated game servers

Home Automation service

far future - old GPU to run a local AI

I'm assuming some kind of Linux-Based OS, but I'm not sure which one to go with that would be easy for a Linux Novice.
- I plan to try the OpenMediaVault first. For my use - a lot less for services and dynamic changes and a lot more for sitting in the closet quietly - it's good enough. And I can still dig into the internals if I wanted to.
  
  And with OMV I can also teach my non-techy wife and kids how to add themselves more disk space :)
Any reason you chose that cpu?
- Yes, in fact! Two main reasons.
  
  I wanted low-power, this is mostly gonna sit in the closet and serve files around. Even ARM CPUs like the RasPi can do that. But I didn't want it to be too weak, in case I wanted a simple service or two, this still has extra oomph. This isn't too powerful, but it is a 64-bit x86 CPU.
  
  I also wanted some ports. This has 4 SATA ports. It's supposed to be a NAS. It has a Gbit ethernet - I don't have a Gbit network at home so this is good enough for now, and I can expand it somewhat. It has USBs, expansion slots etc.
  
  those two combined resulted in a few selections, AsRock's mini-ITX boards with integrated CPUs are quite good choices in this space.
  
  I wanted low power consumption. I could have gone with a slightly stronger ‎J5040-ITX perhaps, but it's also using just slightly more power.
  
  it's also cheaper, the mobo with the CPU cost me 120€. The j5040 I mentioned would be a bit more - not a lot but still noticable.
  
  I wanted silent, and this board and CPU is passively cooled. If I had money, I would get SSDs for storage as well (less power, less noise) but it's a LOT more expensive.
  
  I know there are other CPUs in this space but in the end you have to pick one so I did.
Looks like a really cool build! Is 90w gonna be enough for a couple of spinning HDD?
- Yes, the specs say less then 5W per HDD. Even if I had older and hungrier disks at 10W each, it's still good. The CPU is consuming about 10 watts, the rest of the board, let's say another 10. Even if I fill all six HDD slots that the case has room for, I think it would work.
These kinds of posts are very helpful, thanks!

The Celeron gave me pause, because I remember them from way back as being underpowered CPUs for cheaper laptops. Seems like they would drag down performance a bit on a new build, especially for CPU intensive media management? Unless the situation is different with newer Celerons and they're much better for performance?
- My old HP laptop was referred to as having celery for a CPU. It was about capable of using Chrome without having a breakdown.
  
  Better than having a potato as a CPU, I s'pose
  
  Good thing I'm not gonna run Chrome on this :)
- Well, look at these few things:
  
  Modern CPUs, even Celerons, are powerful. People are driving a lot of workload even on ARM CPUs, and this is a proper 4-core x64 CPU. I mean, look at your phone, it's most likely doing a lot of full-hd media, right? And it's doing just fine.
  
  Most commercially-available Home/Small Office NAS systems, by Synology, Asustor, QNAP and others, they have either CPUs in this class, or weaker, ARM CPUs. I'm not gonna be sitting at this box. I have 3 desktops and 3 laptops around the house for work - this is gonna be mostly storage.
  
  My planned media management workload is a bit different than media processing. I mostly want to serve files around, maybe transcode something in the background. I don't plan to watch movies off of this (yet). I have a 4-core Hetzner VPS that is similar in power to this, and it's driving something like 4-5 docker containers and still serving all the files.
  
  I think it's gonna be fine, but we shall see.
  
  Yeah, that's fair, I have an Odroid HC2 with an arm32 server which easily handles Plex atreaming, qB, *arrs, etc. I think it's just nostalgic prejudice on my part! I don't doubt that it'll handle your workload just fine.
Enjoy the ride! I too have been building PCs for a long time (since the 90s in my case) and went down the rabbit hole of NAS / self hosting starting about 7 years ago.

In that time I went from a Bitfenix Portal SFF case, to a Deep Silence 6, to an 18U cabinet... so fun and lots of learning.
- Oh, I am enjoying it, but I didn't expect to start learning already. I thought I'll pick up a thing or two about the software side of things though, but most of the stuff I've been doing already for a long time. But yes, it's a deep rabbit hole.
How do you like the case so far?

Ive been considering making a custom NAS myself but, struggling to find one that seems ideal for me.
- I like the case a lot. It surprised me as it was bigger than expected and than it looked like, but I should have seen it coming. For one, it has room for a full-blown PSU (and I have the PicoPSU), and for two, I picked it because it has room for 6 3.5" HDDs.
  
  But it's still pretty small, it's nice enough that my wife would let me keep it in a living room :)
Node 304 is a solid case. Used for my last itx build.
- Yes, I like it a lot. FD has this niche and does a good job.
I went this route but with louder cooling as it's mainly sitting in a closet, and I'm glad I did. The extra space keeps the drives cooler and I was able to add on a PCI M2 card without too much trouble.

Plus since it's just a PC case you can gut it entirely and have standard parts to do complete up grades, so you don't lose your case stickers.
- I thought about it, but I got rid of a lot of my electronic junk in the recent years and would have to buy everything from scratch anyway. So I went with the "small and silent and low-power" route. I also think it's going to live in a closet in my home office as well :)
That's the same exact case I chose for my nas
- How did you find it for cable management?
  
  Pretty terrible tbh
I have the same case for my SFF work pc. Its great, but the front dust grill can be a pain to clean and service.

For the M.2 slot. I believe the E key is for WiFi modules. However, you should be able to buy an adapter for M key. Something like thisSintech M.2 (NGFF) NVME SSD to M2 A/E Key WiFi Port with 20cm Cable https://amzn.eu/d/3JG3dhO ( YMMV - I've never used this setup for a boot drive before, please do your research before purchasing!)

In my opinion, I would still recommend purchasing a standard SATA ssd. If you find the nvme adapter works and you can have it as your boot drive, you could always use the SATA ssd as a cache store for the spinning rust
- Thanks! I ordered a SATA SSD already, and I did plan to read about the E key slot later, but for now I'm good. The board has 4 SATA slots, so I will either have to have an USB OS disk or an adapter like this, but for now I'll just go with what I know.
  
  Do you know what are the speeds like on that Sintech or similar adapter? I don't really need NVMe speeds, it's a simple OS disk, but I wouldn't like to go down to something bellow regular SSD speeds.
Good luck with those Celeron CPUs. I owned a bunch of PCs running those and they are essentially space heaters that can do math.
- They are perfectly fine for a home NAS.
- That is why I bought a few Ryzen powered Mini PCs. They have plenty of computational power and they are also power efficient.
  
  I also wanted some Ryzens, but my requirements were different. I did not want so much computational power, as much as I wanted low power. Combined with the price and availability, this works good enough for mne. We'll see in the long run.
- Oh, I don't want this to be a PC. I have plenty of CPU power for what I do, this has a different purpose.
  
  I'm not planning to run anything much on those Celerons - it's mostly just a file server. People do that with a RasPi - a 4-core CPU is going to blow it out of the water I think.

40 comments