Personal notes and gathered information on building a simple home NAS for myself.
For a while I've had the idea of acquiring a simple home NAS for my backup and file/media storage needs. While there are lots of products on the market that provide such functionality without too much hassle to setup and maintain, I always liked the idea of tinkering myself. Therefore, to eventually reach my dream of my low-power home NAS - and to fight the boredom during Covid-19 - I set out to gather some insight on how to realise it.
In this repository, I try to document my thought process and bits of information I gather along the way.
My actual requirements are rather basic:
- Storing Time Machine backups
- Supporting a growing RAW photo collection
- Decent throughput
- With 125 MB/s being the Gbit Ethernet limit, I'd like to reach 100-110 MB/s
- Streaming some media to terminal devices
What I do not need and probably never will:
- Transcoding
- Sure, maybe a small 1080p video here and there, but nothing fancy
- Running 24/7
- Case: Fractal Design Node 304 (86.31 €)
- RAM: 16GB Crucial CT16G4SFD824A DDR4-2400 SO-DIMM CL17 (86.96 €)
- MB: ASRock J5005-ITX SoC So.BGA Dual Channel DDR4 Mini-ITX Retail (118.65 €)
- PSU 2:
- SilverStone SST-ST30SF v 2.0 (52.90 €) Ref
- Storage:
- HDD: 2x Western Digital Red 4 TB (2x 109 €)
- OS: WD Green 120GB Interne SSD (2,5 Zoll) SATA (28.99 €)
Total: ~593 €
Optional power supply:
- PicoPSU-150-XT 150W 12V DC-DC ATX Netzteil/Power Supply (39.95 €)
- LEICKE ULL Netzteil 12V 12.5A 150W (39.99 €)
- Sata Power Splitter: deleyCON 0,15m S-ATA Strom-Adapter Y-Adapter (8.99 €)
A PicoPSU is meant to work more efficiently at low idle consumption, which fits this kind of NAS setup. However, on startup, HDDs need quite a bit of juice to actually power up and start spinning. During research, some numbers I found were like 30-40W per HDD on startup + whatever the remaining components require.
If you're planning on supporting 4-8 3.5" HDDs, then a PicoPSU is most likely not gonna suffice.
Side note: Off-the-shelf solutions seem to use PicoPSUs or something similarly efficient, but end using staggerd disk spin-up to reduce the total wattage needed during initial startup.
- Extendable Storage
- 4 SATA 3 ports by default; 4 additional SATA 3 ports possible via PCIe 2.0 card
- Up to 6x3.5" drive bays
- RAM Flexibility
- Up to 32GB RAM in total
- 2x4GB/8GB RAM possible for smaller budget
- Much more CPU performance and RAM than SBCs and even off-the-shelf solutions, eg. Sonology
- Still relatively low power usage considering performance
- Higher price than SBC 2-bay setups
- Higher power usage than SBC setups
- https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/comments/ahq5e7/my_private_15w_allinone_homeserver_and_media/
- https://www.technikaffe.de/anleitung-178-eigenbau_nas_anleitungen_fuer_4_bis_16_festplatten_auf_einen_blick/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/comments/f6lj8r/hardware_choice_for_basic_nas_on_a_budget/
- https://www.speicher.de/arbeitsspeicher-blog/32gb-arbeitsspeicher-asrock-j4105-itx