techokami

Techokami

@techokami

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techokami
@techokami
plumpan
@plumpan
plumpan
@plumpan

So here's how I would make a DIRT cheap NAS right now.

I ran through what this would look like last night after I decided to put in a $20 offer on a SFF office PC and went "... oh shit what would I do with it". Thankfully, the offer was not accepted.

But it was too late.

There's no one I could even build this FOR right now for cost of parts. So I'm gonna walk through it here. Keep in mind this is a "I want to spend the LEAST amount of money possible" kind of setup and it's a little, ramshackle. You'll see.

Pricing and availability based on what's here in the US. Sorry.

slumberfang
@slumberfang

I MADE A DIRT CHEAP NAS

After seeing this post from Plum I was inspired to actually do this. (BECAUSE ONE OF MY HARD DRIVES BLEW UP AND TOOK MY BEAUTIFUL MUSIC LIBRARY WITH IT)

And I am PLEASED to announce that it worked!

So now I'm gonna run down what I did and how I bodged this into happening. Then I'll tell you how much this cost me.

plumpan
@plumpan

I'd also like to point out that the final cost of this comes within spitting distance of an 18TB external USB hard drive, current retail price. Give or take 10-20% due to exchange rates but, you can for sure pay MORE on a new 18TB USB external than this. For roughly 18TiB of usable space, probably a TiB or two more than a 18TB drive gets you.

And with the external you get... a single external USB disk. No redundancy, no network functionality, no expandability, just a disk in a box. Upsides: lower power use, which IS good.

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in reply to @plumpan's post:

kw1q51lv3r
@kw1q51lv3r

So I have a spare chassis that’s lying around that has a B450 board, an R3 3300X, and an RX580 in it that im intending to repurpose as a NAS. Other than getting a 250GB NVMe drive and putting TrueNAS on that, would you have any additional recommendations to add to this build guide?

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plumpan
@plumpan

oh yeah no, consumer drives are hella overpriced. Buy as many 8TB or 12TB SAS drives you can afford. 10s might have good pricing depending on the day, and if you were planning on Blacks I assume you were going to spend enough money to put you out of the ballpark of 6s or 4s.

I wrote some about it below but depending on where it's going to live and how many drives you want, you should consider an external shelf.

I'm going to have to write up my shelf post today.

The rest of the system is perfectly adequate, overpowered even. I'd honestly go find some $10-20 graphics card to put in as a video output and save the 580 for something else, unless you have plans for it. I don't think the encoders on the 580 are good enough to use for that ???? citation needed

Oh and you could get two NVMe drives and mirror them if you wanted. Just saves you a bit of hassle if one dies, but that tends to be unlikely. Most of the systems that one can get for dirt cheap only have a single NVMe slot, so I didn't mention it in the post.

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kw1q51lv3r
@kw1q51lv3r

Afaik the board only has one NVMe slot so it’s just going to be the OS on there. I tried going sub-1k when I bought it mid-2020 but pandemic price surge, etc. Ended up spending 1.2k on something that’s served me pretty well as a gaming pc for about three years, which is why it’s OP for a NAS. Decided to switch to a B650 platform because games in 2023 started demanding 6-core CPUs and a 5800X3D was still about $450. At this point my only plan for the RX580 is just to keep using what I have so I don’t unnecessarily send stuff to landfill

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plumpan
@plumpan

If you really want to, you could always slam another NVMe drive in a PCIe slot if you have the desire to. But just having it on a single drive is fine as long as you back up your config.

AM4 is gonna live on for years and years, I love it.

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sudo-EatPant
@sudo-EatPant

I have been thinking about switching from core to scale, and its useful to know about SAS drives being cheaper! Right now i'm running all SATA drives on my server, but i've been holding back on buying spares because theyre expensive, so when i buy spares i'll get them as SAS drives instead. Which should be soon because i dont have spare drives right now x3

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plumpan
@plumpan

I was lucky in that me switching from core to scale also involved a new main pool, so I didn't need to import anything. Everything I had set up on the old system would have to be rebuilt from scratch since I was reorganizing all my data in a dramatic fashion, so I completely avoided the upgrade process. The only thing I know for sure doesn't work is if you have drives with extended sectors; they work on Unix but not on Linux. If you're on SATA drives you are virtually guaranteed to not have this issue.

I don't know how a mixed pool like that would work but in theory it should work perfectly fine. Another thing I should test some day.

Also while this guide uses internal breakout cables because that's manageable with a low drive count, I personally do not like the idea of doing that layout if you're thinking about more than like 4 drives. If you're patient you can get an external shelf that will hook everything up with 1 cable + power for $100 or so, with 12 or 24 bays. Downside is they're a bit noisy, not terribly so but too loud to reasonably live in close quarters with. That can be fixed but it's more of a hack than anything in this guide.

Of course there's always old server chassis or just getting a SAS backplane from one and what not, lots of ways to accomplish that goal depending on your needs.

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sudo-EatPant
@sudo-EatPant

Yeah, i think i will try to get an external shelf or a server case of some kind, right now i have all of the 5 inch and 3 inch bays of an old beige case filled with drives lol. I think i'll do all hardware changes before switching from core to scale, because i might end up buying a new system altogether for this instead. The one i have is fine but underpowered, and the prospect of importing an existing pool instead of rsyncing it over to a different server is a little scary for me

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plumpan
@plumpan

My understanding, based on having done it outside of TrueNAS, is that pool imports actually go pretty darn smoothly. But I've never had to do that with anything important so I can't really say that confidently.

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in reply to @slumberfang's post:

plumpan
@plumpan

:D!

Interested to hear about how using network storage works for you as well, if you haven't been doing it before! Both in terms of the technical side (user permissions in samba lol) and personal side (workflow of having a bunch of storage in a different folder). I'm always interested to hear about such things. And if there's anything you start running directly from the NAS i.e. Plex!

Also, what's the mileage on those drives?

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plumpan
@plumpan

Good luck! It looks like handling the permissions in samba can be a bit more of a chore than NFS/*Nix mounting, but if you're primarily accessing with one computer it should be ok. Plus most people are probably accessing these via Windows so there should be plenty of info out there if you run into any roadblocks.

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