Building A DIY NAS On A Budget - TrueNAS Scale

Make sure to check out the follow up video where I make some upgrades!

I needed a NAS, so I set out to build my own with primarily used PC components. How will it turn out? #nas #pcbuilding #homeserver

Some of the parts I used (affiliate links):

Craft Computing's iSCSI video:

Support The Channel:
---------------------------------------------------
Music (in order):
"If You Want To" - Me
"Town Groove" - Me
"CRENSHAW VIBES" - GARRISON
---------------------------------------------------
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:34 Why I'm Building This
1:03 The Components
4:46 Assembling Everything
7:43 Setting Up TrueNAS
11:44 How It Performs
13:18 Pros/Cons and Final Thoughts

[daelra]

After buliding several NASs and home servers in my time, here's a few additional points to consider.
1. Reduce power draw as much as possible, especially if you're planning to leave it on 24/7.
Get a low power motherboard/CPU, preferably a mobile chip if you can. 38w power at idle is low for a desktop but pretty high for a NAS or laptop. With the current energy prices in the UK right now 38W 24/7 would cost me £113 to run a 38W NAS for a whole year. With a mobile chip, especially a modern ones, you could easily half and in my case 1/4 this.
The alternative is to tweak TrueNAS to use Wake on LAN. You'll need to make sure your motherboard/NIC has that capability. That way it's shut down until you needs it.
Get bigger, fewer drives. Again for power usage reasons. The less hardware used, the less power it takes up. Go for 5400rpm drive if performance isn't an issue as they use less power too.
Fewer sticks of RAM. One 16GB stick is better than 2x8GB if power reduction is the aim.

2. It's actually harder than you think to source the perfect case for a home built NAS.
Home built NASs are nearly always too big. You've got two choices. Get a hulking 10y old+ old tower for pennies or spend several hundreds on a dedicated NAS case. Cheap cases suitable for NASs are practically non-existant.


3. A homebuilt NAS is WAAAYYY easier to fix than a bought NAS if it goes wrong. Busted Synology or QNAP and you're looking at weeks to get it fixed/replaced and there's the chance, if it's and older model they don't have the parts any more. Personal experience of having several TB of data held hostage by a NAS company because their repair/replace policy was so inadequate/expensive. Use bog standard parts/disks and things can usually be put back together quckly and with less chance of a part literally not being avaliable anymore.

4. Decide early if what you want is just disk storage or something more flexible. It might just easier to just set a machine as a general purpose server. If the hardware available to you can cope with being used as a render station or for video format conversion or something, then why limit it to just serving files?

5. Avoid 'Green' drives. Get NAS specific ones if you can. I've never had much longevity with 'Green' drives. These types are not meant to be run 24/7 and wear out/fail a lot faster than drives designed for NASs. 'Black' drives or those for meant for desktops are generally okay but they're the same price as NAS drives and don't have the cache/power features of NAS drives. Of course any drive will do on a budget, but if you have the option, always pick a NAS drive first (or try to at least avoid the green ones).

[corvusaflame]

As someone who bought a "off the shelf NAS", having it fail HURTS. You can restore the data, but you have to use the exact same hardware. Some newer products allow for drive pools to be transfered to other systems, but TrueNAS doesn't seem to care about the hardware, and you seem to be able to import your data forward, no matter how old your setup was.

[eldibs]

It's completely fair to exclude the cost of storage when comparing a DIY NAS to an off-the-shelf one. The off-the-shelf models don't come with drives, after all.

[Siemenneste]

Honestly once explained it's fairly intuitive. Thank you for breaking it down so nicely for us newbies! Can't wait to play with the full version

[utubeuser]

I built a NAS back in 2014 - it had an i3 4170 CPU, 16GB RAM and a HighPoint DataCentre 7280 PCIe HBAwith 8 MiniSAS ports (max 32 SATA drives) - I loaded it up with 24 x 1.5 TB 2.5" Seagate hard drives and the whole thing under load used about 150W (These days of course I'd just use a couple of 3.5" 12-18TB drives instead) - performance was outstanding for the time, saturating a full gigabit NIC easily and doing local transfers between the drives around 160-180 MB/s. Thanks for the video and the memories!

[ethi]

the big problem with using old hardware for this purpose is power consumption. older cpu architectures consume a lot more energy to do something trivial. but I'm a fan of the idea of repurposing old hardware instead of discarding and buying new

[AdrianBacon]

I have two of that exact case. They're great for a generic file server. Good air flow, lots of 3.5 inch drive bays. Overall, a good little box you can stick in a corner.

[ausfoodgarden]

This video popped up in my suggested list and I'm so glad it did.
I'm building a NAS out of unused computer gear I already own plus some new drives.
The idea of adding a high-speed network card for a dedicated connection to an editing machine is golden.
I'm borrowing that for sure. Cheers! 👍

[jpalmz]

The main advantage of separating the hardware from the OS is you don’t need to worry about the manufacturer losing interest in providing patches and updates for a ready made version (that uses their own proprietary software) A classic is a couple of WD my-cloud models I had with perfectly good drives but WD decided to drop support. Ubuntu Server setup with a Samba config also makes a good NAS (although not as feature rich as true nas)

[zerocooler]

I set up a NAS using this same case. It is big, but it holds a lot of hard drives. I removed the DVD drive and filled every bay with hard drives. I use an SSD as the boot drive. I use a motherboard with plenty of SSD connectors, running with an old Intel Xeon processor. I decided to use OpenMediaVault as the OS, as I found it easy to set up and it works well for using the NAS as storage and a media server. And for anyone wondering about backups, this is my second NAS. My first one is an actual NAS unit, and both contain the same data.

[deadlymarsupial]

The benefit of this over RAID is that RAID controllers can be proprietary and the encoding change not only between board versions, also firmware versions - which can make it a big problem getting access to the data.

With iSCSI you would want some UPS protection. iSCSI risks data corruption on abrupt power loss.

[MatthewNOHU]

Really nice to see this video, as I recently started a similar build with TrueNAS SCALE. Of course, I managed to pull it off with almost no cost by using stuff that I've scrounged over the years. I also like the fact that you're pointing out other YouTube videos, like the one Craft Computing did on iSCSI.

[tigeroats]

This is the video I've been waiting for, I love that u used truenas scale, thanks man this video helped a lot

[Frank-dobg]

I really appreciate the real world performance tests, a lot of similar videos leave that out!

[wrightsublette]

Congrats on your new baby!! I totally enjoy seeing what you can put tougher and use on a budget. Well Done :)

[knomad]

I love how you sourced old hardware to do this. Kudos for helping to reduce eWaste!

[ygrittesnow]

There was an old video called "Turn an old laptop into a NAS - Synology". It actually utilized sinology's OS. I did this and utilized the usb 3.0's with multi drive docks. Gives me lots of storage, expandability and portability. Plus being a laptop really low power consumption.

[jamie-ckjs]

Great video and thanks for including power consumption. It depends on where you live of course but unfortunately here in the UK using old hardware like this has become quite expensive. A year of running this on idle would cost about 150 USD in the UK.

[derloos]

Nice details on the iSCSI setup, very informative, thanks.

[senstion]

Bro I love your channel, your content just keeps on getting better and better. Good Luck!