Update: budget(200-600), the reason for the build is I found cheap 4tb drives for almost $10/Terabyte. So I want to use as much of them as I can
I am trying to build my final NAS build as a beginner.
I have a 6x4tb dell server, but it’s not enough.
I am currently trying to build the final boss of my nasses. 4x16tb with truenas with raid
I am unsure of what parts to buy as I am a complete beginner.
I found a case that can hold all 14 drives.
I need a motherboard, CPU, ram, PSU
I am on a budget, kind of.
What motherboard do you recommend? Pulled from a workstations with CPU and ram? A server board? Normal consumer with normal consumer CPU? Motherboard should have some pcie slots for 2 sata cards and one 2.5 GB card.
What CPU to run all these drives?
What ram and how much? 16? 32? Ecc, non ecc? Ddr4? Ddr3?
Power supply: 850w or more?
All parts should be able to support the 16 drives with headroom…
I would appreciate any help on this build, I want to build this as soon as possible.
Thanks
I have never build a machine like that, so I guess I can’t help you much, but like another comment said, it seems like a pain to maintain, I usually have trouble with sata cables losing contact, with that setup there are many cables keen to lose contact.
As for ram I wouldn’t worry about it at all, unless you use zfs 4GB should be more than enough, even 2 or less. Ram is expensive now, so you may want to consider using as little as possible unless you already have it laying around. Does truenas use zfs? If so you may want to use other fs like btrfs or test how well zfs works with the ram you have. I’m not sure zfs is worth the trouble. I wouldn’t buy extra ram.
As for CPU I don’t think it matters much, but like I said, I have never tried your setup. But even an ancient sandy bridge should work fine if it’s just a personal has, with HDDs even with encryption. Works fine on my nas.
Also, if you have access to free old computers you can try a ghetto setup where each each computer only handles 4 drives and then you join them together on a master computer either via nbd or nvme other Ethernet (works on sata too). But that seems like an even bigger pain to maintain and increases your power consumption by a lot.
That sounds like a nightmare tbh. So many failure points, so much heat and power usage, and cables.
I have 6 out of 8 bays filled and still feel like it’s a lot to worry about and manage if something fails.
Ehhh one thing I’ve learned over the years, it doesn’t matter how much storage I buy. Within a few weeks it’ll be full.
Where are people getting drives at $10/tb?
Where I live it’s $50/tb
In the past!
My 20TB drives cost me $17 per TB 2 years ago. The exact same model is now at $33 per TB :(
You say you are on a budget. Yet you talk about 128 Gigs of ram.
Maybe you should clarify what your budget is.
Maybe the budget was planned out before RAM prices spiked. 128 gigs of used server RAM was not that expensive before that happened.
Why 16 drives? Do you already have 16 4tb drives?
I also went with 16 drives, but they were 20TB each. OP, if you don’t already have those 4tb drives, reconsider the amount and sizes. 4tb can’t be the price sweet spot for HDDs…
It would seem that the sweet spot for HDDs is as high as 16 to 24 TB at the moment (at least here in the Netherlands).
You can get a 24TB Seagate Barracuda for €479,- right now, which comes out to about €20 / TB.If you specifically want a NAS drive though the best “bang for the buck” appears to be a 28TB Seagate IronWolf Pro for €688,- coming out to about €25 / TB.
Edit: Personally I run 8TB drives in my server, which are currently €209,- (€26 / TB) for a regular Seagate Barracuda, and €289 (€36 / TB) for a Seagate IronWolf Pro. Funnily enough 4TB drives would actually be better for NAS drives at €132,90 (€33 / TB) for a WD Red Plus.
If I ever got a lucky Amazon mistake where I order one 4 TB drive but a box of 16 does, I would set up a full *arr stack.
Probably won’t be that lucky though.
Take a look at https://diskprices.com/ for the best price per TB. Backblaze has been pretty great about sharing their hardware specs and builds. Maybe get some ideas from them https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-server/
They already have the disks, they are looking for the rest of the build.
No more Storage Full warnings.
Is that a challenge?
Just one more drive bro. Please one just one more
Fix it by simply turning off “Low Disk Space” warnings in System Settings.
Mix that with keeping your/and your home cache, local, share etc directories in a non-data drive and you get no warnings. Only errors when a write fails.
I would consider fewer, larger drives
I would seek the best price per terabyte while still allowing redundancy.
True, but I would factor in some kind of negative to cost/longevity from increasing number of drives. Even if 16x4 is a bit cheaper than 4x16 today, will it die faster?
At these scales, I don’t think it’s measurable, if statistically significant at all.
In any case, you should always be ready to replace a drive that fails. I buy used because they’re significantly cheaper (or at least they used to be) and I’ve never had any major failures.
And while more drives means more failure opportunity, it also means when a failed drive is replaced, it’s likely of a different manufacture period.
I have a 5-drive NAS that I’ve been upgrading single drives every 6 months. This has the benefit of slowly increasing capacity while also ensuring drives are of different ages so less likely to fail simultaneously. (Now I’m waiting for prices to come back down, dammit).
You’re talking a lot of storage - it might be worth investing in some low-end server hardware. A Dell tower or something, maybe one off eBay if you’re looking to cut costs.
I picked up a PowerEdge T110II a long time ago and it’s been… flawless. Just a simple server with a 4x4TB RAID5. No hardware problems (aside from occasional disk failures over the years), easy to manage. It costs a bit more - but server hardware is often just more reliable and for a NAS that’s job #1. This server just runs.
I just upgraded the memory in it to 32GB for ~$100USD. Before that it had 8GB. I needed more for restic doing backups. I probably could have gotten away with 16GB but I figured I’d max it out for that price.
It’s better to buy 4x 16-20TB drives and expand storage instead of buying 16 4TB drives. Also 16 3.5 inch HDD drives draw around 200W of power alone.
Honestly, I bet it would be cheaper to replace a few of the 4 TB drives in your current set up with larger drives.
You really want the ECC ram and the motherboard/cpu combo that supports it.
Others have mentioned power - you may want to do some math on drive cost vs power consumption. There’ll be a drive size point that is worth the cost because you’ll use fewer drives which consume less power than more drives.
Having built a number of systems, I’m a LOT more conscious of power draw today for things that will run 24/7. Like my ancient NAS draws about 15 watts at idle with 5 drives (It will spin down drives).
More drives will always mean more power, so maybe fewer but larger drives makes sense. You may pay more up front, but monthly power costs never go away.
Also, I’ve built a 10 drive n NAS like this (because I had the drives and the case, mono and ram). It can produce a lot if heat while doing anything, and it was a significant power hog - like 200w when running. And it really didn’t idle very well (I’ve run it with UnRaid, TruNAS and Proxmox).
Honestly, you might want to look into proper server hardware. There are many out there that support dozens of drives, assuming you’re willing to go with a blade. Even if you explicitly want a tower, server hardware is where you’re going to get the best support.
You’ll most likely also want to increase the size of your drives. Assuming you’re being smart and utilizing RAID, you’re going to be losing a bunch of that storage.
