Building a new PC and want it to double as a NAS Home server. Please help

Hi guys, I’m about to finish building a PC that I would like to use as a multipurpose machine. Productivity, editing, gaming and use it as a home backup & NAS media server. I currently use a 4-bay QNAP NAS but it’s a few years old and stutters like crazy when playing larger 30-70 GB 4K content. I’m a best quality vs large file size kind of guy, so I don’t mind having large files. Transcoding is also not very good in my opinion and I notice a big drop in quality. Video/audio passthru would be ideal if that’s even possible. Does anyone have any recommendations?

I’ve heard of FreeNas, Unraid and very little about virtual machines but I plan on using Windows 10 as the OS for my PC. I have zero experience when it comes to using linux but I think I could learn if I needed to. Also the majority of articles, youtube videos and posts related to this topic are a few years old. Not to mention that they specify using an older spare PC as the NAS but, I don’t have an old spare PC for that scenario. I’ve been using a macbook pro for as long as I can remember. This will be my first actual home desktop PC.

I’m hoping that my PC will be able to stream/output my saved, large 4K content to my LG B9 4K TV using the graphics card’s HDMI 2.1 port and play smoothly with no stutter or hiccups. I’ve been using plex media server for all my content and have a pretty large library and would like to continue to use it on this PC / NAS if possible.

How can I turn this main PC into a home backup NAS server? I would really appreciate any help or advice that you have. I’ll put the PC specs down below if that will help at all. Thank you guys.
PC specs:
CPU = AMD 5900X
GPU = RTX 3080
PSU = Corsair RM 850x
RAM = 32GB 3600 CL16 Crucial Ballistix
MoBo = MSI X570 Tomahawk
Boot drive = 1TB Samsung 970 evo plus
Storage drive = 2TB Samsung 860 evo

and I have about 15-20TB of backup files and media content on my QNAP.

you want everything in one package thats a tall order. and you want to do it as a linux noob even harder.

well lets dig in…
you will need a second graphics card any card will mostly work… some better than others.
you will need to cut off a core for the host machine a few cores for the NAS VM ( really dont recommended a one for all with a NAS like really strongly do not recommend this)
then a few cores to the windows OS along with the 3080.
you will also probably need a add in network card to help isolate the NAS from the net.

did i say this is a bad idea. yup really bad.
after you get all of the VM’s set up and all cards passed through. you will now need more drives to set up the network storage portion of the NAS as you are using a VM instead of bare metal you will have to do some shuffling partitioning ( lots of headache inducing work) and convert your bare metal disks that are in use to VM drives ( it might be possible to pass the drives through with an add in PCIE to sata card… no guarantees) and if the drives are in a raid or other format like raid you will most likley need to buy new drives as raids break when you move them to VM’s from bare metal.
did i mention this is a bad idea once again.
now you are in a situation where one bad thing can cause this whole thing to collapse in on it self and lose everything.

TLDR buy more drives use the current nas system as a back up and copy every thing over to the new system and just use windows 10.

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@looming-hawk Thanks for the reply and YIKES! It sounds pretty crazy already. I’m assuming the next best option is to buy some old PC parts and slap it together like most other articles and youtube videos suggest. If that is the case, what parts would I need in order to have a media server that can handle streaming or outputting 30-70 GB 4K files smoothly?

I’ve noticed I get the video buffering issues with files larger than 23-25 GB. I can only guess that it’s an old ethernet issue. Maybe the NAS ethernet capabilities is less than gigabit and is bottlenecking giving the buffering issues. The QNAP tech specs don’t specify the version of ethernet it has. I have gigabit home internet so I don’t think internet bandwidth is the issue.

Question, would I be able to setup a NAS on windows 10 through the manage storage spaces utility and create a storage pool and then use the graphics card’s hdmi port to send the 4K stream to the TV?

If not, then would I need to build the spare computer? Do I need a GPU with hdmi 2.0 or 2.1 output? Does the MoBo need gigabit ethernet? How fast does the CPU need to be? How much RAM does it have to have?

Again thanks for the feedback and advice. Looking forward to the next reply.

The main question with this is are you planning on playing the media files directly, like playing from a network drive, or are you planning on transcoding on the fly, like Plex does? Transcoding takes quite a bit more horsepower.

Your LAN is only as fast as the slowest link in the chain. If anything is only 100 megabit, then that is what your max speed is. So cables, the device on each end, and any switches or routers in the middle.

With a 2 hour 70gb file, that is like 75 megabit, which given overhead for stuff is pushing right up against max speed for 100 megabit connections.

It is also possible that the Qnap is just not capable of pushing that much data, even if the connection theoretically could handle it.

2.0 works for 4k 60fps no problem. However, you may need 2.1 for full HDR support.

Thanks for the reply @TheCakeIsNaOH . I wanted to use plex to stream my 4K movies because I like the UI plex has but I can also play them directly to the tv using the ethernet network connection through the back of the tv. I don’t want to transcode anything, I just want the direct playback. So i’m thinking the QNAP has to be the slow link in the chain. It’s a few years old and doesn’t have much compute power. The ethernet rating on the QNAP has to be 100 mbps because of how old it is and the tech specs doesn’t specify its rating. Or maybe the tv ethernet can’t handle more than 100mbps connection. The tv tech specs also doesn’t specify the rating. I guess that means I would have to connect to the tv through HDMI in order to be able to play the full bitrate resolution of the large 4K files.

Now I just need to figure out the CPU, MoBo and case to start building a NAS. Thanks @looming-hawk & @TheCakeIsNaOH

Gigabit has been dirt cheap since early 2000s. Just check, if file transfer it ever goes above 10MiB/s it’s gigabit.


If you’re new to Linux. I wouldn’t put all my data on it yet. Try it in a VM first.

To throw it out there, you probably don’t need to dip into linux to host a NAS. There’s windows UPNP servers for windows, you can use SMB shares to other windows machines, and it’s pretty easy to set up in Windows.
You just have to share your drives on the network, or download and run a UPNP server, and they will be accessible either through UPNP(you can probably turn off transcoding in most of them? I’ve never bothered with this in windows because honestly it’s overrated AF) or just Windows network drive access.

You don’t need VMs, RAID, or any other special thing; you can just share your drives in Windows(or linux) and they’ll be accessible on the network like a local drive. You can read from these drives, even play music or video from them, just fine!

A bigger question though than what you use for the NAS, is what your client is. What are you trying to use to connect to it? Other Windows PCs? Linux PCs? Android? IOS?

If you’re only looking to stream video directly to a smart-TV, it can probably access UPNP I guess? And you can do that from any OS just by using a server application and pointing it to your media folder.

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I didn’t know windows could do that. I’ve been on mac os for as long as I could remember. Can you still set up a raid through windows? I want to be able to have redundancies in case some of the drives go down. Thanks @alkafrazin

Apparently, Windows 10 can do it directly through “Storage Spaces” according to google, but I’ve never tried personally.

Here’s what came up though

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@alkafrazin Thanks I’ll try this!

Why use Storage Spaces for this if you just want a basic RAID 10? You can set that up using Disk Manager and just having mirrored disks. I’m not saying Storage Spaces are bad but there’s a simpler way.

Also, Storage Spaces are more for serious enterprise approaches, imo. You can’t just pull out a disk and access it as a normal file system the way you would a mirrored drive created through Disk Manager. On the up side, they’re great for plugging in or replacing drives as your needs change. I have a couple of storage spaces configured on my Windows 10 system and if I need to add capacity I just add a new disk to the pool and Windows will handle it re-distributing any data according to the resilliance requirements I’ve set.

So I guess what I’m saying is that Storage Spaces are good. But based on the level of expertise and the needs of the OP who says they just want it for redundancy I might suggest just using Disk Manager and creating a mirrored drive.

If OP wants to just throw in more and more drives as time goes on though, Storage Spaces are a good option.

I don’t know, I don’t use that stuff. I just remember that a simple file server is easy enough to set up in any version of Windows, and that Windows 10 has features that enable RAID configurations, so there’s no need to dive headfirst into FreeNAS or UnRaid for a casual user, especially if you already plan to use Windows on it for gaming.

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My tip would be to upgrade to Windows Pro and use Windows 10 hyper-v to host VMs of the various things you want.

I do this at the moment (partially because i’m in the middle of a vSphere → HyperV transition at work) - you’ll be able to spin up whatever you want inside of HyperV virtual machines. Sure, Virtualbox is free, but it just isn’t integrated like HyperV is - hyperV will auto-pause and re-start your VMs when win10 reboots for updates for example - which is nice.

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