DIY NAS Build Spec Help

[CorticalStack]

Hey,

Have a 10 year old QNAP 4 bay that’s served me well, but time to upgrade.

Use case is backup from PCs, light media serving mostly family photos, virtualization for VMs and CI/CD self hosted agents.

Looking to self build, with Ryzen AM4 and fractal node case in mind. Would like it quiet as placed in home office, so storage will be SATA SSDs, thinking 4x1TB.

Any recommended micro ITX boards for AM4? 16gb RAM enough?

How would I go about having a storage pool for the backups/media, but also storage for VM images and where the container instances run. Would these be 2 separate storage pools?

If using something like TrueNAS, how do I manage the dockers for VMs etc. Do I have access to Linux CLI as normal, or…?

Easy enough to backup the NAS storage to the Cloud?

Thanks for any guidance!

[cowphrase]

Wendell has a guide that covers various aspects of setting up TrueNAS Scale, check it out. TrueNAS Scale: Ultimate Home Setup incl. Tailscale

@CorticalStack

Any recommended micro ITX boards for AM4? 16gb RAM enough?

Honestly anything will work. Look up pcpartpicker and find something that matches your requirements. Maybe look for more SATA ports.

16GB should be fine for containers and a few VMs. If you want to run lots of VMs in the future then 32GB would be better.

@CorticalStack

How would I go about having a storage pool for the backups/media, but also storage for VM images and where the container instances run. Would these be 2 separate storage pools?

ZFS supports multiple datasets on one pool, and can deploy VMs as zvols on top of the pool. TrueNAS allows you to deploy ZFS through its web gui.

@CorticalStack

If using something like TrueNAS, how do I manage the dockers for VMs etc. Do I have access to Linux CLI as normal, or…?

TrueNAS lets you manage containers and VMs through a web gui.

@CorticalStack

Easy enough to backup the NAS storage to the Cloud?

Personally I use rclone for this, it allows backups to most cloud storage providers. However it’s a linux CLI tool. TrueNAS may provide a builtin option that may be better for you.

[wertigon]

Well… If you are locked in to the AM4 platform a Ryzen 5500 would serve most use cases just fine, a spare GPU could assist with the first install too.

Here is a PCPartPicker core for a starting point, feel free to modify:

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 5500 6 core 12 thread	$134.00
Motherboard	Gigabyte A520I AC	$142.29
Memory	Corsair Vengeance LPX 2x16GB 3600 MHz CL18	$99.99
Storage	Kingston A2000 250 GB PCIe 3.0 NVME	$44.99
Total		$421.27

Potential upgrades; 5600G for an increased media capability and integrated GPU; RX 550, GTX 1030 or RX 6400 for a low profile GPU. Or run as headless.

Savings, yes but only a few bucks or so before quality goes down the gutter.

[edit]Oh, and for completeness sake, here is the same build with an Intel Core i3 12100 system, slightly lower in spec, but a bit cheaper too:

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	Intel Core i3-12100 4 cores 8 threads	$129.97
Motherboard	ASRock B660M-ITX/ac	$119.99
Memory	Corsair Vengeance LPX 2x16GB 3600 MHz CL18	$99.99
Storage	Kingston A2000 250 GB PCIe 3.0 NVME	$44.99
Total		$394.94

[/edit]

[risk]

i3-12100 gets you quicksync , for when you choose to store/stream movies on it.

Additionally, I’d recommend a pair of newer drives in a mirror which also happen to be larger, 1T drives aren’t really manufactured anymore and you’d do well to avoid SMR drives and drives that were sitting on a warehouse shelf for half a decade.