My intel i7 8700k server has passed away and looking to make my own DIY NAS.
I’m looking for a rack mountable storage system that will serve storage to a mac mini and another server. Ideally a storage that will be a mix of SATA and NVME. I have 10GB switch and NICS for now but will look to upgrade to 100GB in the future so looking to start with the storage server. Wil need the following.
Run proxmox
TrueNas in a VM
Home assistant
Plex
8 SATA HDDs
10GB Nic with future upgrade to 100GB
Icy Dock PCIE 4.0 card for 4 X 4TB nvme (Motherboard needs Bifurcation)
Low TDP as possible (will run 24/7)
If possible UB4/Thunderbolt to connect a Mac mini
Any recommendations, I don’t mind Aliexpress type boards I have been seeing online.
Consider an Asrock Rack AM5 mainboard with AMD EPYC 4004 CPU. ECC RAM optional, consider the price/performance difference for ECC vs non-ECC. SATA via HBA adapter, it’s easier swapping out a mainboard in future (upgrade path!). USB4/TB also via adapter card. (that’s a minimum of 4 PCIe slots, as you’d need one for a GPU as well) Apropos GPU: use a single slot workstation card. It suffices for Flex and leaves your other slots available (and you’ll need them!)
If AM5 doesn’t have enough PCIe slots, consider the full EPYC route, there’s a lot of used 1st/2nd gen EPYC parts on Aliexpress.
My nas is an am4 rig with a raid card in hba mode. Using mdadm raid6 and ext4. NFS for the transport.
If i were using ssds, id probably do RDMA and ZFS instead of my legacy methods. But my hdds physical speed is the cap in my current setup anyways, so i dont see the benefit in converting.
Also: windows vista and newer supports nfs clients. I hear windows rdma support is not as good.