I am new to LevelOneTechs fourms. I have been following the channel for some time and today I have decided to dare and ask about this here.
I have an old X79 (i7-3930K) system with 64 GB DDR3 RAM and a GTX 1060 or Radeon WX4100(workstation card) or GTX 670 laying around for a while now and I want to build a NAS and Server (along with a few things more if possible).
My main purpose for the NAS (as of now) is to have 1TB backup(google photos, videos from phones and other personal media devices) for me and my family(over the internet from different country). Data saftey is important, ease of backing up photos from mobile phones.
Thinking of getting 2x8TB drives(for now and expand later) so that after 1TB backup each for me and my family I have at least 2 to 4 TB for Work and other VMs(if needed).
Help me with my work footage, multimedia work and live-streaming(Twitch, Youtube). Planning to get a used 10GBe + 2.5GBe or 10GBe + 1GBe switch
Plex (Jellyfin) and similar services
PfSense router (Virtual machine). Can I for now use my existing Netgare D7000 V1 as Access Point and later get a proper Access Point like Ubiquiti later once WiFi 7 comes out
I am a complete novice in terms of servers, NAS or Networking and so please consider this while answering. I am willing to learn and get my hands a little dirty down the lane but at the least, I need something to be up and running.
I have recently upgraded my home ethernet runs to a CAT8 (indeed abolute overkill) hoping that this would help me to work on the files over the LAN instead of having them on my main PC.
I was looking for tutorials on Youtube but there is a piece here and a bit there not not all together as I need.
Please help me understand what I am getting myself into here. Is this possible or is this way too complicated? What all hardware might I need and what parts of the software I may have to dabble in?
Sorry for my dumb over ambitious query and thank you in advance
I will update my query as new info surfaces based on your suggestions and questions. I am open to suggestions.
If you want to learn you likely don’t want to run a bunch of frontends/VMs and have little to no knowledge of how they actually operate (work). Since you’re willing to you should probably look into something that’s well documented and atleast somewhat accurate.
In general I think FreeBSD would be a good starting point, it performs very well in for storage (ZFS integrates very well), networking and is well documented. There’s a good amount of update to date (software) packages around and you can if you want to squeeze out more peformance later on move to ports or build your own repo. You can also later on start utilizing jails and/or VMs if needed but I don’t think that’s a good starting point.
As far as documentation goes I’ve found Gentoo and Arch to provide best information however they’re probably not the easiest distributions to wrap your head around. There’s of course Debian but there’s a lot of old documentation around which can it make a bit confusing especially if you’re not familiar with it.
You can also do something like Proxmox but I’d argue that you get very little insight and when things breaks you’re going to be quite clueless on how to fix X without doing a fresh reinstall.
One very important thing, if you need to start work around (bypass) the provided package system by the OS/distro you’re doing it wrong or using the wrong software. While it may work initially it’ll quickly become a pain and hard to maintain between updates/upgrades.
I was wondering what hardware I might need apart from a Switch and HDDs to get this thing to start. If I know what I have to invest, I can plan my finances based on it.
Does FreeBSD or others allow me to have my NAS up and running with my basic requirements like Google Photos backed up (automatically) and let me work off of it?
I was wondering how difficult is a system to run TrueNAS or FreeNAS or something like that, I keep seeing Youtube videos from LevelOneTech and other channels recommending these for NAS and it feels like there are more guides on Youtube regarding setting these things up than the other ones you have mentioned.
FreeBSD or TrueNAS or other ones you suggested, how hard would it be to start with these and then extend into what I was aiming for? Is it like an additive process or do I end up having to start over once I decide to get other things included?
Well, depends on how hard you want to work for it. Should be possible but you might need to write a custom script.
I find most DIY NAS based on hardware pre 2018 to have a way too big idle power draw, so you will essentially run your computer on a 50-60W cycle compared to maybe 20W with an AM4 system, depending on your setup ofc.
Those extra 30-40W becomes an extra 22-29 kWh per month, which may or may not be a problem depending on your current power bill.
You need to find something that supports Google Photos and rclone seems to do that, I haven’t used it myself so I don’t know much about and it’s in ports/packages.
For file sharing with Windows you normally use Samba and there are a ton of tutorials out there about it. For other systems NFS is common and that’s covered in FreeBSD’s Handbook.
Start with one project and once its done proceed to the next, don’t do multiple at the same time.
Thank you for your reply/feedback. Electricity bill is going to be a problem in Australia
Just wondering… Is it any good in terms of power, ease of use or any similar benefits getting a “Dell R910 4U Rack Server, 4X10 Core 160GB RAM”
I was just browsing FB Marketplace and found this for AUD$300. So, was curious and asked.
I am not considering starting all the projects at once… I was planning on getting a Good NAS setup up and running and then making the system support something like Jellyfin, pfSense (since there is still time for WiFi 7 to come out) something like that.
So, would you suggest I go with FreeBSD or any other like TrueNAS?
For this system, optionally you can throw in your 1060 here, for hardware encoded media. It is possible to get below $500 for this with a cheaper PSU, too. Idle power would draw < 30W and max power is somewhere around 300W, or 500W with an RX 7600 or your GTX 1060. This NAS system will only support 10 drives, but for home use that is already a ton of storage². The 13100 is well within specs to handle all your NAS capabilities with ease, and you could downgrade to a 13100F + 32 GB RAM + cheaper PSU if you want to go below $500. I wouldn’t, but the option is there.
The 7900 runs at 65W, has 12 cores / 24 threads to do virtualisation in, and is awesome in general. Coupled with 64 GB, it should be more than what you need for experimentation.
As a final note, this is just how I would do things, if I were starting from scratch, today. Think of it not as an end goal, but as a starting point. There are many more ways to skin this bear
Footnotes:
¹ I make the assmption here that these two servers will be non-critical, e.g. them going offline is not going to cause any significant physical, material or economical harm, even though it will be an annoyance.
² For home use I find it very unlikely you will use above 8 x 22TB or even 8 x 16TB storage. Even with Raid6, that is 96 TB of usable storage. You would need a Blue Ray collection of around 3 000 titles before it starts to fill up properly.
If power consumption is a concern you basically need to sit down and think about the priorities. In most cases anything that requires a noticable amount of processing power (encoding video for streaming etc) will use quite a bit more power than “just” being a NAS.
As far as Samba goes, the only thing you “need” to care about is AES-NI support which pretty much any recent CPU supports. While there is work being done on getting better multi-threading utilization fast single core speed helps especially when you’re starting to look at 2.5Gbit and more.
Regarding Intel or AMD either is fine however AVX512 can be useful if you’re going to do encoding. Intel QuickSync is in general the best option if you want to use hardware acceleration which obviously isn’t going to be available on AMD unless you pair it with an ARC GPU. Do have in mind that bleeding edge hardware especially graphics takes a while to mature and right now support for both ARC and later revisions of integrated Intel graphics is in alpha stage at best if you plan to utilize it for encoding. If you go for Intel you probably want to go for one with only one type of cores for the sake of simplicity and consistent performance.
Networking, get Intel below 5Gbit otherwise consider Chelsio (preferred) or Intel. You might also want to look at Broadcom based NICs.
For a plain NAS you can get by with 8Gb, you probably want at least 16Gb however if you’re going to start adding services and possibly VMs later on. Depending on how much you value your data you might want to consider ECC.
As far as motherboards goes I tend to favour Asus and MSI but that’s up to you, I’ve seen ASRock AM5 boards being a bit quirky on non Windows platforms so that wouldn’t be my first choice personally.
No strong optinions about SSDs as pretty much anything with some kind of cache will do just fine. I personally like Curcial P5 Plus-series because they just work, WD SN770 are probably also fine and Samsung 970 Evo Plus if you want something cheaper (which seems to peform better than 980 in general).
If you need more SATA slots, ASM1166 based card will likely do fine but you wont win any performance benchmarks with it otherwise go for a LSI HBA that’s at least 12GB/s as the older ones are getting very old and are EoL.
