Also tangential to the topic, Wendell actually took a look at the Flashstor mentioned earlier 
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I know this thread is winding down now, but Iâll throw my opinion in for a possible build to do. It isnât really priced on the low end of things, but instead it goes for great performance and very large expandability, more than the other options proposed before by far. The main case will also look nice in a media center.
Case
Power Supply
Motherboard
CPU
RAM
Cooler
OS SSD
drive expansion HBA card
PCI-E adapter
SAS cables
Drive Tower
Price is about $1850 before adding however many hard drives you want to start. Two HDDs can go in the main case, and 8 more can go in the expansion tower that sits off to the side. If you ever want to add more drives down the line you can just stick another HBA card in and another 8 bay tower, which would bring the total up to 18 drives at that point
Software wise you could install Windows or TrueNAS on it, though I would personally do Windows. You could use Storage Spaces, StableBit Drive Pool, or SnapRAID for the hard drive management.
Tip for the wise, when putting together a build, try to add at least part names and cost, makes it so much easier to see what youâre putting together. Here, let me fix that:
Now, for that build, I see plenty of things that I could shave down. 13600k is just a bad buy, not power efficient. AIO Liquid Cooler? You wonât be OC:ing on this. 13600k is waaaay overkill and draws a lot of power when running, too. Why buy case + drive tower + expansion card, PCIe adapter for $700 when something like this exist?
In fact a Ryzen ECC system is not that bad to build around this:
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 5 7600 | $218.61 |
| Motherboard | Asus PRIME B650M-A AX II | $179.99 |
| Storage | Samsung 980 250 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 | $33.20 |
| Power Supply | SeaSonic SSP-300SUG 300W | $84.37 |
| Case | NAS 8-Bay K7 Chassi | $184.99 |
| Memory | Kingston Fury Renegade Pro PnP 16GB 4800MT/s DDR5 ECC Reg CL36 | $90.15 |
| Memory | Kingston Fury Renegade Pro PnP 16GB 4800MT/s DDR5 ECC Reg CL36 | $90.15 |
| Total | $881.46 |
I think that is a better deal overall if you have the need for big storage right now, but feel free to argue Do remember; 32 TB SSDs will come below $1000 within the decade, investing now in SSD NVMe infrastructure is a viable call and one most NAS users might want to invest in.
And please donât take this as me shooting your idea down, I see where you are coming from and the idea has some merit, but everything in a single box is just cheaper and less prone to failure in this instance.
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Thanks for typing the list out.
Ryzen doesnt work with Plex hardware transcoding, only Intel and Nvidia do, and the OP will probably end up using Plex or something like it in the future as he gets more experience with this sort of thing. Ryzen does work with Emby, though for some reason you get very low performance out of its transcoder and you have no HDR transcoding capabilities. I think the tower you picked out also looks really ugly and is not likely to be wanted next to his TV, but of course beauty is subjective and maybe the OP wont mind how that looks. The case I chose is for aesthetics sake while retaining expansion card capability and hard drive space. The AIO is partly because the case is designed for it and the CPU would run really hot with a small low-profile air cooler otherwise, and it keeps the noise down for where the PC will be placed. That was my thought process anyway.
Perhaps this case then instead to have a bit better aesthetics and still get the 8 drive capacity in the one case?
| Part | Model | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Case | AUDHEID 8-Bay NAS Chassis | $229.00 |
I wanted the high level of expandability in the design because I know how these things can grow. My own NAS started with a pair of drives, and has managed to become 47 now, and another 5 going in one of these next weekends. lol
Demonstrably false. It is not optimal but it is also not unusable, just like you âcannotâ run AI on Radeons. You can, it is just much more work (though getting better by the month). Low profile Intel A380s exist in the market for this purpose if you are worried about it though.
Sure, there are quite a few of those. If mITX is a factor and you do not want hot swap my new favorite is probably the Jonsbo N3:
Wait, what the heck are you doing that requires about 832 TB of storage? I am assuming you are buying 16TB drives now and have continually replaced your older drives with newer ones. Because if youâve been hoarding on sub 1TB drives for a long time, well⌠Fewer drives means fewer failures and better reliability, I hope you are aware of this.
If you are still using drives that are ⤠2TB, do yourself a favor and update those to 12TB-20TB drives.
It is, but I still canât find an answer for these NAS cases/solutions. The question is - can I run this WITHOUT NAS requiring to squeeze everything to a pool like space, dictating the need to format drives (lets imagine I want to hotswap drives WITH data) and maintain the possibility to access them without a fuss?
If you donât need redundancy then mergerfs is the easiest thing to use. it combines multiple drives in 1 big pool but it still writes the files out to each drive seperately. (it might be possible to still use ntfs with this)
If the OP is willing to wait, the AMD mini-epyc 8000 series will be released in the next 6 months. The IO chip the epyc chip from a 9000 series cut down to 1/2 to 3/4. So you get 6 ddr5 ecc channels and 96 pcie5 channels. The CPUs run at 2/3 the clock speed, and start at $400 for 8 cores, or $650 for 16 cores.
The ryzen is the sports car,
The epyc 9000 is the semi truck.
The epyc 8000 is the delivery van.
If you go the epyc 8000 route itâs expansion capabilities will last you for years.
I consider the epyc 9000 series processors to not be priced right for the home lab, but I think the epyc 8000 processors are.
Here is an example epyc 9000 series motherboard that is a deep microatx
I would imagine that this still requires a partition table for the whole gang of drives. Swapping out a drive would result to consequencesâŚ
nope, each drive is partitioned seperately. mergerfs just combines them in 1 big pool.
this is my list of disks on my current server. sd a, b and c are separate ext4 drives.
this part of fstab combines them together into 1 mount, and when you write there it will try to put things in the same folder, and spread out the files over multiple hard drives.
(this is the spread of files over 3 different size hard drives.)
Absolutely, especially if you are building a large array, you still have to buy all of the SATA or SAS cables.
While that 4TB drive is no longer available for crazy cheap. You can get a $110 14TB drive, and scale up with much less bulk power and noise than using a ton of smaller drives.
Select only rotational 3.5 inch drives on the site below to see some of the options.
A NAS is really just a computer that is set up to store files and make them accessible over the network. A NAS can be any computer really. A Raspberry Pi, other alternatives to a Pi, a regular desktop computer, a purpose-built piece of hardware, a pre-made and configured PC from various companies (Like Synology).
If you make one out of standard PC parts, you can configure it however you want. Even running a plain old windows OS like any other PC. You can stick a drive in, initialize it and set up sharing on that drive. Then when you connect to that share from anywhere on your network it is available. You can unplug that drive fine, and plug in a new one. As long as you set sharing up on the new one it too can become available. This is honestly how I started my NAS a LONG time ago, and is fine for a starting point if you are uncomfortable with starting off with any other option.
It is a bit cumbersome though once you have more than 1-2 drives you want to share.
One easy option to start with would be keep the Windows OS you want, and install StableBit DrivePool software. You can still keep your individual drives, store data on those drives like they are normal ones, unplug them and plug them into other computers. But DrivePool you can combine as many drives as you want into a single pool of storage, without re-formatting, and still keeping your stored files on the drive outside of the pool. You can set up the share 1 time for the pool itself, and set that storage pool to be available over the network. Then when you unplug a drive it will be removed from the storage pool and you can plug it in to another computer and still access your files that were on that drive before you pooled it, and even some files that are in the pool that were stored entirely on that drive. When you plug a new drive into the computer to replacer the one you just pulled out, all you have to do is open the software, click the add button and it now is part of the pool and adds space to your share âdriveâ. In this manner you never had to set up sharing on each drive you plug in, you just click add or remove from the pool instead, and all your computers or other devices accessing the shared storage never had to be set up to look at some new share point either.
https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Features
https://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=Removing%20a%20Drive%20from%20the%20Pool
When a drive is removed from the pool, StableBit DrivePool will move all of the unprotected pooled files stored on it onto a different drive thatâs part of the pool. StableBit DrivePool will also regenerate every protected file part that is on the disk being removed (unless Duplicate files later was selected). Then, the virtual pool drive shrinks in capacity by the size of the drive that was removed.
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OK, I can see the usefulness of merge fs as long as you have frequent backups, but if all of your drives are local, it can be disastrous.
You are performing backups right?
I have a single large zfs SSD with hourly snapshots and am backing that up to a single large HDD which I spin up daily for the backup, then spin down. The SSD will expire the local snapshots a month to a year after I last backed them up. I may never need to expire the snapshots off of the HDD. I have independent m.2 optane 118gb for virtual memory.
If my main ssd fails, I boot off of the hdd, as it contains an exact duplicate of my sdd to within a day.
2 years ago I spent 3 weeks manually cleaning up all of my data sets and went down from 51 small hard drives to 3TB on an 8tb USB disk. Which I then replicated to 2 other 8tb USB disks. That is much easier to manage long term from my laptop. My weekly laptop backup currently is to an SSD, but I am going to supplement that with an archive array on my server in the future.
This is how i setup all my media files which I donât mind losing. some of the stuff is also backed up on other places.
(i want to store more important information, thatâs why iâm switching to a zfs raidz1 for media and backups. and zfs mirror for documents)
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Interesting. Thanks
I see. I was worried that NAS, and the controller specifically, is build in a manner that you simply must configure it as a storage pool.
It is usually a balance.
On most workstations you prioritize the graphical user interface, with video cards, and a fast cpu and gpu with enough ram to load all of your applications.
On a nas, you get a fast enough processor, ie main line 2ghz+. Enough ram, ie 16gb if it is only going to serve files, and a method to get the data on and off of storage media. It is also a good idea to have a temporary monitor connection so you have some way to configure the bios and perform initial setup and configuration.
After initial deployment you may not reconfigure it for years, except to boot it after extended city wide blackouts.
At this point you may start thinking that you have an idle pc in the closet doing basically nothing, have it perform some minor tasks. To give it more capabilities, give it 32gb of ram instead, install something like âjellyfinâ and run an hdmi cord to your TV. Now it will play the movie it is storing too (provided it is capable). That capable part is tricky, and it may be worth adding a 1 slot gpu (less than $200) as long as you have the available slots. Then you add some home automation⌠throughout that tinkering it still acts as your nas and handles that task without issue.
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It may be from some manufacturers. Just have to look and see. Anything you build yourself can be set up however you want it to be.
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