I’m building my first NAS and my budget is around $1300 for everything including drives.
FD Node 304 (6xHDD + 2xSSD)
Gigabyte B450 I AORUS PRO WIFI
Ryzen 3 3100
Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 16 GB 3200MHz CL16
2 x 8TB Ironwolf Pro
My biggest question is - would it be better to wait after Zen3 products hits the market and hope for Zen2 discounts?
Second question is about PSU wattage. I looked for some low power models and most of them either looks like a turd or cost more than motherboard or CPU (the decent ones). Are there any recommended models for that usecase?
If you are in the price range of the Ryzen 3 3100 then it probably doesn’t make sense to wait. The new Zen 3 chips are not in that price range, so I’d be surprised if we see discounting on the Ryzen 3 line anytime soon. Not to mention that the 3300X is basically still vaporware at this point.
On the PSU, I’ve had this trouble as well. The lower-wattage PSUs generally don’t have good 80 Plus ratings. Most of my servers are at least a 350W if not more just so I can get something that I know will be good quality. The PSU market as a whole has been hit pretty hard this year so I don’t really expect any good deals there unfortunately.
On the PSU, I was going for quiet on mine and not extra-low power. I used a 500W EVGA (I think, not going to open it up and look) with the fan shutoff. So in normal situations it runs silent.
Anyway, do you really save that many watts going for a small PSU?
PSU efficiency climbs rapidly in the first 20% or so of the usage range. You can sometimes get 30% better efficiency or more if you size the PSU correctly for your use case. It’s not necessarily a deal breaker, but it does make a difference over time.
This kind of application is where I’d like to see some real uptake with the new ATX12VO standard. It greatly improves power efficiency at very low usage levels, which is excellent for low utilization systems.
This is A LOT of hardware just for NAS. Do you have an idea of what you want for it to do (besides serving files over various protocols)?
I love building things too, at the same time along with my gaming/work PCs I do use off the shelf NAS system that are file servers . I take backup to it (Veeam), i store media collection on it. I sync it with the google cloud (backup and sync). all handled just fine with hardware consuming very little power
Thanks, I had that feeling, but wasn’t sure. I think I’ll wait nonetheless.
Oh yes. Second point would be automating syncing and backups between various machines - either with rsync or syncthing. At this point I’m not sure if I’ll go with RAID for hardware config.
Next I need good automation tools for managing my work stuff - image/video files in very different formats between 1-40GB.
Other purpose woud be to serve as HTPC/gaming machine, but that has much lower priority than NAS.
And the last thing I was thinking about was to deploy Windows VM for legacy games and software, but that is distant future.
Thank you @NukeDukem - it is a lot of very different use cases. Some of which are contradictory (NAS vs gaming machine). Ultimately , these are your decisions (and your consequences).
I was in similar positions before ,building my own ‘servers’, then Windows Home Server and its iterations, then evolving to some conclusions for me
I want a tool for a job (server is a server, workstation/gaming PC is a gaming PC, NAS is a NAS).
trying to do too many things leads to being ‘master of none’. NAS with too high power consumption and useless capacity, under-powered workstation, etc. So now I prefer to separate
single point of failure leads to more painful failure. one is none, two is one, three is right for me (in terms of copies of data that exists).
So i bought NAS to be NAS and nothing else - simple device optimized for what it does. I went with QNAP 332X few years ago, I am sure there are other choices. Picked that one for 10G built in, both HDD and M2 SSD capability, support from vendor +security patches.
out of remaining money I then built workstation for myself to do what i want to do (i.e. game, process videos, etc) put in cheap ($25 off e-bay) connect x3 SFP+ card, put a $90 brocade 10G switch in between and went to business.
my workstation (among other things) backs itself to NAS
NAS has USB backup included and important things sync to cloud.
if I want power - I use my workstation. If I finished gaming, that PC turns off.
NAS stays on and does not depend on what else I doing