Ok I’m 100% sure there will be this information somewhere here or on the internet. But I can’t find it. Most likely because I’m shit at searching now compared to 10 years ago. I’m also a tech noob. I’ve learnt some things but its very patchy.
I’m looking to create my own NAS. My use case is storing surveillance footage. I may look at seeing if I can do something with alerts if I can work out how to do all that. We live in an ok area, but the work ute does have quite a bit of pest control gear that I’d like to have monitored at night plus the front door.
With this being the case, I am guessing this is a brief overview
1: NAS running ZFS (because who says jumping into the deep end as a noob) with 6 2tb HDD, from what I’ve read most likely in Raidz1.
2: Ethernet cord running to my router (I will be making my own at some point over the next few months)
3: My own computer hooked up to the router via Ethernet that I will be able to see all the surveillance footage via the network to start with.
So with the above being what I’m assuming will happen,
CPU: I have no idea if you ‘need’ high core count for more storage oriented NAS. I can’t see if you even need high clock speed. I was going to buy basically a 12100 and use the iGPU. I can’t find any reason that I would need anything more? Basically if all I’ll be needing is transferring files over the network, does this scale with core count? clock speed? IPC?
Motherboard: The only thing I assume I’ll need to look for is how many PCIE lanes I can access. If I have enough for a HBA card to connect all the HDD, then a high transfer speed ethernet port. I don’t think there’s anything else I need? Based on this, I could not see if I could run a relatively basic motherboard, run the HBA card in the main PCIE slot, 10gb Ethernet port from the m.2 slot. OS from a regular Sata SDD. Do i need to look for anything else in a motherboard? As far as i could research, basically its just PCIE lanes, and because I’m not running hardware raid ( as in the chipsets that allow you to run your HDD in raid 0 thourgh raid 10) it doesnt really matter the chipset. So I could run some bog standard motherboard.
Is there anything else that I am missing? I assume gunning for just really low power options will be fine? I tried to go down the rabbit hole of getting a server motherboard, there are a few on FB marketplace, x99 motherboards with Xeon 269x CPU’s for 200 bucks ish. But outside of ECC, I can’t see if there is anything else they give?
If someone can help that would be great. I know I’m definitely not the first to ask. But outside of just buying hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of parts and just seeing what happens, I’d prefer to ask or research. Research I feel like is hitting a brick wall.
Thanks