So at the moment I am using an old qnap 212 with two 4 tb wd reds and am running twonky. Twonky continually loses its directory structure so whenever I want to use it I have to mount the media dir.
I am planning to build a home nas/ media server for our house.
3 three computers we have at the moment are a asus built ryzen 5 5600 with a rtx 3060, 32 gig ram.
An old dell xps i7 4770 with an rtx 570 with 16 gig ram.
A very old imac lol.
What I was planning to do for a build is the following. Canadian prices.
ryzen 5 5600 g $179.99
X570 AORUS ELITE WIFI $239.99
as its the only board that seems to support raid 5
Corsair CV Series CV550 - 550Watt 80 Plus Bronze Certified Power Supply - Black $29.95
Cooler Master N200 microATX Tower Computer Case (NSE-200-KKN1) $64.99
I am planning to add 2 more 4TB wd reds to have 16gig in raid 5
I have a 128 gb samsung ssd for the OS
I have a single stick of 16gb pc4 3200AA ram I was going to use as memory.
Internet currently is cable 300 / 50 as we have no fiber in our community yet.
Planning to use truenas or something for the OS.
Have movies and family pictures on the qnap now that i want to save as well as other media.
I am looking for suggestions on this. Any help would be appreciated.
I assume that you intend your new NAS to run 24/7 for easy availability, right?
If so, I would recommend looking at the power consumption of the build, especially the power consumption at idle. This soft requirement is easily overlooked and hard to correct after the fact.
The first item on your list that doesn’t seem to be the ideal choice would be the motherboard.
In 2023, there is no reason to use motherboard RAID (look for Wendel’s video on this topic). TrueNAS, the OS you indicated, will easily take care of this requirement (using the ZFS file system) and much better than the mobo ever could.
Also, the 570X chipset is known to be power hungry at idle. All the features come with a signficant power budget.
I recommend you look for a A520 or B550 motherboard. Also, mATX motherboards often seem to be designed with power savings in mind. My 24/7 computer runs a AMD 5700G on a ASUS TUF Gaming B550 mATX mobo. This runs 40W lower at idle than my workstation based on AMD 5900X+ASUS Pro 570X WS.
Consider future upgrade paths when selecting your mobo. Does it have enough SATA ports allowing you to add future HDDs? Does it have NVMe ports to support drives for a performance boost (check this thread for more info )? Does it have PCIe slots and configuration that allow for future expansion into either more storage (NVMe or SAS card) or a network upgrade (10gib)?
Second, I’d question your selection of CPU.
The equivalent desktop CPU (AMD 5600X) does not sip (noticeably) more power at idle, but offers significant additional performance potential. The mobile version only supports PCIe Gen3 and RAM up to DDR4-3200 speeds, while the desktop version supports PCIe Gen4, DDR4-3600, and is generally unlocked for better fine tuning.
OTOH, if you’re set on the mobile version of the CPU, you may be able to save a few bucks looking at previous gen motherboards, that don’t support PCIe Gen4.
Storage:
You expressed your intention to add 2 more 4TB HDDs for a total of 4 in a RAID5 configuration. I want to point out that in RAID 5 the capacity of one HDD is consumed with parity data, meaning from the 16TB of raw capacity only 12TB will be available for storage. This may look like a significant upgrade based on your current usage.
I think the sweet spot on HDD prices ($/TB storage) has moved on to 8TB drives or higher. Consider adding larger drives. ZFS allows running your drives in a striped mirror configuration (equivalent to a RAID10) with your existing drives.
Apps:
You mention Twonky. TrueNAS provides a nice setup to run many apps on your NAS (in VMs or containers). Consider upgrading Twonky to a more modern app. Look for Jellyfin or Plex or Emby or even a simple miniDNLA in a Linux container. If you find more apps to be useful (PiHole, etc.) you may wish you’d have gone with a more powerful CPU (e.g. 5800X). Just sayin’.
You didn’t mention RAM in your setup. I’d recommend getting memory at the fastest supported speed for your CPU (DDR4-3200 or DDR4-3600 see above). The reason is that DDR4 prices are pretty low right now and upgrading a slower set of sticks means replacement or leaving performance on the table.
btw. If really the main reason for upgrading is the frustration around Twonky, there is probably a much cheaper software fix for that. Let us know if you would like help with that.
please never use motherboard raid, linux md or zfs is a far superior choice in 2023
i use an i5-12600 in a ddr4 mainboard as a home server and it’s been fantastic. all p-cores, and you don’t need to worry about taking up a pcie slot with a video card to get display on the machine if you need to
Also one thing you might want to think about… It’s 2023. 4TB drives are not a whole lot of capacity for spinning rust anymore, and starting to become the norm for SSD drives.
On the market today, cheapest 4TB SSD I can find is roughly $200 with the Crucial P3 NVMe coming in at $250. Equivalent 7200 WD Red Pro drives offers 12TB for $219, 14 TB for $269 and 16 TB for $279. NVMe and SSD is rapidly overtaking harddrives which means SSD for bulk storage is starting to make real sense now for many - still more of a high end thing but getting to midrange buyers. 2TB NVMe SSD for $99 also exist.
As of right now, if you are buying a couple of new drives… My advice is to stretch that budget to at least 8 TB spinners if not more. And do consider SSDs.
I hear exactly what you are saying and agree with you %100 if I was on the south side of the 59th parallel.
Up here the cheapest 4 tb ssd I can find is 309 on sale so that would be $1240 plus tax.
8tb drives are $220 so that’s $880 plus tax.
2 more 4tb drives Are $198 plus tax.
Right now I have 2 4 tb drives mirrored so I have less than 4 tb of storage.
by spending $200.00 Ill have close to 12 TB of storage.
The market and a vandalized rental property has cost me close to $140,000.00 this year. lol
I am trying to save money by doing a somewhat frugal upgrade.
I agree that the iGPU is potentially a challenge (and a big win for the 7k series CPUs).
TrueNAS offers installation via serial port (most mobos have a header, but are no longer equipped with a serial port), but I have not tried it.
My solution was to pick up a cheap graphics card that fits into a 1x PCIe slot. All my mobos have them and this is the first use I had for those slots.
I may have bought the last available one in North America, though
I kicked myself when I realized that the 5700G doesn’t do PCIe Gen4 and is limited in memory bandwidth. Also, the mobile CPUs reserve 8 PCIe lanes for the iGPU, leaving only 8 lanes for the PCIe slots.
I feel that without those features the gap between AM4 and AM5 is too wide.
That said, the 5700G runs pretty well as an upgrade to a core 6500.
I need to point out that my rig has higher performance requirements that are not relevant to your build, but benefit significantly from the extra PCIe bandwidth (40TB HDD + 2x16TB NVMe storage, 10+GB network).
Roughly $550 with the same PSU and case above, but puts you in a much better spot. Your decision though! Don’t cheap out too much - when you are shaving off dollars to save pennies, you’re not doing yourself any favors.
You might also just want to take the 5600 system you already got and upgrade to a new build, and retire the old one for NAS duty a year or two in advance. But it all comes down to pricing. And A520 boards come with little downsides for the 5600G, so could be a good way to save a few more dollars.
Motherboard - Gigabyte B650M DS3H $155 here $200
CPU - Ryzen 5 7600 $229 here $309
Memory - Patriot Viper Black 16 GB DDR5-5200 CL36 $65 Here $92.99
$609 for these 3 parts. May not be a bad Idea but then ill use my 6600x and asus motherboard for the new build and put this in a new computer for me. Will need to think about it. Had to put $2200.00 into my truck today.
