Starting a NAS journey

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Don’t quite know if this is the right category since my question overlaps with a few.

I’ve been spending the last few days cleaning and organizing my parent’s place and have dug out quite the collection of music and video disks that they want to throw away. I know them and I know that they will be disappointed when they no longer have access to their movies and netflix/disney decides to no longer stream them so I’m looking for a way to digitize and store these. Also we need a good way to do PC backups and I’m hoping to clear that issue up as well with this.

I currently have 2 short choices that I don’t quite like and the build my own option.

  1. Synology 4-bay DS923+
  2. Qnap TS-462-4G also 4 bay
  3. DIY (not sure on hardware yet.)

I have a few requirements for this project so I’ll start with the hard limits. I have a $500-550 budget before storage media. It needs to take up no more desk footprint than a UDM pro, however I would prefer to stick to about the footprint of the Synology NAS. I need to have no less than 4 drive bays with room for at least 1 NVME drive.

For something a bit more flexible. I would like 10Gb networking. Either through an expansion card or an integrated port. I would like to have backup nics. And I would like more than 4 bays if possible. Some sort of graphics processor would be nice for PLEX as well. TrueNas would be a plus since I already know that OS.

I have some used hardware but I dont know if PLEX/Jellyfin will be able to use a Tesla M40 for anything and I dont know if I want a build large enough to fit that card.

I don’t need or even really want remote access like what is offered by QNAP and Synology since access from outside my network will be accomplished via Unifi’s VPN or something running on the NAS like TailScale or cloudflare tunnels.

And advice on hardware for DIY or if I should grab a pre-built NAS like the two listed above or a different option would be appreciated.

EDIT for any new comments to clear up a little bit of confusion:

Size, as long as it could sit on top of the UDM its fine, height is not really a factor (at least practically but I dont want to get a full sized tower here, ITX preferred.)

The 10g NIC, this does not need to be included in the budget. Esp since the Synology or Qnap expansion card is not included for ~$550

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Qnap has a horrible software, if you get it replace the software before putting any data on it with TrueNAS Scale or Proxmox or something.

For the drives, avoid WD.

Cheers

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Let’s see… $500-ish with a low footprint?

This greatly depends on your capacity needs, but the Asustor Flashstor 6 bay all SSD NAS comes with a dual 2.5 GbE. If you can live with a low capacity ( 20TB or below) a couple of years, this might be a good option, seeing as 4TB NVMe SSDs are reaching ~$150 now (e.g. $900-$1100 in drives for a redundant 20TB solution).

As for a DIY option, only thing I can think of that beats the Flashstor in anything is a step up to more professional needs, but then we are talking ECC and $1.3k, at the very least.

I’ll throw in two DIY options; One cheap, one expensive. First, the more expensive DIY build:

El Cheapo

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 5 5600G $124.00
Motherboard Gigabyte B550I AORUS PRO AX $159.99
Memory TEAMGROUP T-Force Zeus 2x16 GB DDR4-3200 CL16 $56.99
Storage Samsung 980 250 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 $45.66
Case Jonsbo N1 $130.00
Power Supply Lian Li SP 750W $110.00
Total $626.64

Not much to say, here. It is about as cheap as you can get away with. It is possible to squeeze the stone of a few more drops of blood, I assume, but not very much. Should do a decent job with the base, but the lack of ECC support and other fun features makes me hesitate to recommend it over:

El Modesto

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 5 7600 $229.00
Motherboard Asus PRIME B650M-A AX II $179.99
Memory Patriot Viper Venom 2x8 GB DDR5-5200 CL36 $62.99
Storage Samsung 980 250 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 $45.66
Video Card PowerColor Fighter Radeon RX 6600 $189.99
Case Fractal Design Node 804 MicroATX $136.98
Power Supply Thermaltake Toughpower GX2 600W $59.99
Total $904.60

This system may seem humble but looks are deceiving. Top notch, can even support ECC RAM, and this system should have no problem supporting 10 concurrent 8k Plex streams with transcoding. Cost is unfortunately a bit on the pricey side, as is the physical space, but I doubt you can find anything better right now in consumer space land. Intel also has a similar build that draws quite a bit more power for basically the same money right now.

Hope that helped!

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I layed out the budget and requirements.

That’s gonna be tough for all the bellow.

Dual 10G <$550 ain’t gonna happen. Stick with single 2.5 Gbps. Why do you even need dual NICs for a home server anyway (particularly if you use 10G Ethernet, that uses more power)? I mean, it’s all fine to have redundancy and a lot of bandwidth, but for a home setup, it’s kind of a waste. Again, you can have such a setup if you want, but not at this budget.

If you want a compact form-factor and cheap, you’ll need to go with a DIY with 2.5" or NVME drives. A 1U UDM Pro would barely be able to hold 4x 3.5" disks, let alone more than 4. But the SFF will be pricier.

Personally, I’d say to go for an Odroid H3 with a Type 1 case (with 2x 3.5" drives), but that doesn’t fit your requirements (I think it should be fine from what you divulged thus far, but not sure if you have other plans for this build besides a media server and not sure what capacities you’re looking to achieve).

You could get a ZimaBlade and something like a StarTech, IcyDock or Chieftec (in nor particular order) 4x or 8x 2.5" hot-swap bay (in 5.25" or dual 5.25" form-factor) + a SATA or SAS card and it would realistically fit in 1U, but it would be jank (made out of parts and you’d need a tray to rack mount it, or just slap it on top of your UDM Pro). The single 5.25" to 4x 2.5" would do the trick.

The ZimaBlade is $65. You can passthrough the iGPU to a container. Add a cheap card to it, RAM, then grab the bay and there’s your build, probably at half the cost. The onboard is gigabit. But you don’t have a slot for NVME.

If you don’t mind going ITX, buy an iStarUSA or Rosewill 1U case and slap the 2.5" drives inside wherever you can find space for it (it’ll be a loud build). Don’t go anything past a Ryzen 3400G (and even with that, cooling will likely be a problem). If you want less noise, you need to pay a premium for something like a Streacom FC5 (half the budget, lmao).

A celeron j3455’s iGPU should give you at least 2 streams at 1080p, maybe one at 1080 and another at 720, but I think it should be capable of dual 1080p transcoding. Of course, adding a dGPU is a plus, but pretty much optional.

I’m sorry, but there’s no way I can do a build at your specs for <$500 that’ll use very little space. There’s 4 restrictions of which you can only pick 2 or 3.

  • compact
  • cheap
  • 10G dual NIC
  • more than 2x 3.5" drives (I know you said 4, but if you kept it at 2, the build would’ve been easier for the budget)

I can only assume that the budget is the only thing you can’t really compromise on. I’d say give up 10G and 4 drives and stick to an Odroid H3 with type 1 (3.5" drives) or type 3 (2.5" drives), The h3 has dual 2.5Gbps Ethernet (although a single one should be more than enough).

Dual 10 to 22TB spinning rust, or dual 8TB SSDs (in RAID1, where you’d only get redundancy and better read speeds) should be plenty for a small music and movie collection (do your parents really have a garage full of discs and dvds? I find it hard to fathom that they’d be able to fill even the SSDs up - assuming you’d have only 4k blurays and your average size would be 40gb, you’d need at least 200 movies to fill that up and that’s on the very exaggerated size, I think most people’s collections consist of DVDs).

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Confusing does not quite describe the thing…

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I orderd a realy cheap 2.5 gb managed switch with 2 sfp ports for 10 gbe connection of AliExpress. I want to make my wan faster and a bit more dangerous (whooo china)

Next year when it arive’s i can tell you more on how it is. but for a nas 10gbe network is nice

https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005006278753506.html

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I guess I should have been more specific on that… I need a way to add 10G, the NIC is not included in the budget…

the height doesn’t matter, just the footprint. It could be 6-8U for all I care, just needs to be roughly the footprint of the UDM

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That case is nearly perfect from your DIY options. Ill probably make some changes to the build but that’s basically the missing piece I needed. Ill have to run the flashstor by the folks to see if everything fits in budget with that and I’m honestly leaning towards it but the Node 804 seems to cover everything I think I need at this point.

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https://forum.level1techs.com/t/build-log-silent-night-my-own-take-on-quiet-and-power-efficient-nas/

Even if you’re not looking for something power efficient you can get all the basic parts I choose, motherboard + CPU, RAM, PSU and case below 500$ and be on a way better machine platform compared to the ones offered by Synology and Qnap.

10Gbit ethernet is out of the question at this budget and even if the Synology says it can support it, it’s using a PCIe 3.0x2 to connect it to so it’s never gonna reach the full 10Gbit speed. So even with a 10Gbit card you’re only gonna see 2.5Gbit speed tops.

Depending on how many concurrent transcoding streams you need to handle a GPU might be needed. If you know some family members don’t have a stupid low internet cap just set their home devices to dicret playback and use only transcoding for on the streaming. That way you’re gonna be able to get away with an iGPU, like the one in the Intel N100, for two simultaneous transcoding and room for at least a couple more direct streams.

Unless you go for socketed CPUs there aren’t decent options for low power Intel N CPUs on ITX boards. Maybe you could try to hack something together like I did.

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Any particular reasons why avoid them?

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Re Qnap SW: they add too many features that they can not implement securely. So you have to keep updating, but that breaks software every now and then especially regarding containers.

Their storage is some magic thing build around ext4 that somehow implements snapshots. Day to day I notice that mounting the drives takes 20-25 minutes

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That is incorrect. PCIe 3.0 x2 is ~1.9GB of bandwidth, while 10GbE is only 1.25GB theoretical. Big B on the PCIe, little b on the ethernet. But yes, it’s around $70-100 added to the cost to buy a used 10GbE NIC for Synology

My reply is late, but having used QNAP and Synology both my personal preference will always be Synology. But $600 is only going to get you 4-bays at this stage, unless you pick up a used 8-bay off ebay or elsewhere. Used Synology units can be pretty good, but there is no guarantee how long they will see DSM updates past five years. I also strongly recommend against used DSxx15 year Synology gear due to defective Intel Atom chips and a board design flaw on some models. DSxx18 year onwards is fine.

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My bad, I’ve had a little bit of a blackout when doing the math on it. Didn’t mean to spread misinformation like that!

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Haha, don’t worry about it! I can’t even remember the bandwidth specs for anything despite having to use them regularly, always falling back to google. It’s unfortunate they didn’t develop better shorthand notation than B vs b for bandwidth stuff.

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