Want to build a Home NAS for storage, editing, and on the go access

PeanutPlays · January 29, 2023, 2:10am

Hello Everyone!

So I’m wanting to build a little NAS setup to help get some of the drives out of my current tower, and make the storage more accessible from home and afar.

Here’s my current setup:

CPU: i7-11700K
COOLER: Corsair H115i Elite Capellix CLWC
GPU: RTX 3080
RAM: 64GB of GSkill Trident Neo
MOBO: Asus Z590-E
CASE: Corsair 750D Full ATX Tower
PSU: Corsair HX1000
SATA EXPANSION: 2x Ziyituod PCIe SATA Cards (1 unplugged ATM)
DRIVES:
C: 1TB Samsung 970 PRO M.2 (Windows, Apps, some games)
D: 240GB Kingston SH103S3240G SSD (Currently Empty)
E: 1TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD (“Junk Drawer” Some videos, apps, copies, recordings)
F: 240GB Kingston SH103S3240G SSD (Gaming)
G: 6TB WD60EZAZ HDD (Vault for uncomplete video edits) unplugged
H: 6TB WD60EZAZ HDD (Assorted Backups) unplugged
I: 2TB WD20EZRX HDD (All my photos, music, personal records, PDFs, movies, and Primary work folder)
J: 2TB WD20EZRX HDD (Recording Storage)
K: 2TB WD20EZRX HDD (Currently Empty)
L: 6TB WD60EZAZ HDD (Vault for completed video edits)
M: 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 (Stream Assets, Editing Assets, Live Recording, Current IRL Work Projects)
N: 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 (Game Libraries, Live Editing)

I want G, H, I, J, K, and L out of this tower. D and F can go as well. (I can move F’s stuff to N.) I’m not against RAID arraying these drives, but I am going to have to shuffle data off of them to do that. (Or at least I assume your drives need to be empty before putting them in an array.)

-I use AutoCAD and Vectorworks for a living, so when I’m working on any drawings they need to be on one of the SSDs. But once I’m done, they can go in the vault somewhere.
-Obviously the games need to stay on SSDs.
-I enjoy video editing. (Premiere Pro and After Effects) All of my footage is 1080p, and a lot of the Premiere Pro projects source video from multiple files. I try to keep everything on one of the 970’s when I’m working, but for some videos I need stuff buried in one of the 6TB vault drives. I don’t want to move a 100GB video file just to get 8 seconds of footage, but I also don’t want to spend half a day waiting for that snippet to spin up.
-There are no RAID arrays amongst any of this. I know that’s dumb, that’s why I’m here, lol.
-I have a Netgear Nighthawk RAX50 router and my own Arris SURFboard SB6183 modem. 350 down/ 50 up plan.

Right now, all of this is in one box. Which means I can’t send any of my movies, music, or TV shows to my TV’s, my phone, tablet, etc. (Well, I could. But I’m not leaving this tower powered up all the time.) It also means that when I’m on the road, I don’t have access to any of this data. It’s not infrequent that I could have an easier day if I could get to an old show drawing. (My WORK folder is ~525GBs right now. Not exactly portable.) It would be nice to have my laptop sync up to my work folder, and I’d like to be able to watch the LOTR appendices videos without having to carry a whole other drive around in my backpack. It would also be great to pull and dump from my video editing folders when not at home.

Another growing concern for me is the age of some of these drives. D, F, I, and J are all in the neighborhood of a decade old I think. And I has been heavily used that entire time.

Budget for new build: Not much. But I’ve got a lot of misc hardware laying around, so let’s start there.
MOBOs
ASRock Z-270 Gaming-ITX/ac
Gigabyte Z270X-Gaming 5
ASrock Z97 Extreme6
CPUs
i5-4430
i5-7400
RAMs
Corsair Vengeance LED DDR4 2666 16GB (2x8GB)
Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR4 3000 32GB (2x16GB)
DRIVES
120GB Corsair MP500
250GB Crucial MX200
1TB Samsung 980 M.2 (4x)
PSUs
Corsair CX450M
Corsair CX750M
Corsair RM750i
CASEs
I have 4 Regular ATX Tower cases available
COOLING
There are a couple of Corsair closed loop coolers floating around.
GPUs
XFX R9-270X 2GB
XFX R9-390P 8GB
I have plenty of fans and screws and all that sort of stuff as well.
The two SATA Expansion cards can move into this box as well.

Notes:
-I’m assuming I need a GPU if I want to be able to watch videos from this box, correct?
-I am not good with softwares. The last time I looked at doing this, I got buried in a list of like 15 softwares and needing all these Linux console commands, and a whole bunch of other magic tricks and it made my brain blue screen. I’m willing to learn, but there are days where I struggle to get windows to update itself. If there’s paid softwares that make this more user friendly, I’m all for it.
-I’m not against spending money where needed, but I’m not looking to drop a house payment on this if at all possible.
-This needs to be fairly secure. Maybe not Fort Knox with tanks secure, but I obviously don’t want this to be a walmart.

I’m all ears for any help, guides, pointers, suggestions, etc.
Thanks everyone!

wendell · January 30, 2023, 4:50pm

Overall, reading your post, you have a lot of reading to do. Unraid might be a good fit for you, but truenas scale would probably be my choice because of easier access to ZFS. Unraid doesn’t do zfs out of the box, though it can with some fiddling, but you’d have to do some reading and tinkering.

The random hardware you have laying around is basically fine. You could use 4x m.2 samsung 980s in a raidz1 pool and any one of them could die… and it would be very fast.

Though with the motherboards you have idk if they provide 4x not-bottlenecked m.2 without looking at it. The itx probably only has 1 or 2 m.2 slots.

the i5 7400 would be fine for this. it is a nice to have error correcting memory in your home server, but it doesnt matter.

ram doesn’t really matter a ton in this scenario but if you use the 32gb kit more will be cached into ram, and that will overall feel faster.

try not to have your main nas client and the nas itself be wireless. hard wired is worth the headache and any cabling insanity.

ZFS is the best file system in these kinds of scenarios. Raidz2 will tolerate 2 failures but generally you want matched drive.

it makes sense to get another 6tb drive, maybe, and then have a 4 drive raidz1 pool with 3*6tb usable space. idk I’d bother with the 2tb drives and you probably start to run into edge cases with “is there enough sata ports” for one or two of those sata ssds plus drives.

box plays video just fine. its transcoding a high res file to lower res on the fly that you’re thinking of? in that case that’s something software like plex media server does and you should see if your gpus work for that. I bet they don’t so you could probably use your cpus igpu instead of a discreet gpu. if the 270x is supported for transcoding, then great, but as that is a relatively recent thing you’re more likely to get trancoding from the 7000 series cpu’s igpu… but again I think intel was somewhat slow to add that and I’d have to look up if the 7000 series igpu supports h264 transcoding etc. on modern cpus it is called quick assist but I doubt its that

unraid is more newb friendly but truenas is more robust and better for error recovery. zfs, a filesystem for doing what you want to do, is unmatched in the world in how bulletproof it is… certainly in the free/cheap category.

either one of those system has a robust password/user system

jode · January 30, 2023, 5:46pm

Both H.264 (also AVC) encoding and decoding is supported.

PeanutPlays · January 31, 2023, 10:42pm

Thank you for reading through that novel!

Copy that, I’ll start reading and youtubing that.

Just listed those since I was naming everything else in the house. Anything in this house with an ethernet port gets a cable. Wireless can suck it!

That’s easy enough. And it’ll force me to get away from the aging drives any who.

Duly noted on that Jode!

Again, thank you both for your help here. I guess I’ll report back when I’ve got this thing put together!

PeanutPlays · February 25, 2023, 9:58pm

Well, it’s all built!

Ended up with a different mobo and cpu after a day of fighting with old stuff, but grabbed the 4th 6TB drive and an ASUS Hyper M.2 x16. For the sake of getting the party started, I went ahead and RaidZ1’d the HDDs and got all my data moved onto them.

I then set off tinkering with the M.2 card only to learn I needed a mobo that could bifurcate to 4/4/4/4, which this one does not. So before having to redo a bunch of work, I decided to see how the server handled me trying to edit straight off the HDDs.

Now, I’ve been in aa fisticuffs with Premiere Pro for quite some time now because of how much it hates variable frame rate footage. (Normally it manifests as having a long pause before starting playback, then the video freezing 5 seconds in and having a runaway timeline. And scrubbing was its own nightmare.) I’ve rarely had the time or the space to run it through something to make it constant frame rate. Proxies weren’t helping either. I expected that at a minimum, things would still be as difficult as before, but probably much worse.

But when I loaded up a project file and re-linked all the files… It worked smooth as butter. There’s still a couple of seconds of delay before playback, but it never hangs up and runs away and I can scrub anywhere with no problems. So long as I stay in Premiere, I never have that pre-play buffering time.

So at this point the only thing that has changed is I went from editing these files off an M.2 on my motherboard to editing them off a NAS array of HDDs. The files are still the same VFR files. This should not have made things better. It should have made them worse. But Gift Horses are for petting, not taking to the dentist.

With that, I decided I’d rather have significantly more space than a card full of M.2’s. Everything from video editing to Vectorworks files to music works at the same speed it always has. So the SSDs went back and I bought 5 new 6TB hard drives, a sata expansion card, and a second HDD cage.

I didn’t know if TrueNAS would take kindly to me moving drives around, so I didn’t. Built a second 4 drive RaidZ1, added it to the pool, and set the 9th drive to be a hot spare. (I travel a lot for work and might not be home if a drive needs replacing.)

Slowly working my way through getting apps installed and scooting more data onto it, but all in all I’m loving it so far! Thanks for the pointers everyone!

system · November 26, 2023, 3:59pm

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