Big Frugal NAS Build (Part 1)

Low free space? Difficult-to-find files? No backups? These are a few of the growing pains I've been having over the last few years. To set myself up for an easier time managing my digital content, I built a NAS to provide reliable, abundant, organized storage.
In Part 1, I'll discuss my ZFS RAID design, unbox the case, and install the motherboard, CPU, and OS SSD.
View the parts list here: pcpartpicker.c...
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[@Furriee]

Greetings. I'm a ZFS admin. I manage several large pods, each with 45 to 60 drives-almost 2 PiB in total in one location. Great video. The only thing I wish you would elaborate on is the proper ratio between a number of the VDevs and the hard drives count to get the "sweet spot" in regards to efficiency. Cheers 🙂

[@mithubopensourcelab482]

Your choice of NAS case is perfect. We have used same case for more than 20 projects.

[@jcramond73]

Very well explained Jacob, certainly gave me food for thought on my own storage.

[@mithubopensourcelab482]

Nice explanation. If I would be in your chair, I would probably settled for 4 drives in raid zero [ Stripped ] with a single pool. No need to organize directory. Off course I will put 5 drives in Raid Z1 configuration on a second box with probably with a slightly lower end processor and 8 gb ram. This job of the second system is replicate main Raid 0 box. This is very interesting case. One side you are getting best possible IOPS due to stripping of 4 hdd's ( You can probably edit the video directly on the storage ) and you are getting a backup on secondary system by way of ZFS replication which is protecting upto loss of 1 HDD.

[@MisterQuacker]

dude you deserve more coverage

[@v.sswaroop8401]

Amazing! Can you please tell how much power does this rig consume on idle? I plan to run this NAS 24/7.

[@Solrak8O]

Nice video, especially explaining the theory behind your NAS software/hardware choices. Needs chapter markers badly as it's a looooong video

[@navdeepshergill4956]

great review man. loved the video. Thank you!

[@kevinintheusa8984]

I currently have two different NAS running Plex with a 4 drive (40 tb/ 20 tb useable) and one 2 drive (20 tb/10 tb useable). They both work great but I am now at the point where I need to get more storage so I am building my own NAS and planning to use unraid. I am using a server micro-IDX mb (Gigabit) with a 6th gen i5 and 32 gb of RAM. I plan to put in two 18 tb drives to start and experiment with using it. Once I am confident in my abilities and it works with Plex then I will migrate over to it and move my older drives to it. Great video and very informative. I did not get a NAS case but a mid-tower with lots of fans and I plan to add more once I start building. It has space for 20 drives as it sits. My backup has been a whole bunch of external drives laying all over my office. I need to fix that next.

[@olimpiudehelean5885]

Best clarifications i've ever had

[@apached343]

Hi, Your title drew my attention, as I am looking to setup a very simple home NAS for my photos and data. Its great that you do not gloss over buzzwords and and explain the terminology, but this system is way beyond my needs. Do you think you could do one for those with just a couple of PCs, to safely store their data.

[@NerdOnTheStreet]

I'm not sure if you're asking me to design a NAS for smaller-scale usage, or if you're asking if you can use an existing PC as a NAS. You can run file sharing functionality on any working computer with available storage. The RAID setup that I talk through in this video is mainly what gets you additional "safety" against equipment failure compared to a normal computer (and then you need offsite backups for true "safety" against your building burning down or being broken into).

[@ipstacks11]

Great job on your explanation especially after when you went to the visual aid. I am curious why you didn't consider dielectric fluid for your cooling. You could dunk the whole system in it and keep things cool and it would be cheaper because you wouldn't have the added strain on your apartments AC system.

[@NerdOnTheStreet]

"you wouldn't have the added strain on your apartments AC system." - Unless the cooling system has a radiator extending outside of the apartment (which does not sound like what you're describing), the energy is not being destroyed or removed from the apartment's environment; liquid cooling of any kind would place the same load on the apartment's AC as air cooling. As for why I didn't consider dialectic fluid, I am not aware of any consumer solutions for dialectic fluid PC cooling. A DuckDuckGo search for this returns absolutely nothing. Do you have a single example of this being used?

[@SplittingField]

Video like this could do with chapters.

[@xGshikamaru]

I'm half an hour into the video and I wonder if this is not overthinking the system. Is it really the work files for your videos you're storing on your NAS? If this is the case, it seems to me you're concerned about redundancy for data that is mostly written once, read for a bit and then not accessed again for a very long time. So, wouldn't it be better to archive that data and access it when you rarely need it ? You wouldn't need to have disks spinning 24/7 and be worried about them failing. You could even duplicate that cold data and store it off site. I'm really tempted about designing a system like this where hot data that becomes cold gets moved on other storage devices that probably don't need as much redundancy that hot data which is accessed a lot need. That makes me just want to set a raid1 array for that hot data with 2 disks. At the moment my most valuable data doesn't take a lot of storage space, it's mostly documents, pictures. I do have the work files for my KZbin videos but I can't remember even accessing data, I would only need them to re render the video if KZbin would take it down, but it does eat a lot of space quickly.

[@NerdOnTheStreet]

So you're saying a single RAID 1 hot array is overthinking, but your suggestion is a RAID 1 hot array plus an automatically managed cold array plus some kind of off-site cold data system with manual management? I would hazard to say this is one of the simplest NAS setups you will find on KZbin. Go watch some Linus Tech Tips videos with thousands of dollars (or more) of free equipment from various manufacturers, or even ItsMyNaturalColour with a data center rack and a 10 Gbps house-wide network, then come back and tell me I've overengineered my single-box system. I'm fairly certain I mentioned in the video that I intend to do a lot of traveling and I want to be able to access *any* of my data remotely. That means no "going to get the cold archive," wherever you think that would live. I also never stated that the only thing on this NAS is raw footage for KZbin videos, only that it's one of the reasons I end up needing a lot of storage space. (And I *have* used cold archives for video data in the past, and I am well aware of how often I need to dig older things out... just because *you* never do large projects involving old footage and/or are willing to accept quality degradation by using KZbin-encoded video in newer projects doesn't mean that I am willing to make those compromises. You've been on KZbin longer than me, but my channels have over ten times as many videos as yours, not that quantity means anything except giving you an idea of the scale of data I'm working with.) Sometime in 2023, I hope to make Part 3 of this series, which will show some of the apps I'm running on the NAS. That might shed some more light on why I wanted it consolidated. But your suggestion to "design a system... where hot data that becomes cold gets moved on other storage devices that probably don't need as much redundancy" is more overengineered, not less, and *any* storage device is going to need at least 1 level of redundancy to protect against bitrot and spontaneous failure, which is exactly the level of redundancy that I have. I'm not sure where you think I've gone overboard when you're suggesting the same or more.

[@xGshikamaru]

@@NerdOnTheStreet as I said, look back at 30' into the video, it's not a raid1 array you're talking about, but an 8 disk array in different setups of Raid-z2 with fault tolerance for multiple disks failing at the same time. Like I said, if you're worried about bitrot and spontaneous failure, you can pretty much cover that with an off site backup that will also handle your house catching on fire. In the end I was looking at your video and other to get an idea and I came to the conclusion that any kind of parity system involves preparing for drives to fail way more than necessary, so in the end I went on to setup mergerfs+snapraid. That way if any disk fails I can still access any other data that is on the other disks, reconstruct the disk that failed. The data that I care about most is already duplicated a few times elsewhere. 8*18TB with a single disk costing at least $300, that is a shitload amount of money. I think my solution is more cost effective and also simpler in that I'm just merging different disks with readable data on their own under a single mount point.

[@xGshikamaru]

@@NerdOnTheStreet one last thing about disk failure and disk usage. When I said data that is read and written mostly once, I was implying that a disk that wouldn't be under a very heavy load would last a very very long time, so this thing about bitrot and spontaneous failure, it's a risk you're trying to cover but at the end of the day how many of your disks actually failed, or even had bad sectors? I had a 10GB Maxtor drive failing on me a long time ago but it was read and written to an absurd amount of time, and a 80GB also Maxtor. But I have a 160GB that is more than 15 yo in my gen1 Xbox that is still alive even if it doesn't get used a lot these days. That's why I said if you're just storing mostly cold data, you'd probably be better with a system like mergerfs+snapraid, because your storage needs would probably lead you to get new disks long before a single of your drives fails. Of course it's different if it's "Linux isos" you're sharing via BitTorrent where it's accessed all the time and you need to care about the workload you're putting on your disks.

[@christopherjames9843]

Wouldn't a gpu make for much better transcoding? That isn't a Ryzen strong point.

[@BraynerBR]

I am new to RAID but how does UNRAID makes possible to have 8 disk array, 1 being parity and allows you to lose a whole disk and not lose any data, because that 1 parity disk will save it? isnt it more efficient for cheaper big storage? GREAT video btw, I value these small details that only our kind of people will notice and debate about it lol

[@mas921]

Ryzen, node804 and x570m pro4... best bang for buck! Although I took the easy way and went with Unraid I went with that mobo because of the 8x Sata ecc also the main pcie can be bifurcated into 4*x4, so a quad m.2 card works (you can find a basic display adapter or 10gbe m.2 cards now adays) also used a pcie x1 gt710 gpu with quad hdmis its single slot and passive cooled. For awhile it worked fine gpu-less though.

[@SteveStowell]

All the reason that raid and devs and pools are not backup

[@TrueNAS]

Great work!

[@chidorisai]

Nice video I am doing a similar build, when I look at your pcpartpicker, I could see u took some noctua fan / anti-vibration, thinking or replacing or adding something ?

[@NerdOnTheStreet]

The fans are all working great so far, so I'm not planning to replace/add anything on that front! The fans are a low-pitched whir that is not annoying at all; the hard drives emit higher-pitched ringing that is more noticeable.

[@chidorisai]

@@NerdOnTheStreet Thanks for the reply. so you left the fan by default. are you waiting for part 2 video to provide temperature etc...

[@NerdOnTheStreet]

I did not "leave the fan by default." I added the Noctua gear you saw on the PCPartPicker link. It will be covered in Part 2.

[@pietossing]

Where did you get the cup? Also, if you like docks, get the OWC dock, it's more expensive but very worth it.

[@NerdOnTheStreet]

The metal cup? Just checked the sticker, it says Walmart (I knew it was either that or Target.) Got it when I moved into my first apartment.

[@HirschyKiss]

hear me out. Let's add a layer of Vpools between your vdevs and your pools. I'm submitting the pull request now!

[@SeaTaj]

I enjoyed the video, but as an e-commerce seller, I'm not sure why you blamed newegg for not "guarding" your $120 case. Newegg doesn't do the final delivery, that would be FEDEX, UPS, or USPS>

[@marcinsosna2852]

Soo many words. No better was just to make another nas for a backup? RAID and RAIDZ are not for a backup- I use them to increase efficiency of data transfer only. Add also cloud solution to backup most important data there and you are at home.

[@NerdOnTheStreet]

If you'd listened to the "Soo many words," then you might have noticed I addressed the backup issue in the video.

[@martinschoenauer8261]

JBOD of 4 disks.

[@NerdOnTheStreet]

JBO4D

[@DevilDriver665]

I'm a fan of fractal design cases but this one is IMO not very good because the hdd bracket is basically a "tuning fork". The more hdds are in, the more vibration it will get :-|

[@NerdOnTheStreet]

Yeah, I started with one drive in each cage because I know they'll interact more once they're sharing a cage. Between the rubber shock mounts, being suspended, and the drives being data center-grade drives that are built to operate near many other drives, I still think the cooling benefits outweigh any vibration drawbacks (but more on that in Part 2!)

[@Fisha695]

At the point where you're unboxing the case and you mentioned Newegg when talking about how it was delivered to your apartment, that would be FedEx or UPS or whoever. Then when it's internal accessories are just loose in the case you say that's not a Fractal thing but a Newegg thing and that's 110% wrong, Fractal packs the box not Newegg...

[@NerdOnTheStreet]

Your information is out of date. Newegg has vans with their logo doing deliveries in some cities now, similar to Amazon. The Node 804 box was delivered with a Newegg tracking number, not "FedEx or UPS or whoever." My email receipt says "Shipped by: Newegg" to confirm this.

[@Thewickedjon]

i just skipped through the whole video waitig to see how this case handles hard drives, and to my suprise , you didn't install them,.... great.

[@NerdOnTheStreet]

Watch Part 2. I show the hard drive mounting in detail during that one.

[@rrorge]

Are you able to do hot spares on your device, for me the best thing in the world is raid 6 and have a hot spare plugged in. And if this is for archival purposes it should be ok regarding slow performance. The way I have my setup (12 drives) a 4 drive Raid 10 array of SSDs(1 tb each) with current work, and a 8 drive (8tb each) hard drive raid 6 array, plus a hot spare, this gives me 40 tb of archival on spinning rust and 2tb of fast storage for current projects