Building a MAXIMUM STORAGE Desktop NAS - A DiY NAS Builders Guide

btw, did you know your postings and discussions about HexOS was covered on the WAN Show?
Luke seems to really appreciate what your doing.
Moving up in the world Robbie.

I'm thinking of building my first DIY nas, on as limited a budget as possible 🙈😂 must be able to be placed in my 19" rack :) Referrals, suggestions welcome 😊

Please can someone help me out i m bit confused ? Which Motherboard was the one with ECC support he was talking about in the Video ? He showed two AMD boards AMD 7840HS and AMD 7940HS but which of them is supporting ECC ?

Wow so many nas. Ive needed to get one for a long time ,they are just so expensive.

Linkreal LRNV9F48 has only Gen4 16 lanes and ToughArmor MB873MP-B requires 32 so the speed is cut in half (32 GB/s max). This could be solved if the controller had a 16x Gen5 to 32x Gen4 switch, i have no idea if this exists.

Still, if you want full speed, you need either Threadripper/EPYC or Xeon mobo with four SFF-8654 connectors either onboard or on two controller cards.

For the case, i'd go for an Inter-tech 4416. It's a 4U rackmount with 16 drive bays + two 5.25" slots.

I really cant recommend the CS380, it is the worst design ive ever encountered. First the drive fans blow directly into a solid side panel, an the cage its self is almost solid, which results in almost 20c drive temp variance. Also if you have warmer components (as i did with supermicro server board) if you try mount fans to the side panel, they overlap the hdd cage ones, so you can only run one or the other. Result is horrible airflow, and now i had to rma that very exspensive mb. I went back to my old matx mb an cpu idle temps were 58C, i then decided to stick with matx but swapped to the CS383, an was literally night n day, idle temps are now 33C, exact same hardware. 20C is the difference custom watercooling does, thats how bad the airflow is.

cs382 is to small for full atx motherboard !

Is it possible to build a NAS that also has LTO drives ?

A big thank you for a very good channel!
Thank you for this video that is almost spot on what I'm looking for to build. I have looked at the SilverStone cases that you show in the video and they are very interesting for me. The problem thou is where can I buy them here in Thailand where I live, The cost of shipping from US is crazy, so some local retailers is the best, but the ones I contacted is no longer importing these cases. So what I asking for is to reach out to your viewers to see if anyone knows about where to buy those cases here in Thailand or in countrys near Thailand. I am not very good in speaking Thai so english speaking contacts is my preference.

i think an angle you haven't looked at is used enterprise computers that have skylake xeons. They are modern enough to have decent enough idle wattage (30w for just cpu), have an insane amount of pcie expansion, but have 5.25 bays for extra hot swap functionality. I've bought a P520, but the dell t5820 is another possible solution. The only issue may the fact that t5820 only has 4 hotswap bays built in while p520 has 4 hdd bays with no hotswap (with an option for 3 hotswap 3.5 bays with 2x5.25 bays), but other than that the price to performance/value proposition of these xeon workstations outperforms the options you've listed here.

AVOID the Silverstone CS380 Case if your looking for an always on or medium/heavy use.
Had one, still have it but boxed it up. Temps for the drives are horrible, even did the cardboard mod to help airflow and yet, HDDs were running in the high 50's/low 60's.
Moved to a 4U 24 bay case and I'm in the low 40's.
I didn't think this was an issue till WD told me the 2 drives I had die were because of eccessive heat. 3rd day from the top and last bay at the bottom to be specific. Those 2 were idle at 55-64C.
New case looks to have the same flaw, not even 3000RPM Nactua fans could help, and I even tried adding 2 too the MOBO side (industrial double stick tape). So be warned, this will kill spinning drives if your planning on Plex or anything HDD intensive.

How important is ECC memory for the average Joe? Will the difference be noticeable or is it necessary for the use case?

Interesting stuff, nice one. I do like those cases you showed, I'm still using old Antec 900/1200's and a historic Thermaltake Armor (10 x 5.25" bays all filled with trayless dodads).

I keep wondering if the Seagulls are silent partners of NASCompares 🙂

I believe this video might be the best video about DiY NAS. It just happen i follow you recently just because i was looking for a review on the Sivelstone case.
Thank you !

The answer is never use a case, attach to a flat board with some french cleats(sp) hang your system on a wall in your basement somewhere out of the way. come back once a week with a can of air to kick the spiders out. wasting cash on cases. and lights crazy!

this will be an interesting Build thanks

Please help me understand, can I reuse an existing drive bay of a Synology DS 920 plus with a storage pool and a hard drive with basic volume created on it by inserting another new drive in that slot without losing the data of the previous drive? So if later if I again insert the older drive it will recognise it and mount normally with its storage pool. When I inserted a new drive it was beeping continuously with error message. I know if I delete the storage pool then the beep will stop and allow me to format the new drive on that slot, but then my old drive with its data won’t be recognised when I will reinsert it

Waiting for Jonsbo N5 to build my NAS.

Loving these new series of DIY NAS videos!

How is everyone getting past the ECC subject? Just avoiding intel altogether? I’m building out a ASUS w680 + i5 13500, I know it might be overkill but I’m curious to hear what others are using for a base 4k ripping media server .

What I'm missing from this roundup is power. It's all good and well you have eight hdds and eight ssds, but how are you supposed to pwer all of them. Are there even psus with 16 sata connectors?

Thanks!

awesome video

I love you videos, been watching a couple of years and I just like what you do and how you do it. Thanks for being entertaining and providing great information - (Synology user here).

What a video! Loads of interesting options I didn't know existed, thank you!

But what if I have a little more money and I want to just go ahead and get the full size motherboard? Are there any good recommendations if I am looking to build a dual NVME SSD, 8x SATA drive, unlocked Blu-ray drive Plex server to host all of my ripped DVDs and Blu-rays?

Those ITX motherboards are so NOT the optimal choice for an ATX storage server it’s not even funny.

If max storage is the goal, I don't see the point in choosing SSD's over more hard drives. You could get a qnap DAS box and more hard drives to expand the storage far greater than the hardware going toward the SSD's. That Silverstone case is sick btw. I didn't know about it. I wish my server case had an optical bay.

One of the things I've had to resort to in many cases is using a Threadripper.. and PCI-E lanes have been the reason why. I have the Asus 4 NVME PCI-E x16 4.0 card (I may upgrade to a 5.0 at some point) plus a graphics card and I proxmox then Truenas inside of it, using a PCI-E 3.0 LSI HBA for 8 x 20TB drives. But one thing that absolutely kills me, where maybe I could do this different is something I'm seeing now. I've found M.2 to 6 SATA drives, which could cure some problems. The new AMD 9xxx have an improved power profile which would be fine, and I could have the drives that I want and still get the transcoding I want for really just two TVs at 4K. But I'll be damned, the one thing I never find - though I've heard of/seen several on here, the M.2 to 10Gbe; not on Amazon, not on Newegg, and I get sketchy about Aliexpress. But it would be an ideal solution; I'm very interested in how well they actually work.

I love your site, I use mostly (almost entirely) TrueNas Scale, for varying reasons, but I'm interested in some of this.. I'm using an Antec P101 right now, and I'm loving it. Your option IcyDock for 8NVMEs.. are those Occulink on the back or ? Because I'm not sure how to cover the 8 NVMEs without the PCI-E lanes behind them... and you'd either need a PLX or ports, right?

also look at the siena (epyc 8004) boards. Those can be a perfect nas board. 16 or 32 sata channels, either onboard dual 10g or dual sfp28, and 6 ram channels, all ecc, and enough pcie lanes for cards or SSDs.

If you don't care about hot-swap, why not the Meshify 2 or 2XL in storage config?

Good video, but why mess around with itx when you have a huuuge chassi?

mATX? Disgusting! I have a habit of reusing my desktop's components for servers when I upgrade and I always go for ATX mobos for all the extra PCIe-slots they got. I'd never pay for an mATX.

If you can get your hands on something like a Thermaltake ARMOR+ you have a great case, suitable for MANY MANY HDD's
Note you do need those brackets that either convert 3 5.25" bays to 5 HDD's or 1 5.25" bay to 6-8 2.5 inch HDD's

Or if you go the NVME route you can have EVEN more SSD's

Would be hilarious a desktop Case with 80 NVME ssd's

The icydock stuff is insanely priced!

Damn I have absolutely no idea whats going on. 😢

Can it be running 24/7 without issue ?

Icydock as always is wayyyyyyyyy to expensive all their stuff has ridiculous margins

I recently found very affordable SAS drives for purchase. But absolutely no channel addresses installing them in a home setup with a controller. Why?

Does that nvme adapter card support RAID? Or just JBOD?

All very interesting but the elephant in the room is how to power all of the additional SATA / SSD drives that you are attaching? It would be goid to see a review of PSUs with lots of SATA power adapters.❤

Too bad the cs382 isn't rack mountable.

Why no mention of a SAS HBA? They can be gotten for around $100 and allow 8 sata drives, which would struggle to saturate any modern PCIE speed you put it on (assuming you are using HDDs and not SSD but this would go well with the 5.25 adapter you shown too)

Can you do a rack mount build. 1ru preferably please

Excellent video I don't know how many videos I see talk about icy dock while skipping the essential of the computer connectivity. I want a case with a bunch of 5.25" bas.
I'm really staring down using u.2 to nvme adapters in hotswap bays and sas instead of sata. If I want a graphics card I start thinking about epyc sp3.

Thank you for sharing!

So why not just a Define 7 (XL) instead of all those workarounds.