I am a multi-discipline design engineer that likes to make videos on the weekends! I like to make videos primarily on projects that I worked on, but there will also be tech related and product review videos.
I like the way you have proceeded with your plan, and reasoning. But these would serve a home server. For a NAS you don’t need all that power. Just hard drives and wired Ethernet, with the least power consuming CPU.
I'm attempting to build an all-NVME NAS, and I selected my motherboard based on the number of Gen3x4 or Gen4x4 connection points. The reason for this is a device from OWC called the U2 Shuttle which can fit 4 Gen3 NVME drives in a 3.5" HD form factor enclosure. You connect it to your motherboard via U.2 which requires 4 PCIe lanes that you can get either from a PCIe slot, an M.2 slot, or by other connectors not generally available on consumer motherboards (all via adapters). The Shuttle does this using a PCIe switch, but it should still get you speeds faster than your network connection. If you search around for the right motherboard, you can connect up to 8 or 9 U2 Shuttles, for a frankly ridiculous 36 NVME drives on one consumer PC. Motherboards eg. ASRock X670E Steel Legend (9 Shuttles), Asus Prime Z790-P WIFI (8 Shuttles). I'm still scraping up the funds to populate just the one Shuttle...
Nice review, but let me ask you a question that is bothering me on this machine, i dont know if it is only mine (because i bought it cheaper, as was probably a returned item) but i find the self propelling system to be too strong and makes it harder to manouver, what is your experience on this?
Thanks for this great video! I love the part on objectives and interfaces vs justification - it’s a good way of helping me make up my mind about getting this cleaner. In fact, I did buy it on Amazon yesterday solely because of the video 😊
Love the build, my nas is currently a thinclient with a m.2 hba connecting 6x16tb drives, I'm still kinda scared having so much data on such a janky setup, but it's honestly pretty safe, even losing all your configuration, truenas can figure the layout of your vdev out and restore the configuration. One thing I would definately have done differently in your build though, is using a ryzen 8000 apu, due to their monolithic design, they have a way lower idle power draw and also quite a bit more GPU power if you ever want to run compute / ml tasks.
Well, cool video so far. One flaw still: the comparison of power consumption on AMD vs. Intel platforms is not sufficient for average users, I'd say. What weighs much more than TDP or maximum power draw is the average power consumption at idle state because NAS (and home servers) are sitting at idle by far most of the time instead of doing high load. So quantification of these idle state draw would be a blast. My old Core i9-9900K e.g. at idle takes 6 W from the wall while my Ryzen 7 7800X3D never goes below 30 W at idle. Taking into account that the NAS (or server) CPU will be in idle 90% of the time this will make a huge difference in power draw and on your bill during a year. Good luck with AMD! They all are bad at idle, while Intel CPUs with an ideal CPU-Mobo combination in idle might just suck 0.1-0.2 W from the wall (like my 6500 in a Lenovo mini pc does...) 😆
This was a great video, informative and care taken to develop the configurations fully with very good recommendations and considerations. I really felt informed once I finished the video. I will keep this handy. I am retired as a network engineer, but I keep a hand in the game. I need to shatter my cloud storage dependence, so I keep this video and your channel handy! Thank you did a good job!
I don't know if anybody mentioned this yet but Intel is the go to option if IDLE power is what you're worried about. Something like i3 12100 or i5 12400 sips much less power at idle than 7600 for example (Ryzen 5000 has even worse idle power usage). If you expect to be writing/reading from your NAS at all times (for example editing daily) then AMD could be the better option. Also things like older NIC's and HBA's don't always support lower "C-states" which can prevent your CPU from going to deeper "C-states" (power saving modes). P.S. before anybody calls me an Intel shill, most of my homelab servers are AMD based so I have had to experienced this first hand... :P
not helpful. 8plus minutes talking about pcie bandwidth -- not helpful. the most important thing , at least for me , is the number of sata ports available NAS. (the #sata ports on the mobo) here is my NAS (FreeNAS) ===================================================================== Version 11.1.0.4 - Atomics (revision 5017) Compiled Sunday December 10 10:33:21 CST 2017 Platform OS FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p6 #0 r326737M: Sun Dec 10 00:45:11 CET 2017 Platform x64-full on AMD Athlon(tm) II X3 450 Processor System ASRock 970DE3/U3S3 System BIOS American Megatrends Inc. Version: P1.50 07/31/2012 System Time Thursday June 27 08:53:47 CDT 2024 System Uptime 22 Days 12 Hours 27 Minutes 21 Seconds System Config Change Thursday August 03 17:12:06 CDT 2023 Disk Space Usage bootdata 0% of 80GB Total: 80GB | Used: 8.2kB | Free: 74GB POOL1 60% of 55.52TB Total: 55.52TB | Alloc: 33.67TB | Free: 21.85TB | State: ONLINE ====================================================================== this is an old NAS , I've been running it for years , almost never turn it off (note above uptime is 22days) my NAS has 7 (seven ) 8.0TB ( Terabyte) byte drives (56TB total) 8Gb memory 1Gb nic the ASRock 970DE3 mobo also has PATA , which I use to boot from (note well , there is a PATA-SATA device (StarTech IDE2SAT2) , that converts old PATA connections to SATA, so I'm booting from a SATA ssd) at NO time did I consider pcie bandwidth or 1gig/10gig nic or the CPU , etc (the motherboard , yes , the board with most sata ports) it's all about HOW MUCH WILL I BE ABLE TO STORE -- i.e. attach ! ! ! (pice lanes is the last thing , if ever , that you will think about when building a NAS) as for motherboards , the newer boards seem to be focused on gaming and few sata ports , so good luck finding a board with 8sata ports. Even 6sata ports get diminished to 4sata , cuz the nvme ssd slot rob you of 2sata ports on most of the boards I've looked at. bottom line , you can play around with pcie bandwidth nonsense , or just build a very reliable NAS without worrying (who cares) about pcie bandwidth.
Ive used JB Weld plastic epoxy a few times successfully for patching holes in those ribbed hoses for a pool filter and a washing machine drain, but ive never had any success with it outside of that singular application. Great video, great channel. Thanks for doing it.
You recommend amd over intel. While intel uses more power when it is used amd usually has much higher idle power. If you know your system is going to idle most of the time intel is usually the better choice unless you go for a modt (mobile on desktop) motherboard.
Power consumption should have been an important factor to consider with your build. Yes you don't pay a monthly fee. However running it 24/7 like many of us use a NAS would certainly add a considerable amount to the electricity bill. This should have been factored in to the comparison of the different solutions. Making the build more power efficient would have increased the upfront cost.
They do, but they can require higher end equipment to accommodate their server centric focus. Often their power considerations have been more data center level than home user level as well. But their boards are good but somewhat different from consumer boards, it just depends on what you think is best for your device machine build! There is usually a cheaper resource for used equipment also that can be a consideration if you wish to build Supermicro!
Great video and very well explained. One minor correction: SATA uses 8b/10b encoding: thus 6 Gbps SATA is not 750 MB/s, but 600 MB/s. In the examples, 220 MB/s = 2.2 Gbps (not 1.76 Gbps) & 560 MB/s = 5.6 Gbps (not 4.5 Gbps). Thus a SATA SSD is truly nearly exhausting the available data rate. The overhead is minimal (560 MB/s achieved, 600 MB/s theoretically).
@@notaras1985 It is confusingly written, apologies. 220 MB/s, as delivered via SATA, is 2.2 Gbps. SATA includes the overhead in their MB/s numbers. This is mandatory overhead because it's used in parity; it's not like a "more optimized" SATA controller will reduce this overhead. That's why the maximum real data rate of SATA III is set to 600 MB/s; there's no way to "find" that 150 MB/s. That 150 MB/s was used for parity and did not contain any actual data. So the calculation is to divide by 10. 6 Gbps = 600 MB/s. The SATA specs: SATA III: 6 Gbps = 600 MB/s SATA II: 3 Gbps = 300 MB/s SATA I: 1.5 Gbps = 150 MB/s We need 1.0 Gigabit to deliver 100 MB/s with 8b/10b encoding. This is a physical specification, so we need to take into account encoding / decoding.
Damn man you are one of those channels that will become millionaires. Keep up the good work. I hardly have implemented hand based calculations i learned as mechanical engineer and usually just simulate stuff but damn i missed that part of engineering.
I bought my computer 3 years ago, had a guy build it to my specs cheaper than I could source all the parta, he must have access to price discounts that I dont. 2 nvme drives 2 hdd 2 2.5gb ports. Its been serving me well. Rtx 2080 video card its not top of the line anymore but It was closer a few years ago when I bought it.
Great work, I personally would have purchased a used machinest vice and a load cell and called it a day. Vices have huge ratings already, are made of solid metal, are cheap and readily available and would require minimum modification to function in this capacity. But hey, it was a cool project anyway. Just my thoughts.
Great video! I am a solidworks user myself with 5950x, 64gb ram and 3tb storage. I use keyshot for visualization which is cpu intensive application mostly. Since none of my work involves gpu intensive load yet, I am cruising along with an old 1660ti. But for large assemblies rhe vram falls short so might upgrade in near future.
Thanks, I appreciate your work. I am actually testing a home server on a raspberry pi and thinking of building a proper setup for storage, streaming service and a Minecraft server. Now I know what to look for. All the best
The death of SLI made it super hard/expensive to find boards with dual 8x pcie slot configuration. 14 years ago you could easily get that for less than 150$ now 400$ if you're lucky
Very well made video! I would be interested in seeing the idle power draw for your system I've been tossing and turning on cpu/mobo choice myself, and while the AMD AM4 platform is especially well priced vs the Intel LGA1700 platform, I feel like in the long run, the idle power draw for the NAS would be a major deciding factor in the overall price in the build, for me anyways Thanks again for the detailed video
Nice vid. I've gone between with a decently high end setup. An ASrock z690 with 8 sata, thunderbolt 4 header, 4 PCIE and 3 M.2 slots. Might be tad expensive to run when idle, but the plan is to use a plex server and family album archive plus UniFi controller host and maybe something to do with a VPN, firewall, and ad blocker. Couple of 18tb disks and more smaller HDDs in Unraid.
I really like your video content! Keep doing what you're doing! ... Aside from the WHITE screen transitions! My poor retinas were nuked so many times in this video. Please, have mercy.
Perhaps a used server motherboard would be a better option. They come with much more expansion possibilities. I'm using a Chinese x99 with a xeon 2683v4, the motherboard comes with 2 pcie x16, 1 x4, 2 x1 and an nvme, although they are all gen 3
An idea for a follow up video might be to talk about the actual storage for the NAS (NVMes and HDDs). Which NVMes for a lot of data read/write, which for PCIe 4, which for PCIe 5, etc... White labels HDDs might be worth mentioning for the Casual option (cuz cheaper). 8:33 some recent HDDs (e.g. Seagate Exos) are advertised at 285MB/s (2.285Gbps) so that following math doesn't exactly match up.
I upgraded my PC last year and I'm thinking about using my old motherboard for a NAS. As it is my first NAS and I'm mostly going to use it as a plex server and possible data backup for some small projects and personal files, I was thinking that I could use some of my old hardware as a cost saving, and it would be like a hobby project where I could learn about NAS and all that, then some time in the future I could buy or build something better. I have no idea if it will do okay or not, but my old parts (specs) will be: ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming motherboard Intel i7-6700K CPU DDR4 2x16GB (32GB) 3200MHz RAM I also have a set of 2x8GB (16GB) 3200MHz, which I've run fine together with the 2x16 stick for a total of 48GB, both are Corsair Vengeance Dual Channel RAM kits, and I guess it could be better to have more RAM, again I don't know. The motherboard has a M.2 PCIe 3.0 connected to the chipset, and I was thinking of using that as a OS drive for TrueNAS. Also I have noticed not all motherboards have Raid controllers on them, although that only applies to low end boards, but I thought it could have been mentioned in the video, especially if someone like in my case wanted to retrofit an old system into a NAS. 👍on the video.
good effort..... one thing i'd say you could have expanded on is how things are attached to the chipset. Like how some of the PCIe slots on a motherboard are attached to the chipset and not the CPU. Keep it up
What you are building here is a bit more than just a pure NAS as you seem to need more services running as well. A pure storage pool on your local network do not require very much computational power. If, however, you want your NAS to do more than just being a NAS, it really isn't a NAS anymore but is now a server of some capacity that also can act as a NAS. My own NAS is OMV running on a celeron @2 GHz, 4GB of RAM and 80 TB storage. Runs smooth as butter. There's no need to shoot birds with ICBMs
Thank you for the video. This is a bit of my feedback. As a geek trying to learn I wish you had shown us what you did to the BIOS; the screen was at a tilt, so it makes this old fart very hard to read it. Also, I'd love to have seen a graphic chart of what parts you repurposed, and which were new. The system cost I think was ~>$1k. but didn't break down the old and new prices. Are you really only using 1 16MB RAM stick?? How did you get the 10G network speed, was that on the MB I don't recall you saying. I'd also like to have heard the reasoning and evaluation of the NAS software and if you considered making the NAS an optional DAS as well.
If it works for metal it should work for plastics - nope... You dont weld plastic this way, the fact that this is how you weld metal doesnt mean it works for plastic. Plastic doesnt flow like metal and those circular motions like you should do in metal welding are not applicable here. Many more mistakes in this video.
I used to plastic weld professionally. You need a filler rod of the same material to force into the plastic to properly weld and get good penetration. I would recommend a hot air welder with a speed welding tip.
